In Elizabethan England, it seemed like everyone was carrying a sharpened object with the intent to inflict damage.

Research-backed stories that consider how and why moral panics begin and spread, who they serve, and what becomes of them in the end.

Ninety million bottles of Valium were dispensed yearly in the U.S. during the mellow Seventies. What happened?

The late summer crime wave of 1744 London sparked an intense moral panic about crime that burnt itself out by the new year. But not before heads rolled.

Jane Addams, a leading Victorian-era reformer, believed dance halls were “one of the great pitfalls of the city.”