In the late 1790s New England clergy, led by Jedidiah Morse, warned that a secret European order was plotting to overthrow religion and government in America. Stauffer’s 1918 dissertation explains the panic: the decay of the Puritan standing order, fear of French radicalism and infidelity, the European origins of the Illuminati legend, and the bitter argument over Freemasonry that followed.
A sober scholarly study of one of America’s first conspiracy panics, revealing for anyone interested in how such fears spread. Download the free EPUB.