American Fears Research Articles

The Soviet Sputniks and American Fears about the Militarization of Outer Space

The publication of the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2020 Defense Space Strategy and its recognition of outer space as a “distinct warfighting domain,” along with recent media discussion regarding the militarization of outer space by powers such as Russia and China, seems to portend a new era of outer space relations. The so-called “final frontier” that has for years been treated as a realm of scientific and civilian exploration with a spirit of cooperation appears poised to transform into a domain of military competition. The early fears centered around three key themes: the possible terrestrial impact of rocket technology capable of launching a satellite, the unknown applications of satellite technology, and the assumption that the launch of the Sputniks had opened up a new frontier, one that the United States had failed to reach at the time of the Soviet achievements. An examination of these themes and how Americans discussed the Sputniks reveals that while the domain of space looks incredibly different in the twenty-first century, discussion surrounding the militarization of outer space has a longer history that could offer insights for contemporary discussion.

Deconstructing Fears of Terrorism: A Comparison between Fear from Domestic and International Terrorist Groups

ABSTRACT Although research on fears of terrorism has been growing, previous studies approached the topic of the fear of terrorism as a monolithic concept without considering the various political aspects of terrorism as a crime. The current research employed a novel approach to studying the fear of terrorism as a polylithic phenomenon by comparing three different types of fears of terrorism among Americans: general fears of terrorism, fears of domestic terrorist groups, and fears of international terrorist groups. Drawing on a nationally representative sample from the Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 5 (2018), the results of the analysis indicated that the predictors were differentially associated with the three types of fear with respect to their statistical significance and correlation directions. Thus, this study provides a significant contribution to the literature on the fear of terrorism topic by illustrating the important differences among general fears of terrorism, fears of domestic terrorist groups, and fears of international terrorist groups.

Online and Social Media News Usage, Conspiratorial Attitudes and Fear of Terrorism

Are individuals who obtain their news from online news sources or from social media more likely to fear terrorism? If so, why is this the case? Based on the 2021 Chapman Survey of American Fears, this study draws two key conclusions. First, subjects who more frequently use online and social media news sources exhibit higher levels of fear of terrorism. Second, the relationship between online and social media news reliance and fear of terrorism is mediated through conspiratorial attitudes. These findings are robust to the inclusion of a host of demographic and attitudinal control variables.

“Through Death’s Wilderness”: Malaria, Seminole Environmental Knowledge, and the Florida Wars of Removal

Abstract For more than fifty years the United States waged wars of removal in Florida against the Seminole Indians. This article unpacks how the Seminoles deployed their knowledge about Florida’s environment and, crucially, an understanding of American fears about Florida’s environment to resist removal and the loss of territory. Taking Seminole movement, home construction, and language and placing it in dialogue with sources from soldiers and settlers involved in the wars, this article reveals a new facet of Indigenous resistance to colonial violence, rooted in relationships with the natural world. Finally, this essay recasts disease in the history of Native North America as potentially liberatory, as different lifeways exposed different populations to mosquitoes and their diseases.

Hajj Humanitarianism

This article explores how pilgrimage to Arabia became the catalyst for Northern Nigerian Muslim leaders to develop a kind of humanitarianism for the poor to expand their political power in the era of independence from Britain and postcolonial Afro-Arab alliance-making. Muslim elites forced the British to provide welfare for poor pilgrims who conducted the pilgrimage over land through Sudan and then undertook their own relief and reform as means to resist national integration with Southern Nigeria and bolster their reputation and influence in the Muslim world. Muslim West Africans did not simply side with Sudanese or Saudi Arabian officials in the matter of hajj but instead critiqued Arab racism and enslavement of Africans while also playing on British and American fears of communism in Africa and attempts to use Islam and religious discourse more broadly to create alliances with Muslim Nigerians. Hajj humanitarianism reveals careful Nigerian negotiations of global politics during the Cold War and non-Western involvement in international humanitarianism, which has been treated as a largely Euro-American phenomenon.

The battle for curriculum: arrested semantics and reconciling racism with Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies

ABSTRACT US Republican lawmakers continue their nationwide crusade against Critical Race Theory because it unsettles the racial state. We argue that the partisan attacks on Ethnic Studies and CRT are motivated by White American fears of racial reconciliation. An honest review of our racial past and present through a critical race lens would upset the United States’ centuries-long colonial racial project, whose maintenance and containment are dependent on an enduring system of a hierarchical racial order grounded in White supremacy. Attacks on Ethnic Studies and CRT are about US political society preserving racial meaning in the US, by which safeguarding their entitled position within the racial order. The latest political tactic in educational policy to maintain White privilege is to empty meaning from racial categories, particularly the term ‘White’, through a colorblind linguistic subterfuge we call ‘arrested semantics’. As members of civil society, students and community members continue to mobilize to wrestle away political control over their education. Civil society continues to be a potent force against White supremacy, especially in the struggle for Ethnic Studies – whose curriculum is grounded in the premise that race has been the central organizing principle in US nation-state building. Indeed, US political society’s wealth-building capacity – and therefore sociopolitical and economic positioning, is predicated by the current racial order. We believe the reconciliation of racism will only occur by naming those agents who perpetuate racist policies and practices. Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies employ unequivocal language that can help us to identify the agents upholding White supremacy.

Chrystal Ann Chemris. The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation

Chrystal Ann Chemris. <i>The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation</i>

Review: Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers, by Charles McCrary

Review: <i>Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers</i>, by Charles McCrary

From Radiation Effects to Consanguineous Marriages: American Geneticists and Colonial Science in the Atomic Age

In 1947, the US National Academy of Sciences established the Atomic Bomb Casualty Com­mission (ABCC) and sent American scientists to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to investigate the delayed effects of the atomic bombs among survivors. James Neel, medical professor at the University of Michigan, headed the genetics team of ABCC whose mission was to measure the possible genetic mutations caused by radiation. After the conclusion of the ABCC studies, Neel and his scientific team continued to use the resources and subjects in southern Japan to conduct research on the genetics of consanguineous marriages in Japan. This article explores how both the ABCC genetic studies and consanguinity studies reflected American fears about rising mutations in an apocalyptic atomic age. Studies on inbreeding illuminated the nature and extent of mutations in a “pure” genetic population. Furthermore, the Japanese data were used for genetic counseling back in America, helping to address the American public’s concern about increasing interracial marriages between whites and Asians. Despite the attempts of Neel and other American geneticists to disassociate their work from previous, racist, eugenics studies, postwar genetic studies took on the same practices, institutions, and goals as their predecessors—to ensure the wellbeing of the white race. Neel’s ABCC and subsequent studies, all bankrolled by the US Atomic Energy Commission, exploited American military and financial power to take advantage of the “intimate” relationships with nonwhite, “deviant” subjects.

Chains of Persuasion: A Framework for Religion in Democracy

Chains of Persuasion: A Framework for Religion in Democracy

Fears of cyberterrorism, terrorism, and terrorist attacks: an empirical comparison

ABSTRACT The goals of this study are to identify the determinants of the fear of cyberterrorism and to compare these to the determinants of the fear of terrorism as well as the fear of a terrorist attack. As no empirical study has yet tested what predicts the fear of cyberterrorism, the current research used variables from the fear of terrorism literature to explore the impact of these factors on the fear of cyberterrorism. Based on nationally representative data from the 2018 American Fears Survey (N = 1190), our analytic results indicated that fear of cyberterrorism is a distinct fear when compared to terrorism and terrorist attacks in terms of their predictors, and age and education are significant determinants for fear of cyberterrorism, but not for the two terror-related fears in our sample. Other similarities and differences between the three measures of terror-related fear are also discussed in the study.

Platform regulation of hate speech – a transatlantic speech compromise?

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the binary opposition in the treatment of hate speech in the US and Europe hides non-binary preoccupations that reflect different primary fears which do not fall along the same ‘scale’. European liberal democracies fear the consequences of hate speech being left uncensored in the public domain (a WHAT concern) whilst America fears the consequences of content interventions by government (a WHO concern). The paper then proposes that the German Network Enforcement Law of 2017 builds a bridge between American and European speech traditions. NetzDG requires major platforms to moderate content in response to user takedown notices based on legally imposed speech standards. The mechanism of public standards being enforced through private processes is arguably uniquely adept at simultaneously assuaging the primary European fear about the absence of effective speech controls in the public domain and the primary American fear about the presence of governmental censorship.

Supernatural Sociology: Americans’ Beliefs by Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Education

The authors analyze the 2020–2021 Chapman University Survey of American Fears ( n = 1,035), the most recent nationally representative survey to examine fears of and beliefs about supernatural and paranormal phenomena, including ghosts, hauntings, zombies, psychics, telekinesis, Bigfoot or Sasquatch, Atlantis, and extraterrestrial visitation. This research examines how supernatural beliefs vary by race/ethnicity, gender, and education after adjustment for other demographic characteristics and religiosity. There were five gender differences, such that women were more likely than men to believe in or fear all nonmaterial or spiritual supernatural phenomena, as well as Atlantis. People with a bachelor’s degree or higher were less likely to believe in extraterrestrial visitation, hauntings, Bigfoot or Sasquatch, and Atlantis. There were also six beliefs and fears for which racial/ethnic differences emerged. The results highlight how gender, education, and race/ethnicity are strongly related to complex belief systems, including supernatural phenomena.

Sociodemographic correlates of vaccine hesitancy in the United States and the mediating role of beliefs about governmental conspiracies

AbstractObjectiveVaccine hesitancy remains a significant public health challenge, and one that is socially patterned. This study examined whether the vaccine hesitancy effects of identifying as female, race–ethnicity, the number of children, educational attainment, and political conservatism were mediated by governmental conspiracy beliefs.MethodsLinear mediation models controlling for potential confounders were employed to analyze data from a national survey of adults (2019 Chapman University Survey of American Fears; n = 1,209).ResultsEffects on vaccine hesitancy were significant and negative for educational attainment, and significant and positive for the other focal predictors. Governmental conspiracy beliefs significantly mediated each of these effects; the percent mediated was largest for Hispanic identity (79 percent), followed by female identification (69 percent), educational attainment (69 percent), number of children (55 percent), black identification (34 percent), and political conservatism (30 percent).ConclusionThis study underscores the importance of nonvaccine‐related conspiracy beliefs for future interventions aimed at reducing sociodemographic disparities in vaccine hesitancy.

Fear of Crime on Community Engagement: Nonadditive and Nonlinear Effects by Gender

ABSTRACT In this article, we propose that fear of crime has nonadditive and curvilinear effects on community engagement, and that this relationship varies by gender. We test our propositions utilizing the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 2. We find that fear of crime has a linear positive relationship with community engagement for men. For women, we find a curvilinear relationship. At low and average levels of fear, there is a positive relationship between fear of crime and community engagement. At very high level of fear, there is a negative relationship. Implications for theory and research are discussed.

Religious perceptions of crime and implications for punitiveness

This study tests the role of crime perceptions in mediating the relationship between religiosity and punitive attitudes about criminal justice. Specifically, we estimate the effects of (a) religious affiliation and (b) fundamentalism on punitiveness and assess mediation by dispositional attribution of crime, perceived rising crime rates, perceived immigrant crime, and fear of violent victimization. Data are from the 2014 wave of the Chapman Survey on American Fears, a nationally representative sample of adults in the United States (N = 1,573). We estimated religious effects on punitiveness using ordinary least squares regression and assessed mediation by crime perceptions with the Karlson-Holm-Breen (KHB) method. Punitiveness was positively associated with Mainline Protestant affiliation (vs. non-religious), Catholic affiliation (vs. non-religious), and fundamentalism (fundamentalism also largely accounted for heightened punitiveness among Evangelical Protestants). Perceptions of crime accounted for about 60% of the effects of religious affiliation on punitiveness and nearly 100% of the effect of fundamentalism. Perceptions of crime as caused by evil or moral failure, belief in rising crime rates, and perceptions of immigrant crime were important to explaining religious effects on punitiveness, while fear of violence was relatively unimportant. These findings illuminate the perceptual mechanisms underlying religious effects on criminal justice attitudes.

Gun Ownership and Life Satisfaction in the United States

ObjectiveAlthough there is little empirical evidence linking gun ownership with personal well‐being, speculation is widespread in gun culture. In this article, we test whether people who own guns are more or less satisfied with their lives than people who do not own guns.MethodsWe employ data collected from three national surveys, the Baylor Religion Survey (2014), the Chapman University Survey on American Fears (2014), and the General Social Survey (2018) to formally assess this understudied association.ResultsIn adjusted models, gun ownership was unrelated to life satisfaction. This general pattern was consistent across surveys, different measures and specifications of life satisfaction, and a wide range of subgroups.ConclusionOur analyses contribute to the growing study of gun ownership and personal well‐being and challenge theoretical perspectives and cultural narratives about how owning a gun can contribute favorably to one's quality of life.

Beautiful Beach Bodies and Muscle Heads

Uneasily situated between counterculture images projected by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius” a decade later, there emerged a motion picture interlude of innocence on the beaches of Southern California. It was fostered by Gidget (1959) and then thirty “surf and sex” movies that focused on young, attractive bodies and beach escapades rather than serious social causes.The films, argues Kirse May, “created an ideal teenage existence, marked by consumption, leisure, and little else.” Stephen Tropiano explains how their popularity helped shape “the archetypal image of the American teenager” and, reinforced by the surfin' sounds of Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys, and other recording groups, “turned America's attention to the Southern California coastline,” where “those who never set foot on its sandy shores were led to believe that life on the West Coast was a twenty-four-hour beach party.” This study examines a notable film of this genre to determine how musclemen were exploited to exhibit this playful spirit and how their negative reception reinforced an existing disregard toward physical culture. Muscle Beach Party illustrates how physical culture served other agendas, namely the need to address American fears of juvenile delinquency and to revive sagging box-office receipts within the guise of the “good life” of California.

‘The worst loups-garous that one can meet’: Reading the Werewolf in the Canadian ‘Wilderness’

Ginger Snaps (2000) has been recognised as a significant example of feminist horror. This article analyses the final film in the trilogy, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004). On first appearance, Ginger Snaps Back reacts to the ending of the first film, in which Brigitte kills her lupine sister Ginger. Set in the nineteenth century, the film draws on Canadian Gothic tropes with the two sisters trapped in an isolated fort, surrounded by frozen forest. In doing so, it echoes another Canadian werewolf narrative, Henry Beaugrand's ‘The Werwolves' (1898). Beaugrand's story opens with a group of settler-colonisers spending the Christmas period in Fort Richelieu, Quebec. This location evokes North American fears, and the representation of the wooded wilderness as full of wild beasts and wild men. Beaugrand collapses the ‘wild beasts’ and ‘wild men’ into one hybrid monster. By comparing the depiction of werewolves in Ginger Snaps Back and Beaugrand's story, this article uncovers the implications of ignoring and appropriating Native Canadian folklore.

American Fears

American Fears Keith Kopka (bio) Fear Icons: Essays Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel Mad Creek Books https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814254943.html 160 Pages; Print, $19.95 How do we live meaningful lives in the face of the fears that our current culture forces us to confront? From the seemingly ubiquitous possibility of being shot as we shop, eat, or learn, to the less tangible fears of damnation or disappointment that religion instills in us from a very young age, Americans are forced to confront this question on a daily basis. This kind of self-interrogation about America's "culture of fear" is ripe for the inherently alarmist nature of the soundbite. However, as we all know, the goal of the sound bite is not to challenge or to inform; instead, its purpose lies only in gaining higher ratings. The 24-hour news cycle learned long ago that instilling fear fosters more viewership than complicated examinations of the symbiotic relationship between fear and cultural iconography. Luckily, literature continues to confront these more difficult cultural questions, and Kisha Lewllyn's Schlegel's debut collection of essays is the latest example of this kind of necessary literary contribution. In Fear Icons, the inaugural prize winner of the 21st Century Essays series from Ohio State University Press, Schlegel not only asks readers to examine their lives in the context of popular culture's connection to fear, but she also challenges her readers to see their own fears in relationship to the fears of others. "Who are we to each other when we're afraid?" is the central question of these essays. It is asked at the conclusion of the prologue entitled "Jesus?" which frames the narrator's early engagement with fear in a universally identifiable way. Schlegel uses the interrogative voice of the Sunday school child awakening to the obvious contradictions in God's omnipotence in conjunction with a much more adult "I" to create a vulnerability, as well as a psychic distance that allows for objective observation. This use of point of view not only gives Schlegel the carte blanche to ask difficult questions, but it also allows her to effectively contextualize and clarify this line of inquiry through even more specific and difficult examinations. For example, the thematic power of Schlegel's central question of who we are in relation to each other when facing our fears springs from the more specific question found only two lines earlier, "Why does one person's suffering make another feel safe?" Unlike our society's focus on the false flag of finding "solutions" to our fears, Schlegel is content with naming and questioning. Through this narrative construction readers are challenged with in the intersectionality between fear and belief on a personal level. However, Schlegel does not shy away from the idea of fear on a larger cultural scale. Throughout the collection, Schlegel uses a mix of reportage and personal narrative to contextualize her personal experiences with fear in relationship to more cultural iconography. Some of these icons are more directly related to fear (Osama Bin Laden) than others (Dolly Parton). However, by engaging with specific icons such as Dick Cheney, Ozzy Osbourne, Darth Vader, and Mother Mary, along with the iconic identity of objects or settings such as oil, guns, and the San Andreas Fault, Schlegel is able to move beyond the celebrity status of these icons in order to explore themes of nostalgia, motherhood, violence, suffering, political identity, aging, etc. For example, in the chapter entitled "San Adreas Fault," this iconic landscape provides a backdrop for a young couple grappling with the fears associated with parenting when they discover they are having another child. Schlegel writes, Down below, the fault line crushed rock and clay into flour. In time, that pressure would erupt into an earthquake with enough force and magnitude to knock us out of this life like loose baby teeth. But in that moment, it just squeezed water to the surface, make the oasis of Mara. This landscape, teeming with tension, allows readers to move beyond the more cliched fear responses to the narrator's situation and connect with these very human fears on a more universal level. Although...