American Hysteria

American Hysteria explores how fantastical thinking has shaped our culture – moral panics, urban legends, hoaxes, crazes, fringe beliefs, and national misunderstandings. Poet-turned-podcaster Chelsey Weber-Smith tells the strangest stories from American history and examines the forces that create the reality we share, and sometimes, the reality we don't.

Society & Culture
History
176
FLORIDA SCAM
36 min
177
FLORIDA MAN
57 min
178
Context Clues: Feeling Like a Freak on a Beach
27 min
179
An Irresistible Movement with Reproductive Just...
48 min
180
WOMB WARS (part two)
52 min
181
WOMB WARS (part one)
55 min
182
Context Clues: Maybe it Ain't About the Babies
30 min
183
Postcolonial Astrology with Alice Sparkly Kat
39 min
184
THE PLANETARY PROPAGANDA OF THE ANTI-NAZI ASTRO...
36 min
185
The Supernatural Imaginary of the Third Reich w...
56 min
186
ASTROLOGY
50 min
187
All the Other Snuff with Sarah Marshall of 'You...
55 min
188
ROTTEN.COM
25 min
189
SNUFF FILMS
50 min
190
Context Clues: Pornography
This rerelease will give some context for next week's new episode called Snuff Films.
38 min
191
Hear ye! Hear ye! Extra extra hear all about it!
Just a handful of little announcements as we take a few weeks off (back in late April).
2 min
192
The Séance of Selena with Poet Melissa Lozada-O...
Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a Guatemalan-Colombian-American poet, screenwriter, and educator, and co-host of the podcast Say More. She is the author of a novel in verse called Dreaming of You, about bringing 90s Mexican-American pop star Selena back to life through a séance and the disastrous consequences that follow.
38 min
193
Scene Queens with Podcasters BJ and Harmony Col...
'This Ends at Prom' is a podcast that dives deep into coming-of-age and teen girl movies from the queer, feminist cisgender and transgender perspectives of wives and film analysts BJ and Harmony Colangelo. Today we chat about millennial pop groups, the emo scene, pop punk, hair metal, gender contamination, boy band haircuts, and what we hope for the next generation of stars and the fans that make them.
57 min
194
BOY BANDS
Behind every manufactured boy band there is what the press calls a Svengali, a puppet master who assembles the group and styles everything about them. This episode will introduce us to the eccentric producers and talent agents who have long shaped pop music from behind the curtain.
52 min
195
FANGIRLS
Hysterical fangirls have become so commonplace in popular music that we hardly pay attention to them anymore, no matter how loud they scream. But there was a time when the screaming, crying, fainting teenage fan was seen not only as a psychological puzzle but also as a major threat to the American empire.
44 min
196
Context Clues: Teenage Sex
To prepare for our series called Fangirls and Boy Bands, we are heading back to the fantastical realm of the teenager and the reactionary moral panics their sex lives have inspired since the days of the Puritans. In this episode, pay special attention to the invention of the teenager in the 1920s and 40s as well as the way the small revolutions that music and dance were able to incite, and then come back next week when we will break down the archetype of hysterical fangirl and see how these seas of swooners were seen as both ridiculous and extremely dangerous to the very fabric of America.
36 min
197
Twitter Saves Megan from the Westboro Baptist C...
*Please listen to our Westboro Baptist Church episode first!!* Megan Phelps-Roper was born and raised in the WBC, a fervent believer and lover of cruel funeral pickets. But when she got on Twitter to preach the hatred of God, she was met with thousands of replies from thousands of different people, a few of whom would slowly help reveal to her the error of her ways.
40 min
198
THE WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH
The Westboro Baptist Church outraged both sides of the political spectrum throughout the 90s, 2000s and 2010s, picketing the funerals of AIDS victims and soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, touting their loud and always shockingly foul-mouth message that America was doomed because we had accepted homosexuality.
61 min
199
Context Clues: Televangelists
Next week we will be covering the Westboro Baptist Church, the small family clan and hyper-Calvinist group who have long outraged both the left and the right with their severe anti-gay and anti-military funeral pickets.
55 min
200
E.T. Phone Hollywood: 'Hysteria Home Companion'...
This is a sneak peek of our new Patrons-only podcast Hysteria Home Companion, where we share with you all the hottest gossip from the cutting room floor. This week we’re talking about the outrageous celebrity alien encounters of Demi Lovato, Anne Heche, Elvis Presley, Fran Drescher, and Miley Cyrus.
4 min