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In August 9-10, 1969, ex-convict, musician, and charismatic leader Charles Manson ordered members of his countercultural "family" to kill some of Hollywood's wealthy, white, "beautiful people." He also told them to leave clues that would implicate black radicals, in hopes of thereby triggering an apocalyptic race war. Rather than a race war, however, the violence only unleashed terror. Once "the family" had been named as suspects and then as the "love and terror cult", the case placed the entire counterculture under suspicion and came to mean, in line with a famous sentence handed down by Joan Didion in
The White Album, the end of the Sixties.
Based upon newly released archival material of case transcripts,
Love and Terror presents the Manson case as an exemplary site for historical scholarship. The book shows how the standard story of the Manson murders came to be told the way it was, excavating its fragmented sources and then tracing the way these were arranged—in the media and in court—into the official version of events. Based on years of empirical research,
Love and Terror presents the Manson murders as a prism of American culture, and as an event best understood in the context of global avant-gardist movements and revolutionary violence.
List of contents
Introduction
Ch. 1: "More to It Was the Ranch": Mapping the Manson Murders
Ch. 2: "Now Is the Time for Helter Skelter": Terror and Temporality
Ch. 3: "Make It Look Like Nothing": The Optics of the Manson Murders
Ch. 4: "This Confusion": Helter Skelter, Modern Myth
Ch. 5: "Viva la Raza!": Race, Racism, and the Race War
Ch. 6: "I Don’t Break Laws. I Make Laws": The Out/Law in the Paradoxical Power of the Void
Ch. 7: "And You Humans? Goodbye": ATWA(R) Against the Anthropocene
Ch. 8: "Hi There!" Said the Man to the Apocalypse: Manson’s Catastrophic Charismatic Mind
Ch. 9: "Good Neighbors": The Manson Murders and the My Lai Massacre
Ch. 10: Epilogue
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the author
Claudia Verhoeven is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. She was born and raised in the Netherlands, but, after her family emigrated, educated in the US. She received a BA in Philosophy from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in History from UCLA. Her first book is The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism and she is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism. She has been a fellow at the Robert Schuman Center of Advanced Studies at the European University Institute and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, and was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin in 2023-24.
