America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.
Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.
Chapter 1: Now Entering Fantasyland
Chapter 2: I Believe, Therefore I Am Right: The Protestants
Chapter 3: All That Glitters: The Gold-Seekers
Chapter 4: Building Our Own Private Heaven on Earth: The Puritans
Chapter 5: The God-Given Freedom to Believe in God
Chapter 6: Imaginary Friends and Enemies: The Early Satanic Panics
Chapter 7: The First Me Century: Religion Gets American
Chapter 8: Meanwhile, in the Eighteenth-Century Reality-Based Community
Chapter 9: The First Great Delirium
Chapter 10: The All-American Fan Fiction of Joseph Smith, Prophet
Chapter 11: Quack Nation: Magical but Modern
Chapter 12: Fantastic Business: The Gold Rush Inflection Point
Chapter 13: In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Conspiracy Theory Habit
Chapter 14: The War Between States of Mind
Chapter 15: Ten Million Little Houses on the Prairie
Chapter 16: Fantasy Industrialized
Chapter 17: Progress and Backlash
Chapter 18: The Biggest Backlash: Brand-New Old-Time Religion
Chapter 19: The Business of America Is Show Business
Chapter 20: Big Rock Candy Mountains: Utopia in the Suburbs and the Sun
Chapter 21: The 1950s Seemed So Normal
Chapter 22: Big Bang: The Hippies
Chapter 23: Big Bang: The Intellectuals
Chapter 24: Big Bang: The Christians
Chapter 25: Big Bang: Politics and Government and Conspiracies
Chapter 26: Big Bang: Living in a Land of Entertainment
Chapter 27: Making Make-Believe More Realistic and Real Life More Make-Believe
Chapter 28: Forever Young: Kids “R” Us Syndrome
Chapter 29: The Reagan Era and the Start of the Digital Age
Chapter 30: American Religion from the Turn of the Millennium
Chapter 31: Our Wilder Christianities: Belief and Practice
Chapter 32: America Versus the Godless Civilized World: Why Are We So Exceptional?
Chapter 33: Magical but Not Necessarily Christian, Spiritual but Not Religious
Chapter 34: Blue-Chip Witch Doctors: The Reenchantment of Medicine
Chapter 35: How the Mainstream Enabled Fantasyland: Squishies, Cynics, and Believers
Chapter 36: Anything Goes—Unless It Picks My Pocket or Breaks My Leg
Chapter 37: The Inmates Running the Asylum Decide Monsters Are Everywhere
Chapter 38: Reality Is a Conspiracy: The X-Filing of America
Chapter 39: Mad as Hell, the New Voice of the People
Chapter 40: When the Gop Went Off the Rails
Chapter 41: Liberals Denying Science
Chapter 43: Final Fantasy-Industrial Complex
Chapter 44: Our Inner Children? They’re Going to Disney World!
Chapter 45: The Economic Dreamtime
Chapter 46: As Fantasyland Goes, So Goes the Nation