Why was there a surge of writings about the Illuminati in America in the late 1910's?
score:8
Sadly, either ngrams doesn't provide the details required to find the statistical culprit(s), or I'm not skilled enough to know about them. However, looking through the actual hits provides some really historically interesting stuff.
For instance, Google divides their detail pages into year ranges. However, there's one "range" in that blip that is just a single year (1918). So I'm guessing that's the true blip.
Clicking on that, the main hit seems to be the book New England and the Bavarian Illuminati, by Vernon Stauffer. This looks like it might be a typical conspiracy theory book, but in actuality it appears to be a somewhat respected history of Illuminati conspiracy theories in the early United States. Its still in print apparently. It may have to go on my list.
The book seems to particularly concentrate on the conspiracy theories as they relate to politics in the early USA. It seems many Federalists felt that the Jeffersonians were controlled by the conspiracy. Sort of the late 18th century version of birthers. From the Amazon blurb:*
It tells how the Federalists, including the New England clergy in particular, seized upon the idea that the Illuminati were behind the actions of the Democrats. Only a far-reaching conspiracy could explain the irreverent habits and searing attacks of the Jeffersonians. Fear of the secret Democratic Clubs, magnified by fear of the French Jacobins, made such a conspiracy readily believable
There are also several hits from that period on things published by publishers from Allentown, Pennsylvania of all places. One, Philosophical Publishing Company, is still in business. This is the same period that Allentown became a hub of beer brewing. Typically this happened in places that experienced a lot of immigration from Germany, particularly Bavaria. I suppose it shouldn't surprise anyone that Bavarians might be interested in the Bavarian Illuminati.
But to get back to the question, it looks like the real surge in interest in the Illuminati was probably around the turn of the 19th century. What you saw in the early 20th was perhaps an echo, at least partly based on the late 18th century surge being far enough in the past to have become a valid subject for historical study.
* - One important bit of context here: In early America it was New Englanders who frequently used religion as a political cudgel, and chiefly Southerners (particularly Baptists) who strongly supported the separation of Church and State.
Upvote:3
Google N-Grams are very pretty look at but they work best only for large-scale trends (i.e. "vampire" "werewolf" "zombie" "mummy" "Frankenstein" is interesting), and even then, they are somewhat flawed. There are two reasons that I'd be inclined to distrust the graph:
- Google does not make available the data on the corpus that the N-Grams are searching. It's not even searching ALL of Google Books, and it's unclear what's actually in Google Books. See http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.00960 for a discussion of what's actually under the hood of Google Books in general.
- The spike that you're seeing is actually very small. At it's highest, it's only .0000275% of the corpus, which, even if you're searching 5 million books, is only about 135 mentions.
If you're interested in something more representative, you could try the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) at BYU: http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/?f=texts_e.
More post
- 📝 Marc Bloch's "Feudal Society"; Why do nobles have this vocation?
- 📝 Was Carausius the grandfather of Magnus Maximus?
- 📝 When was the last moment that Dutch, German and Swiss German were the same language?
- 📝 How did the layout of a Medieval European village typically change as it grew into a town?
- 📝 How did France balance the budget by 1738?
- 📝 What was Rousseau's point in "The Social Contract"?
- 📝 Did anyone in ancient times want to abolish slavery?
- 📝 Did Romans create dictionaries?
- 📝 Was there intermixing between Brits and Hong Kongers during Britain's control of the territory?
- 📝 How much did we know about heredity pre-Mendel?
- 📝 What is the current location of the "Cauldron of Trun and Chambios" from August 1944?
- 📝 Does Siquieros' Echo of a Scream resemble a known news photo from the Second Sino-Japanese War?
- 📝 How was the Pandidakterion organised?
- 📝 What methods were used for onboard ship communication during WW2?
- 📝 What is the best method/ readings to learn WWII
- 📝 Why did helmets have this metal thing between the eyes?
- 📝 Why wouldn't the South make salt from seawater during the American Civil War?
- 📝 Did the USSR have a more positive relationship with France than other west european countries after 1945?
- 📝 Who conducted the first "straw poll" in U.S. election politics, and when was it conducted?
- 📝 What legal code first provided tenants rights and/or covered eviction?
- 📝 In the USSR, what if any was the formal, ideological response to the Cultural Revolution in China?
- 📝 Why did US annex Hawaii?
- 📝 Did Napoleon ever visit Modern Israel?
- 📝 Can anybody identify this 1900-1933 uniform (possibly German)
- 📝 Were the Vikings descendents of the Tribe of Dan?
- 📝 What was the death toll of Plague of Justinian?
- 📝 Could Romania have remained neutral in WWII?
- 📝 What was the official policy of British administration about the integration of Indian Princely States in 1947?
- 📝 Books on development of collective identities (tribal, ethnic, national etc) and people's identification as part of the collective through time?
- 📝 Why did Ong Khan offer Temujin (young Gengis Khan) a position?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Why was there a surge of writings about the Illuminati in America in the late 1910's?
- 📝 Why was there a surge in the US incarceration rate during the 1990s?
- 📝 Why was there an increase in literature regarding fire safety in America during the 1970s?
- 📝 Why are there so many laws about eye injuries in the Code of Hammurabi?
- 📝 Why was PTSD not written about as much before the 20th century?
- 📝 Why was there lack of food during WW2 in the UK?
- 📝 Why was the Spanish kingdom in America called New Spain if Spain didn't exist as a country back then?
- 📝 Why was there little nonwhite migration to Europe in the 19th century?
- 📝 Before entering WW II, why was the US so against Japanese aggression in China but did nothing about Germany in Europe?
- 📝 Why was there no concerted effort to end the Barbary pirate raids until the 1800's?
- 📝 Why was Northern Ireland mostly peaceful from the late 1920s to the mid 1960s?
- 📝 Why did the Germans wait until it was too late to reinstate their unrestricted submarine warfare in WWI?
- 📝 Was there a constant 'fear of the bomb' in the Soviet Union and America during the Cold War?
- 📝 Why was there a 2nd version of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that gave Lithuania to USSR?
- 📝 Was there anything in common between the War of 1812 between Britain and America and the War of 1812 between Napoleon and Russia?
- 📝 Considering what was known about Hitler in 1933, why would German bishops declare that Catholics could cooperate with the new State?
- 📝 Why are there shields present on the sides of Henry VIII ships, did they serve any function or was it pure decoration?
- 📝 Why was there a reference to the Battle of Hastings in Harper Lee's novel?
- 📝 Was there a military practice of reloading while marching/running, in Europe or America during the 18th and 19th centuries?
- 📝 Was there actually debate amongst the Norse about the existence or location of Britain?
- 📝 Why was there no "Atlantic Wall" equivalent on the Mediterranean coast of France?
- 📝 Why was there so little information about sex in Eastern Block countries?
- 📝 Were there attempts to rename the French language Prussian order Pour le Mérite, why was it never Germanised?
- 📝 Why was the Cornish Militia stationed in Devon in late 18th Century?
- 📝 Why was there calm in Indian-held Kashmir until 1989? What happened in 1989 that triggered the public unrest that still continues to this day?
- 📝 Why was there a sharp decline in the number of municipalities in West Germany in the 1970s?
- 📝 Why was America much better prepared earlier in World War II in the air than in other respects?
- 📝 Why was there such tension between the Ottoman Empire and Russia during the Armenian genocide?
- 📝 Why was there a "workers' militia" in Eastern Europe but not in the USSR?
- 📝 Why America was not discovered from the left land at Bering strait?