RESOURCES
Primary Sources
The California
Historical Society (CHS) is the chief repository for materials related to
the Peoples Temple. These materials include organizational and personal
papers, legal documents, financial records and photographs. CHS currently
holds five individual collections that form the Peoples Temple Collection:
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Peoples Temple records, 1941-1983, 130 cartons (MS 3800)
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FBI collection
of Peoples Temple papers from Jonestown, Guyana: photocopies, 1972-1978,
15 cartons (MS 3801)
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Moore family papers, 1968-1988, 28 boxes (MS
3802)
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John R.
Hall research materials on Peoples Temple, 1954-1987, 1 carton (MS 3803)
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Ross E.
Case collection pertaining to Peoples Temple, 1961-1984, 2 boxes (MS 4062)
The California Historical Society
http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org
is located in downtown San Francisco at
678 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. The North Baker Research Library
is open to the public Wednesday through Friday from 12:00 pm to 4:30 pm.
Appointments are not required, but due to the limited amount of seating
in the Reading Room, researchers are encouraged to email or call ahead if
they would like to discuss their research prior to visiting or to reserve
a seat. Contact the Library by email at reference@calhist.org
or call 415-357-1848 ext. 220.
Researchers will find online
catalogue records for materials related to Peoples Temple at http://melvyl.cdlib.org,
the online catalog of the University of California libraries, the California
State Library, and independent California libraries, including the library
of the California Historical Society. Guides or finding aids to larger
collections that provide more detailed information than is possible in catalog
records may be searched in the Online Archive of California (http://www.oac.cdlib.org).
Government Documents
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The
Assassination of Representative Leo J. Ryan and the Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy.
Report of a Staff Investigative Group to the Committee on Foreign Affairs,
U.S. House of, May 15, 1979, 96th Congress, 1st Session. Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979.
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“Findings of
GAO study on California placement and federal funding of foster children
under guardianship of members of Peoples Temple religious group in Jonestown,
Guyana.” In Abuse and Neglect of Children in Institutions, 1979 Hearings
before the Subcommittee on Child and Human Development, U.S. Senate Committee
on Labor and Human Resources, May 31, 1979.
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“Investigation
Report on Peoples Temple.” Department of Social Services, State of
California, Sacramento, CA, November, 1979.
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“Information
Meeting on the Cult Phenomenon in the U.S.” Transcript of Proceedings, United States Senate, February 5, 1979, 96th Congress,
1st Session.
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“Report
of Investigation of Peoples Temple.” Office of the Attorney General,
State of California, Sacramento, CA, April, 1980.
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“The Performance
of the Department of State and the American Embassy in Georgetown, Guyana
in the People's Temple Case” aka “The Crimmins
Report.” U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., May, 1979.
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“The Death
of Representative Leo J. Ryan, People's Temple, and Jonestown: Understanding
a Tragedy.” Hearing by Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S.
House of Representatives, May 15, 1979, 96th Congress, 1st Session.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979.
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Ahlberg,
Sture. Messianic Movements: A Comparative Analysis
of the Sabbatians, the People's Temple and the
Unification Church. Stockholm: Almqvist and
Wiksell, 1986.
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Anthony,
Dick and Thomas Robbins. “Religious Totalism, Exemplary Dualism, and the Waco Tragedy.”
In Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements.
Edited by Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer. New
York: Routledge, 1994.
-
Bromley, David
G. and Anson D. Shupe, Jr..
Strange Gods: The Great American Cult Scare. Boston: Beacon Press,
1981.
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Chidester,
David. “Rituals of Exclusion and the Jonestown Dead.”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56, no. 4 (Winter 1988):
681-702.
-
Salvation
and Suicide: An Interpretation of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown.
Bloomington: Indiana University, 1988, 2003.
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“Saving
the Children by Killing Them: Redemptive Sacrifice in the Ideologies
of Jim Jones and Ronald Reagan.” Religion and American Culture:
A Journal of Interpretation 1, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 177-201.
-
Hall, John
R. “The Apocalypse at Jonestown.” In In
Gods We Trust: New Patterns of Religious Pluralism in America. Edited
by Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction
Books, 1981, pp. 171-190.
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Gone
from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History.
New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books, 1987, 2004.
- “Rituals
of Exclusion and the Jonestown Dead.” Journal of the American Academy
of Religions 56, no. 4 (1988): 681-702.
- “Peoples Temple.” In America’s Alternative Religions. Edited by Timothy Miller. Albany, N.Y.: State University of
New York, 1995, pp. 303-311.
-
“Public
Narratives and the Apocalyptic Sect: From Jonestown to Mt. Carmel.”
In Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian
Conflict. Edited by Stuart A. Wright. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 205-235
- Hall, John
R. and Philip Schuyler. “Apostasy, Apocalypse, and Religious Violence:
An Exploratory Comparison of Peoples Temple, the Branch Davidians, and the Solar Temple.” In The Politics of Religious
Apostasy: The Role of Apostates in the Transformation of Religious Movements.
Edited by David G. Bromley. Westport, Conn.: Praeger,
1998.
-
Hall, John
R. with Philip D. Schuyler and Sylvaine Trinh.
Apocalpyse Observed: Religious Movements
and Violence in North America, Europe, and Japan. New York: Routledge,
2000.
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Harding, Vincent.
“My Lord, What a Mourning: Jonestown is America.” In The
Other American Revolution, by Vincent Harding. Atlanta: Institute
of the Black World, 1980.
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Introvigne,
Massimo . Idee che uccidono.
Jonestown, Waco, il Tempio Solare. Milan: Pessano MIMEP-Docete, 1995.
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Johnson, Doyle
Paul. “Dilemma of Charismatic Leadership: The Case of The
Peoples Temple.” Sociological Analysis 40 (1979): 315-323.
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Lewis, Gordon
K. “Gather with the Saints at the River:” The Jonestown Guyana Holocaust.
Río Piedras: University of Puerto
Rico, Institute of Caribbean Studies, 1978.
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Lincoln,
C. Eric and Lawrence H. Mamiya. “Daddy
Jones and Father Divine: The Cult as Political Religion.” Religious Life
49 (1980): 6-23. (Reprinted in Moore, et al., Peoples Temple and Black
Religion in America.)
-
Lindt,
Gillian. “Journeys to Jonestown: Accounts and Interpretations of the Rise
and Demise of People’s Temple.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review
37, nos. 1 & 2 (Fall-Winter 1981-1982): 159-174.
-
Levi, Kenneth,
ed. Violence and Religious Commitment: Implications of Jim Jones’ People’s
Temple Movement. University Park, Penn.: Penn State Press, 1982.
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Melton,
J. Gordon. Peoples Temple and Jim Jones: Broadening Our Perspective.
New York: Garland, 1990.
-
Moore, Rebecca.
“‘American as Cherry Pie:’ Peoples Temple and Violence in America.”
In Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases. Edited by Catherine Wessinger. Syracuse
N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000, pp. 121-137. Available online.
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“Drinking
the Kool-Aid: The Cultural Transformation of a Tragedy.” Nova
Religio 7, no. 2 (November 2003): 92-100. Available online.
-
“Is the
Canon on Jonestown Closed?” Nova Religio
4, no. 1 (October 2000): 7-27.
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“Reconstructing
Reality: Conspiracy Theories About Jonestown.”
Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 200-220. Available online.
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A
Sympathetic History of Jonestown. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985.
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Moore,
Rebecca, Anthony B. Pinn, and Mary R. Sawyer,
eds. Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2004.
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Moore, Rebecca
and Fielding M. McGehee, III, eds.
New Religious Movements, Mass Suicide, and Peoples Temple: Scholarly
Perspectives on a Tragedy. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen
Press, 1989.
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Mary McCormick
Maaga. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998. Chapter available online.
-
Pozzi,
Enrico. Il
Carisma malato. Il People’s Temple
e il suicidio collettive di Jonestown. Naples: Liguori,
1992.
-
Richardson,
James. “Peoples Temple and Jonestown: A Corrective Comparison and Critique.”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 19, no. 3 (1980): 239-255.
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Robbins, Thomas.
“Reconsidering Jonestown.” Religious Studies Review
15, no. 1 (January 1989): 32-37. (This article was expanded into “The Second
Wave of Jonestown Literature,” noted below.)
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“The Second
Wave of Jonestown Literature: A Review Essay.” In New Religious Movements,
Mass Suicide, and Peoples Temple: Scholarly Perspectives on a Tragedy.
Edited by Rebecca Moore and Fielding M. McGehee,
III. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press,
1989, pp 113-134.
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Robbins,
Thomas and Dick Anthony. “Sects and Violence: Factors Enhancing the
Volatility of Marginal Religious Movements.” In Armageddon at Waco: Critical
Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict.
Edited by Stuart A. Wright. Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1995.
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Smith, Archie
Jr. “An Interpretation of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown: Implications
for the Black Church.” PSR Bulletin Occasional Paper 58, no. 2 (February
1980). (Reprinted in Moore, et al., Peoples Temple and Black Religion
in America.).
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The
Relational Self: Ethics and Therapy from a Black Church Perspective.
Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982. (The last chapter discusses Peoples
Temple.)
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“We Need
to Press Forward: Black Religion and Jonestown, Twenty Years Later,”
published online 1998. [URL= http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/Articles/smith.htm]
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Smith, Jonathan
Z. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982.
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Stephenson,
Denice. Dear People: Remembering Jonestown. Berkeley:
Heyday Books, 2005.
-
Weightman,
Judith. Making Sense of the Jonestown Suicides.
Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983.
-
Wessinger,
Catherine. How the Millennium Comes Violently: From
Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000.
-
Barker, Eileen.
“Religious Movements: Cult and Anticult Since
Jonestown.” Annual Review of Sociology 12 (1986): 329-346.
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Black, Albert.
“Jonestown: Two Faces of Suicide: A Durkheimian
Analysis.” Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 20, no. 4 (Winter
1990): 285-306.
-
Brown, Norman
R., Lance J. Rips, and Steven K. Shevel.
“The Subjective Dates of Natural Events in Very Long-term
Memory.” Cognitive Psychology 17, no. 2 (April 1985): 139-177.
-
Dunning,
Christine M. and Milton N. Silva. “Disaster-Induced
Trauma in Rescue Workers.” Victimology
5, no. 2 (supp. 4) (1980): 287-297.
-
Dwyer, Philip
M. “An Inquiry into the Psychological Dimensions of Cult Suicide.” Suicide
and Life-Threatening Behavior 9, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 120-127.
-
Hochman,
John. “Miracle, Mystery, and Authority: The Triangle of Cult Indoctrination.”
Psychiatric Annals. 20, no. 4 (April 1990): 179-184,
187.
-
Hoyt,
Michael F. “Observations regarding patients’ reactions to the Jonestown
Massacre and the Moscone-Milk Assassinations.”
Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis.
9, no. 2 (April 1981): 303-309.
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Jones, David
R. “Secondary Disaster Victims: The Emotional Effects of Recovering and
Identifying Human Remains. American Journal of Psychiatry 142, no.
3 (March 1985): 303-307.
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Jorgensen,
Danny. “The Social Construction and Interpretation of Deviance: Jonestown
and the Mass Media,” Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal
1 (1980): 309-332.
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Kroth,
Jerry. “Recapitulating Jonestown. Journal of
Psychohistory 11, no. 3 (Winter 1985): 383-393.
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Lasaga,
Jose I. “Death in Jonestown: Techniques of Political Control by a Paranoid
Leader.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 10, no. 4 (Winter
1980): 210-213.
-
Nesci,
Domenico Arturo. The Lessons of Jonestown:
An Ethnopsychoanalytical Study of Suicidal Communities. Rome:
Società Editrice Universo, 1999.
-
Osherow,
Neal. “Making Sense of the Nonsensical: An Analysis of
Jonestown.” In Readings about the Social Animal,
7th edition, ed. Elliot Aronson. New York: W. H. Freeman. Available online. [URL=http://www.academicarmageddon.co.uk/library/OSHER.htm]
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Stack, Steven.
“The Effect of the Jonestown Suicides on American Suicide Rates.”
Journal of Social Psychology 119, no. 1 (February 1983): 145-146.
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Ulman, Richard B. and D. Wilfred Abse. “The Group Psychology of Mass Madness: Jonestown.”
Political Psychology 4, no. 4 (December 1983): 637-661.
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Brailey,
Jeff. The Ghosts of November: Memoirs of an Outsider who Witnessed
the Carnage at Jonestown, Guyana. San Antonio: J &
J Publishers, 1998.
-
Ethan Feinsod.
Awake in a Nightmare: Jonestown: The Only Eyewitness Account. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1981. (Information provided by Odell Rhodes.)
-
Laurie Efrein
Kahalas. Snake Dance :
Unravelling the Mysteries of Jonestown. New York: Red
Robin Press, 1998.
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Klineman, George, Sherman Butler,
and David Conn. The Cult that Died: The
Tragedy of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. New York: Putnam’s, 1980.
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Lane, Mark.
The Strongest Poison. New York: Hawthorn, 1980.
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Layton, Deborah.
Seductive Poison: A Survivor’s Tale of Life and Death in the Peoples
Temple. New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1998.
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Moore, Rebecca.
In Defense of Peoples Temple. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin
Mellen Press, 1988.
-
Thielmann Bonnie and Dean Merril. The Broken God.
Elgin, Ill.: David Cook, 1979.
-
Thrash, Catherine
(Hyacinth) as told to Marian K. Towne. The Onliest
One Alive: Surviving Jonestown, Guyana. Indianapolis: Marian K. Towne,
1995.
-
Kern,
Phil and Doug Wead. People’s Temple,
People’s Tomb. Plainfield N.J.: Logos International, 1979.
-
Krause, Charles
with Laurence M. Stern, Richard Harwood and the staff of the Washington
Post. Guyana Massacre: The Eyewitness Account. New York: Berkeley
Publishing, 1978.
-
Mills, Jeannie.
Six Years with God: Life inside Rev. Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple.
New York: A&W Publishers, 1979.
-
Wooden,
Ken. The Children of Jonestown. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. (Cites Stanley Clayton extensively.)
-
Wright, Lawrence.
“The Sons of Jim Jones.” The New Yorker 69, no. 39 (22
Nov 1993): 66-89.
-
Yee,
Min S. and Thomas N. Layton. In My Father’s House. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981.
-
Alinin, S. F., Antonov,
B. G. and A. N. Itskov. The Jonestown
Carnage: A CIA Crime. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987.
-
Appel,
Willa. Cults in America: Programmed for Paradise. New York: Holt,
Rinehart, Winston, 1983.
-
Bacon, Margaret.
Journey to Guyana. London: Dobson Books, 1970.
-
Boyle,
James J. Killer Cults. New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks,
1995.
-
Carpozi,
George Jr. The Suicide Cults. New York:
Manor Books, 1978.
-
Cawthorne,
Nigel. The World’s Greatest Cults. London: Chancellor Press, 1999.
-
Daniels, Elam
J. An Exposé of the King of the Cults. Orlando, Fla.: Christ
for the World, 1979.
-
De Angelis,
Gina. Jonestown Massacre: Tragic End of a Cult. Berkeley Heights,
N.J.: Enslow Publishers, 2002.
-
Dieckmann,
Ed Jr.. Beyond Jonestown: ‘Sensitivity Training’
and the Cult of Mind Control. Torrance, Calif.: Noontide Press, 1981.
-
The
Secret of Jonestown: The Reason Why. Torrance, Calif.: Noontide
Press and Decatur, Ga., Historical Review Press, 1981
-
Endleman,
Robert. Jonestown and the Manson Family: Race, Sexuality and Collective
Madness. New York: Psyche Press, 1993.
-
Hamilton, Sue
L. The Death of a Cult Family: Jim Jones. Bloomington, Minn.: Abdo
and Daughers, 1989.
-
Hougan,
Jim. “Jonestown: The Secret Life of Jim Jones: A Parapolitical Fugue.” Lobster 37 (Summer 1999):
2-20.
-
Judge, John.
“The Black Hole of Guyana.” In Secret and Suppressed: Banned
Ideas and Hidden History. Portland, Ore.: Feral House, 1993.
-
“Jonestown,
CIA, Assassinations, Drugs and Mind Control.” Critique: A
Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics 6, no. 1,2
(Spring/Summer 1986): 39-63.
-
Landau, Nathan.
Heavenly Deceptor. Brooklyn,
N.Y.: Sound of Music Publishing, 1992.
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Kilduff, Marshall and Ron Javers. The Suicide Cult: The Inside Story of the
Peoples Temple Sect and the Massacre in Guyana. New York: Bantam, 1978.
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Knerr,
M. E. Suicide in Guyana. New York: Belmont Tower Books, 1978.
-
Maguire,
John and Mary Lee Dunn. Hold Hands and Die. New York: Dale,
1978.
-
McBirnie,
W. S. The Untold Story of Jonestown. Glendale,
Cal.: Community Churches of America, n.d.
-
McCoy, Alan
W. The Guyana Murders. San Francisco: Highland House, 1988.
-
Meiers,
Michael. Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? A
Review of the Evidence.
Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988.
-
Nichols, Norma.
Pot Pourri with a Taste of Cult.
n.p.,
n.d.
-
Rodgers, William
D. Cult Sunday. n.c.: Accent Books, 1979.
-
Nugent, John
Peer. White Night: The Untold Story of What Happened Before—and Beyond—Jonestown.
New York: Rawson, Wade, 1979.
-
White, Mel.
Deceived. Old Tappan, N.J.: Spire Books, 1979.
-
Thomas G. Whittle
and Jan Thorpe, “Revisiting the Jonestown Tragedy.” Freedom Magazine
n.v. (August 1997): 4-11. Available online.