It’s tempting to believe that we live in an unprecedentedly fertile age group for conspiracy ideas, with seemingly each churn of the news headlines cycle getting fresh manifestations of large-scale paranoia. But the sad simple truth is that these narratives of suspicion-and the delusional psychologies that energy them-have been a constant presence in American existence for nearly as long as there has been an America.

In this sweeping publication, Thomas Milan Konda traces the country’s obsession with conspiratorial thought from about Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How Delusions Have Overrun America the first times of the republic to your own anxious instant. Rather than basically rehashing the surface eccentricities of such theories, Konda draws from his unprecedented assemblage of conspiratorial writing to crack open the mindsets that business lead people toward these self-sealing worlds of denial. What is distinctively American about these ideas, he argues, isn’t basically our country’s homegrown obsession with them but their ongoing prevalence and virulence. Konda shows that conspiracy ideas are no safe sideshow. These are instead the dark and magic formula heart of American politics history-one that is poisoning the blood stream of an increasingly sick body politic.