Jason Colavito – författare

Say you found that a few dozen people, operating at the highest levels of society, conspired to create a false ancient history of the American continent to promote a religious, white-supremacist agenda in the service of supposedly patriotic ideals. Would you call it fake news? In nineteenth-century America, this was in fact a powerful truth that shaped Manifest Destiny. The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of ""true"" native Americans.Thomas Jefferson's pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with Presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval and the Mormon Church among those benefiting. Jason Colavito traces this monumental deception from the farthest reaches of the frontier to the halls of Congress, mapping a century-long conspiracy to fabricate and promote a false ancient history - and enumerating its devastating consequences for contemporary Native people.Built upon primary sources and first-person accounts, the story that The Mound Builder Myth tells is a forgotten chapter of American history - but one that reads like the Da Vinci Code as it plays out at the upper reaches of government, religion, and science. And as far-fetched as it now might seem that a lost white race once ruled prehistoric America, the damage done by this ""ancient"" myth has clear echoes in today's arguments over white nationalism, multiculturalism, ""alternative facts,"" and the role of science and the control of knowledge in public life.

Could the Great Pyramid of Giza be a repository of ancient magical knowledge? Or perhaps evidence of a vanished pre–Ice Age civilization? Misinformation and myths have attached themselves to the Egyptian pyramids since ancient Greece and Rome. While many Americans believe that the pyramids were built by aliens, archaeologists understand that the Giza pyramids were built by the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty around 2450 BCE. So why is there such a disconnect between scholarly opinion and the popular view of Egypt? In The Legends of the Pyramids, Jason Colavito takes us back to Late Antique Egypt, where the replacement of polytheism with Christianity gave rise to local efforts to rewrite the stories of Egyptian history in the image of the Bible. When the Arab conquest absorbed Egypt into the Islamic community, these stories then passed into Islamic historiography and reentered the West. Colavito's The Legends of the Pyramids lays open pop culture's view of Egypt in movies, TV shows, popular books, and New Age beliefs, detailing how the hidden history of Egypt has grown alongside the official history of archaeology and Egyptology.

Tracing the development of horror entertainment since the late 18th century, this study argues that scientific discovery, technological progress, and knowledge in general have played an unparalleled role in influencing the evolution of horror. Throughout its many subgenres (biological horror, cosmic horror and others) and formats (film, literature, comics), horror records humanity's uneasy relationship with its own ability to reason, understand, and learn. The text first outlines a loose framework defining several distinct periods in horror development, then explores each period sequentially by looking at the scientific and cultural background of the period, its expression in horror literature, and its expression in horror visual and performing arts.

Horror fiction stormed the bestseller lists with classics like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, setting the stage for Stephen King's worldwide popularity, but the genre has literary roots going back centuries. This collection provides insight into the way classic horror texts were received, interpreted and discussed by the first generations to experience them, ideas that continue to define the way modern society views horror. Each reprinted article, review or critical essay is prefaced with an introduction and explanatory notes to put the work in context. The book also includes an overview of horror criticism, a publication timeline, and period photographs and illustrations.

The story of Jason and the Argonauts is one of the most famous in Greek myth, and its development from the oldest layers of Greek mythology down to the modern age encapsulates the dramatic changes in faith, power and culture that Western civilization has seen over the past three millennia. From the Bronze Age to the Classical Age, from the medieval world to today, the Jason story has been told and retold with new stories, details and meanings. This book explores the epic history of a colorful myth and probes the most ancient origins of the quest for the Golden Fleece--a quest that takes us to the very dawn of Greek religion and its close relationship with Near Eastern peoples and cultures.

Did aliens visit ancient civilizations? Could Jesus have fathered a dynasty? Did people of the ancient world visit the Americas centuries before Columbus? The public enjoys such questions, which have spawned countless books, movies and television series, but very rarely is any actual evidence produced.According to many eager writers and television hosts, evidence for long-ago astronauts or early transatlantic voyages can be found in ancient texts. But too often sources remain obscure and some writers have altered or fabricated texts to make their case for extraterrestrials and lost civilizations.This book examines more than 130 very old texts used to make the case for Atlantis, aliens, fallen angels, the Great Flood, giants, transatlantic voyagers, ancient high technology and many other mysteries. English translations are presented with explanatory notes showing how these texts have been used and abused to make entertaining claims about prehistory.

A fresh and long-overdue reassessment of James Dean, examining his life and legacy as a queer man.Although he died at a heartbreakingly young age and appeared in only a handful of movies, James Dean revolutionized American manhood. As a celebrity and icon, he melded vulnerability with determination, sensitivity with strength, in a way that offered a bracing and—for some—threatening new vision of masculinity. His massive influence and the fascination he has always inspired are inseparable from his identity as a queer man whose complex sexuality shattered the norms of midcentury American society. (When asked whether he was a homosexual, he reportedly said, “I’m certainly not going through life with one hand tied behind my back.”)Today, even though it is widely accepted that Dean was gay or bisexual, the story of his life and personal character continue to be colored by the prejudices of an earlier era and the work of often unscrupulous biographers and journalists. Drawing on exhaustive new research (including more than four hundred previously secret pages of Dean’s personal and business records), Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean is a revelatory reassessment of the man and his legacy. Free from sensationalism—but unafraid to confront the difficult facts of Dean’s life—it deploys modern insights into sexual diversity to transform our understanding of James Dean’s story, and the stories of boys and men like him.