Part cultural history, part sociological critique, and part literary performance, "Panic Diaries "explores the technological and social construction of individual and collective panic. Jackie Orr looks at instances of panic and its "cures" in the twentieth-century United States: from the mass hysteria following the 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells's "War of the Worlds" to an individual woman swallowing a pill to control the "panic disorder" officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Against a backdrop of Cold War anxieties over atomic attack, Orr highlights the...

Part cultural history, part sociological critique, and part literary performance, "Panic Diaries "explores the technological and social construction of individual and collective panic. Jackie Orr looks at instances of panic and its cures in the twentieth-century United States: from the mass hysteria following the 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells s "War of the Worlds" to an individual woman swallowing a pill to control the panic disorder officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Against a backdrop of Cold War anxieties over atomic attack, Orr highlights the...