Moral panics

A comprehensive list of moral panics in US history via gpt

Colonial America

- Antinomian crisis — 1636–1638
- Connecticut witchcraft panic — 1647–1663
- Quaker menace / persecution — 1656–1661
- New England witchcraft scares — 1660s–1690s
- Salem witch hysteria — 1692–1693
- First Great Awakening — 1739–1745
- “Enthusiasm” / New Light controversy — 1740–1750
- Popery / Anglican bishop scares — 1760s–1770s
- Quebec Act / Catholic conspiracy panic — 1774–1776

Early Republic and Antebellum America

- Second Great Awakening — 1790–1840
- Bavarian Illuminati panic — 1797–1802
- Alien / Jacobin radicalism panic — 1798–1800
- Sabbatarian crusade — 1810s–1830s
- Benevolent Empire — 1815–1861
- Temperance crusade — 1826–1919
- Anti-Masonic panic — 1826–1836
- Sunday-mail panic — 1828–1831
- Nat Turner / slave-insurrection panic — 1831–1835
- Masturbation / “self-abuse” panic — 1830s–1910s
- Anti-convent / nun panic — 1834–1845
- Maria Monk / priestly-sex conspiracy — 1836–1840s
- Millerite apocalypse — 1840–1844
- Know-Nothing / papal conspiracy panic — 1844–1860
- Irish Catholic menace — 1840s–1860s
- Mormon theocracy panic — 1833–1858
- Spiritualism craze — 1848–1870s
- Slave Power conspiracy panic — 1840s–1860
- Abolitionist-insurrection panic — 1850s–1861
- Mormon polygamy crusade — 1852–1890

Reconstruction and the Gilded Age

- “Black rule” / Reconstruction panic — 1867–1877
- Chinese labor panic — 1870–1882
- Yellow Peril — 1870s–1924
- Comstockery / obscenity crusade — 1873–1915
- Social-purity crusade — 1870s–1917
- Anti-prostitution crusade — 1870s–1910s
- Opium-den panic — 1870s–1914
- Catholic-school / Blaine panic — 1875–1890
- Anti-polygamy crusade — 1877–1890
- Anarchist / Haymarket panic — 1886–1901
- “Black brute” / rape panic — 1880s–1930s
- Degeneration / hereditary-defect panic — 1890s–1930s
- Race-suicide panic — 1900–1925
- Cocaine-fiend panic — 1900–1914
- Dance-hall / working-girl vice panic — 1900s–1920s
- White-slavery panic — 1907–1914
- Eugenic “feeblemindedness” panic — 1907–1930s

World War I through the Depression

- Anti-German hysteria — 1917–1918
- Wartime disloyalty / sedition panic — 1917–1919
- First Red Scare — 1919–1920
- Palmer Raids / Bolshevik conspiracy — 1919–1920
- 100% Americanism — 1917–1925
- Second Ku Klux Klan moral crusade — 1915–1928
- Immigration / racial-stock panic — 1919–1924
- Jazz morality panic — 1917–1930s
- Flapper / sexual-modernity panic — 1920–1929
- Prohibition — 1919–1933
- Evolution / “monkey” panic — 1922–1925
- Al Smith / Catholic-president panic — 1928
- Gangster / crime-wave panic — 1920s–1934
- Reefer Madness — 1930–1942
- Sex-crime / “sexual psychopath” panic — 1937–1955
- War of the Worlds panic myth — 1938

World War II and Early Cold War

- Japanese fifth-column panic — 1941–1945
- Wartime juvenile-delinquency panic — 1942–1945
- Second Red Scare — 1947–1957
- McCarthyism — 1950–1954
- Lavender Scare — 1947–1969
- Comic-book panic — 1948–1955
- Juvenile-delinquency panic — 1953–1961
- Rock-and-roll / race-mixing panic — 1954–1960
- Elvis / teenage-sexuality panic — 1956–1958
- Switchblade / teenage-gang panic — 1956–1959
- Beatnik moral panic — 1957–1963
- Pornography / obscenity panic — 1955–1973
- Fluoridation / communist-poisoning panic — 1950s–1960s

The Sixties and Seventies

- Hippie / counterculture panic — 1965–1973
- LSD / psychedelic panic — 1966–1972
- Urban-riot panic — 1964–1972
- Black militant / revolutionary panic — 1967–1973
- Campus-radical panic — 1968–1972
- Law-and-order crime panic — 1968–1976
- Overpopulation / Population Bomb — 1967–1982
- Ecological-doomsday wave — 1968–1975
- Global-cooling scare — 1972–1978
- Cult / brainwashing panic — 1974–1984
- Snuff-film panic — 1975–1980
- Halloween poisoned-candy panic — 1970–2001
- Anti-nuclear-power crusade — 1975–1990
- “Save Our Children” / gay-recruitment panic — 1977–1981
- Nuclear-war / nuclear-freeze wave — 1979–1987
- Missing-children panic — 1979–1986
- Stranger Danger — 1979–1995

— Samuel Hammond 🦉 (@hamandcheese) August 21, 2026