Hi - please forgive me if this isn't appropriate for AskHistorians but I thought I would ask here first.
Current events have been making me think a lot about previous periods in history when the 'official narrative' of current events were in dispute - from my own periods of study at university I am thinking particularly of talk of 'slave power' conspiracies in the pre-American Civil War period, and of anti-Catholic/Irish hysteria in 17th Century England prior to and during English Civil War, the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution.
Does anyone have any recommended reading on disputed public narratives/conspiracy theories/minsinformation campaigns, particularly in the above period, but also in any period of study where you think these played a key role?
Anything from popularly-targeted to scholarly works is welcome.
I haven't read it but in American politics the classic work on the subject is Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
There are two related sources... no, three, I think... that might on the one hand be sort of necessary for understanding how the more extreme aspects of misinformation and conspiracy-thinking function, but on the other hand kind of open a window onto (or maybe slip through the transom in from) a whole world of other weirdness.
First, most accessible: Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington is a fairly comprehensive look at a narrow slice of UFOlogy - how the UFO phenomenon has affected and been manipulated by intelligence agencies and counterintelligence operations. The lengths to which these groups or projects have taken UFO "stuff" - whether it's the formal debunkers, true believers, or tabloid publishers - is really remarkable.
More exhaustive than that is The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen, a parapsychologist from the Rhine Research Lab in North Carolina and the PRL in Princeton. This is a fairly huge and mostly dry (!) look at how hard it is to do real research into any paranormal field due to the way misinformation and true belief feed off each other. It's more or less an attempt to map the epistemological pitfalls that open as soon as one tries to do any study into liminal subjects.
It's specifically about the paranormal, but the bits on misinformation and skepticism as social structures might be useful in forming some frames for interpreting things.
Perhaps more tangential is Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality, which is more like a familiar Fortean collection of unexplainable or weird events, but plunges into the same kind of epistemological mapping as Hansen - why do people believe what they do, and how do those beliefs actually shape what reality is?
Unrelated to any of that, you might also be interested in reading up on the Afrikaner Broederbond, a well-documented secret society that was instrumental in propping up the power structures of apartheid South Africa. In other words, a conspiracy that was actually found out and publicized.
I was once assigned Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom's The Broederbond in an undergraduate class - I'm sure there are more academic approaches, but they were journalists who did a good job researching the story and telling it, as far as I could tell.