Secondary sources for further reading

History of LSD

  • Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987)

  • Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (New York: Grove Press, 1992)

  • Andy Roberts, Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2008)

Social history context for psychedelics in the 20th century

  • David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)

  • Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

  • Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)

  • Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)

  • Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2017)

Psychedelics in the Media

  • Stephen Siff, Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015)

Changing Conceptions of Mental Illness in the Mid-20th Century

  • Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019)

  • Laura Stark and Nancy D. Campbell, "The Ineffable: A Framework for the Study of Methods Through the Case of Mid-Century Mind-Brain Sciences," Social Studies of Science 48, no. 6 (2018): 789–820

  • Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997)

History of Psychedelic Therapy

  • Matthew Oram, The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)

  • Lucas Richert, Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019)

  • Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

Technological Utopianism and Psychedelic History

  • Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)

  • Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (New York: Little, Brown, 2023)

  • Benjamin Breen, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central, 2024)

The Psychedelic Renaissance

  • Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind (New York: Penguin, 2019)

  • Danielle Giffort, Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022)

  • Nicolas Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of the Brain (Berkeley: UC Press, 2013)

Premodern history of psychedelics

  • Breen, Benjamin. "The failed globalization of psychedelic drugs in the early modern world." The Historical Journal65, no. 1 (2022): 12-29.

  • Nesvig, Martin. "Sandcastles of the Mind: Hallucinogens and Cultural Memory,” In Substance and seduction: ingested commodities in early modern Mesoamerica, pp. 27-54. University of Texas Press, 2017.