Peoples Temple was a pseudo-religious organization founded in 1955 by Jim Jones that, by the mid-1970s, included over a dozen locations in California including its headquarters in San Francisco. It is best known for the events of November 18, 1978 in Guyana, in which 918 people died at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project (informally, and now commonly, called "Jonestown"), a nearby airstrip at Port Kaituma, and Georgetown.
The tragedy at Jones...
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Peoples Temple was a pseudo-religious organization founded in 1955 by Jim Jones that, by the mid-1970s, included over a dozen locations in California including its headquarters in San Francisco. It is best known for the events of November 18, 1978 in Guyana, in which 918 people died at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project (informally, and now commonly, called "Jonestown"), a nearby airstrip at Port Kaituma, and Georgetown.
The tragedy at Jonestown resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster, prior to the events of September 11, 2001. At the airstrip, Temple members murdered, among others, Congressman Leo Ryan, the only Congressman murdered in the line of duty in United States history.
Before forming a church, Jim Jones had become enamored by communism and frustrated by the harassment communists received in the U.S. This, among other things, provided a seminal inspiration for Jones; as he himself described in a biographical recording,...
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