The Jonestown Massacre.

On 18 November 1978 James Warren ("Jim") Jones, founder and head of the Peoples Temple, ordered the assassination of California congressman Leo Ryan and the mass suicide of nearly a thousand of his followers in the colony he had established in the jungles of Guyana, the Promised Land. Jones himself died in the catastrophe. The events in Jonestown, as reporters called the enclave, stunned the world and deepened the fear of cults that was already rampant in the United States.

Beginnings.

Jim Jones was born in Indiana in 1931. He went into the Pentecostal ministry as a youth, establishing a congregation in Indianapolis that took the name Peoples Temple in 1955. In time Jones affiliated both himself and his congregation with the Mainline denomination the Disciples of Christ. From the beginning Jones maintained a biracial congregation.

Apocalyptic Visions.

In the early 1960s Jones became...