1. The discussion with “Abe,” the urban survivalist, is based on a series of interviews conducted between 1990 and 1991 at Abe’s apartment in a modern, low-rise complex in a small city northeast of Boston, Massachusetts.
2. Daniel Boone (1734–1820), frontiersman and legendary American hero, helped blaze a trail through the Cumberland Gap, a notch in the Appalachian Mountains near the border between Virginia and Tennessee. Zebulon Pike (1779–1813) was a U.S. Army officer and explorer for whom Pikes Peak in Colorado is named. In 1805 Pike led a 20-man exploring party to the headwaters of the Missouri to discover the source of the river, negotiate peace treaties with Indian tribes, and assert legal claim of the United States to the area. Pike also explored the Southwest and Spanish territory. Pike served in the War of 1812 and was killed in action on April 27, 1813. Davy Crockett (1786–1836), frontiersman, politician, and Indian fighter, was a legendary figure who made a name for himself in Tennessee during the Creek War (1813–1815). In 1821 he was elected to the Tennessee legislature, winning popularity with homespun yarns and humor. When he failed to win election to the U.S. Congress he headed west to Texas and joined the American forces against the Mexicans. In 1836 he and fewer than 200 Texas volunteers were killed by 4,000 Mexican soldiers at the eighteenth-century Franciscan mission in San Antonio known as the Alamo. Purportedly a real trapper and mountain man living in the mid-19th century, Jeremiah “Liver Eatin’ “ Johnson (so-called because of the way he devoured his victims) was made famous by the Sydney Pollack film Jeremiah Johnson (1972) starring Robert Redford. Jeremiah Johnson was writted by John Milius, author of Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn.
3. Two decades of legal squabbling and unruly protests turned the Seabrook, New Hampshire, nuclear power plant into a symbol of everything that was wrong with atomic energy in the United States during the 1980s. After years of start-ups, shutdowns, and protests that led to more than 2,500 arrests since the mid-1970s, the beleaguered power plant continues to operate, but at a lower level.
4. James Coates, Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987).
5. Stephen N. Linder, “Survivalists: Ethnography of an Urban Millennial Cult” (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis: University of California, Los Angeles, 1982).