Peoples Temple
People's Temple was a 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 909 people died at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project (informally, and now commonly, called "Jonestown") and nearby airstrip at Port Kaituma, and Georgetown in an organized mass suicide/killing.
The mass suicide and killings at Jonestown resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural non-accidental disaster prior to the events of September 11, 2001. Casualties at the airstrip included, among others, Congressman Leo Ryan.
Read more about Peoples Temple: San Francisco Temple, Mass Suicide At The Temple's Jonestown Agricultural Commune, Aftermath
Famous quotes containing the words peoples and/or temple:
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“One sorry fret,
An anvill Sparke, rose higher,
And in thy Temple falling, almost set
The house on fire.
Such fireballs dropping in the Temple Flame
Burns up the building: Lord, forbid the same.”
—Edward Taylor (1645–1729)