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:
“The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The divinity in man is the true vestal fire of the temple which is never permitted to go out, but burns as steadily and with as pure a flame on the obscure provincial altar as in Numa’s temple at Rome.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)