Jonestown

It was called a mass suicide for years. The record has moved, and so should the language.

The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, known as Jonestown, was a remote commune in Guyana established by the Peoples Temple, an American religious cult led by Jim Jones. On 18 November 1978, 918 people died in a coordinated mass murder-suicide across three locations: the compound itself, the airstrip at nearby Port Kaituma, and the group's headquarters in Georgetown.

909 of those deaths were at Jonestown. All but two were from apparent cyanide poisoning, and many of those people were injected against their will. Jones and some members called it revolutionary suicide, on tape and in recorded discussions beforehand. The poisonings followed the murder of five people at Port Kaituma, including United States Congressman Leo Ryan, killed by Temple members on Jones's order. Four more Temple members carried out a murder-suicide in Georgetown at his command.

That is why the terminology has changed. Contemporary media called it a mass suicide. Later sources use mass murder-suicide, massacre, or mass murder, because a third of the dead were children and a great many people were killed rather than chose.

The site itself has largely gone. San Diego State University runs Jonestown and Peoples Temple, a digital archive of the community and its end, and its account of the place today is blunt: the isolation of the dense jungle in Guyana's Northwest District, which is what made the location attractive to the Temple in the first place, has worked against preserving anything. Visitors in 1998 found few remains, and the years since have buried them further. Proposals to memorialise the site have never progressed past planning.

Read the archive. It is built around the people who died, not the man who killed them.