American Trip
2020 book by Israeli scholar Ido Hartogsohn
American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century is a 2020 book by Israeli author, artist, activist and academic Ido Hartogsohn. The book examines the historical, social, and cultural influences on the psychedelic experience in midcentury America. Published by MIT Press, the work explores how factors such as the mindset of the user ("set") and the environment of the experience ("setting") shaped the outcomes of psychedelic use during the 1950s and 1960s. Hartogsohn explores the diverse applications of psychedelics, including experiments by the CIA, various military research, therapeutic practices, and their impact on art, music, and the countercultural movement. The author introduces the concept of collective set and setting, by integrating perspectives from science, technology, and society studies, hence framing the psychedelic experience as a product of its sociocultural context.
Author and background
Hartogsohn was a journalist and blogger before academia. He published the first Hebrew book covering the field of psychedelia, Technomystica: Consciousness in the Age of Technology (2009), and served as an editor of Lapsychonaut, an Israeli magazine on psychedelics. He also organized Altered Minds (2017), the first Israeli conference on Psychedelics. As of 2024, Hartogsohn serves as assistant professor at the Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society at Bar-Ilan University.
In a 2020 interview with the New Books Network, Hartogsohn described his transition from writing fiction to writing nonfiction first as a journalist, and later as an academic interested in the topic of psychedelics, which became his main focus as a scholar, artist, activist, and writer.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “American Trip” as 2020 book by Israeli scholar Ido Hartogsohn. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 17, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q131573070. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020, 2009, 2017 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “American Trip” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.