One of my friends hadn't heard of it, and she's generally well-educated. I'm trying to figure out if this is something that's less well-known outside of the US.
I'm not in the U.S. and I know about it. Jim Jones, People's Temple, Guyana, shot a U.S. government representative, then drank poisoned Kool-Aid in a mass murder/suicide (not everyone drank voluntarily, IIRC, including small children; Jones encouraged the mothers to give the poison to their children.)
That may be due more to your friend's age; most people I know who were born in the 80s and later don't know much about it unless they have the sort of morbid curiosity that lends itself to reading books on the subject.
I was born in 1974, but I had a perservation with cults as a child. Still, I've heard pop-culture references, so it probably won't fade into obscurity quite yet.
I was born in the late Sixties, and the first time I ever heard of Jonestown was in 1986, IIRC. It came up in a group of folks I was hanging out with once, and I was the only one who had never heard of it. Everyone thought that was pretty weird.
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