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| spiritualism in antebellum america: Spiritualism in Antebellum America Bret E. Carroll, 1997-10-22 At a time when the New Age movement is starting to make good on the Spiritualists' vision of America as a 'grand clairvoyant nation', Carroll's work raises provocative questions about the tension betwen freedom and authority in the harmonial religions of today. -- Church History ... offers the most comprehensive, sane examination of its topic yet available, no mean achievement for a subject long afflicted by religious partisanship and now perhaps in danger of sympathetic attraction. -- Journal of American History ... fascinating reading it will be for those with a taste for good scholarly writing and a love of the American past and the manifold varieties of the spiritual quest. -- The Quest In addition to being an excellent introduction to mid-19th-century Spiritualism, Carroll's work also offers scholars a new vantage point from which to view the religious creativity that was so prominent in antebellum America in general. -- Choice During the decade before the Civil War, a growing number of Americans gathered around tables in dimly lit rooms, joined hands, and sought enlightening contact with spirits. The result was Spiritualism, a distinctly colorful religious ideology centered on spirit communication and spirit activity. Spiritualism in Antebellum America analyzes the attempt by spiritually restless Americans of the 1840s and 1850s to negotiate a satisfying combination of freedom and authority as they sought a sense of harmony with the universe. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Secularism in Antebellum America John Lardas Modern, 2011-11-11 Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Radical Spirits Ann Braude, 2020-05-25 “Braude has discovered a crucial link between the early feminists and the spiritualists who so captured the American imagination.” —Los Angeles Times In Radical Spirits, Ann Braude contends that the early women’s rights movement and Spiritualism went hand in hand. Her book makes a convincing argument for the importance of religion in the study of American women’s history. In this new edition, Braude discusses the impact of the book on the scholarship of the last decade and assesses the place of religion in interpretations of women’s history in general and the women’s rights movement in particular. A review of current scholarship and suggestions for further reading make it even more useful for contemporary teachers and students. “It would be hard to imagine a book that more insightfully combined gender, social, and religious history together more perfectly than Radical Spirits. Braude still speaks powerfully to unique issues of women’s creativity—spiritual as well as political—in a superb account of the controversial nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement.” —Jon Butler, Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University “Continually rewarding.” —The New York Times Book Review “A fascinating, well-researched, and scholarly work on a peripheral aspect of the rise of the American feminist movement.” —Library Journal “A vitally important book . . . [that] has . . . influenced a generation of young scholars.” —Marie Griffith, associate director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University “An insightful book and a delightful read.” —Journal of American History |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Church in the Wild Brett Malcolm Grainger, 2019-05-13 A religious studies scholar argues that in antebellum America, evangelicals, not Transcendentalists, connected ordinary Americans with their spiritual roots in the natural world. We have long credited Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists with revolutionizing religious life in America and introducing a new appreciation of nature. Breaking with Protestant orthodoxy, these New Englanders claimed that God could be found not in church but in forest, fields, and streams. Their spiritual nonconformity had thrilling implications but never traveled far beyond their circle. In this essential reconsideration of American faith in the years leading up to the Civil War, Brett Malcolm Grainger argues that it was not the Transcendentalists but the evangelical revivalists who transformed the everyday religious life of Americans and spiritualized the natural environment. Evangelical Christianity won believers from the rural South to the industrial North: this was the true popular religion of the antebellum years. Revivalists went to the woods not to free themselves from the constraints of Christianity but to renew their ties to God. Evangelical Christianity provided a sense of enchantment for those alienated by a rapidly industrializing world. In forested camp meetings and riverside baptisms, in private contemplation and public water cures, in electrotherapy and mesmerism, American evangelicals communed with nature, God, and one another. A distinctive spirituality emerged pairing personal piety with a mystical relation to nature. As Church in the Wild reveals, the revivalist attitude toward nature and the material world, which echoed that of Catholicism, spread like wildfire among Christians of all backgrounds during the years leading up to the Civil War. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: The Reluctant Spiritualist Nancy Rubin Stuart, 2005 Chronicles the life of Maggie Fox, a young woman who, in 1848, claimed she and her sisters had received messages from the spiritual world, beginning the spiritualist movement that swept the country. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: The Village Enlightenment in America Craig Hazen, 2000-01-05 The Village Enlightenment in America focuses on three nineteenth-century spiritual activists who epitomized the marriage of science and religion fostered in antebellum, pre-Darwinian America by the American Enlightenment. A theologian, writer, and apologist for the nascent Mormon movement, as well as an amateur scientist, Orson Pratt wrote Key to the Universe, or a New Theory of Its Mechanism, to establish a scientific base for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Robert Hare, an inventor and ardent convert to spiritualism, used his scientific expertise to lend credence to the spiritualist movement. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, generally considered the initiator of the American mind-cure movement, developed an overtly religious concept of science and used it to justify his system of theology. Pratt, Hare, and Quimby all employed a potent combination of popular science and Baconianism to legitimate their new religious ideas. Using the same terms--matter, ether, magnetic force--to account for the behavior of particles, planetary rotation, and the influence of the Holy Ghost, these agents of the Enlightenment constructed complex systems intended to demonstrate a fundamental harmony between the physical and the metaphysical. Through the lives and work of these three influential men, The Village Enlightenment in America opens a window to a time when science and religion, instead of seeming fundamentally at odds with each other, appeared entirely reconcilable. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Spiritualism in the American Civil War R. Gregory Lande, 2020-07-27 America's Civil War took a dreadful toll on human lives, and the emotional repercussions were exacerbated by tales of battlefield atrocities, improper burials and by the lack of news that many received about the fate of their loved ones. Amidst widespread religious doubt and social skepticism, spiritualism--the belief that the spirits of the dead existed and could communicate with the living--filled a psychological void by providing a pathway towards closure during a time of mourning, and by promising an eternal reunion in the afterlife regardless of earthly sins. Primary research, including 55 months of the weekly spiritual newspaper, Banner of Light and records of hundreds of soldiers' and family members' spirit messages, reveals unique insights into battlefield deaths, the transition to spirit life, and the motivations prompting ethereal communications. This book focuses extensively on Spiritualism's religious, political, and commercial activities during the war years, as well as the controversies surrounding the faith, strengthening the connection between ante- and postbellum studies of Spiritualism. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Melissa Daggett, 2016-12-02 Modern American Spiritualism blossomed in the 1850s and continued as a viable faith into the 1870s. Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism, and many séance circles flourished in the Creole Faubourgs of Tremé and Marigny as well as the American sector of the city. Melissa Daggett focuses on Le Cercle Harmonique, the francophone séance circle of Henry Louis Rey (1831-1894), a Creole of color who was a key civil rights activist, author, and Civil War and Reconstruction leader. His life has so far remained largely in the shadows of New Orleans history, partly due to a language barrier. Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans focuses on the turbulent years between the late antebellum period and the end of Reconstruction. Translating and interpreting numerous primary sources and one of the only surviving registers of séance proceedings, Daggett has opened a window into a fascinating life as well as a period of tumult and change. She provides unparalleled insights into the history of the Creoles of color and renders a better understanding of New Orleans's complex history. The author weaves an intriguing tale of the supernatural, of chaotic post-bellum politics, of transatlantic linkages, and of the personal triumphs and tragedies of Rey as a notable citizen and medium. Wonderful illustrations, reproductions of the original spiritual communications, and photographs, many of which have never before appeared in published form, accompany this study of Rey and his world. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: William James and the Art of Popular Statement Paul Stob, 2013-03-01 At the turn of the twentieth century, no other public intellectual was as celebrated in America as the influential philosopher and psychologist William James. Sought after around the country, James developed his ideas in lecture halls and via essays and books intended for general audiences. Reaching out to and connecting with these audiences was crucial to James—so crucial that in 1903 he identified “popular statement,” or speaking and writing in a way that animated the thought of popular audiences, as the “highest form of art.” Paul Stob’s thought-provoking history traces James’s art of popular statement through pivotal lectures, essays, and books, including his 1878 lectures in Baltimore and Boston, “Talks to Teachers on Psychology,” “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” and “Pragmatism.” The book explores James’s unique approach to public address, which involved crafting lectures in science, religion, and philosophy around ordinary people and their experiences. With democratic bravado, James confronted those who had accumulated power through various systems of academic and professional authority, and argued that intellectual power should be returned to the people. Stob argues that James gave those he addressed a central role in the pursuit of knowledge and fostered in them a new intellectual curiosity unlike few scholars before or since. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance Arthur Versluis, 2001-03-08 The term Western esotericism refers to a wide range of spiritual currents including alchemy, Hermeticism, Kabbala, Rosicrucianism, and Christian theosophy, as well as several practical forms of esotericism like cartomancy, geomancy, necromancy, alchemy, astrology, herbalism, and magic. The early presence of esotericism in North America has not been much studied, and even less so the indebtedness to esotericism of some major American literary figures. In this book, Arthur Versluis breaks new ground, showing that many writers of the so-called American Renaissance drew extensively on and were inspired by Western esoteric currents. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: A Republic of Mind and Spirit Catherine L. Albanese, 2007-01-01 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans and Americans joined together to transform the U.S.-Mexico borderlands into a crossroads of modern economic development. This book reveals the forgotten story of their ambitious dreams and their ultimate failure to control this fugitive terrain. Focusing on a mining region that spilled across the Arizona-Sonora border, this book shows how entrepreneurs, corporations, and statesmen tried to domesticate nature and society within a transnational context. Efforts to tame a 'wild' frontier were stymied by labour struggles, social conflict, and revolution. Fugitive Landscapes explores the making and unmaking of the U.S.-Mexico border, telling how ordinary people resisted the domination of empires, nations, and corporations to shape transnational history on their own terms. By moving beyond traditional national narratives, it offers new lessons for our own border-crossing age. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Speaking with the Dead in Early America Erik R. Seeman, 2019-11-01 In late medieval Catholicism, mourners employed an array of practices to maintain connection with the deceased—most crucially, the belief in purgatory, a middle place between heaven and hell where souls could be helped by the actions of the living. In the early sixteenth century, the Reformation abolished purgatory, as its leaders did not want attention to the dead diminishing people's devotion to God. But while the Reformation was supposed to end communication between the living and dead, it turns out the result was in fact more complicated than historians have realized. In the three centuries after the Reformation, Protestants imagined continuing relationships with the dead, and the desire for these relations came to form an important—and since neglected—aspect of Protestant belief and practice. In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders. This prodigious research reveals how sermons, elegies, and epitaphs portrayed the dead as speaking or being spoken to, how ghost stories and Gothic fiction depicted a permeable boundary between this world and the next, and how parlor songs and funeral hymns encouraged singers to imagine communication with the dead. Speaking with the Dead in Early America thus boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Ghostly Communion John J. Kucich, 2015-03-24 In this exceptional book, Kucich reveals through his readings of literary and historical accounts that spiritualism helped shape the terms by which Native American, European, and African cultures interacted in America from the earliest days of contact through the present. Beginning his study with a provocative juxtaposition of the Pueblo Indian Revolt and the Salem Witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century, Kucich examin[e]s how both events forged contact zones - spaces of intense cultural conflict and negotiation - mediated by spiritualism. Kucich goes on to chronicle how a diverse group of writers used spiritualism to reshape a range of such contact zones. These include Rochester, New York, where Harriet Jacobs adapted the spirit rappings of the Fox Sisters and the abolitionist writings of Frederick Douglass as she crafted her own story of escape from slavery; mid-century periodicals from the Atlantic Monthly to the Cherokee Advocate to the Anglo-African Magazine; post-bellum representations of the afterlife by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mark Twain and the Native Americans who developed the Ghost Dance; turn-of-the-century local color fiction by writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt and Maria Cristina Mena; and the New England reformist circles traced in Henry James's The Bostonians and Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood. Kucich's conclusion looks briefly at New Age spiritualism, then considers the implications of a cross-cultural scholarship that draws on a variety of critical methodologies, from border and ethnic studies to feminism to post-colonialism and the public sphere. The implications of this study, which brings well-known, canonical writers and lesser-known writers into conversation with one another, are broadly relevant to the resurgent interest in religious studies and American cultural studies in general. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling , 2015-03-31 Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and geographies, the Brill Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling presents modern spirit possession in a variety of contexts. Weaving together the interrelated movements of Spiritualism along with its specific Franco and Latin American currents, articles explore the nineteenth-century beginnings of séances and trance mediumship. Channelling, an heir to Spiritualism begun in the 1970s and still flourishing today, is brought into direct conversation with its predecessors with a view to showing both continuity and disjuncture as the products of new cultural and religious needs. The Brill Handbook marks the first extensive collection on these two interrelated movements and examines themes such as gender, race, performance, and technology in each instance. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: A Luminous Brotherhood Emily Suzanne Clark, 2016-08-26 In the midst of a nineteenth-century boom in spiritual experimentation, the Cercle Harmonique, a remarkable group of African-descended men, practiced Spiritualism in heavily Catholic New Orleans from just before the Civil War to the end of Reconstruction. In this first comprehensive history of the Cercle, Emily Suzanne Clark illuminates how highly diverse religious practices wind in significant ways through American life, culture, and history. Clark shows that the beliefs and practices of Spiritualism helped Afro-Creoles mediate the political and social changes in New Orleans, as free blacks suffered increasingly restrictive laws and then met with violent resistance to suffrage and racial equality. Drawing on fascinating records of actual séance practices, the lives of the mediums, and larger citywide and national contexts, Clark reveals how the messages that the Cercle received from the spirit world offered its members rich religious experiences as well as a forum for political activism inspired by republican ideals. Messages from departed souls including François Rabelais, Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Robert E. Lee, Emanuel Swedenborg, and even Confucius discussed government structures, the moral progress of humanity, and equality. The Afro-Creole Spiritualists were encouraged to continue struggling for justice in a new world where “bright” spirits would replace raced bodies. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Unfree Spirits Bret Evan Carroll, 1991 |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Gospel of Disunion Mitchell Snay, 2014-02-01 The centrality of religion in the life of the Old South, the strongly religious nature of the sectional controversy over slavery, and the close affinity between religion and antebellum American nationalism all point toward the need to explore the role of religion in the development of southern sectionalism. In Gospel of Disunion Mitchell Snay examines the various ways in which religion adapted to and influenced the development of a distinctive southern culture and politics before the Civil War, adding depth and form to the movement that culminated in secession. From the abolitionist crisis of 1835 through the formation of the Confederacy in 1861, Snay shows how religion worked as an active agent in translating the sectional conflict into a struggle of the highest moral significance. At the same time, the slavery controversy sectionalized southern religion, creating separate institutions and driving theology further toward orthodoxy. By establishing a biblical sanction for slavery, developing a slaveholding ethic for Christian masters, and demonstrating the viability of separation from the North through the denominational schisms of the 1830s and 1840s, religion reinforced central elements in southern political culture and contributed to a moral consensus that made secession possible. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: American Countercultures: An Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in U.S. History Gina Misiroglu, 2015-03-26 Counterculture, while commonly used to describe youth-oriented movements during the 1960s, refers to any attempt to challenge or change conventional values and practices or the dominant lifestyles of the day. This fascinating three-volume set explores these movements in America from colonial times to the present in colorful detail. American Countercultures is the first reference work to examine the impact of countercultural movements on American social history. It highlights the writings, recordings, and visual works produced by these movements to educate, inspire, and incite action in all eras of the nation's history. A-Z entries provide a wealth of information on personalities, places, events, concepts, beliefs, groups, and practices. The set includes numerous illustrations, a topic finder, primary source documents, a bibliography and a filmography, and an index. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: The Sympathetic Medium Jill Galvan, 2011-03-15 The nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter but also a fascination with séances and occult practices like automatic writing as a means for contacting the dead. Like the new technologies, modern spiritualism promised to link people separated by space or circumstance; and like them as well, it depended on the presence of a human medium to convey these conversations. Whether electrical or otherworldly, these communications were remarkably often conducted—in offices, at telegraph stations and telephone switchboards, and in séance parlors—by women. In The Sympathetic Medium, Jill Galvan offers a richly nuanced and culturally grounded analysis of the rise of the female medium in Great Britain and the United States during the Victorian era and through the turn of the century. Examining a wide variety of fictional explorations of feminine channeling (in both the technological and supernatural realms) by such authors as Henry James, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Marie Corelli, and George Du Maurier, Galvan argues that women were often chosen for that role, or assumed it themselves, because they made at-a-distance dialogues seem more intimate, less mediated. Two allegedly feminine traits, sympathy and a susceptibility to automatism, enabled women to disappear into their roles as message-carriers.Anchoring her literary analysis in discussions of social, economic, and scientific culture, Galvan finds that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminization of mediated communication reveals the challenges that the new networked culture presented to prevailing ideas of gender, dialogue, privacy, and the relationship between body and self. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture Lucy Frank, 2018-01-18 From the famous deathbed scene of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Little Eva to Mark Twain's parodically morbid poetess Emmeline Grangerford, a preoccupation with human finitude informs the texture of nineteenth-century US writing. This collection traces the vicissitudes of this cultural preoccupation with the subject of death and examines how mortality served paradoxically as a site on which identity and subjectivity were productively rethought. Contributors from North America and the United Kingdom, representing the fields of literature, theatre history, and American studies, analyze the sexual, social, and epistemological boundaries implicit in nineteenth-century America's obsession with death, while also seeking to give a voice to the strategies by which these boundaries were interrogated and displaced. Topics include race- and gender-based investigations into the textual representation of death, imaginative constructions and re-constructions of social practice with regard to loss and memorialisation, and literary re-conceptualisations of death forced by personal and national trauma. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: The Abolitionist Sisterhood Jean Fagan Yellin, John C. Van Horne, 1994 A small group of black and white American women who banded together in the 1830s and 1840s to remedy the evils of slavery and racism, the antislavery females included many who ultimately struggled for equal rights for women as well. A lively exploration of this nineteenth-century reform movement, The Abolitionist Sisterhood brings together sixteen essays by a distinguished group of historians. After an introductory overview, it includes chapters on the principal female antislavery societies, discussions of black women's political culture in the antebellum North, articles on the strategies and tactics the antislavery women devised, and a richly illustrated essay presenting rare graphics from both sides of abolitionist debate -- incendiary illustrations from periodicals, books, tracts, and broadsides, as well as images the women reproduced on goods they sold at antislavery fairs. A final chapter compares the experiences of the American and British women who attended the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. -- From publisher's description. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: The Shape of Utopia Irene Cheng, 2023-08-01 How nineteenth-century social reformers devised a new set of radical blueprints for society In the middle of the nineteenth century, a utopian impulse flourished in the United States through the circulation of architectural and urban plans predicated on geometrically distinct designs. Though the majority of such plans remained unrealized, The Shape of Utopia emphasizes the enduring importance of these radical propositions and their ability to visualize alternatives to what was then a newly emerging capitalist nation. Drawing diagrammatic plans for structures such as octagonal houses, a hexagonal anarchist city, and circular centers of equitable commerce, these various architectural utopians applied geometric forms to envision a more just and harmonious society. Highlighting the inherent political capacity of architecture, Irene Cheng showcases how these visionary planners used their blueprints as persuasive visual rhetoric that could mobilize others to share in their aspirations for a better world. Offering an extensive and uniquely focused view of mid-nineteenth-century America’s rapidly changing cultural landscape, this book examines these utopian plans within the context of significant economic and technological transformation, encompassing movements such as phrenology, anarchism, and spiritualism. Engaging equally with architectural history, visual culture studies, and U.S. history, The Shape of Utopia documents a pivotal moment in American history when ordinary people ardently believed in the potential to reshape society. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era Ben Wright, Zachary W. Dresser, 2013-11-04 In the Civil War era, Americans nearly unanimously accepted that humans battled in a cosmic contest between good and evil and that God was directing history toward its end. The concept of God's Providence and of millennialism -- Christian anticipations of the end of the world -- dominated religious thought in the nineteenth century. During the tumultuous years immediately prior to, during, and after the war, these ideas took on a greater importance as Americans struggled with the unprecedented destruction and promise of the period. Scholars of religion, literary critics, and especially historians have acknowledged the presence of apocalyptic thought in the era, but until now, few studies have taken the topic as their central focus or examined it from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. By doing so, the essays in Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era highlight the diverse ways in which beliefs about the end times influenced nineteenth-century American lives, including reform culture, the search for meaning amid the trials of war, and the social transformation wrought by emancipation. Millennial zeal infused the labor of reformers and explained their successes and failures as progress toward an imminent Kingdom of God. Men and women in the North and South looked to Providence to explain the causes and consequences of both victory and defeat, and Americans, black and white, experienced the shock waves of emancipation as either a long-prophesied jubilee or a vengeful punishment. Religion fostered division as well as union, the essays suggest, but while the nation tore itself apart and tentatively stitched itself back together, Americans continued looking to divine intervention to make meaning of the national apocalypse. Contributors:Edward J. BlumRyan CordellZachary W. DresserJennifer GraberMatthew HarperCharles F. IronsJoseph MooreRobert K. NelsonScott Nesbit Jason PhillipsNina Reid-MaroneyBen Wright |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State Gretchen Murphy, 2021 Scholars have long known that early American women wrote pious, sentimental stories. This book uses biographical and archival sources to understand how their religious concerns fed into debates about democracy and belief in a republic, and offers a new account of their political participation and the process of religious disestablishment. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Up from the Depths Aaron Sachs, 2022-06-07 A double portrait of two of America’s most influential writers that reveals the surprising connections between them—and their uncanny relevance to our age of crisis Up from the Depths tells the interconnected stories of two of the most important writers in American history—the novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819–1891) and one of his earliest biographers, the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford (1895–1990). Deftly cutting back and forth between the writers, Aaron Sachs reveals the surprising resonances between their lives, work, and troubled times—and their uncanny relevance in our own age of crisis. The author of Moby-Dick was largely forgotten for several decades after his death, but Mumford helped spearhead Melville’s revival in the aftermath of World War I and the 1918–1919 flu pandemic, when American culture needed a forebear with a suitably dark vision. As Mumford’s career took off and he wrote books responding to the machine age, urban decay, world war, and environmental degradation, it was looking back to Melville’s confrontation with crises such as industrialization, slavery, and the Civil War that helped Mumford to see his own era clearly. Mumford remained obsessed with Melville, ultimately helping to canonize him as America’s greatest tragedian. But largely forgotten today is one of Mumford’s key insights—that Melville’s darkness was balanced by an inspiring determination to endure. Amid today’s foreboding over global warming, racism, technology, pandemics, and other crises, Melville and Mumford remind us that we’ve been in this struggle for a long time. To rediscover these writers today is to rediscover how history can offer hope in dark times. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: The Man who was Rip Van Winkle Benjamin McArthur, 2007-01-01 The most beloved American comedic actor of the nineteenth century, Joseph Jefferson made his name as Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle. In this book, a compelling blend of biography and theatrical and cultural history, Benjamin McArthur chronicles Jefferson's remarkable career and offers a lively and original account of the heroic age of the American theatre. Joe Jefferson's entire life was spent on the stage, from the age of Jackson to the dawn of motion pictures. He extensively toured the United States as well as Australia and Great Britain. An ever-successful career (including acclaim as painter and memoirist) put him in the company of the great actors, artists, and writers of the day, including Edwin Forrest, Edwin Booth, John Singer Sargent, and William Dean Howells. This book rescues a brilliant figure and places him, appropriately enough, on center stage of a pivotal time for American theatre. McArthur explores the personalities of the period, the changing theatrical styles and their audiences, the touring life, and the wide and varied culture of theatre. Through the life of Jefferson, McArthur is able to illuminate an era. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Extraordinary Beliefs Peter Lamont, 2013-02-07 This book examines the remarkable feats of mesmerists, mediums and mind-readers, and provides a new psychology of extraordinary beliefs. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Gideon Lincecum's Sword Gideon Lincecum, 2001 Gideon's letters provide a rich and detailed account of how one individual and his large extended family, all of whom were strongly committed to the Confederacy, kept up with the progress of the conflict and coped with the multitude of problems it created. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Ghosts of Futures Past Dr. Molly McGarry, 2008-05-26 Ghosts of Futures Past guides readers through the uncanny world of nineteenth-century American spiritualism. More than an occult parlor game, this was a new religion, which channeled the voices of the dead, linked present with past, and conjured new worldly and otherworldly futures. Tracing the persistence of magic in an emergent culture of secularism, Molly McGarry brings a once marginalized practice to the center of American cultural history. Spiritualism provided an alchemical combination of science and magic that called into question the very categories of male and female, material and immaterial, self and other, living and dead. Dissolving the boundaries between them opened Spiritualist practitioners to other voices and, in turn, allowed them to imagine new social worlds and forge diverse political affinities. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Extrasensory Perception Edwin C. May, Sonali Bhatt Marwaha, 2015-06-23 Scholars from around the world collaborate to explain the history of parapsychology, the study of extrasensory perception (ESP), and the arguments of skeptics and supporters in this fascinating collection. This two-volume set introduces ESP—also known as anomalous cognition—and psychokinesis, addressing the history, research, philosophy, and scientific theories surrounding the phenomena. With contributions from leading research scientists from within the field of parapsychology and other areas of study, this reference addresses the fundamental questions that the evidence of ESP evokes; examines parapsychology research from all over the world; and explores the controversies, skepticism, and contemporary criticism disparaging the field. Written for a multidisciplinary audience ranging from physicists to psychologists to lay persons, the volumes present the scientific validity of the field. Volume 1 addresses the historical, philosophical, skeptical, and research viewpoints; volume 2 lays out the current theories on ESP. Chapters reveal how strict scientific protocols and state-of-the-art technologies enable scientists—at sites such as Harvard and Cornell universities to their international counterparts in Amsterdam, Austria, and Asia—to pinpoint and investigate ESP abilities. Appendices include a glossary of key terms in parapsychology, ESP research protocol, ESP research organizations, skeptic associations, and recommended reading. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age Brian C. Wilson, 2018-08-06 John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age is the remarkable story of the spiritual search of one of Michigan’s most successful entrepreneurs, a search that culminated in the Fetzer Institute whose ambitious mission is nothing less than the spiritual transformation of the world. John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age follows the spiritual sojourn of John E. Fetzer, a Michigan business tycoon. Born in 1901 and living most of his life in Kalamazoo, Fetzer parlayed his first radio station into extensive holdings in broadcasting and other enterprises, leading to his sole ownership of the Detroit Tigers in 1961. By the time he died in 1991, Fetzer had been listed in Forbes magazine as one of the four hundred wealthiest people in America. And yet, business success was never enough for Fetzer—his deep spiritual yearnings led him from the Christianity of his youth to a restless exploration of metaphysical religions and movements ranging from Spiritualism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, UFOology, and parapsychology, all the way to the New Age as it blossomed in the 1980s. Author Brian C. Wilson demonstrates how Fetzer's quest mirrored those of thousands of Americans who sought new ways of thinking and being in the ever-changing spiritual movements of the twentieth century. Over his lifetime, Fetzer's worldview continuously evolved, combining and recombining elements from dozens of traditions in a process he called freedom of the spirit. Unlike most others who engaged in a similar process, Fetzer's synthesis can be documented step by step using extensive archival materials, providing readers with a remarkably rich and detailed roadmap through metaphysical America. The book also documents how Fetzer's wealth allowed him to institutionalize his spiritual vision into a thriving foundation—the Fetzer Institute—which was designed to carry his insights into the future in hopes that it would help catalyze a global spiritual transformation. John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age offers a window into the rich and complex history of metaphysical religions in the Midwest and the United States at large. It will be read with interest by those wishing to learn more about this enigmatic Michigan figure, as well as those looking for an engaging introduction into America's rapidly shifting spiritual landscape. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Prophetic Encounters Dan McKanan, 2011 Though in recent years the religious right has been a powerful political force, making religion and conservatism synonymous in the minds of many, the United States has always had an active, vibrant, and influential religious Left. In every period of our history, people of faith have envisioned a society of peace and justice, and their tireless efforts have made an indelible mark on our nation's history. In Prophetic Encounters , Dan McKanan challenges simple distinctions between religious and secular activism, showing that religious beliefs and practices have been integral to every movement promoting liberty, equality, and solidarity. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Prophet Motive Nancy K. Stalker, 2007-10-31 From the 1910s to the mid-1930s, the flamboyant and gifted spiritualist Deguchi Onisaburô (1871–1948) transformed his mother-in-law’s small, rural religious following into a massive movement, eclectic in content and international in scope. Through a potent blend of traditional folk beliefs and practices like divination, exorcism, and millenarianism, an ambitious political agenda, and skillful use of new forms of visual and mass media, he attracted millions to Oomoto, his Shintoist new religion. Despite its condemnation as a heterodox sect by state authorities and the mainstream media, Oomoto quickly became the fastest-growing religion in Japan of the time. In telling the story of Onisaburô and Oomoto, Nancy Stalker not only gives us the first full account in English of the rise of a heterodox movement in imperial Japan, but also provides new perspectives on the importance of charismatic entrepreneurship in the success of new religions around the world. She makes the case that these religions often respond to global developments and tensions (imperialism, urbanization, consumerism, the diffusion of mass media) in similar ways. They require entrepreneurial marketing and management skills alongside their spiritual authority if their groups are to survive encroachments by the state and achieve national/international stature. Their drive to realize and extend their religious view of the world ideally stems from a prophet rather than profit motive, but their activity nevertheless relies on success in the modern capitalist, commercial world. Unlike many studies of Japanese religion during this period, Prophet Motive works to dispel the notion that prewar Shinto was monolithically supportive of state initiatives and ideology. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Consulting Spirits Joel Bjorling, 1998-04-30 Throughout history, people have been intrigued with spirits, angels, or devas as sources of wisdom and guidance. They are not only interesting as those who possess an insight into events and circumstances, but also as proof of life after death. In this clear and useful reference guide, Bjorling presents a listing of the literature on the various ways in which people of different cultures have consulted spirits—through shamans and oracles, magic, mediums, Voodoo, and psychics. Each chapter contains a general introduction to the respective topic as well as a listing of pertinent books, articles, and dissertations. His survey also includes early spirit contacts in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: The Subtle Energy Body Maureen Lockhart, 2010-09-23 A global study of the psychospiritual body and its central role in the esoteric and spiritual traditions of the world • Explains the nature, purpose, and functions of the subtle body • Explores the role of the subtle body in such traditions as Alchemy, Ayurveda, Tantra, Qi Gong, and Yoga • Shows how the various layers of the subtle body provide a map for various levels of consciousness Ancient traditions of both the East and West have long maintained that the human being is a complex of material and nonmaterial systems, or energy bodies. The “subtle body” is an energetic, psychospiritual entity of several layers of increasing subtlety and metaphysical significance through which the aspirant seeks knowledge of the self and the nature of God. In many traditions, the component parts of the subtle body serve as a map of the different levels of consciousness. The practices and disciplines that evolved from an awareness and understanding of the subtle body, and how the material and nonmaterial work together, form a coherent system of psychospiritual transformation that is central to numerous and extremely diverse spiritual practices--including those of the Gnostics, Sufis, Native Americans, Vedic seers, Chinese, and Greeks. The subtle body plays an essential part in more recent traditions such as Anthroposophy and Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way and the cutting-edge science of Ervin Laszlo’s research into the Akashic field. But the benefits of understanding the role of the subtle energy body are not confined solely to the spiritual plane. The energetic bodies provide a coherent system of life-affirming principles and practices for the diagnosis and treatment of the whole person that is not only part of many traditional healing systems, such as Acupuncture and Ayurveda, but also is forming the basis for a synthesis of traditional and contemporary healing practices that could lay the foundation for the medicine of the future. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Special relationships Janet Beer, Bridget Bennett, 2018-07-30 This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book addresses the special relationship from the perspective of post-Second World War British governments. It argues that Britain's foreign policy challenges the dominant idea that its power has been waning and that it sees itself as the junior partner to the hegemonic US. The book also shows how at moments of international crisis successive British governments have attempted to re-play the same foreign policy role within the special relationship. It discusses the power of a profoundly antagonistic relationship between Mark Twain and Walter Scott. The book demonstrates Stowe's mis-reading and mis-representation of the Highland Clearances. It explains how Our Nig, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life. Telegraphy - which transformed transatlantic relations in the middle of the century- was used by spiritualists as a metaphor for the ways in which communications from the other world could be understood. The story of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship is discussed. Beside Sarah Orne Jewett's desk was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. Henry James and George Eliot shared a transatlantic literary network which embodied an easy flow of mutual interest and appreciation between their two milieux. In her autobiography, Gertrude Stein assigns to her lifelong companion the repeated comment that she has met three geniuses in her life: Stein, Picasso, and Alfred North Whitehead. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Awash in a Sea of Faith Jon Butler, 1990 Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in Europe where state churches battled dissenters, magic, and astonishingly low church participation. He charts the transfer of these difficulties to America, including the failure of Puritan religious models, and describes the surprising advance of religious commitment there between 1700 and 1865. Through the assertion of authority and coercion, a remarkable sacralization of the prerevolutionary countryside, advancing religious pluralism, the folklorization of magic, and an eclectic, syncretistic emphasis on supernatural interventionism, including miracles, America emerged after 1800 as an extraordinary spiritual hothouse that far eclipsed the Puritan achievement--even as secularism triumphed in Europe. Awash in a Sea of Faith ranges from popular piety to magic, from anxious revolutionary war chaplains to the cool rationalism of James Madison, from divining rods and seer stones to Anglican and Unitarian elites, and from Virginia Anglican occultists and Presbyterians raised from the dead to Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, and Abraham Lincoln. Butler deftly comes to terms with conventional themes such as Puritanism, witchcraft, religion and revolution, revivalism, millenarianism, and Mormonism. His elucidation of Christianity's powerful role in shaping slavery and of a subsequent African spiritual holocaust, with its ironic result in African Christianization, is an especially fresh and incisive account. Awash in a Sea of Faith reveals the proliferation of American religious expression--not its decline--and stresses the creative tensions between pulpit and pew across three hundred years of social maturation. Striking in its breadth and deeply rooted in primary sources, this seminal book recasts the landscape of American religious and cultural history. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy Christopher Grasso, 2021 Teacher, preacher, soldier, spy: the civil wars of John R. Kelso is an account of an extraordinary nineteenth-century American life. A schoolteacher and Methodist preacher in Missouri, in the Civil War Kelso earned fame fighting rebel guerrillas. Seeking personal revenge as well as defending the Union, he vowed to slay twenty-five rebels with his own hand, and when he did so he was elected to Congress. In the House of Representatives during Reconstruction, he was one of the first to call for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. After his term in Congress, personal tragedy drove him west, where he became a freethinking lecturer and author, an atheist, a Spiritualist, and, before his death in 1891, an anarchist. John R. Kelso was many things. He was also a strong-willed son, a passionate husband, and a loving and grieving father. The Civil War remained central to his life, challenging his notions of manhood and honor, his ideals of liberty and equality, and his beliefs about politics, religion, morality, and human nature. Throughout his life, too, he fought private wars-not only against former friends and alienated family members, rebellious students and disaffected church congregations, political opponents and religious critics, but also against the warring impulses in his own complex character. His life story moreover, offers a unique vantage upon dimensions of nineteenth-century American culture that are usually treated separately: religious revivalism and political anarchism; sex, divorce, and Civil War battles; freethinking and the Wild West-- |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: A Secret Society History of the Civil War Mark A. Lause, 2011-12-01 This unique history of the Civil War considers the impact of nineteenth-century American secret societies on the path to as well as the course of the war. Beginning with the European secret societies that laid the groundwork for Freemasonry in the United States, Mark A. Lause analyzes how the Old World's traditions influenced various underground groups and movements in America, particularly George Lippard's Brotherhood of the Union, an American attempt to replicate the political secret societies that influenced the European revolutions of 1848. Lause traces the Brotherhood's various manifestations, the most conspicuous being the Knights of the Golden Circle (out of which developed the Ku Klux Klan), and the Confederate secret groups through which John Wilkes Booth and others attempted to undermine the Union. Lause profiles the key leaders of these organizations, with special focus on George Lippard, Hugh Forbes, and George Washington Lafayette Bickley. Antebellum secret societies ranged politically from those with progressive or even revolutionary agendas to those that pursued conservative or oppressive goals. This book shows how, in the years leading up to the Civil War, these clandestine organizations exacerbated existing sectional tensions in the United States. Lause's research indicates that the pervasive influence of secret societies may have played a part in key events such as the Freesoil movement, the beginning of the Republican party, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Lincoln's election, and the Southern secession process of 1860-1861. This exceptional study encompasses both white and African American secret society involvement, revealing the black fraternal experience in antebellum America as well as the clandestine operations that provided assistance to escaped slaves via the Underground Railroad. Unraveling these pervasive and extensive networks of power and influence, A Secret Society History of the Civil War demonstrates that antebellum secret societies played a greater role in affecting Civil War-era politics than has been previously acknowledged. |
| spiritualism in antebellum america: Comparative Studies in Asian and Latin American Philosophies Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Leah Kalmanson, 2018-04-05 Comparative philosophy is an important site for the study of non-Western philosophical traditions, but it has long been associated with “East-West” dialogue. Comparative Studies in Asian and Latin American Philosophies shifts this trajectory to focus on cross-cultural conversations across Asia and Latin America. A team of international contributors discuss subjects ranging from Orientalism in early Latin American studies of Asian thought to liberatory politics in today's globalized world. They bring together resources including Latin American feminism, Aztec teachings on ethics, Buddhist critiques of essentialism, and Confucian morality. Chapters address topics such as educational reform, the social practices surrounding breastfeeding, martial arts as political resistance, and the construction of race and identity. Together the essays reflect the philosophical diversity of Asia and Latin America while foregrounding their shared concerns on issues of Eurocentrism and coloniality. By bringing these critical perspectives to bear on the theories and methods of cross-cultural philosophy, Comparative Studies in Asian and Latin American Philosophies offers new insights into the nature and practice of philosophical comparison. |
Spiritualism (beliefs) - Wikipedia
Spiritualism is a metaphysical belief that the world is made up of at least two fundamental substances, matter and spirit.
Spiritualism | Religion, Beliefs, Practices, & History | Britannica
Spiritualism is a wide-ranging religious movement beginning in the 19th century in America and Europe based on the belief that departed souls can interact …
Spiritualism Explained - NSAC
Spiritualism is the Science, Philosophy, and Religion of continuous life, based upon the demonstrated fact of communication, by means of …
The Rise of Spiritualism in 19th Century America
Oct 18, 2021 · Spiritualism was a religious movement that gained momentum in America during the mid-1800s. The movement essentially …
Religions - Spiritualism: Spiritualism at a glance - BBC
Sep 22, 2009 · Spiritualists are those who believe in a continued future existence, and that people who have passed on into the spirit-world can …
Spiritualism (beliefs) - Wikipedia
Spiritualism is a metaphysical belief that the world is made up of at least two fundamental substances, matter and spirit.
Spiritualism | Religion, Beliefs, Practices, & History | Britannica
Spiritualism is a wide-ranging religious movement beginning in the 19th century in America and Europe based on the belief that departed souls can interact with the living through mediums.
Spiritualism Explained - NSAC
Spiritualism is the Science, Philosophy, and Religion of continuous life, based upon the demonstrated fact of communication, by means of mediumship, with those who live in the …
The Rise of Spiritualism in 19th Century America
Oct 18, 2021 · Spiritualism was a religious movement that gained momentum in America during the mid-1800s. The movement essentially held that people could communicate with people …
Religions - Spiritualism: Spiritualism at a glance - BBC
Sep 22, 2009 · Spiritualists are those who believe in a continued future existence, and that people who have passed on into the spirit-world can and do communicate with us. Spiritualists' …
What Is Spiritualism and How Does It Work? - TrueAwake
Feb 7, 2025 · Spiritualism is a belief system that asserts the existence of a spiritual realm for communication with the deceased through mediumship. It emphasizes the continuity of …
10 Facts about the History of Spiritualism - Mental Floss
From spiritualism's beginnings at the Fox cottage to ectoplasm, so-called spirit photography, and beyond, here's what you need to know about this controversial cultural phenomenon.
Religions - Spiritualism: Beliefs - BBC
We believe in freedom of religion and freedom of worship - and that you worship God in your own way. Spiritualism gives you a set of values that enables you to think about how your …
Spiritualism - Wikipedia
Spiritualism may refer to: Spiritual church movement, a group of Spiritualist churches and denominations historically based in the African-American community; Spiritualism (beliefs), a …
Spiritualism - New World Encyclopedia
Spiritualism is the belief that the spirits of the dead can be contacted by mediums. The afterlife is seen by Spiritualists, not as a static place, but as one in which spirits continue to evolve. …
