S2 – INTERVIEW 8: Molly McGarry

California's Museum of Photography. Dr McGarry has been honored by the Smithsonian, the American Association of Museums, and the Society of American Archivists, among others. So we were delighted when she agreed to sit down with researcher Carl Nellis to discuss her book, Ghosts of Futures Past and the power

of Spiritualism in America. I think that you'll find Dr McGarry's incredible insight into spiritualism and her consideration for what it still means today make this conversation the perfect place to wrap up our series. Thanks so much for listening. Without further ado, here's our interview with Dr Molly McGarry. This is the Unobscured Interview series for season two. I'm Aaron Mankey. To be a spiritualist was never one thing. There were always many spiritualisms, both in the nineteenth century

and beyond. So some people came to the science tables seeking answers, wanting deeply to commune with lost loved ones. Um. Others were curious investigators, looking to see for themselves with this new technology could materialize. UM. But what I found in what I've been most struck by is that many spiritualists took seriously the possibility of channeling of voices of the dead as a means of both connecting with the

past and imagining both worldly and otherworldly futures. Mhm. Let's talk a little bit about the world where that kind of mindset and that kind of perspective and belief could come into being. There are religious threads and technological, scientific, historical. Um. Maybe let's start kind of on the political side and say, UM, dig into what historians mean when they would talk about something like Jacksonian democracy in American life in the decades

before spiritualism alived arrived on the scene. What do we mean by that and what influence did something like a democratic spirit or a Jacksonian democracy have on American religion well. Jacksonian democracy, of course, refers to a series of political movements around the term two term presidency of Andrew Jackson seven, and the most significant change affected by Jacksonian democracy was the extension of the franchise of the vote to white men over the age of twenty one who did not

own property, so that that was new um. At the same time, those same white men who had been granted the vote became a key constituency in keeping others from getting the vote. So the democracy of Jacksonian is um was always severely limited. UM. I should probably also add that Jacksonian democracy is also intimately tied with settled colonialism, with Indian genocide, empire building, clearing the West for a

new manifest destiny. That said, there were real changes and forms of democratization, but maybe to cast the lens a little bit wider um. Spiritualism was born of an era of enormous social change and fervent anti authoritian impulses. So for many spiritualists, small group communalism took the place of institutionalized religion. Alternative healing placed male dominated medicine UM, and the voices of priests and ministers were drowned out by

the spirits themselves. So this is a very different imagination and formation of antebellum democracy. And I would also add that actually in terms of Democrats versus Republicans, that that in many ways that what became the Republican Party UM was much more important for sort of fueling the and

peopling spiritualism itself. So I could say more about that, but I think it's it's interesting that spiritualists were actually crucial to the Free Democratic Party and then present at the eight fifty four birth of the Republican Party, and spiritualism actually functions as a kind of political theology which provided the third party insurgency that became the Republican Party UM with a deeper, open ended theology of free labor and a deep faith in the national rebirth the kind

of millennial Second American revolution him in that context where it is a movement that's so um that that's breaking down or cutting against so many of these hierarchies. It's interesting that early on spirits like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington William Penn, white male authority figures statesmen appear to various sound circles and translactors. Uh. Sometimes they're addressing just one or two people through the Fox Sisters, especially the

Post Household early on records. You know, Benjamin Franklin showing up in Isaac Post has taken down their message. UM. But sometimes they're addressing large crowds through a translactor like Cora Scott. And you know, I'm just saying, this is Thomas Jefferson, and he says, m M, what do these kind of appearances tell us about, um, A relationship to a particular kind of past, to a history in a kind of anti authoritarian collectivist movement. Yeah, that's that's a

great question. And I think I think what Spirits said reveals most about who they said it to. So following that logic, seance revelations provide a kind of unique window into what at least a segment of nineteent century Americans might have wanted to know, both from their own dead ancestors as well as from other actors who people to

America has passed in its history. UM. The ghost of George Washington often offered blessings to spirit circles, presumably as a founding father, giving national foundational stature to this seemingly marginal movement. UM. William Penn. The spirit of William Penn often appeared with vaguely Quaker messages of peace and of non violence. And Benjamin Franklin was ubiquitous, the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, the Great Inventor. Um. As an inventor and as a scientist, his spirit is often called up to

offer scientific impromoter for a new spiritualist media. Literally, um, the wraps and knox of mediums echo the spiritualist telegraph and spiritualist media, both in terms of mediums, but in

terms of these other kind of technologies. Um, we're very much ameshed in conversations and investigations into electricity and spiritualists imagine themselves investigators who who wait Benjamin Franklin would offer blessings to I'd love to hear a little bit more about technology, because it does seem to be so significant

for spiritualism. Um, the telegraph, new canals, opening up railroads. Um. Thinking about people's relationship to distance and time and communication changing, even the explosion of periodicals at the at the moment, Can you talk a little more about spiritualism and its

relation to ship to technology. Yes, Um, so spiritualism this popular religious practice conducted through communication with the spirits of the dead, was born a century and popularized during a time of newly proliferating media technologies, when speaking to the dead may have seemed no less strained than communicating across

cables or capturing the living on film. So spiritualism at once transformed ordinary Americans into spiritual mediums that sense of media, and transfigured new forms of information and technological media into

the means of the movement's proliferation. So just to sort of set up to set up the dates um, Samuel Morris's electrical telegraph was introduced in eighteen forty four, so it predated the Fox sisters invention of spirit rapping, but their communication, that is spirit rapping, with its telegraphic typing, it's encoded sequences and subsequent inscriptions of messages from the dead, was almost immediately dubbed the spiritual telegraph, as was one

of the first spiritualist newspapers, which extended the connection as it spread the news in this atmosphere of all these new technologies, communication technologies reaching places they hadn't been before. There are also other ideas about the human mind and the way that we think, uh, what's going on inside of our bodies and our relationship of our bodies to something like a mind, with mesmerism and phrenology and related practices that were kind of horizons of applied science that

people were lecturing about on the circuit um. How did how did these kind of understandings and practices around what a human mind was contribute to the foundations for spiritualism. Well, there are there were a number of investigators interested in these new sciences of head reading and mind readings and chronology and mesmerism in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, and they later became spiritualists, So that's the most obvious connection.

But like mesmerism and I think phrenology to a lesser extent, spiritualism responded to a growing interest in ecstatic experiences, so the fits, trances and visions experienced, and religious revivals. Uh. And they were interested in using scientific thinking and explanatory systems to to understand the relationship between mind and body. Um. And as you point out, mesmerism and phrenology were studies at the horizons of applied science in the early nineteenth century.

UM addressing the meanings and connections between the soul, brain, and psyche. Uh that these are now considered pseudosciences or debunked sciences was not inevitable. It certainly wasn't inevitable at the time. And all of these all of these investigations into that kind of nexus, that triangle between religion, science and magic were working on the same kinds of questions. Um they were imbricated and shifting during the nineteenth century

and arguably to this day. But what roses science and what was designated as religion or spurned as magic or superstition was always about gate keeping about what counts as religion proper, that is, good religion, religion that stays in its place, real science, testable in a laboratory, and large questions about rationality, about modernity and how you know, seemingly

marginal practices like spiritualism might fit into this. But spiritualisms spiritualists understood themselves as investigators, as popular scientists who attended sciences under test conditions. So spiritualism supplied both the language and the technology to test the unseen boundary between this world and the next. Um. So eventually, as mesmerism and phrenology faded over the course of the nineteenth century, spiritualism eventually became another site for a sophisticated struggle over some

of the most vexing issues of the day. UM questions about the nature of scientific knowledge and the possibilities and I suppose also the limits of the scientific method in understanding phenomenon like mediumship. There are magnetizers traveling around putting people in chances. Um. There are uh, you know, abolitionist movements that are connected operating underground railroad to places like

Rochester where the telegraph has arrived. And we come to your eighty and you do a beautiful job in your work of talking about the global context of what was going on in eight Can you can you put the Fox Sisters in the transatlantic context? For US? Eighty eight was a year like few others. Um, maybe was a year like this. There are very few years that have this almost talismanic quality where the year itself contains so much that it's it's hard to even understand the kind

of revolutionary impulses that are swirling around the globe. So in the year eight alone, revolutions ignited across the world from Aunts to Brazil, but also from Sicily to the Austrian Empire, and revolutions swept the globe during that year. UM. Of course, also in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the Communist Manifesto, opening with the line a specter is

haunting Europe, the specter of communism. Um. And in that same year, two young girls heard communications from a very different sort of specter, giving rise to a quite different revolution. But the revolutionary impulses that fueled these very different international global revolutions were a kind of world spirit. Um. Each each of them had a different specific history that um, you know, that explains why things broke out in different

places at different times. But the year itself was one that if reading writings from those times, the sense of revolutionary possibility was in the air, and it was in and it was in the air across the globe. One of the people who is expressing that sense of revolutionary possibility through a new publication was Frederick Douglas. He and WILLIAMS. C Nell moved to Rochester and they launched The North Star, the paper that would be connected with with Douglas for

the rest of his life. UM. How did they imagine their new publication in the context of a local community but also a global liberation movement Rochester, New York was an interesting place in the nineteenth century, so for Frederick Douglas and others it became a center of abolitionist organizing. It's there where they published the abolitionist newspaper The North Star and the celestial north Star, of course, is the marker and the night sky, pointing the way towards freedom

from the south to the north. And not coincidentally, Rochester is bordered on its north shore by Lake Ontario, the waterway that separates the US from Canada, so flight to Canada was possible at that almost visible border. Um Douglas's North Star Circle in Rochester was a key center in a global movement for freedom, and Douglas and Nell obviously launched The North Star in that newspaper is crucially important.

Douglas Is organizing was important. But there are also figures like Harriet Jacobs, who went on to write Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, who landed in Rochester at the same time and not coincidentally um In Harry Jacobs moved to Rochester to help her brother John run the anti slavery Reading Room, which was located above the offices where Frederick Douglas published the North Star, and at that time and probably in that place, Jacobs also began

a lifelong friendship with Amy Post, who was a radical Quaker, a long standing abolitionist, and early activists in in the cause of women's rights, and not coincidentally, one of the

earliest proponents of spiritualism. UM And there's whole lots more to say about about Amy Post, But as scholars have documented, Jacobs told her story to Post in eighty nine, and between that time and the time that Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl was published in eighteen sixty one, it's precisely those circles of abolitionists that make possible speaking tours and um and and eventually the publication of that work.

And it's also it's also the Posts who host the Foxes family when they arrived in Rochester and eventually send them off to a hamlet called Hydesville. Um who were the fox family And what was the relationship like with the Posts in in those years, Well, I should say a by Post was um Again, She's she's sort of deeply, deeply involved in a series of movements. She's also the cousin. We're gonna get into the family tree on this She was the cousin of a man named Elias Hicks, who

had organized the Hicksite separation. But the fact was that she came from a family of religious radicals who had thought that the Quaker establishment had grown to orthodox, too comfortable with the material institutions of the world, including slavery. So it's um, it is the power of of the posts in many ways that both radicalize the movement but

also provide a home for the Fox sisters. So as the story goes, as you know, UM, in March of of ety eight, Maggie Fox Margaret Fox usually called Maggie, aged thirteen, and Kate, her younger sister, who twelve at the time, heard the knox of a spirit of supposedly a murdered peddler. Um. They determined that the raps were coming from this ghost who communicated by making a knocking sound and answer to a yes no question, or by

wrapping out letters of the alphabet. And again you see that you see the connection with Morris's telegraph and the particular kind of telegraphic type being in coding sequences and

subsequent inscriptions from the dead. And and and why um, the term the spiritual telegraph would have been used so quickly, but anyway, as soon as the raps were heard in this little town called Hydesville, which is not far from Rochester in central New York, um yet people came to hear the knocks and raps from all around, and soon they be began receiving messages from the Fox sisters about dead relatives, about things that presumably the sisters would have

no other knowledge of. And the news of this unquiet household spread. So the family, that is the Fox family DeCamp to Rochester, left Hindsville to to leave the throngs and crowds, and went to Rochester to the home of the third Fox sister, the older sister of of Maggie and Kate, whose name is Leah Fox fish Um later under Hill. She was an old family friend of Isaac and Amy Post, who later became a medium as well.

So the Posts took an early, if initially skeptical interest in the two local celebrities in the Fox sisters, but their interests soon grew as the girls seemed able to communicate with recently deceased friends and loved ones, and while some of the messages they brought from the dead were banal or just wrong, Um, there was enough that was

right and that that it fit. And it also fit in the context in which um, the splits and schisms of the Quakers were all of a sudden receiving UM, you know, messages from beyond that they were doing the good work in the world. And word spreads pretty quickly. It brought. It brought seekers to Hydesville first, but then also to Rochester, and then out from Rochester the practice of table wrappings spreads. UM. Within three years after those rapping,

spiritualism traveled to England. Um, how is it received when it got outside of it's you know, it's the context of its origin and in these Quakers and the religious impulses in the burned Over district. Once spiritualism spreads outside of that cradle, what's the response. Well, in many ways you could argue that spiritualism in America predates the eighteen forty eight knockings. UM. Belief in spirit communication has long

even ancient roots across cultures. Regular communication with the spirit world features prominently in Native American cosmologies, and Europeans and Africans brought forms of spiritism with them to American shores. So I don't want to collapse important differences here. Um that said, in many ways, you could argue that spiritualism

in America predates the eighteen forty eight knockings. So when spiritualism becomes a global movement, it becomes one for the same reasons that it had power in the United States. So these religious reform movements, very specific ones that are coming out of the burned over district, but others across the world differently, but in some ways similarly, are drawing on a kind of the twin reservoirs of elite and folk discourse that had a sense of a form of spiritualism.

So in some cases and internationally, it's about Unitarians and universalists, about Freemasons and free lovers, about Shakers and Quakers, and

Mormons and Millerites. But all of that rich soil that became the kind of spiritual hotbed that that birtht American spiritualism had enough that connected it to distinctive but older folk traditions and you know, maybe even just older desires for spiritual contact and connection that translated and spread m You write that in your book that spiritualism was similar to many of the other kind of radical anti clerical strains of Protestantism at the time, pardon me, and and

that it sought to make religious hierarchy, and you said this at the beginning to and kind of the control of expertise by white men, and they're kind of the boundaries around authority obsolete. And it wasn't that that it eliminated the idea of revelation through a medium or that it was mediated by someone in particular, but it changed

the rules of who could be the go between. Can you talk a little bit about the consequence of these changes, maybe in the context of the Seneca False Convention, which was also part of that revolutionary spirit and they were all connected. I mean, the most obvious and unique thing about spiritualism is that women and sometimes young girls like the Fox sisters, were placed at the center of spirit circles.

So at a time in the middle of the nineteenth century where the idea of women speaking in public was anathema, all of the sudden there were these women and children speaking in voices that presumably were not their own, but in doing so, they were taking center stage in a

way that had not been seen before. And actually, and Browdie argues that that of the women speaking in public at that time of the nineteenth century, spiritualist outnumber all other public speakers, so it becomes a way for women to find women and girls to find a different voice. Although this gets really tricky because their vessels of a sort, they're not presumably speaking in their own words, they're they're

channeling messages from beyond. So what spiritualism allows for is a kind of remaking of women, middle class white women, I should say, as as pure, as receptive, as passive. All of those qualities that seemingly them unfit for public life made them perfectly fit as the empty vessels who could channel the spirits and the words of others from beyond.

You write that the roots of spiritualism and radical communities and including the women's rights movement at the time, meant that spiritualists when they went to England, spiritualists like Maria hayden Um had access to some well known reformers and and uh utopians like Robert Owen and other European radicals.

Can you briefly describe the political situation in England uh kind of at the time that would have opened space for people like Robert Owen and for spiritualists who had connections to him again, this goes beyond on the scope of my knowledge, and I'm taking this up in the morn No. But it's super but it's but it's super fascinating. And that that the kind of Anglo American movement, the movement back and forth across the Atlantic, is absolutely crucial

to the to the structuring practice of spiritualism. And it's not just that that mediums moved back and forth, or that there were speakers who you know, went on circuits and traveled. But you know, as you point out, that there were there were these connections of of of folks and what it meant is that it opened very powerful doors very quickly. So what I know about that particular case is that medium um was very well connected and and you know, someone who can who knows more can

tell you about it. But that combination of mediumship media, which is to say a lot of people who had relationships with the press, that was that was that enabled to kind of mediation of these um, of these experiences and of this movement meant that door swung open in ways that they that seems really surprising from our vantage. Let's jump to uh spiritualism and the institution of marriage. We've been talking about kind of the instant, the anti

institutional impulse, uh, and its relationship to spiritualism. UH. Marriages like Cora Hatch's marriage to Benjamin Hatch or Victoria Woodhall's early marriage to Kenning. Um, what did they tell us about marriage and gendered power more broadly in American life in the eighteen forties, fifties, sixties, in eighteen seventies, where people like Victoria would Hall really challenge the well, I

get a Victoria Woodhall. But to begin with the question that you asked in the eighteen forties and fifties, it's probably worth saying that coverture, which is the legal doctrine in which the married woman is literally covered politically, socially, and economically by her husband, meant that marriage was an institution which women gave up their power figuratively and literally. Uh. So spiritual is become among the group of folks, and really starting in the eighteen fifties, they allie um in

some ways with also free love advocates. And I should say, um, from our vandam point, free love sounds very sixties or seventies, UM, And it's you know, it sounds like a kind of untrammeled sexual license, which it really wasn't um. Free love advocates, who often had ties to the abolition movement, frequently invoked comparisons between marriage and chattel slavery. However deeply problematic that is, for you know, these these white free love advocates to

do UM. But nonetheless, spiritualism and free love, with its idea of elected affinities, directly attacked the often coercive bodily bonds of marriage. So the idea was is that UM gets complicated, but the notion of spiritual affinities is such that UM, in some versions, everyone has a spiritual affinity, a spiritual mate that they might find in this world or perhaps the next. But free love advocates dissolved their marriages with much more frequency than did many of their contemporaries.

And then i teenth century, and the idea was is, if there was a spiritual affinity that would override the earthly bonds of marriage, then that earthly legal marriage should be dissolved for the more UM spiritually affinitive that's not

a word or a different kind of spiritual affinity. That would be the you know, the real, the real, the real love UM so that's that, and Um, Cora Hatch is married for five times Andrew Jackson Davis, who is a male medium at the time, again, who who actually uses a lot of those same Victorian ideas, at least when he's young, about being susceptible, impressionable, virtuous, pious um, and and is able to kind of to to use those those characteristics that would not be fitting for a

different kind of active man. Um becomes a way for him to also create a kind of uh unconventional notion of of masculinity. But but most significantly, he dissolves his marriage is over and over in this kind of free love. So so that connection between free love and spiritualism is real. Um. It is also true that many spiritualists at the time decried free love and refuse the connection and saw free love is really tarnishing the especially religious impulses of spiritualism.

So there there is many There are many as many detractors of free love within the worlds of spiritualism as there are spiritualists to become free lovers. Um. But when you think of someone like like Cora Hatch, but really Victoria Woodhall and Tennessee Claflin and Tennessee. Claflin is Victoria woodhall sister. And they attacked the double standard, the sexual double standard, as well as the sort of hypocrisies of marriage, and they attacked them in print, and they attacked powerful man.

And um, it's it's kind of amazing looking back on it in this moment, because so Cleveland described, i would say, modestly explained her incredibly radical project that she and her sister, Victoria Woodhold took up. And she she wrote, we've we've tried, and this was a kind of attack on the rights that the Rakish man had and that that the woman was made to bear the blame of this, the sexual double standard. So Cleveland rights, we've tried to make rake

as disgraceful as horror. We can't do it. And now we are determined to take the disgrace out of horror. That's in the eighteen seventies. I still find that incredibly. I mean, it's it's it's amazing that that. It's just it's so ahead of its time and in so many ways, so so folks like Cleveland and Woodhall are are at

theater edges of spiritualism. That said, the movement made room for a kind of range of ways of being the world that would not have, um, that would not have fit in many, certainly religious communities in the United States at the time, um, but also political communities. Let's let's talk a little bit more about that, because, um, you have mediums like the Fox sisters and Cora and Emma

Britain who were closer towards the center of spiritualism. You have the wood Halls who well, well, Victoria Woodhall and Tenny who who restore up trouble for spiritualism when they you know, with those attachments. But you also have male mediums like you mentioned Andrew Jackson Davis, and we're talking

a bit about Daniel Douglas whom as well. UM, can you say a little bit more about masculinity and femininity and gender and power in spiritualism and how maybe by contrasting these these figures, um, how they they challenged or adapted or remixed some of these ideas about what a man or a woman should do or be. Spiritualism provided a different kind of home for a range of gendered masculinities and femininities that would not have fit comfortably into

every Victorian community. And part of that was about embracing a notion of receptivity, so you know, mediums open themselves to other spirits. There they take up nineteenth century Victorian notions of the virtues of white female womanhood that allow certain kinds of power for women and girls to speak in public, as we talked about before, but also a range of masculinities for men who might have sat you know, outside that the strictures or boundaries of what was possible

for Victorian men. So um Andrew Jackson Davis, who starts his career very young, and he then goes on to become one of the major writers and figures of nineteenth century spiritualism. But when he begins, he's he's very young, and he is developed by a mesmerist um. And and that even the term developed, the idea of being developed as a medium is passive. It it happens to the medium developed like film, I mean these kind of media technology.

It's it's more than analogy, but it's everywhere as analogy and metaphor. So once a medium like Andrew Jackson Davis is developed as a medium, he was then he then followed this stronger control who was also a man um later in his life Andrew Jackson Davis marries a much older woman. The idea of her strength and age was that she would also be a more powerful control. So you have this kind of shifting notions of of gender and power that again exceed what was possible in in

many Victorian communities at the time. Um. As spiritualism grew, and it grew pretty fast. Um, how did the various church traditions or some of these can unities that were really centered around institutions that are being challenged, Uh, how did they respond to spiritualism and the challenges opposed to hierarchy across these various avalances. The most honest answer is it worked differently, and it worked differently across different traditions.

So you have Quakers, especially Hicksite Quakers, uh, you know, creating the foundation for spiritualism to grow in a place like Rochester at on. You know, on the other end, you have someone like Orestes Brownson writing um publicly that he was converting to Catholicism because the feminized, you know, weak kinds of movements that are coming out of this feminization of American Protestantism, UM made him yearn for the

strictures and hierarchies of the Catholic Church. So both on the individual level and on the collective community level, they're they're real. There's a real range of response. I don't know if churches actually came out against spiritualists or how that, how that might have worked. I think a lot of the major denominations refer to ignore spiritualism and hope it would go away, like how is this possibly going to last? Um?

But within the movement and within the press, which you know, spent a lot of time reading, there's a lot of UM correspondence discussing, you know, what what some pastor has said, or the attacks coming from someone who was leaving, you know, to to to find a more proper good religion, and and spiritualism then becomes that the foil against which these you know, properly ministered and institutional churches can define themselves against.

Spiritualism was also often positioned sometimes in the press, sometimes by spiritualists themselves in their own press vehicles. UM kind of at an interesting midpoint between what we could crudely call like faith and science. Uh. For believers, it was sometimes you know, a field of empirical proofs for a belief in the spirit world. Um. While for materialists or dissenters, it was uh kind of a horizon of knowledge in the natural world. Um. Was this kind of liminal zone?

Was it more of an asset or a liability? For spiritualists in the eighteen fifties, I would say it was absolutely an assets. That idea of a little zone I think is exactly right. Spiritualists refused the distinction between religion and science. They denied that a warfare or even that a divide exists between religion and science, and instead offered up and al chemical combination of religion and science wrapped

in popular positivism. So spiritualism was a vernacular science, and spiritualists saw I should say most spiritualists saw themselves as vernacular scientists, as investigators. Um. It was also a religious practice and sometimes just excellent theater. But the language around spiritualism was all about that relationship between faith and science.

So a very um well known book from the time was called proof Palpable, the idea that that the manifestations of spiritual spiritualists provide proof palpable that could be studied in the lab, that can be shown by investigators UM of the existence of the spirit world. So from the very beginning, the connections to technology, to science, all of that was was born into the movement. You mentioned the

spiritualist press. What were the banner of light in the Herald of progress and why we're periodicals like these important for the history of spiritualism. Spiritual is published voluminously throughout the especially throughout the second half of the of the nineteenth century, and it is what has made the research possible that many of us have done. So there's there's

there's voluminous writings by spirituals in the nineteenth century. There's now an almost equally extensive historiography on the subject UM. But it was incredibly important for the movement for spreading the word UM. Spiritualists in many ways were UM organized in their home circles and their science circles in small group communalism. But the community of print of readers who met in camp meetings and in lecture and lecture circuit

was only one part of the spiritualist community. I mean, when you think of all of the readers UM, this kind of imagined community that was made possible by the hugely burgeoning, incredibly diverse nationalist spiritualist press UM, then you get a sense of um, of the kind of power of the spreading of this word, and spiritualism has. One of one of the difficulties of studying spiritualism is that it doesn't it doesn't provide the same kind of obvious

means of either counting or accounting for spiritualism. So there are no membership roles UM, there are no churches. You can't count you know, adherents in the same way that you could with a more traditional religious study UM. And it isn't until really late in the waning days of spiritualism that they become interested. Well, there there's interest earlier, but it's only in the waning days at the end of the nineteenth century that spiritualist institutions really start going.

So the press for much of the nineteenth century is

that institution. It's the it's the network, it's the the the interweaving of um, of people in places that were um, that were brought together in this um, in this kind of well, in this imagined community, and of the net I mean you also probably say like networks also played a vital role within spiritualist circles, whether it's networks of rope held by participants in some say, once circles to connect them like the you know, like like the ectromagnetic

flows in a battery. Um. They created a vast network of communications between heaven and earth. Um networks of transportation. Obviously that these knew what networks of transportation from the railroad to the Erie Canal, which where was Rochester is connected right in the call that as well as networks of subtle energies that were connecting that we're connecting people

in science circles. When it comes to some of the early tallies, there is that interesting point in four when interest in spiritualism had grown so much that although we don't have kind of a a sum total number of the movement, there's that one expression of a swell of interest in the fifteen thousand people petition the United States Senate to fund a scientific commission to investigate spiritualism. UM. What was the result of that attempt? It was tabled,

but it created more publicity for the movement. So that moment in eighteen fifty four, when Senator James Shields, then of Illinois he went on to be a senator in two other states as well, when he takes these fifteen thousand signatures to Congress. He's at once met with some derision, but the argument was that Congress was funding investigations into electricity, so why not spiritualism, And that they're seen as similar

at that time is so extraordinary to me. But um, nothing happened with that particular petition, but the fact of fifteen thousand people signing it um was huge. And again even though it was tabled, the investigation didn't happen. Congress didn't move forward, the Senate didn't move forward. Um, the publicity around it increased interest for the movement, without question. So that's a kind of key moment in a lot

of ways. I think let's shuffle a little even a little more into political history of the era, because this is the decade after the the American invasion of Mexico and the gold Rush, the Compromise of eighteen fifty the Kansas Nebratas Nebraska Acts eighteen fifty four, um. So at this point, how were Americans in the East thinking about the West? What was what was the presence of the West in the imagination of some of these groups in New York that were if there's a center to spiritualism,

which is a really dispersed movement. Um. How is the West featuring in the imagination of spiritualism at the time. Well, I think in multiple ways. UM. On the one hand, that this, especially before the Civil War, the West was seen by many Americans on the East coast is what was called the Great Desert that there that it was this you know, open open plain and waiting to be conquered with the spirit of manifest destiny. On the other hand,

spiritualist moved to the West coast. So there's spiritualists encampments that can be traced throughout the West. So that I mean just as one example or a Hatch's father goes to Wisconsin to um to form a kind of version of Hopedale there. So there are these movements west forming um forming communities in the West. UM. California yesterday is today has become a kind of spiritual hotbed. So eventually

spiritualist moved to San Diego and Madame Tingley's Loma Land. Um. Spiritualism comes west to just a place near Santa Barbara that is still called Summerland, named after the spiritualist idea of the afterlife, not justification spot. UM. So these on the one hand, there is this imagination of the West as this, at least among you know, certain certain kind of theological conception of the West is wide open for

the taking. They're also real spiritualists who are looking at that, especially the West coast, as a place that would become the kind of UM next movement forward, the next the next place for UM for building a spiritualist community, and they do from from very early on, and you've also written a lot about this um spiritualisms. Spiritualists claimed to be under the control of Native American spirit guides. Indian spirit guides controls UM. What does this tell us about

what spiritualists thought about Native nations, native peoples. It's complicated. Um Spiritualists relied on a Anglo American cultural understanding of Native Americans as highly spiritual and mapped onto the spirit world the colonial relationship of the Indian as a figure as a guide for the white man. So spiritualist positioned Native Americans as spirit guides as vital links between this

world in the next um. It was Indian guide who could bring spiritualists through the veil, tracing the invisible footprints beyond UM. That said, these performances were a way of staging Indians vanishing their disappearance right their Indian ghosts. So, on the one hand, spiritualists are interested in um in spectral Indians, which is to say, dead Indians UM, and as such they're they're part of um of a larger kind of national engagement with um uh notion of the

vanishing Indian and vanishing tribes. There's a huge literature in the nineteenth century, the Last of the Mohicans being the most famous among them. But from these nostalgic, nostalgic portrayals of dying warriors and lost tribes um to an idea of playing Indian, as Philip Gloria has termed it um. Nineteent century subjects produced themselves as Americans through an engagement with national fantasies of a white man's Indian, which is to say, an appropriated um version as opposed to actual

Native Americans. So while native actual native nations are being literally absented from the national landscape through ongoing dispossession, removal acts, acts of war, acts of genocide, the figure, the literary figure, especially of the vanishing Indian, often took on um an apparitional, if metaphorical form, and the figure, the figure of the Indian ghost is profoundly ambiguous. And the figure of the of the Indian ghost appears in antebellty fiction, in plays, again, poetry.

It's everywhere, um, but it's it's very it's a very ambiguous figure. Often the Indians, whether it's its spiritual sciences or in other literary manifestations, register your dissatisfaction with the European conquest of the Americans. But the fact that they are ghosts testifies seemingly contradictorily to the success of that very conquest. Um. It's a complicated logic of absension, of abstraction, and and of appropriation of a kind of love and theft.

So Indians appear, and they begin to appear really early, um, very very early after the forty eight knockings, and is the first one that I found. Um. Indians spirits begin to appear as guides to the afterworld, as healers, often as kind of disembodied envoys of American historiography, and all of this relies on a cultural understanding of Native Americans again as highly spiritual that would map onto the spirit world.

This colonial relationship as Indians as guides, um, whether as spirit guides in the seance or the you know, the kind of older portrayal of the Indian's role as guiding the white man, as helpers in this in this manifest destiny. UM. So that said, spiritual what what I found in like that? We know right that that that ninete century Anglo Americans have this, this this notion of the vanished Indian. It becomes an easy way to see themselves as not um

implicated in Indian genocide. They can weep sentimental tears over po Hotton Um or you know, the figure of the vanishing, the vanishing Mohican, the last Mohican. But the strange thing happened because it turns out that when spirits show up as a science, they don't always say what you want them to. So spirit guides, Indian guides came to spiritualist science demanding justice in this material world, and some spiritualists, many more than other nineteenth century Anglo Americans, begin to

work for the cause of Native Americans. So Um, using the publications of the spiritualist pressed to speak out against particular particular outrages. UM eventually to work against the DAWs Act, which is a um the idea putting breaking up tribes and putting them on reservations. So there is again it's ambiguous,

it's complicated, it's at once appropriation. But also these at least some spiritualists took seriously the messages that they were being given from these spiritual Indian guides and used them as a way to create relationships with the act actually ongoing disappearance, genocidal vanishing of um of native nations in that nineteenth century present. So let's jump back into the late eighteen fifties. Um, there's a big crash in seven market crash, How did it affect the American mood in

the years before the Civil War? And did that have any influence on spiritualists? Seven crash? The panic of eighteen seventy eight seven was the again like overexpansion of whatever they declining international economy blah blah blah blah blah. But um, the panic of eighteen fifty seven becomes the financial crisis that was really the first worldwide economic crisis. So because and across the across the nineteenth century, there will be panics there, and they get worse as the nineteenth century

goes on. And part of the reason why they get worse is because people for the first time were m imbricated in the cash economy, they were paid wages, they were often renters, They didn't own their own property. UM, they were increasingly urbanized, that they didn't have that little plot of land and you know, a way to grow food. They were out of work. So with each of those crashes,

with each of those panics, m things get worse. I'm not sure that the crash had that much or or I have not found that the crash really affected the mood um of spiritualists in the way that it um, the way that it's you know, something obviously, something like the Civil War, that that, at least in what I was reading UM this sense and of course they're lad, but the sense of personal loss, of of of death UM, whether it was on a global skill or in you know,

in the familiar situation, seemed to be much more important in UM in bringing people to the seance table than the kind of anxieties caused by a panic. And and interestingly, they're you know, they're they're called panics of the nineteenth century. And I think, as the story goes, it's it's Herbert, one of Herbert Hoober's advisors, who says, don't call it a panic. People panic. If you call it a panic, call it a depression, UM, and then it's called a

depression is starting with the great compression UM. But the question of why these are already always named after moods is no psychic states and not psychological states has yet another issue. But to the best of my knowledge, of the seven PANICCK did not have a great deal of connection to UM, to the growth or or UM really affect the spiritual's movement. To the best of my knowledge, that said, UM, the nineteenth century was a time of

tremendous loss. Women died in childbirth, epidemics, decimated communities. Cholera was the epidemic disease of the nineteenth century. It was to the nineteenth century what the plague was to the fourteen UM. And there were deadly upbreaks in the United States and in eighteen forty nine. I mean, in some ways I hate of those kind of cause explanations, but you know, you could argue that eighteen forty eighteen forty nine UM, massive death plus this new technology would bring

people to spiritualism. And then obviously the American Civil War had devastating death tolls on both sides, which is kind of hard to wrap one's head around. Just in terms of pure numbers, right, So on the two sides, at least six and twenty thousand soldiers died from diseases and wounds. That number is equivalent to two of the entire population the US population at the time. Two percent of Americans

today equals six million people. So thinking about the equivalent of a war in four years in which six million people died, it's just it's so massive, and it just was not a war that people got over. Um. That said, spiritualism begins before the Civil War, So all of these things, all of these things are linked. And um, you know, commuting understanding those those forms of massive loss is something that you know, no, no technology really provides us needs

to do. Well, let's let's point towards the Civil War a little it, um, maybe starting with another kind of big picture question. Um, with spiritualism's background in all of these Eutopean radical Northern reformist movements, how was spiritualism received across the South? Really differently, Spiritualism is most popular in

areas of the Northeast, sometimes the Midwest. Eventually California with the largest grouping of those post Calvinist Protestant Anglo Americans, again the northeast the west, but there were also small groupings in the South. So New Orleans, with its French, Creole, Afro Caribbean and Catholic syncretic mixture, became a kind of hotbed of spiritualism, and there are relatively smaller numbers of

spiritualists across the South. There are many fewer, But I just learned that before the Civil War, the states of Alabama, that is, the Alabama and South carol line of legislatures, prohibited sciences and other gatherings in their states, which I found particularly interesting because we we know the way that religion was prohibited and was seen um for enslaved people as a way to organize. So some religious gatherings at certain times in different states across the South were made illegal.

But the fact that Alabama and South Carolina bother to put this newly into their laws suggest that perhaps there was there was something going on, and that the spread of spiritualism, like the spread of the abolitionist publications that were making their way south from the North um was seen as particularly dangerous. When when the Civil War begins, how do spiritualists respond? There? They're almost universally pro union, but they're also kind of amazing ways that the spiritualist

press positions itself. So various spiritualist newspapers UH talk about the importance of spirit helpers in getting the numbers and the news of the war quicker, faster, and arguably more accurate than could other forms of news distribution. UM. And I mean the thing again, so that the amazing thing, the sort of a hard thing that I can never quite wrap my head around about the Civil War is that most soldiers died as unknown soldiers. There were no

dog tags in the nineteenth century. Often UM soldiers would place letters in their pockets UM with the hope that if their body was found, the letter would be sent to their loved ones. But there was no system for identifying the dead, identifying the wounded, knowing where people could be.

I mean, eventually there was, but because of that that huge lack of of knowing where people were, the spiritualist press takes on this kind of metaphysical quality where people are turning to it to provide and to and to get news of the war and presumably news of their loved ones, whether that or alive. Can you talk a little about the letters of mourning that we're published in

spiritualist periodicals. Yeah, these are so amazing to me. And like, after my book is published, actually got an email from someone who had just lost just lost a child and she was reading this book and talking about it in with a group of women who had also lost children. But that idea that the only the only people who understand mourning are those who have experienced lost themselves and

the spiritualist press um. I think that the Schekna is one of the first spirituals publications to include pages of letters from readers to the editor man in Samuel Britten, asking for comfort, asking for consolation, and sometimes asking for assistant in contacting dead loved ones. So their letters of mourning, their letters of loss, and there's sometimes letters asking for

help and making the connections. So thinking about again multiplying the idea of media and mediation that the mediums often worked for the media, that is the spiritualist news newspapers. So UM. The Banner of Light, which is one of the largest and most widely read spiritualist publications at mid century, regularly published a column called The Messenger, which included communications to readers from spirits of the dead and they had

a medium exclusively for the banner of light. So again you have this community in print that's bringing people together

beyond the science circle. And those those letters of mourning um I were so different than the kind of elaborate morning cultures that um have been um so well documented in middle class morning cultures with you know, elaborate dress rituals and clothing and the shifting of colors and crape covered houses and like the kind of etiquette around those Victorian morning cultures are so different than reading these letters, which are just so raw and and and and and

a really different kind of archive into the nineteenth century history of loss mm hm. When we're talking about kind of the middle class expectations, especially around something like mourning that was often coded feminine um. And we're looking at the seventies, what can we say about the connections between the women's rights movement and spiritualists and maybe women in class kind of between all those points. How was spiritualism operating in that space in the seventies mhm isous question? No,

I like it. I like it, um Yeah. I mean as the story goes, spiritualism rises and falls in the eighteen seventies, is a kind of you know, death rattle. I don't think that's true, but many historians do. But in the in the eighteen seventies, you have you have people like Victoria Woodhall who on the one hand are galvanizing a national stage UM and on the other are seen as pushing the edges, pushing spiritualism beyond beyond a

kind of fringe. But in terms of class, I mean, one of the earliest writings on um on spiritualism came was written by Lawrence Moore about the medium as a new profession in the nineteenth century. So mediumship very early on became way for women to work and get paid for what they do. And there's a lot of discussion in this spiritual espress about weather not mediums should be paid and but but it becomes his way, it becomes a form of wage work. Um. By the eighteen seventies,

that's not so shocking, and those discussions disappear. But um that I don't know if there's actually a shift in adherence and how that shifts around class. I mean. The criticue of the women sufrage movement, of course is that it was mainly peopled are largely peopled by um more affluent elite women, white women women. But Ambrodi can run

that that history beautifully again. Um. But speaking of white women in positions in these movements, UM, sojourn or truth, Harriet Jacobs other black spiritualist women like Harriet Wilson UM often faced bigotry even in ambolitionists and equal rights circles,

as well as utopian and reformist movements. Um. Can you describe some of the forces at work in these movements that maintained race attitudes and relationships even as these groups lobbied for social reform, for abolition before the war, that kind of thing. Yeah, I think the spiritualists were often reformers, some were radicals. But abolitionism is not equivalent to anti racism.

And it's well known that especially white suffrages were very clear that they deserve the vote and black men didn't, and black women were, you know, another another thing altogether.

So white supremacy structured these reform movements even as many of of the people involved and abolished the white you know, the white women, the white people involved in abolitionism, involved in in suffragism and spiritualism, were on some ways outside of their time in other ways those movements were as structured by um anti black racism as the rest of

the culture. And I say that not as an apologia, but just as an explanation, because I think the fantasy is that, you know, here were these incredible interracial groups, but in a place like Rochester was actually very unique in that it did provide for um for interracial organizing around abolition. But Isaac and Amy Posts were actually thrown out of their of their Genesee Quakers group for as the story goes, having hosted a wedding of two African

American friends of theirs. So they're at the sort of center of what one would imagine would be the most freethinking, most anti racists, you know, communities in the country. You know, it's still it's it's still there. What kind of pressures on the spiritualist movement created a space for materialization mediums?

And then what did those materialization mediums mean for people who had been in the movement for a long time that were maybe translectors or spirit burst I suppose you could see this as a kind of development of relationship to to sound and media. So if those those first raps and knocks American spirituals was always a sonic experience, and those first raps and knocks that were heard were, um, we're a kind of acoustic connection to the to the

to the world of the dead. It was only later that spiritualists began to materialize spiritualist materialized spirits um and then eventually ectoplasm and all sorts of other things. You know, guitars would play, pianos would float, you know, disembodied hands would appear in seances. But it does. The materialization sciences were critiqued from some areas of the movement as overly

showy as just theater. That said, they also convinced investigators and way that the earlier raps and knox or they you know, they convinced some investigators so famously in the again in the eighteen seventies, William Crooks Um, who was one of the one of the scientists who became devoted devoted spiritualists, kind of falls in love with a spirit named Katie King who appeared at it at a science. Um. She's she's manifested by another medium, a woman named Florence Cook.

And it's precisely the materialization of those figures that at least for Crooks, and presumably for many others, that was the proof palpable. So it's as if spiritualism had um had sort of up to its game, moving from the sounds of the raps and the knox of the telegraph to the development of these new manifestations, paralleling the new developments in photography and then eventually spirit photography. M hm, UM,

let's talk a little bit more about some of those investigators. UM. Can you describe the Societies for Psychical Research that formed first in London and then in the United States and their approach to spiritualism that happens later And here I would say, debor Blum is your person. And it's so interesting to me the way that people scholars of William James and Henry James for that matter, UM, really do very little around his work around abnormal psychology and and

and the founding of the Society's for Psychical Research. But but James later in the century sort of turns and there's there's probably more to me said about the relationship

between elite science and spiritualism. So very early on, UM, I think it's it's really is like eighteen fifty eighteen fifty two, a scientist named Robert Hare, respected chemists at the University of Pennsylvania, becomes a devoted spiritualist, and there are a number of very prominent scientists, so Hair Crooks, Michael Faraday, Beacons experimenting the kind of elite scientists start looking at spiritualism and and seeing if there's anything there.

Once James takes it on, you know, going towards the turn of the century. He's very clear and addresses the American UM Society for Psychical Research, and I guess it's the first or second here that he's president about how how important it is that that that spiritualism and the psychic states have been taken out of the darkened rooms and rat hole sellers that's a quote UM and into

the you know, the bright light of the laboratory. So James is one of the many men at that time who are who are deeply interested in the same thing that spiritualism, are interested in the in the relationship between the brain, soul and psyche, of psychic states, of abnormal psychology. And you know, many of those investigators went on to to bring that work into academic institutions. So UM psychical research goes to Duke University, the first parapsychology lab is

has started there. So there are these connections and it's James, but it's a number of other people as well, and it's a whole fascinating world. That's great. So let's talk a little more about new thinking about kind of abnormal psychology towards the end of the century of the nineteenth century. Um, how did new ways of thinking about the human mind either relate to interest in spiritualism? Where did they? Did they draw interest away or did they push interests towards spiritualism? Um?

How did how did this kind of new thinking that was displacing some of the discrediting some of the older sciences of mesmerism and or magnetism, that kind of stuff we talked about before? How did new thinking about the mind? Uh? Change the way that people related to spiritualism. The amazing thing about the eighteen seventies is that during that time, over the course of about fifteen years, a group of the most prominent Anglo American medical men took up the

question of spiritualism. So, in in answer to your question, how did you thinking about a normal psychology in new ways of thinking about the mind? Sap interest in spiritualism, it actually increased it, um, but increased it in a way that was pathologizing. So in the eighteen seventies, a doctor named Frederick Marvin, who is in New York, coins the term medio mania, the notion that spiritualism was causing this kind of mass mania, both in individual psyches but

also in the collective mania and madness. But there were doctors at that time who were neurologists and UM. In the nineteenth century there's there's basically a split between neurologists who were studying the mind, the brain, the psyche through

the nerves, and alienists who were the asylum keepers. So so so during this time, neurologists are really looking to professionalize their you know, their their own little turf, and they do it in many ways, but but you know, not in a small way over the bodies of female mediums.

So neurologists like William Hammond, Silas Ware Mitchell, George Beard Um and then also prominent alienis in um in London as well, all launch a polemical attack on spiritualism, and reading this medical barrage, um well suggest that doctors were concerned with both clinical and epistemological issues But all of it is about much of it is about medical professionalization. They become, they become the experts um in in the

new worlds of the soul, in the psyche. Did this kind of formation of these disciplines as fields, neurology, alienists distinguished from each other, distinct from each other? Um, this interesting professionalization, did it express anything more all the about

changes in American culture? Well? Yeah, um. In the late nineteenth century, medical doctors were in the process of forming a profession around the caretaking of the diseased spirit or psyche, which would have been a duty traditionally left to religion.

So that warfare between science and religion that that spiritualist refused was one that doctors were taking on and not you know, not all And certainly William James is really beautiful about his his insistence in in not um pathologizing mystical experience in the ways that some of them do. But medical doctors claimed to jurisdiction over insanity rested upon um.

All they could do to minister was to ministered to the body right, and they did so with blood letting in all of these forms of quote unquote heroic medicine, which were actually really pretty savage, and the mind was a new terrain. UM. So spiritualists laid claim and doctors late counterclaim, and they began to study female mediums, sometimes against their will, sometimes with the you know, full collaboration.

But it's a fascinating moment. And it's if historians of psychoanalysis are very clear that psychoanalysis, at least in Europe, was formed around the body and speech of the female hysteric. In the United States, you could argue that the American science of neurology was formed around the figure of the female medium. So in late eighteen eighties we have all

these kinds of things going on. We also have the development of theosophy and New Thought and other kinds of new movements, new communities that are forming UH in some of the same space where spiritualism had been UM. And then Maggie Fox publishes a book that claims her sciences were a fraud. Of course there's someone else writing it

for her, but apparently her testimony. What's the effect on spiritualism as a whole when Maggie Fox, one of the Fox sisters UH, publishes this kind of revelation, Well, it makes them press, as you know, But the actual effect on spiritualism as a whole was little. That's the trick throughout the history of spiritualism. There have been doubters and debunkers, and often those moments of confession actually create more publicity for the movement and have the defenders come back even stronger.

Plus Maggie Fox recants, she really you know, that dissipated and broke. Maggie Fox would go on to her forty years or forty more years after the original Rochester knockings to debunk spiritualism and admit to the very manipulations of bone and joint that doctors had earlier accused her and

her sisters of. Um. It not only confirms the triumph of science over the triumph of science over superstition, but it really did very little to to sort of change the dial among people who were in that said the movement was fading, so you know, she got another she got to do another tour, um, you know whatever people's last act, you know. Um. This is also the period

where as spiritualism is fading. UM, there are some spiritualists like Cora now Cora Richmond, who were working to create something that would be stable and last for Spiritualists going forward. She was central to founding the National Spiritualist Association. Um. What was core ros investment in creating a lasting institutional base for spiritualism, Uh, for this movement that had been

so anti institutional, anti hierarchical um. Maybe not corporate in particular, but can you describe kind of the spiritualist dedication to creating enduring institutions in the in the eighteen eighties and nineties as time kind of stretches on, Well, Core Hatch was getting old. She was an aging child star, a diva who needed to invest her faith in institutions that would outlast her. I mean, I really think that that's there's there's something to that in terms of understanding her,

her her importance to this movement. But that was very much an impulse of the era, and historians have described that air is you know, an age of corporation, incorporation when Americans become you know, more likely to build institutions and you know, to to move away from the kind of anti authoritarian communal impulses of the fervent of the Antebellum years. So some of it is that. But think

what's true is that that spiritualist institutions. Spiritualist national institutions never really get off the ground because spiritualists are rather anti authoritarian as a lot. Um, So even in the eighteen eighties and nineties, it's almost two it's kind of ending, you know. So it always read to me a bit like a last gasp. So I'm interested in in your your view on the pretty common comparison of spiritualism in the United States after the Civil War and in Europe

after the First World War. Do you have thoughts on that comparison that's often made and used to talk about kind of national mourning after a cataclysm mcgloss at that scale, Well, there's certainly a resurgence after World War One. Obviously, comparing the eighteen fifties or the eighteen seventies with the nineteen twenties, so much it changed across the turn of that long nineteenth century, but so much hadn't changed. Um. World War One decimated Europe with a kind of violence and carnage

never seen before. Um. The new twentieth century had invented new weapons of war, but offered little new to help survivors grapple or cope with the aftermath. Um, you know, people were and are still asking how can the dead speak to the living as something other than the haunting, seating presence of absence. The resurgence is real. I mean it's a different resurgence, but I mean I'm now, I'm now in the nine twenties, and Um, Thomas Edison hits the press with the news that he is building an

apparatus to contact the dead. Um, and all of the press is framing it at the time, you know, from the New York Times to the Scientific America as a new resurgence and spiritualism after the war. That's great. Um. Stepping back just a bit, but kind of still in that space of the turn of the nineteenth century into the twenties. You say, in the in the eighties and nineties, spiritualism is in decline, Um, what is its status? Its position?

And maybe in the American religious or social landscape at the turn of the century, but it had found its way to theosophy, which does grow during that time. Um. You know, spirituals are still meeting in camp meetings in the you know, in the eighteen eighties and beyond, they're still doing their work. I think what's true is because the newspapers become less important and the community becomes more diverse.

And because many historians look at the northeast and and don't look at the west quite as much, that you know, they've missed a lot of the rebuilding that goes on in the eighteen eighties and the kind of experiments that are happening outside the northeast or the you know, central New York in that area that had worth the original movement.

So I think the it's less that spiritualism declines. I mean, that would be one way to see it, but it just becomes more difficult to see for all sorts of reasons. And and it moves it you know, it moves into different different formations, but but it doesn't die. And then the fact that that in it can the resurgence can happen again so quickly despite the radical differences across that you know, long nineteenth century and into um speaks to

a kind of enduring power. We're going to cover the formation of Cassadega, the Cassadega community in that's there, you go, that's it. Yeah, where it moves outside of the Northeast, but there are places where people decide to build something and what they build less yeah. Um. So as kind of maybe a final wrap up question, Um, what do you hope that listeners will take away from uh twelve hour narrative exploration of nineteenth century spiritualism? Oh my, oh,

you know I've answered that question really differently over time. UM. I mean, I think part of the only reason to study history, history is what hurts. The only reason to study history is to be able to kind of think differently about our present, to write a history of the present.

And um, I think it's very easy to sort of look back at the past and see irrationality and superstition and a kind of secularization narrative in which we, you know, are are no longer part of this kind of you know, community community of believers are dupes or the credulous, the credulous ones. And you know, I live in Los Angeles. I most people know their sun sign, if not their rising sign. When you know, people don't know their blood type and they know their astrology. This hasn't gone away.

I mean, what can be seen as a kind of um, you know, spurious consolation or after dinner pastime is speaks to a real need for people for for contact, for connection, and it's you know, it's it's easy to see as as as superstition UM or you know, as a child's kids parlor game. But but it was really, it was really powerful, and I originally started doing this work because I was here we are again UM. The rise of the evangelical right was very, very prominent, and obviously again

remained so. But the histories of UM the spiritual or religious left are harder to find. And it was amazing to me the way that the imagination, the possibility that spiritualists could could cross from this world to the next allow them to collapse distinctions between worlds, between body, between genders, between races in some cases. That that that that cosmology allowed for a remaking of things in this world, and

that material connection UM, I think remains very powerful. Un Obscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at History unobscured dot com

and until next time, thanks for listening. Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Menkey. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit i heeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.