Unobscured Season 2 Sources

Spiritualism Proper

Ann Braude (Harvard), Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press 1991)

Molly McGarry (Riverside), Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press, 2008) [MC and REED]

Tatiana Kontou (Oxford Brookes University) Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siecle to the Neo-Victorian (Routledge 2009), Women and the Victorian Occult (Routledge 2010), and The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (Routledge 2012) 

Alexandra Owen (Northwestern) The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Virago 1989) and The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (UChicago Press 2004)

Mark A. Lause (U Cincinnatti) Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era (U Illinois Press 2016)

Cathy Gutierrez (Stonybrook/NYPL Scholar in Residence), Occult in Nineteenth-Century America (The Davies Group 2005), Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling (2015), Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (OUP 2009) and The Deviant and the Dead: Spiritualism and the Sciences of Crime (forthcoming)

John B. Buescher (Voices of America), The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism in the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience (Skinner House Books, 2004) and The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006)

Emily Clark (Gonzaga) A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (UNC Press 2016) 

Robert S. Cox (UMass Amherst) Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (UVA Press 2003)

Emily Ogden (University of Virginia) Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (ChicacgoUP, 2018)

J. Gordon Melton (Baylor) Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (Gale 2001)

Stan McMullin (Carleton University) Anatomy of a Seance: A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada (MQUP, 2004)

Logie Barrow (University of Bremen) Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebians, 1850–1910 (Routledge 1986)

John Kucich (Rutgers) Ghostly Communion: Cross-cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Dartmouth College Press 2004)

Christine Ferguson (University of Glasgow) Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing 1848–1930 (OUP 2012) [REED library]

Jeffrey D. Lavoie (Newbury College) The Theosophical Society: The History of a Spiritualist Movement (Brown Walker Press 2012) and A Search for Meaning in Victorian Religion: The Spiritual Journey and Esoteric Teachings of Charles Carleton Massey (Lehigh University Press 2014) [Use him for the connections between spiritualists across Europe]

L. Anne Delgado (Indiana University Bloomington) “Bawdy Technologies and the Birth of Ectoplasm” Genders 54 (2011), “Makinging Modern Ghosts: Female Mediums and the Birth of Ectoplasm” in The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with the Dead in America and Around the World (2013), and “Psychical Research and the Fantastic Science of Spirits” in Strange Science (University of Michigan Press 2017) [Look at Delgado for the best explorations of ectoplasm as an element in seances]

Christopher M. Moreman (Cal State) The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with the Dead in America and Around the World (Praeger, 2013; 3 vols) [Enormous range of articles on spiritualism as a global movement.]

Erlene Stetson and Linda David Glorying in Tribulation: The Lifework of Sojourner Truth (Michigan State University Press 1994) [REED library]

Sas Mays (University of Westminster) edited The Machine and the Ghost: Technology and Spiritualism in Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Art and Culture (Manchester University Press 2013) and coordinated the ‘Spiritualism and Technology’ network and conference (https://www.westminster.ac.uk/institute-for-modern-and-contemporary-culture/research-themes/spiritualism-and-technology) 

Yvonne P. Chireau (Swarthmore) Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (UCalifornia Press 2003)

Catherine L. Albanese (UC Santa Barbara) A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (Yale UP 2007)

Ann Taves (UC Santa Barbara) Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton UP 1999)

Jocelyn Godwin (Colgate University, Emeritus) Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early New York State (Excelsior/SUNY Press 2015)

Kathryn Troy (SUNY) The Specter of the Indian: Race, Gender, and Ghosts in American Seances, 1848–1890 (SUNY Press 2017)

Simone Natale (Loughborough University) Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (Penn State UP, 2016)

John P. Deveney (?) Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (SUNY Press 1996) [REED]

Darryl Caterine (Le Moyne College) Haunted Ground: Journeys through Paranormal America (Praeger 2011)

Jenny Hazelgrove (University of Nottingham) Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars (ManchesterUP 2000)

Leigh Eric Schmidt (Washington University) Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (HarvardUP 2000) [REED library], Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (2005), and many others. [would be great for the religion side]

Claudie Mascotte (Young Harris College) Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Seances (2017)

Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds) Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2007)

Bret Carroll (CalState Stanislaus) Spiritualism in Antebellum America (1997) [REED library]

Barbara Weisburg (Independent) Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism (2004)

G.K. Nelson (Birmingham) Spiritualism and Society (Routledge 1969)

Georgina Byrne (Worcester Cathedral) Modern British Spiritualism and the Church of England: 1850–1939 (Boydell and Brewer 2010)

Barbara A. White (Deceased/University of New Hampshire) The Beecher Sisters (Yale UP 2003)

John J. Guthrie et al., Cassadaga: The South’s Oldest Spiritualist Community (UPress of Florida 2000)

Historical Context

Barbara Goldsmith (Deceased) Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (Knopf 1998) 

Kevin Young (Guggenheim/New Yorker) Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press 2017)

Ross A. Slotten (St. Joseph) The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (Columbia University Press 2004)

Philip Gorski (Yale) American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton UP 2017)

Simon During (UMelbourne) Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard UP 2002) [final chapter: “Spiritualism and the Birth of Optical Technologies”]

Whitney R. Cross (Deceased) The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Cornell UP, 1950) 

John L. Modern (Franklin and Marshall College) Secularism in Antebellum America (UChicago Press 2011) [Lots about Spiritualism here as a sort of secular counterpoint or countermovement to Christianity, addressing the question is it secular if it’s spiritual but not Christian? among many others.]

Bradley W. Hart (Fresno State) Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (2018) [Stuff on the Silver Legion/Silver Shirts which blended spiritualism and fascist eugenics]

Articles

“How Spiritualism Spread,” James P. Stanley, https://www.publicbooks.org/how-spiritualism-spread/

“‘Indian Guides’ and White Spiritualists,” Linda Besner, https://hazlitt.net/feature/indian-guides-and-white-spiritualists

“Spiritualism, Esperanto, and the End of Race,” Raph Cormack, https://willjharris.com/2016/07/21/nassif-isaac-spiritualism-esperanto-and-the-end-of-race/

Erin E. Forbes, “Do Black Ghosts Matter?: Harriet Jacobs’ Spiritualism,” https://muse.jhu.edu/article/634709/summary