The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear
The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear

Author: John Benedict Buescher

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13:

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John Murray Spear was one of nineteenth-century America's most interesting characters. A leading social agitator against slavery and capital punishment, Spear also became the nation's most flamboyant spiritualist, inventor of spirit machines, and advocate of free love. In his captivating biography, John Buescher brings to life Spear's superlatively odd story. Born in 1804, John Murray Spear began his career as a Universalist minister. Later he was a colleague of William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Parker in the abolitionist movement and worked as an activist among the New England reformers and Transcendentalists such as Bronson Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, and Dorothea Dix. In mid-life, Spear turned to the new revelation of spiritualism and came under the thrall of what he believed were spirit messages. Spear's spirits dictated that he and a small group of associates embark on plans for a perpetual motion machine, an electric ship propelled by psychic batteries, a vehicle that would levitate in the air, and a sewing machine that would work with no hands. human liberation - sexual and otherwise - were far stranger than anyone outside his closest associates imagined, and were aimed at the eventual manufacturing of human beings and the improvement of the race. In the last years of his life, retired by the spirits and regarded by fellow Gilded Age progressives as a visitor from another age, if not another planet, Spear helped organize support for anarchist, socialist, peace, and labor causes. Spear's life, an odd mixture of comic absurdity and serious foreshadowing of the future, provides us with a unique perspective on nineteenth-century American religious and social life.

Spiritualism in Antebellum America
Spiritualism in Antebellum America

Author: Bret E. Carroll

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1997-10-22

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780253114174

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"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.

Re-thinking Mediations of Post-truth Politics and Trust
Re-thinking Mediations of Post-truth Politics and Trust

Author: Jayson Harsin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-01-23

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1003835937

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This collection reaches beyond fake news and propaganda, beyond misinformation and charismatic liars, to explore the lesser-publicized cultural forms and practices that serve as a cultural infrastructure for post-truth society and politics. Situating post-truth in specific contexts as a site of contestation or crisis, the book critically explores it as a dynamic and shifting site around which political and cultural practices in specific contexts revolve and overlap. Through a breadth of perspectives, the volume considers a number of overlapping cultural and political developments across varying national and transnational contexts: changing technologies and practices of cultural production that sometimes shift and at other times reproduce authority of traditional institutional truth-tellers; seismic cultural changes in representations, values and roles regarding gender, sexuality, race and historical memory about them, as well as corresponding reactionary discourses in the “culture wars”; questions of authenticity, honesty, and power relations that combine many of the former shifts within an all-encompassing culture of (self-) promotional, attentional capitalism. These considerations lead scholars to focus on corresponding shifting cultural dynamics of popular truth-telling and (dis-) trust-making that inform political culture. In this more global view, post-truth becomes foremost an influentially anxious public mood about the struggles to secure or undermine publicly accepted facts. This nuanced and insightful collection will interest scholars and students of communication studies, media and cultural studies, media ethics, journalism, media literacy, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and politics.

Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue Extracted from the Catalogues of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Library of Trinity College (Dublin), the National Library of Scotland, and the University Libraries of Cambridge and Newcastle: Phase 1: 1816-1870. v.15. Fort - Fyv and Indexes for volumes 11-15. v.20. Hor-Hunt, W. R. and Indexes for v. 16-20. v.21. Hunten-Jero. v.22. Jerp-Kief. v.23. Kieg-Lecom. v.24. Lecon-Lorc. v.25. Lord-Maccaul and Indexes for volumes 21-25
Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue Extracted from the Catalogues of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Library of Trinity College (Dublin), the National Library of Scotland, and the University Libraries of Cambridge and Newcastle: Phase 1: 1816-1870. v.15. Fort - Fyv and Indexes for volumes 11-15. v.20. Hor-Hunt, W. R. and Indexes for v. 16-20. v.21. Hunten-Jero. v.22. Jerp-Kief. v.23. Kieg-Lecom. v.24. Lecon-Lorc. v.25. Lord-Maccaul and Indexes for volumes 21-25

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 778

ISBN-13:

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History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe
History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe

Author: Marcel Cornis-Pope

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010-09-29

Total Pages: 728

ISBN-13: 9027287864

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Types and stereotypes is the fourth and last volume of a path-breaking multinational literary history that incorporates innovative features relevant to the writing of literary history in general. Instead of offering a traditional chronological narrative of the period 1800-1989, the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe approaches the region’s literatures from five complementary angles, focusing on literature’s participation in and reaction to key political events, literary periods and genres, the literatures of cities and sub-regions, literary institutions, and figures of representation. The main objective of the project is to challenge the self-enclosure of national literatures in traditional literary histories, to contextualize them in a regional perspective, and to recover individual works, writers, and minority literatures that national histories have marginalized or ignored. Types and stereotypes brings together articles that rethink the figures of National Poets, figurations of the Family, Women, Outlaws, and Others, as well as figures of Trauma and Mediation. As in the previous three volumes, the historical and imaginary figures discussed here constantly change and readjust to new political and social conditions. An Epilogue complements the basic history, focusing on the contradictory transformations of East-Central European literary cultures after 1989. This volume will be of interest to the region’s literary historians, to students and teachers of comparative literature, to cultural historians, and to the general public interested in exploring the literatures of a rich and resourceful cultural region.