Credulity

Credulity
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 282
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780226532479
ISBN-13 : 022653247X
Rating : 4/5 (79 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Credulity by : Emily Ogden

Download or read book Credulity written by Emily Ogden and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years. Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.


Credulity Related Books

Credulity
Language: en
Pages: 282
Authors: Emily Ogden
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-03-30 - Publisher: University of Chicago Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting roo
MESMERIST'S MANUAL OF PHENOMENA AND PRACTICE
Language: en
Pages: 0
Authors: GEORGE. BARTH
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A History of Hypnotism
Language: en
Pages: 760
Authors: Alan Gauld
Categories: Medical
Type: BOOK - Published: 1995-03-31 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Dr. Gauld has written a detailed and scholarly history of the phenomena, practice, and theory of mesmerism, hypnotism, and multiple personality disorders. The b
Laboratories of Faith
Language: en
Pages: 308
Authors: John Warne Monroe
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-07-05 - Publisher: Cornell University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

At a fascinating moment in French intellectual history, an interest in matters occult was not equivalent to a rejection of scientific thought; participants in s
Appleton's Library Manual
Language: en
Pages: 460
Authors: D. Appleton and Co. (New York, N.Y.)
Categories: Best books
Type: BOOK - Published: 1849 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK