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Credulity

A Cultural History of US Mesmerism

(Autor)

Buch | Softcover
272 Seiten
2018
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-53233-2 (ISBN)
29,90 inkl. MwSt
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.

Emily Ogden is assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Erscheinungsdatum
Reihe/Serie Class 200: New Studies in Religion
Sprache englisch
Maße 17 x 23 mm
Gewicht 454 g
Themenwelt Sachbuch/Ratgeber Geschichte / Politik Allgemeines / Lexika
Sachbuch/Ratgeber Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie Esoterik / Spiritualität
Geschichte Allgemeine Geschichte Neuzeit (bis 1918)
Geisteswissenschaften Geschichte Regional- / Ländergeschichte
Geschichte Teilgebiete der Geschichte Religionsgeschichte
Geisteswissenschaften Psychologie Humanistische Psychotherapien
Geisteswissenschaften Religion / Theologie Weitere Religionen
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
ISBN-10 0-226-53233-X / 022653233X
ISBN-13 978-0-226-53233-2 / 9780226532332
Zustand Neuware
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