Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America / Edition 1

by Molly McGarry

Overview

Ghosts of Futures Past guides readers through the uncanny world of nineteenth-century American spiritualism. More than an occult parlor game, this was a new religion, which channeled the voices of the dead, linked present with past, and conjured new worldly and otherworldly futures. Tracing the persistence of magic in an emergent culture of secularism, Molly McGarry brings a once marginalized practice to the center of American cultural history. Spiritualism provided an alchemical combination of science and magic that called into question the very categories of male and female, material and immaterial, self and other, living and dead. Dissolving the boundaries between them opened Spiritualist practitioners to other voices and, in turn, allowed them to imagine new social worlds and forge diverse political affinities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520274532
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/30/2012
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Molly McGarry is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, coauthor of Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America, and coeditor of A Companion to LGBT/Q Studies.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Mourning, Media, and the Cultural Politics of Conjuring the Dead
2. Indian Guides: Haunted Subjects and the Politics of Vanishing
3. Spectral Sexualities: Free Love, Moral Panic, and the Making of U.S. Obscenity Law
4. Mediomania: The Spirit of Science in a Culture of Belief and Doubt
5. Secular Spirits: A Queer Genealogy of Untimely Sexualities

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Ghosts of Futures Past offers a fresh and important perspective on significant issues in mid-nineteenth-century cultural history."—The Journal of American History

Editorial Reviews

Ghosts of Futures Past offers a fresh and important perspective on significant issues in mid-nineteenth-century cultural history.

The Journal Of American History