Ghosts of Futures Past2008

"This book guides readers through the uncanny world of nineteenth-century American Spiritualism. More than an occult parlor game, this was a new religion that channeled the voices of the dead, linked the present with the 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." "Through compelling narratives of spectral visitation by dead Indian chiefs, cross-gendered spiritual musical performance, and other mystical experiences, McGarry vividly demonstrates how Spiritualism informed the changing relations of gender, race, sex, and citizenship. Ghosts of Futures Past ultimately asks how this apparitional nineteenth-century netherworld haunts contemporary history and politics as the remainder and reminder of America's first New Age."--BOOK JACKET.