SUGGESTED RESOURCES
Want to learn more? Start here!
Free databases
The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualists and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP)
3.7 million pages of digitized periodicals.
Chronicling America: Historical American Newspapers
The Library of Congress
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Newspapers from 1777-1963.
California Digital Newspaper Collection
Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, University of California, Riverside
California newspapers from 1846-present.
HathiTrust Digital Library
A partnership of academic and research institutions.
Many Spiritualist books are available here.
Internet Archive
Bringing together digitized materials from many institutions.
Many Spiritualist books are available here.
Related digital projects
FoundSF
Managed by Shaping San Francisco
A participatory digital history archive that compiles submitted essays, stories, images and videos on San Francisco history (including Spiritualism and women’s printing), with the motto “history is a creative act in the present!”
Post Family Project
University of Rochester Libraries
https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/exhibits/show/post-family-papers/post-project
Free, digitized papers of Amy and Isaac Post, Spiritualists who corresponded with a wide network of reformers.
The Harriet Wilson Project
http://www.harrietwilsonproject.net/welcome.html
A project to promote the life and work of African American Spiritualist and author Harriet Wilson.
“Chasing Down Emma.”
http://ehbritten.blogspot.com/?view=classic
A blog about the world of Spiritualist leader Emma Hardinge Britten.
A few articles and books related to this topic
Braude, Ann. “News from the Spirit World: A Checklist of American Spiritualist Periodicals, 1847-1900.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 99, no. 2 (October 1989): 399–462.
———. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. 2nd ed. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Casper, Scott E., Groves, Jeffrey D., Nissenbaum, Stephen W., Winship, Michael, and Hall, David D., eds. A History of the Book in America: Volume 3: the Industrial Book, 1840-1880. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Danky, James P., and Wiegand, Wayne A., eds. Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
Gardner, Eric. Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Hawley, E. Haven. “William Berry: Publisher, Scoundrel, and Spiritualist.” Printing History 22 (Summer 2017): 30–52.
Levenson, Robert. Women in Printing: Northern California, 1857-1890. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1994.
Natale, Simone. Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of the Modern Media Culture. Penn State University Press, 2016.
Roman, Dianne. “Women at the Crossroads, Women at the Forefront, American Women in Letterpress Printing In the Nineteenth Century.” PhD diss. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2016. https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4595/. (Available in December 2021)
And more on Spiritualism
Britten, Emma Hardinge. Modern American Spiritualism: Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits. New York: Emma Hardinge Britten, 1870. Internet Archive, The Library of Congress. https://archive.org/details/modernamericansp00brit.
———. Nineteenth century miracles, or, Spirits and their work in every country of the earth: a complete historical compendium of the great movement known as “modern spiritualism.” New York: William Bitten, Lovell & Co., 1884. Internet Archive, The Library of Congress. https://archive.org/details/nineteenthcentur01brit.
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Britten was a contemporary historian of Spiritualism, and her books are detailed compilations and commentary on Spiritualism across America and beyond.
Chandler, Robert J. "In the Van: Spiritualists as Catalysts for the California Women's Suffrage Movement." California History 73, no. 3 (1994): 188-201. doi:10.2307/25177431.
Ellis, R. J. and Henry Louis Gates. “‘Grievances at the Treatment She Received’: Harriet E. Wilson's Spiritualist Career in Boston, 1868—1900.” American Literary History 24, no. 2 (2012): 234-64.
Forbes, Erin E. “Do Black Ghosts Matter?: Harriet Jacobs’ Spiritualism.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 62, no. 3 (2016): 443–79.
Gutierrez, Cathy. Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Hewitt, Nancy A. Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
Lowry, Elizabeth. "Spiritual (R)evolution and the Turning of Tables: Abolition, Feminism, and the Rhetoric of Social Reform in the Antebellum Public Sphere." Journal for the Study of Radicalism 9, no. 2 (2015): 1-16.
Manseau, Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
McGarry, Molly. Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Washington, Margaret. Sojourner Truth’s America. University of Illinois Press, 2009.