| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land. By John Benedict Buescher. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. x, 368 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-268-02200-6.)

Most recent accounts of Spiritualism have approached this mutable movement from a specific critical perspective, reading Spiritualism's intersections with feminism, psychology, modernism, and the like. John Benedict Buescher's biography of John Murray Spear offers instead a transect through Spiritualism's heyday, from its rise in the reformist circles of the mid-nineteenth century to its increasingly eccentric and esoteric manifestations that marked the movement's decline toward the end of the century. Extensively researched and engagingly written, Buescher's biography of this influential and often notorious Spiritualist offers a vivid tour of some of the further reaches of nineteenth-century American culture.

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