| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Benedict Buescher. The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. 2006. Pp. x, 368. $30.00.

The conjunction of political and religious radicalism among nineteenth-century reformers continues to confound historians. Biographers often gloss over séance participation by leading abolitionists, or spirit messages channeled or cherished by their subjects. John Benedict Buescher takes the opposite approach, selecting as his topic a charismatic reformer who followed decades of reform agitation with decades serving humanity at the bidding of the spirits he served as medium. John Murray Spear, a figure whose spiritualism cannot be swept aside, was considered an eccentric extremist even by other radical spiritualists. In this richly detailed biography, Buescher takes seriously both Spear's most inspiring ideas and his most outlandish in order to access the inner depths of nineteenth-century radicalism and unravel its hidden logic. The unanswered question of the book is to what extent Spear's radicalism illuminates anything beyond his own considerable idiosyncrasies.

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