| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. By Robert S. Cox. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. x, 286 pp. $39.50, ISBN 0-8139-2230-5.)

Engaging and building on Ann Braude's Radical Spirits (1989) and Bret E. Carroll's Spiritualism in Antebellum America (1997), Robert S. Cox's Body and Soul is an important new addition to the literature on nineteenth-century spiritualism. Cox, like Carroll, interprets spiritualism as a search for social cohesion and stable selfhood in the face of the disorienting social atomism of modernity; but, whereas Carroll emphasizes the logic and republican grounding of Spiritualist cosmology, Cox roots spiritualism in the concept of sympathy and calls attention to its emotional dimension. And while Braude's Spiritualists made women's rights central to a radical social agenda, Cox saw spiritualism as an "inherently polyvocal" (p. 5) though ultimately conservative movement in which racial essentialism eventually trumped sympathy's reformist thrust.

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