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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative
93.2  
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September, 2006
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Book Review


Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum Culture of Curiosity. By David Chapin. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. viii, 257 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 1-55849-448-0. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-55849-457-X.)
Since Neil Harris's Humbug appeared in 1973, scholars have explored in increasing depth the dynamics of a democratic antebellum popular culture and an emerging mass-entertainment industry driven, Harris argued, by an "operational aesthetic" grounded in appeals to public curiosity and individual judgment (Humbug, 1973, p. 57). Independent scholar David Chapin built on and extended that body of work by examining the antebellum "culture of curiosity" through the intertwined lives and careers of the Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the spirit rapper Margaret Fox. Chapin seeks, as do many other historians, to combine cultural analysis with good storytelling, appealing to our own curiosity by illuminating the often rumor-shrouded romance between two antebellum celebrities. . . .
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