Burned Over District

200 Years of Erie Canal History (1825-2025)

March 23, 2025 by Guest Contributor 4 Comments

In 2025, New York State commemorates the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo. This event was transformative for both the state and the nation, linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean in an unprecedentedly efficient waterway.

During the bicentennial, we are offered an opportunity to reflect on two centuries of rich and complex history and discover how that period’s impacts allow us to explore and enjoy the Canal today. Here is some history, and tips for enjoying the canal. [Read more…] about 200 Years of Erie Canal History (1825-2025)

Burned-Over District Documentary Being Produced

March 5, 2025 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

A new trailer for an in-production feature-length documentary film about the Burned-Over District of 19th-century New York State has just been released. Burned Over focuses on Spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the dead, and the Oneida Community, a free love commune.

Both began in 1848 in the Burned-Over District, an area famous as an incubator of radical religious practice and progressive politics, inspired in part by the Second Great Awakening. [Read more…] about Burned-Over District Documentary Being Produced

Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale

October 22, 2024 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Lily Dale is a hamlet connected with the Spiritualist Movement in the Town of Pomfret in Chautauqua County, NY. It’s been a home for Spiritualists attempting to make contact with the dead, as well as a gathering place for reformers, a refuge for seekers looking for alternatives to established paths of knowledge, and a target for skeptics since the late 19th century.

Lily Dale was incorporated in 1879 as Cassadaga Lake Free Association, a camp and meeting place for Spiritualists and Freethinkers. The name was changed to The City of Light in 1903 and finally to Lily Dale Assembly in 1906. [Read more…] about Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale

Social and Religious Movements in Central New York

November 17, 2023 by Guest Contributor Leave a Comment

Central New York communities that flourished with canal-related development and rail connections throughout the 19th century also became hotbeds for religious and social movements of the early 1800s as the area’s population rapidly grew.

Religious freedom granted by the United States Bill of Rights combined with rapid societal and technological changes experienced by Americans living through western expansion fueled an American spiritual movement that was exemplified in the newly opened frontier of New York. [Read more…] about Social and Religious Movements in Central New York

The Fox Sisters and the “Great American Hoax”

September 3, 2023 by Guest Contributor 1 Comment

On this episode of the A New York Minute in History Podcast, Devin Lander and Lauren Roberts tell the story of the Fox sisters of Rochester, NY, who rose to fame as early practitioners of modern spiritualism in the 19th Century. [Read more…] about The Fox Sisters and the “Great American Hoax”

New History Podcast Features ‘Burned Over District’

September 12, 2021 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The latest episode of A New York Minute In History details the “Burned Over District” and how upstate New York became a “cauldron” of emergent religions and alternative communities during the 19th century. How did the Burned Over District collide with state and national history? And what role did the Erie Canal play in establishing it?

These new religions contributed to the creation of alternative communities, such as the Ebenezers and the Oneida Community, and how this predication for communal living was revisited in New York during the 1960s. [Read more…] about New History Podcast Features ‘Burned Over District’

Spiritualism, Temperance, the Grange and More (Historians Podcast)

August 6, 2021 by Bob Cudmore Leave a Comment

This week on The Historians Podcast, town historian Todd Langworthy on how Lily Dale in the Town of Pomfret in Western New York became a center for spiritualism. Pomfret also was the place where the Women’s Christian Temperance Union began and where the first farmers’ Grange was founded. And the town is home to the village of Fredonia and the SUNY College at Fredonia. [Read more…] about Spiritualism, Temperance, the Grange and More (Historians Podcast)

Speaking with the Dead in Early America

June 30, 2021 by Dr. Liz Covart Leave a Comment

Death is one of the few universals in life. Everyone who is born, will die.

How do the living make peace with death?

While different cultures make peace with death in different ways, Erik Seeman, author of the award-winning book, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), joins the Ben Franklin’s World podcast to investigate how white, American Protestants made their peace with death during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

The Burned-Over District and Mexican Revolution

December 26, 2019 by Guest Contributor Leave a Comment

When Halley’s comet, that star with the quetzal’s tail, flared across Mexican skies in 1910, it heralded not only the centennial of Independence, but a deeply transformative episode, the Revolution launched by Francisco I. Madero on November 20, what Javier Garciadiego calls “the true beginning of a process, the birth of the modern Mexican state.”

The great chorus of Mexican historians agree. And yet, almost unknown and curious as it may sound, a vital taproot of this revolution lies in the Burned-Over District of New York State. [Read more…] about The Burned-Over District and Mexican Revolution

Oneida Community And The Crusade For Public Morality

April 25, 2018 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Michael Doyle’s The Ministers’ War: John W. Mears, The Oneida Community, and the Crusade for Public Morality (Syracuse University Press, 2018) takes a look at Hamilton College philosophy professor and Presbyterian minister John W. Mears and his fight against every sin and carnal lure, from liquor to free love.

In The Ministers’ War, Doyle explores the ways in which Mears’ multipurpose zeal reflected the passions behind the nineteenth-century temperance movement, the fight against obscenity, and the public animus toward unconventional thought. As an speaker, author and political candidate, Mears was a prominent moralizer. [Read more…] about Oneida Community And The Crusade For Public Morality

Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early NYS

June 20, 2015 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Joscelyn Godwin’s Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early New York State (SUNY Press, 2015) is an outstanding guide to the phenomenal crop of prophets, mediums, sects, cults, utopian communities, and spiritual leaders that arose in Upstate New York from 1776 to 1914.

Along with the best known of these, such as the Shakers, Mormons, and Spiritualists, Upstate Cauldron explores more than forty other spiritual leaders or groups, some of them virtually unknown. [Read more…] about Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early NYS

Burned Over District

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