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)
Spiritualism
Speaking with the Dead in Early America
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.
Meredith B. Little: Leading Glens Falls Spiritualist
Getting the vote was just one of the issues suffragettes encountered in the late 19th century.
They also faced the premise of some theologians who contended the afterlife was restricted to an exclusive old boy’s club.
“A benignant looking, white-bearded patriarch,” who distributed candy to local children annually on Christmas Eve, debunked the theory in a Sunday afternoon debate in 1894 at Psychical Hall.
No — not Santa Claus. [Read more…] about Meredith B. Little: Leading Glens Falls Spiritualist
Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early NYS
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