Download or read book The History and Philosophy of Animal Magnetism written by Practical magnetizer and published by . This book was released on 1843 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hidden Depths written by Robin Waterfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hidden Depths, Robin Waterfield explores the fascinating world of hypnosis, tracing the history of this often misunderstood craft beginning with a passage in the book of Genesis, and continuing through his own personal experiences today. Waterfield uses the history and controversy surrounding the practice of hypnosis to gain insight into our behavior and psychology, and considers how hypnotic techniques have been absorbed into society through advertising, media and popular culture.
Download or read book Animal Spirits written by Jackson Lears and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] master class in American cultural and intellectual history.” —Sarah E. Igo, The New York Times Book Review “Jackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire. This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus.” —Cornel West One of Wired's best books of 2023 A master historian’s retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate American life and the possibilities they offer today. In Animal Spirits, the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the “Poughkeepsie Seer”) and the “New Thought” pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the “god within—rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am." Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors’ “animal spirits,” these vernacular vitalists established an American religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist tradition—permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our understanding of the cosmos. Includes 8 pages of black-and-white images
Download or read book The Body Electric written by Carolyn Thomas de la Pena and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the years 1850 and 1950, Americans became the leading energy consumers on the planet, expending tremendous physical resources on energy exploration, mental resources on energy exploitation, and monetary resources on energy acquisition. A unique combination of pseudoscientific theories of health and the public’s rudimentary understanding of energy created an age in which sources of industrial power seemed capable of curing the physical limitations and ill health that plagued Victorian bodies. Licensed and “quack” physicians alike promoted machines, electricity, and radium as invigorating cures, veritable “fountains of youth” that would infuse the body with energy and push out disease and death. The Body Electric is the first book to place changing ideas about fitness and gender in dialogue with the popular culture of technology. Whether through wearing electric belts, drinking radium water, or lifting mechanized weights, many Americans came to believe that by embracing the nation's rapid march to industrialization, electrification, and “radiomania,” their bodies would emerge fully powered. Only by uncovering this belief’s passions and products, Thomas de la Peña argues, can we fully understand our culture’s twentieth-century energy enthusiasm.
Download or read book Fascination written by Patrick Kindig and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2022-12-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most cultural critics theorize modernity as a state of disenchanted distraction, one linked to both the rationalizing impulses of scientific and technological innovation and the kind of dispersed, fragmented attention that characterizes the experience of mass culture. Patrick Kindig’s Fascination, however, tells a different story, showing that many fin-de-siècle Americans were in fact concerned about (and intrigued by) the modern world’s ability to attract and fix attention in quasi-supernatural ways. Rather than being distracting, modern life in their view had an almost magical capacity to capture attention and overwhelm rational thought. Fascination argues that, in response to the dramatic scientific and cultural changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American thinkers and writers came to conceive of the modern world as fundamentally fascinating. Describing such diverse phenomena as the electric generator, the movements of actresses, and ethnographic cinema as supernaturally alluring, they used the language of fascination to process and critique both popular ideologies of historical progress and the racializing logic upon which these ideologies were built. Drawing on an archive of primary texts from the fields of medicine, (para)psychology, philosophy, cultural criticism, and anthropology—as well as creative texts by Harriet Prescott Spofford, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edward S. Curtis, Robert J. Flaherty, and Djuna Barnes—Kindig reconsiders what it meant for Americans to be (and to be called) modern at the turn of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Enchanted New York written by Kevin Dann and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fantastical field guide to the hidden history of New York's magical past Manhattan has a pervasive quality of glamour—a heightened sense of personality generated by a place whose cinematic, literary, and commercial celebrity lends an aura of the fantastic to even its most commonplace locales. Enchanted New York chronicles an alternate history of this magical isle. It offers a tour along Broadway, focusing on times and places that illuminate a forgotten and sometimes hidden history of New York through site-specific stories of wizards, illuminati, fortune tellers, magicians, and more. Progressing up New York’s central thoroughfare, this guidebook to magical Manhattan offers a history you won’t find in your Lonely Planet or Fodor’s guide, tracing the arc of American technological alchemies—from Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton to the Manhattan Project—to Mesmeric physicians, to wonder–working Madame Blavatsky, and seers Helena Roerich and Alice Bailey. Harry Houdini appears and disappears, as the world’s premier stage magician’s feats of prestidigitation fade away to reveal a much more mysterious—and meaningful—marquee of magic. Unlike old-world cities, New York has no ancient monuments to mark its magical adolescence. There is no local memory embedded in the landscape of celebrated witches, warlocks, gods, or goddesses—no myths of magical metamorphoses. As we follow Kevin Dann in geographical and chronological progression up Broadway from Battery Park to Inwood, each chapter provides a surprising picture of a city whose ever-changing fortunes have always been founded on magical activity.
Download or read book The North American Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1843 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vols. 227-230, no. 2 include: Stuff and nonsense, v. 5-6, no. 8, Jan. 1929-Aug. 1930.
Download or read book Driving Force written by James D. Livingston and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997-04-25 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Driving Force unfolds the long and colorful history of magnets: how they guided (or misguided) Columbus; mesmerized eighteenth-century Paris but failed to fool Benjamin Franklin; lifted AC power over its rival, DC, despite all the animals, one human among them, executed along the way; led Einstein to the theory of relativity; helped defeat Hitler's U-boats; inspired writers from Plato to Dave Barry. In a way that will delight and instruct even the nonmathematical among us, James Livingston shows us how scientists today are creating magnets and superconductors that can levitate high-speed trains, produce images of our internal organs, steer high-energy particles in giant accelerators, and--last but not least--heat our morning coffee. From the "new" science of materials to everyday technology, Driving Force makes the workings of magnets a matter of practical wonder. The book will inform and entertain technical and nontechnical readers alike and will give them a clearer sense of the force behind so much of the working world.
Download or read book Of One Blood written by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2022-11-14 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Afrofuturist plot of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–03) weaves together a lost African city, bigamy, incest, murder, ancient prophecies, a thwarted leopard attack, racial passing, baby switching, mesmerism, and hauntings—both literal ghost hauntings and metaphoric hauntings from the sins of slavery. This Broadview Edition offers for the first time annotations and appendices that contextualize the novel in relation to magazines, Black feminism, travels to Africa, racial discourses, scientific and medical debates, and musical culture. The introduction to this edition surveys current debates about Hopkins’s textual borrowings from other contemporary writings, and the appendices provide extensive materials on the novel’s cultural, musical, and political contexts.
Download or read book Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls written by Robert C. Fuller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of mesmerism in nineteenth-century America is the story of how, for the first time, a psychological theory arose to meet the everyday religious and intellectual needs of Americans. Robert Fuller gives us the first complete history of American mesmerist philosophy. He traces its development from an obscure scientific hypothesis to a powerful spiritual philosophy that deeply influenced many of the period's emerging Protestant religious sects. He investigates in depth the role of mesmerism in the Mind-Cure movement and New Thought and paints for us the cultural landscape existing at a time when thousands of antebellum Americans turned from their churches to the realm of psychology in search of self-understanding. In the early part of the century, mesmerism was for the most part the territory of carnival showmen. Itinerant mesmerists during the 1830s placed subjects in trancelike states from which they could divulge the contents of sealed envelopes and describe in detail locales to which they had never traveled. Literary figures such as Poe and Hawthorne seized upon mesmerism, depicting its workings at their most sinister and diabolical extreme. But by midcentury, mesmerism was beginning to enter the American consciousness in ways that involved anything but parlor trickery. Straddling a fine line between religious myth and scientific philosophy, mesmerism's spiritual tenets resonated almost perfectly with important currents in contemporary religious life. Universalists, Swedenborgians, and early spiritualists adopted the doctrine of mesmerism as evidence of man's unity with the Almighty. The self-made mind-cure practitioner Phineas Quimby used mesmeric theory to develop his "power of positive thinking," a concept that led eventually to the emergence of the Christian Science movement. But, Fuller shows, mind-cure cultists such as Quimby also helped transform mesmerism into a kind of self-help spirituality. Later writers condensed the principles of mesmeric healing into handy maxims that could be assimilated by a popular reading audience. Thus Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls presents a paradigmatic instance of the role played by psychology in the American sensibility. In addition, Fuller's study constitutes a rich and hitherto unexplored chapter in American intellectual history.
Download or read book Poe Fuller and the Mesmeric Arts written by Bruce Mills and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines how the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Fuller draw from representations of and theories concerning animal magnetism, somnambulism, or hypnosis rendered in newspapers, literary and medical journals, pamphlets, and books, and also includes discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lydia Maria Child, and Walt Whitman"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Spiritual But Not Religious written by Robert C. Fuller and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fuller traces the history of alternative spiritual practices in America including astrology, Transcendentalism, and channeling.
Download or read book The Bibliography of Progressive Literature written by New Epoch Publishing Company and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General s Office United States Army written by National Library of Medicine (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1874 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General s Office United States Army written by and published by . This book was released on 1874 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pseudo Science and Society in 19th Century America written by Arthur Wrobel and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Progressive nineteenth-century Americans believed firmly that human perfection could be achieved with the aid of modern science. To many, the science of that turbulent age appeared to offer bright new answers to life's age-old questions. Such a climate, not surprisingly, fostered the growth of what we now view as "pseudo-sciences"—disciplines delicately balancing a dubious inductive methodology with moral and spiritual concerns, disseminated with a combination of aggressive entrepreneurship and sheer entertainment. Such "sciences" as mesmerism, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology were warmly received not only by the uninformed and credulous but also by the respectable and educated. Rationalistic, egalitarian, and utilitarian, they struck familiar and reassuring chords in American ears and gave credence to the message of reformers that health and happiness are accessible to all. As the contributors to this volume show, the diffusion and practice of these pseudo-sciences intertwined with all the major medical, cultural, religious, and philosophical revolutions in nineteenth-century America. Hydropathy and particularly homoeopathy, for example, enjoyed sufficient respectability for a time to challenge orthodox medicine. The claims of mesmerists and spiritualists appeared to offer hope for a new moral social order. Daring flights of pseudo-scientific thought even ventured into such areas as art and human sexuality. And all the pseudo-sciences resonated with the communitarian and women's rights movements. This important exploration of the major nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences provides fresh perspectives on the American society of that era and on the history of the orthodox sciences, a number of which grew out of the fertile soil plowed by the pseudo-scientists.
Download or read book Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General s Office United States Army v 3 1874 written by National Library of Medicine (U.S.). and published by . This book was released on 1874 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
