America’s 1848

This prologue traces the origins and growth of American spiritualism as a movement, beginning with the Fox sisters, Margaret and Katie, whose parents believed that they could communicate with the spirit of a dead man. It discusses the evolution and standards of the spiritualist movement, which assimilated important intellectual and theological precedents in various currents of the Christian revivals that spread across the burned-over district of upstate New York and into New England. It also describes the movement's most important feature, the séance (French term for “seated session”). Finally, it examines the explosion of interest in spiritualism and in the possibility of spirit communication that continued through the 1850s.