Spirits on the stage: Public mediums, spiritualist theater, and American culture, 1848--1893

This dissertation seeks to explain how public spiritualist mediums operating in the nineteenth century were able to continually fill seats at their performances and make money at the expense of ordinary people using deliberatively deceptive tactics drawn from the world of religion---and, perhaps more significantly---the world of entertainment. By carefully exploiting methods of mass persuasion that seemed most useful to them at the time, and by developing a working knowledge of stagecraft, public mediums were able to convince audiences they could communicate with spirits. They were careerists who actively took advantage of new forms of technology, promotion, self-representation, and aesthetics to make a public case for themselves and their alleged spiritual power.;This is not to say that public mediums were willing to acknowledge publicly their indebtedness either to religious culture or the world of popular entertainment, despite the fact that the strategies mediums deployed were drawn from those very sources. Nevertheless, the new cultural and technological opportunities of the nineteenth century had given rise to new strategies of public persuasion. Mediums turned to religious autobiography, modern systems of management and promotion, sexual appeal, and visual spectacle in the hopes of bridging the gap between themselves and their audience. But the mediums who utilized these strategies did so even as they denied they were doing it. The public seance was a type of cultural performance that was heavily informed by the entertainment industry, though mediums refused to admit that fact, just as they also tended to deny their reliance on the promotional strategies of the secular market. All of their protests to the contrary, however, cannot reverse the reality that in order to understand public spiritualist mediumship one must examine it through the prism of popular entertainment.