The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit LandUniversity of Notre Dame Press, 2006 - 368 sider John Murray Spear was one of nineteenth-century America's most interesting characters. A leading social agitator against slavery and capital punishment, Spear also became the nation's most flamboyant spiritualist, inventor of "spirit machines," and advocate of free love. In his captivating biography, John Buescher brings to life Spear's superlatively odd story. While no photograph or engraving of Spear exists, and his letters and personal papers are scarce, Buescher recreates in this book a sympathetic, even heroic, figure who spent the most energetic decades of his career absent, in a sense, from his own life, displaced by other spirits. Born in 1804, John Murray Spear started his career as a Universalist minister. He later was a close colleague of William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Parker in the abolitionist movement, an operator on the underground railroad in Boston, an influential leader in the effort to end the death penalty and to reform prison conditions, and a public advocate of the causes of pacifism, women's rights, labor reform, and socialism. Buescher chronicles Spear's work as an activist among the New England reformers and Transcendentalists such as Bronson Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, and Dorothea Dix. In mid-life Spear turned to the new revelation of spiritualism and came under the thrall of what he believed were spirit messages. Spear's spirits dictated that he and a small group of associates embark on plans for a perpetual motion machine, an electric ship propelled by psychic batteries, a vehicle that would levitate in the air, and a sewing machine that would work with no hands. As Buescher documents, Spear's spirit-guided efforts to harness technology to human liberation--sexual and otherwise--were far stranger than anyone outside his closest associates imagined, and were aimed at the eventual manufacturing of human beings and the improvement of the race. Buescher also examines the way in which Spear's story was minimized by his embarrassed fellow radicals. In the last years of his life, retired by the spirits and regarded by fellow Gilded Age progressives as a visitor from another age, if not another planet, Spear helped organize support for anarchist, socialist, peace, and labor causes. Buescher portrays Spear's life as an odd mixture of comic absurdity and serious foreshadowing of the future--for both good and ill--that provides us with a unique perspective on nineteenth-century American religious and social life. |
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... Caroline did not . Charles may have been lingering there , in memory , amidst the mourners ' affections , but John appeared among them like some revenant spirit back in his haunts . In the eyes of almost everyone , he was still married ...
... Caroline and John now both refocused their practical efforts onto the work of healing the body . John con- centrated on his skills at psychic healing , by the laying on of hands . Caroline enrolled at the Philadelphia University of ...
... Caroline had returned to Philadelphia , where they found a benefactor there who would supply them with a house , in return , it would seem , for John's services as a medium . " Another reason for returning was that Caroline might have ...
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The Death of Death | 9 |
Ithuriels Spear | 22 |
Most Inhumanly Outraged | 32 |
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