I started off with light searching on a site called Jstor.com. This site offers a lot of scholarly research material, but I'm focusing more on the scholarly journals and books. I found a few possible journals to use, if not simply for the context, but their sources as well. One journal I found was called "Science and the Seance: Transgressions of Gender and Genre in Late Victorian London" by Judith R. Walkowitz which goes into detail about a spiritualist woman during the 1800s. It is rather interesting, viewing her lifestyle and personality, to see how she grows into a spiritualist. She even tries to help with the Jack the Ripper case! Here is a link to the site: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2928407?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102696048677. This article should help me with seeing how spiritualists would work in their field and what evidence would be found to prove their work. Most of the articles or journals I run across now focus solely on the United States or span into the late 19th century. I hope to find more material that is to my liking within the next week and hopefully shine some light on this unique subject.
Saturday, September 14, 2013
The First Step Into the Unknown...
Today we step into the mystical topic of Spiritualism. Many people today know about Spiritualism in the Victorian days within the United States, but not much is heard about Spiritualism in Victorian Europe. My question is: Why did Victorian Era Europe follow Spiritualism and what does Spiritualism entail? My goal is to discover what Spiritualism was like within Europe during the Victorian Era, mostly covering the 18th century. I might span my research into the early 19th century depending on the progress of my resources. There is much to be discovered and plenty of subtopics, I'm sure, to arise from this adventure.
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I find it intriguing that we are both doing similar topics. I can not wait to see how we each grow as the semester progress. I see us having a few brainstorming sessions throughout this fall. My research question focuses specifically on seances and mediums roles in early American Spiritualism. I am really wanting to see if they were fake or real because I have always had a fascination with communicating with the other side. So I'm crossing my fingers.
ReplyDeleteI love that you are buildig off the research we did last fall for the program at the Glenn House. This topic fascinates me just, because it is a testiment to how far the Victorian's were willing to go for mouring.
ReplyDeleteGood start. Include your specific research question somewhere in that first post. Also, see if you can fix the link to the article. You may need to save the article on your computer as a pdf and then upload it to the blog. Let us know what journal the article is from as well. And, provide us with some more details on how the article helps you on your project. What does it tell you about your research question?
ReplyDeleteDr. H.
Alison and Deseray,
ReplyDeleteGreat subject.
Both of you probably already know of the humungous contribution of work that a turn of the century (19th to 20th) internationally famous magician made to this subject. Most of his writings seem to have been re-released by Oxford or whoever, and are available again/still today.
A quick look at Amazon just now listed 19 pages of books, some dirt cheap, many with 5 stars, and some are also available on Mobius.
The author/magician/investigator's name is Houdini, Harry. He could look for slight of hand with the eye of a master magician. His main interest, he said was that if you could come back, he intended to do it. Did he get it done? Some think he did.
Looking forward to what you find...
Bob Hill
I am really interested in your topic-especially after the Glenn House performance last year. I'm excited to see what new information you will discover on the topic as I've been curious to know more myself.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there is an event called 'A Death in the Family' looking into Death and Mourning in the 19th Century at Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion in St. Louis on October 26th, 2013. They will be looking into the Spiritualism Movement and have Tarot card readings! Should be interesting. =)
website: www.demenil.org
It seems this topic is becoming big again. They have TV shows, Documentaries, and even movies such as "The Others" about this topic.
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