Bret E. Carroll. Spiritualism in Antebellum America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. xiv + 227 pp. $35.00.
THIS RICH, LUCID, AND INTELLIGENT STUDY of antebellum spiritualism deserves to be read by all historians interested in religion, reform, and intentional communities in the nineteenth-century United States. Because it presents spiritualism in its own terms, as a set of ideologies and religious beliefs whose holders faced dilemmas over organization and ...