The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land - Couverture rigide

Benedict Buescher, John

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0268022003 ISBN 13 : 9780268022006

Editeur : University of Notre Dame Press, 2006

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

John Benedict Buescher, chief of the Tibetan Broadcast Service of the Voice of America, received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in religious studies. He has published books and scholarly articles on the history of religion and comparative religion, including The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism in the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience and Echoes from an Empty Sky: The Origins of the Buddhist Doctrine of Two Truths.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date d'édition: 2006
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0268022003
• ISBN 13: 9780268022006
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 380
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne