Historian Burns (author of 1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar) illuminates the story of psychics, seances, and the scientists who researched them in When the Dead Talked. Roughly covering the 1840s to the 1920s, Burns puts his talents as a researcher to use to recount the history of spiritualism, from the famous Fox sisters—entrepreneurial spiritualists whose late-in-life claims to have been deceptive Burns doesn’t quite buy—to Thomas Edison’s attempts to build a machine for communicating with the dead. Burns dives deeply into two scientific societies which attempted to prove the truth or fallacy of claims of communication with the dead, the Society for Psychical Research in England and its Ameican counterpart.
Burns’s deep research is combined with a familiar tone which welcomes the readeris extensively researched, with helpful bibliography and glossary, plus photos of his principal subjects, the psychics and skeptics who investigated them to participate in the same journey that he himself did from skepticism to openness to the reality of psychic phenomena. Readers fascinated by how scientists in the last half of the 19th century thought about psychic phenomena will appreciate Burns’s exploration of this fascinating history. Fascinating study of spiritualism and the scientists who found it credible.
In the late 19th century, an estimated 11 million Americans believed in something called Spiritualism. They believed in it so ardently that it came to be thought of as a religion, and it became the seventh most popular religion in the United States. Its fundamental tenet—virtually its only tenet—was that it was possible for the living to communicate with the dead.
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