The Astonishment of Experience: Americans and Psychical Research, 1860-1935

This dissertation explores the practice of psychical research in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contextualizing it in relation to other observational sciences and the rise of laboratory psychology. Psychical researchers, many of them respected public intellectuals, sought a scientific approach to ephemeral and unquantifiable aspects of human subjectivity. Thousands of ordinary Americans participated in this project as part of a network of psychical societies and publications that gathered evidence of telepathy, clairvoyance, and trance mediumship. I examine the vigorous experimental culture of amateur psychical researchers in light of their growing marginalization in the 1920s and 30s, as psychology asserted its professional status. Their enterprise might today be termed “citizen science,” an effort driven by the curiosity and contributions of non-professionals who participated in the horizontal production of scientific knowledge about the mind. However, psychical research emerged when distinctions between amateur and professional were only beginning to solidify, and the meaning of science itself was in flux. Studying this transition, and the amateur practices that persisted in its wake, sheds light on the demarcation problem in contemporary American culture. Rather than pitting irrational “pseudoscience” against proper science, we must understand the forms that marginal scientific activities take, and the kinds of meaning that participants generate within their communities. This project represents a new approach to the history of psychology and the behavioral sciences. In recent literature, historians have recovered psychical research as an important intellectual precursor of psychology. However, this revisionist narrative still takes the laboratory as the dominant force in shaping the modern psychological subject. I argue that psychology in the early twentieth century emerged from the observational sciences of the nineteenth: much like nineteenth-century meteorology and astronomy, psychical research depended upon a network of trustworthy information-collectors who recorded both normal and abnormal experiences of subjectivity in their own lives. I take a bottom-up approach to their explorations of the mind, placing emphasis on actors' understandings, and utilizing sources that receive little historical attention because of their marginal status. Spanning laboratories and ancient burial mounds, parlors and weather stations, psychical research re-inserts curiosity about the mind into the narrative of turn-of-the-century popular science

The Astonishment of Experience: Americans and Psychical Research, 1860-1935

This dissertation explores the practice of psychical research in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contextualizing it in relation to other observational sciences and the rise of laboratory psychology. Psychical researchers, many of them respected public intellectuals, sought a scientific approach to ephemeral and unquantifiable aspects of human subjectivity. Thousands of ordinary Americans participated in this project as part of a network of psychical societies and publications that gathered evidence of telepathy, clairvoyance, and trance mediumship. I examine the vigorous experimental culture of amateur psychical researchers in light of their growing marginalization in the 1920s and 30s, as psychology asserted its professional status. Their enterprise might today be termed “citizen science,” an effort driven by the curiosity and contributions of non-professionals who participated in the horizontal production of scientific knowledge about the mind. However, psychical research emerged when distinctions between amateur and professional were only beginning to solidify, and the meaning of science itself was in flux. Studying this transition, and the amateur practices that persisted in its wake, sheds light on the demarcation problem in contemporary American culture. Rather than pitting irrational “pseudoscience” against proper science, we must understand the forms that marginal scientific activities take, and the kinds of meaning that participants generate within their communities. This project represents a new approach to the history of psychology and the behavioral sciences. In recent literature, historians have recovered psychical research as an important intellectual precursor of psychology. However, this revisionist narrative still takes the laboratory as the dominant force in shaping the modern psychological subject. I argue that psychology in the early twentieth century emerged from the observational sciences of the nineteenth: much like nineteenth-century meteorology and astronomy, psychical research depended upon a network of trustworthy information-collectors who recorded both normal and abnormal experiences of subjectivity in their own lives. I take a bottom-up approach to their explorations of the mind, placing emphasis on actors' understandings, and utilizing sources that receive little historical attention because of their marginal status. Spanning laboratories and ancient burial mounds, parlors and weather stations, psychical research re-inserts curiosity about the mind into the narrative of turn-of-the-century popular science

The Most Valuable Lands

The oil-producing regions of western Pennsylvania and New York are legendary as the birthplace of the modern petroleum industry; as with any narrative of American origins, it is important to scrutinize the role of racism and colonialism in establishing narratives that render Indigenous people as ghosts, guides, or givers who facilitate white access to resources while fading into a mythical past. Such narratives certainly proliferated in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular press, where petroleum was initially known by its regional moniker, “Seneca Oil,” and dreams of “Indian spirits” were said to lead prospectors to successful holes. The reality was that the Seneca people waged active legal and political battles to secure their rights to land, resources, and sacred sites in Pennsylvania and New York throughout the height of the oil boom. Their historical relationship with oil as a healing natural substance led leaders to preserve the Oil Spring Territory between 1797 and 1801; a century later, Seneca leaders engaged in ever-more complex negotiations with white-owned oil companies, and wound up in an existential fight against the Americans attempting to liquidate their treaty-protected territories