Date of Award
Spring 2024
Project Type
Dissertation
Program or Major
History
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
First Advisor
Eliga Gould
Second Advisor
Ellen Fitzpatrick
Third Advisor
Jan Golinski
Abstract
This is a narrative history about the attempt and failure to organize a new religious movement (NRM) in nineteenth-century America. It is also about the passion of a prophet’s followers, and the power, influence, and transformation of his leadership. Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910) was a nineteenth century American prophet, whose life and work formed the intellectual backbone of the largely democratic spiritualist movement. Yet, before spiritualism emerged in 1848, Davis’s trajectory was towards the creation of an authoritarian NRM based around his personal charisma and teachings. This dissertation reveals that Davis was truly a man of his time, not behind or ahead, but a bellwether of alternative political and religious culture, operating within what was, during the early nineteenth century, a normal range of beliefs—an Overton window. Davis’s unorthodox beliefs about life, death, religion, and society were, in fact, largely inherited from other thinkers. However, in Davis, these distinct ideas came together at a particular historical moment and in a particular place in ways that created fertile soil for the spiritualist movement. This examination of Davis’s rise to prophethood, his philosophical beliefs, and the group which formed around him in the 1840s reveals that he lived as both a nineteenth century reformer as well as an embattled leader of a new religious movement. Davis’s life reflects ideas, practices, and impulses that were circulating in Victorian culture and were crucial to the foundation of modern American spiritualism. Davis’s failure to create a centralized NRM in the 1840s thus provides an important framework within which the emergence of spiritualism should be understood.
Recommended Citation
Wilson, Ian Scott, "THE HARMONIAL PATH: ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS & THE RISE AND FALL OF A NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations. 2848.
https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/2848