Spiritualism.

The religious imagination of Americans had never been contained fully by inherited or orthodox religious organizations and dogmas. Throughout the nineteenth century many popular religious movements crystallized around new leaders and ideas. Spiritualism, for example, appealed powerfully throughout the nineteenth century to many Americans, even though it was widely condemned by established Christian denominations. Spiritualism maintained that the spirit was the prime element of reality and that spirits of the dead could communicate with the living, usually through a medium. It cut across denominational and religious lines, in part because it offered relief for many people yearning for contact with dead relations, often either children or other relatives killed in the Civil War.

Eddy. Interest in Spiritualism was often particularly strong among women. One of the most famous female religious thinkers was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Eddy, a native...