In the 1920s and ’30s, people gathered in darkened rooms to explore the paranormal through seances. They were motivated by grief, spiritual devotion, or a desire to be entertained. Beth A. Robertson resurrects the story of a small transnational group and their quest for objective knowledge of the supernatural, casting new light on how science, metaphysics, and the senses collided to inform gendered norms in this era. Robertson draws back the curtain to reveal a world inhabited by researchers, spirits, and spiritual mediums. Representing themselves as masters of the senses, untainted by the effeminized subjectivity of the body, psychical researchers in Canada, the UK, and the US believed that they could use machines and empirical methods to transform the seance into a laboratory of the spirits and a transnational empirical project. However, mediums and ghostly subjects could and did challenge their claims to scientific expertise and authority.

"Beth A. Robertson resurrects the story of a group of men and women who sought to transform the séance into a laboratory of the spirits and a transnational empirical project. Her findings cast new light on how science, metaphysics, and the senses collided to inform gendered norms in the 1920s and '30s. She reveals a world inhabited, on one side, by psychical researchers who represented themselves as masters of the senses, untainted by the effeminized subjectivity of the body and, on the other, by mediums and ghostly subjects who could and did challenge the researchers' exclusive claims to scientific expertise and authority."--.

In this enthralling study of the ethereal, the scientific, and the strange, Beth A. Robertson investigates the gendered world of the seance, a place where self-proclaimed "psychic researchers" laid claim to objectivity and where spiritual mediums and the spirits they channeled resisted their methods

From the pages of Invincible comes a Science Dog odyssey no fan should miss! Spanning time and space, watch Science Dog fight fire with fire, evil with science! Collected from issues #1 and #2 of Science Dog

This book is intended to round out the picture of American psychology's past, adding the history of psychological practice to the story of psychological science. Written by two well-recognised authorities in the field, this book covers the profession and practice of psychology in America from the late nineteenth century to the present. From Séance to Science tells the story of psychologists who sought to apply the knowledge of their science to the practical problems of the world, whether those problems lay in businesses, schools, families, or in the thoughts, emotions, and behaviours of individuals. Engagingly written and full of interesting examples, this book includes figures and photos from the Archives of the History of American Psychology. This is the story of individuals, trained in psychology, who function as school psychologists, counselling psychologists, clinical psychologists, and industrial psychologists. These are psychology's practitioners; they take the knowledge base of psychology and use it for practical purposes outside of the classroom and outside of the laboratory.

MacKenzie King did it, so did Susanna Moody. In fact, many Canadians consulted the spirits as part of a religious experience, to seek guidance for themselves and others, and to attempt to learn what lies beyond the grave. Some came to the seance room to hear ancient wisdom while others came to understand the nature of psychic phenomena. Like the mechanisms that produced the flashing lights, cool breezes, and whirling trumpets that materialized in the presence of the medium, their beliefs and experiences have been mostly hidden, until now. In this first full-length study of Canadian spirit communication, Stan McMullin has drawn upon seance notes, letters, diaries, and special collections to create a fascinating picture of how educated people were drawn to spiritualism and psychic research. Anatomy of a Seance shows that for many Canadians attempting to sort out their religious beliefs and find an acceptable marriage between religion and science the seance room provided an alternative to formal religious dogma. Despite the opposition of mainline churches, spiritualism offered the possibility of a "scientific" religion that could prove the existence of heaven.