From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years. Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.

Those who take for granted the freedom and advancement of the twentieth century, and are unaware of the desperate conflicts that were waged by scientists and thinkers to emancipate us from mystical superstitions, are being deceived by the new forms in which these superstitions are being revived. -from the Preface More than a century ago, in 1901, Herbert Casson was railing against faith healers, fortune-tellers, past-life regression, and spirituality cults. The world he saw around him, where science and reason were fighting for attention with religion and superstition, is very much the world we see around us today, and Casson's plea for rationality is still highly pertinent. A precursor of such modern classics of skepticism as Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World and Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things, this call to abandon a medieval mind-set and move in the rational modern world could well have been written in the midst of the early-21st-century culture wars. Canadian journalist HERBERT NEWTON CASSON (1869-1951) contributed to numerous New York and London publications, writing mostly about business and technology. He is also the author of The Romance of Steel: The Story of a Thousand Millionaires (1907) and The History of the Telephone (1910).