Exploring Other Worlds
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€31.99
A01=David Chapin
antebellum popular culture
Author_David Chapin
Category=DNBH
Category=NHTB
celebrity romance narratives
commercial entertainment history
cultural history of wonder
curiosity as cultural force
democratic marketplace of ideas
early American celebrity culture
early paranormal research
early popular science communication
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
exploration and empire studies
exploration literature analysis
frontier of knowledge narratives
historical gossip studies
historical love rumors
history of seances
intersection of science and sensation
investigation of the afterlife beliefs
mass media development in the United States
media manufactured fame
mediumship history
moral panic in nineteenth century press
mythmaking in biography
nineteenth century American mass audience
nineteenth century exploration history
polar expedition narratives
print culture evolution
private life of public figures
public and private boundaries in history
public fascination with fame
romantic scandal in historical biography
rumor and reputation in history
science and pseudoscience intersections
sensational journalism origins
spectacle in public life
spiritualist movement studies
storytelling and spectacle in early America
supernatural belief systems
transatlantic curiosity culture
travel and adventure literature history
Victorian era fascination with the occult
Product details
- ISBN 9781558494572
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 163 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 19 Jul 2005
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Illuminates the emerging culture of celebrity in early nineteenth-century America; Exploring Other Worlds tells the intertwined stories of the Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the spiritualist medium Margaret Fox and examines their unlikely relationship. Kane, from a prominent Philadelphia family, became one of the most renowned and honored explorers of the antebellum era. Fox grew up in rural upstate New York and, as one of the Fox Sisters, became a famed and somewhat notorious ""spirit rapper"" whose strange ""knocks"" were said to be communications from the dead. The two were rumored to have had a love affair, and they may even have been secretly married. In their separate professional lives, Kane and Fox each revealed something new and strange (though not necessarily true) to their audiences - the unknown worlds of the globe and the spirit. They brought experiences to their listeners that were exotic and delightful. The burgeoning commercial mass culture of antebellum America provided a natural venue for tales of huge icebergs, fierce polar bears, and messages from the dead. Their public careers bridged the gaps between the scientific investigations of an earlier Enlightenment age and a newer form of sensational inquiry growing up in a democratic marketplace. While Kane and Fox began by generating curiosity about geography and the nature of the human soul, in time their personal relationship became the basis for what newspaperman Horace Greeley would call an ""impertinent curiosity."" Newspapers printed letters about their supposed romance, and eventually a book purporting to be the famous explorer's love-letters to the notorious spiritualist was published. Curiosity about the Arctic and curiosity about the fate of the soul after death were transformed into curiosity about the private affairs of a new kind of media-driven public celebrity.
