Product details
- ISBN 9781682833179
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Texas A & M University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the mid-nineteenth century, a strange new fire swept across the American landscape. It was Spiritualism: the radical belief that the living could—and should—commune with the dead. While historians have long looked to the North for the heart of this movement, John Benedict Buescher reveals a darker, wilder, and distinctly Texan story.
Lone Star Séance is a journey into the borderlands of belief, where parlor tables rattled in the same rooms in which pistols were drawn. From the invisible counsel pursued by Sam Houston and Anson Jones to the mystical visions of Quanah Parker and Francisco Madero, Buescher brings the shadows of the Lone Star State into the light.
It is a saga of independent minds rejecting religious dogma to become their own prophets and the tragicomic backlash that followed. Part occult history, part frontier Western, this is the story of a "cultural infection" that became a Texas obsession. Forget the Alamo for a moment—and remember the séance.
John Benedict Buescher is an academic scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American religious history. Although not a Spiritualist, he is currently a co-director of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP). He moved from Virginia to Texas in 2018 and has since focused his research on offbeat elements of Texas history, including the border radio stations along the Rio Grande, detailed in his 2021 book Radio Psychics. He has taught at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and has worked at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Voice of America.
