A beautifully written suite of personal essays on the value of not knowing. Moments of clarity are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty within which we make our lives? Written by English professor Emily Og…
"Emily Ogden's On Not Knowing is at once a memoir and suite of pointed inquiries. Her brief, sharply observed essays invite the reader to think with her about problems she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love. Ogden moves nimbly…
"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…
Out on credulity! An introduction -- It does not exist: animal magnetism before it was true -- Beyond radical enchantment: mesmerizing laborers in the Americas -- In imagination: traveling clairvoyance and the suspension of disbelief -- Out of character: phrenomesmerism and the …
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 …
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 …
"From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances in parlors, on stage, and in medical offices. They were performing mesmerism. In the first comprehensive American history of mesmerism in thirty years, Emily Ogden connects the occult scie…