Seminar in Spiritualism and the Occult

T.W. Stanford, Leland Jr.'s uncle, left money for founding psychic studies at Stanford. The Stanford's were like millions of people in the nineteenth century who described themselves as spiritualist. Far from being the rejection of science, this movement saw itself and often was seen by others as the forefront of scientific inquiry. Its practitioners often drew a thin line between physics and metaphysics.Our class will examine spirit photographs, explore novels and treatises, and handle artifacts that T.W. Stanford used to communicate across the astral plane. In addition to reading primary and scholarly sources, this course will also provide the opportunity for archival research and several field trips to area sites of occult interest.