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X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://www.schrc.org/
X-WR-CALNAME:Sheboygan County Historical Research Center
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BEGIN:VEVENT
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20250918T130000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20250918T143000
DTSTAMP:20250603T150800
UID:MEC-7f3ad9c65beb20ccbd34a05041b4420b@schrc.org
CREATED:20250603
LAST-MODIFIED:20250603
PRIORITY:5
TRANSP:OPAQUE
SUMMARY:Book Club
DESCRIPTION:The book club will read Barbara Weisberg’s Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism (2009). Participants are responsible for obtaining their own books.\nFrom Amazon.com:\nBarbara Weisberg’s Talking to the Dead blends biography and social history in this revelatory story of the family responsible for the rise of Spiritualism.\nA fascinating story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts in the second half of nineteenth century America viewed through the lives of Kate and Maggie Fox, the sisters whose purported communication with the dead gave rise to the Spiritualism movement—and whose recanting forty years later is still shrouded in mystery.\nIn March of 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox—sisters aged eleven and fourteen—anxiously reported to a neighbor that they had been hearing strange, unidentified sounds in their house. From a sequence of knocks and rattles translated by the young girls as a “voice from beyond,” the Modern Spiritualism movement was born.\nTalking to the Dead follows the fascinating story of the two girls who were catapulted into an odd limelight after communicating with spirits that March night. Within a few years, tens of thousands of Americans were flocking to séances. An international movement followed. Yet thirty years after those first knocks, the sisters shocked the country by denying they had ever contacted spirits. Shortly after, the sisters once again changed their story and reaffirmed their belief in the spirit world.\nWeisberg traces not only the lives of the Fox sisters and their family (including their mysterious Svengali–like sister Leah) but also the social, religious, economic and political climates that provided the breeding ground for the movement. While this is a thorough, compelling overview of a potent time in US history, it is also an incredible ghost story.\n
URL:https://www.schrc.org/events/book-club-7-464/
ORGANIZER;CN=Research Center:MAILTO:katiereilly@schrc.org
CATEGORIES:Book Club
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