Humanizing the Dead: Ghosts, Spirits, and the Role of the Specialists

Humanizing the Dead is a look at the specialists that developed in the age of Spiritualism of 1850 as a reaction to the growing industrial revolution, and follows the evolution of various specialists that have emerged over time to the professionalization of psychics through modernization and up to the present postmodern era. It charts a pattern that persists in humanity of searching for meaning in existence beyond the grave in the act of making contact with the dead as a means of transcending the physical boundaries of reality. This transcendence would allow proof of the existence of the personality of the individual beyond death and perhaps into other dimensions. This human quest cuts across cultures and time. This work chronicles that search through those individuals that became the conduit for this quest.