Welcome to Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.

We begin the interview series for Unobscured Season 2 with the phenomenal historian, Dr.

Anne Browdy.

She is senior lecturer on American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School, where

she directs the Women's Studies in Religion program.

Dr. Browdy has published widely on women in American Religious Life, exploring everything

from spiritualism to Judaism, Christian science and Native American religions.

She's an amazing scholar and we're so glad she joined us to talk about spiritualism.

The research team found her book Radical Spirits while they were working on episodes

for my other podcast lore.

Needless to say, it was one of the inspirations for this season of Unobscured.

Researcher Carl Nella started each historian interview by asking our guests what it meant

to be a spiritualist in the 19th century America, so Dr. Browdy's answer to that question

is where we'll begin.

This is the Unobscured Interview Series for Season 2.

I'm Aaron Minky.

What I would say it meant to be a spiritualist in the 19th century was to be part of a movement

that was seeking empirical evidence for the immortality of the soul by communicating with

the spirits of the dead.

And in general that meant communicating with the spirits of the dead through the intervention

of a human medium.

What spiritualists believed they accessed through the medium of a human being who was being

...