Light for Thinkers [IAPSOP]

Periodical:	*Light for Thinkers*

Summary:	From Pat Deveney's database: Light for Thinkers. The Pioneer Spiritual Journal of the South. Excelsior / There is Nothing Outside Nature Other titles: Organ of Southern Association of Spiritualists 1882--1887? Weekly Atlanta, GA, and then Chattanooga, TN. Language: English. Editor: George Whitfield Kates. Publisher: A.C. Ladd. 1/1, November 1882-1887(?) 4 pp., 11 x 17. $1.50 a year. Articles by William Baker Fahnestock (on vaccination) and La Roy Sunderland (on "Electro-Magnetism"). Advertisement by Elmina D. Slenker for her books on "private Physiology for Girls" and for "Diana." The last known issue is November 14, 1885, but the Carrier Dove, January 1887, lists it among its exchanges. Kates (1845-1922) went on to publish a series of pamphlets on spiritualism for the NSA, and was the object of a lawsuit in 1890 in which his divorced wife and their children sued to rid themselves of his name on the grounds that long before he had sought a divorce from his wife he was intimate with a "Dr." Zaida Brown, the psychometric and test medium, who became his second wife. The result of the petition is unknown.
Other Sources:	LOC; University of Rochester.
Issues:	Light For Thinkers V2 N2 Nov 10 1883
	Light For Thinkers V3 N1 Nov 14 1885
Claude-Generated Themes:	Light for Thinkers is a 19th-century American Spiritualist weekly whose pages are dominated by the machinery of the séance room — mediums and their controls, materializations, rappings, and the ringing assurance that the soul cannot die. Around this mediumistic core cluster the reform adjacencies typical of the period: mesmerist clairvoyance and odylic force, and Fowler-school phrenology. It sits squarely in the Spiritualist press tradition rather than the later mind-cure movements, and reads as a movement organ arguing the reality of spirit return to a skeptical age. Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
Topics:	Spiritualism