Hacker's Pleasure Boat [IAPSOP]

Periodical:	*Hacker's Pleasure Boat*

Summary:	From Pat Deveney's database: Hacker's Pleasure Boat. Bound to no party, to no sect confined, the World our Church, our Brethren all mankind Other titles: Pleasure Boat 1867—1868 Monthly, quarterly (?) Berlin, NJ. Language: English. Editor: Jeremiah Hacker. Succeeds: The Pleasure Boat (1845-1847)—>The Portland Pleasure Boat (1814-1864)—>Chariot of Wisdom and Love (1864-1866) 17/1, July 1867-1868(?). 8 pp., $2.50 a year. The journal continued the volume number of Pleasure Boat/Portland Pleasure Boat. This was the last attempt by Hacker (1801-1895) to publish a journal to proclaim his ideas. He was a poet, freethinker, universal reformer, sometime spiritualist, and Quaker,who, after the demise of Chariot of Wisdom and Love, removed from Maine to Vineland, the huge colony of “friends of progress” and spiritualists founded in southern New Jersey during the Civil War. As with its immediate predecessor, the journal carried a strong defense of spiritualism against charges of demonism and free love (exemplified by Thomas Lake Harris), but was mainly devoted to Hacker’s reform peeves and rants. In March 1868, Hacker announced that he would begin to publish the journal on a quarterly basis until his subscriptions increased.
Other Sources:	Hamilton College; Rutgers University; American Antiquarian Society.
Issues:	The Pleasure Boat V1 N1 April 1 1845
	Hacker's Pleasure Boat V17 N2 Aug 1867
	Hacker's Pleasure Boat V17 N3 Sep 1867
	Hacker's Pleasure Boat V17 N7 Mar 1868
Claude-Generated Themes:	The Pleasure Boat was an antebellum American reform miscellany — a small, opinionated sheet mixing peace, government reform, moral exhortation and Bunyanesque allegory with reader testimonials for 'the Boat.' It is not an occult journal, but like much of the era's reform press it carried the two fashionable reform 'sciences' at their margins: a modest spiritualist thread of mediums, rappings and communications from the dead, and a phrenology of faculties and cranial 'organs' in the Gall tradition. Its 'brotherhood' language is fraternal-reform rhetoric, not Theosophy, which postdates it. In the corpus it registers as a reform paper with incidental spiritualist and phrenological content rather than a dedicated esoteric periodical. Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
Topics:	Anarchism and Radical Individualism \| Spiritualism