How long does it take to read Occult America?
Mitch Horowitz, Paul Michael Garcia
Occult America by Mitch Horowitz, Paul Michael Garcia takes about 5 hours 19 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 19 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2009. 290 pages, about 79,750 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 52 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 19 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 19 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
It touched lives as disparate as those of Frederick Douglass, Franklin Roosevelt, and Mary Todd Lincoln--who once convinced her husband, Abe, to host a seance in the White House. Americans all, they were among the famous figures whose paths intertwined with the mystical and esoteric movement broadly known as the occult. Brought over from the Old World and spread throughout the New by some of the most obscure but gifted men and women of early U.S. history, this "hidden wisdom" transformed the spiritual life of the still-young nation and, through it, much of the Western world.Yet the story of the American occult has remained largely untold. Now a leading writer on the subject of alternative spirituality brings it out of the shadows. Here is a rich, fascinating, and colorful history of a religious revolution and an epic of offbeat history.From the meaning of the symbols on the one-dollar bill to the origins of the Ouija board, Occult America briskly sweeps from the nation's earliest days to the birth of the New Age era and traces many people and episodes, including:-The spirit medium who became America's first female religious leader in 1776 -The supernatural passions that marked the career of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith -The rural Sunday-school teacher whose clairvoyant visions instigated the dawn of the New Age -The prominence of mind-power mysticism in the black-nationalist politics of Marcus Garvey-The Idaho druggist whose mail-order mystical religion ranked as the eighth-largest faith in the world during the Great Depression Here, too, are America's homegrown religious movements, from transcendentalism to spiritualism to Christian Science to the positive-thinking philosophy that continues to exert such a powerful pull on the public today. A feast for believers in alternative spirituality, an eye-opener for anyone curious about the unknown byroads of American history, Occult America is an engaging, long-overdue portrait of one nation, under many gods, whose…
Subjects: New Age, Nonfiction, Occultism, Parapsychology, History
