Episode 305 Erik Seeman, Speaking with the Dead

Death is one of the few universals in life. Everyone who is born, will die.

How do the living make peace with death?

While different cultures make peace with death in different ways, Erik Seeman joins us to investigate how white, American Protestants made their peace with death during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

About the Show

Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.

It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.

Ben Franklin’s World is a production of the Omohundro Institute.

Episode Summary

Erik Seeman is a Professor of History at the University at Buffalo. He’s an award-winning historian who has written three books on death practices in early America, including his most recent book, Speaking with the Dead in Early America, which won the Lawrence W. Levine Award for best book in American Cultural History from the Organization of American Historians in 2020.

During our investigation of early American death practices, Erik reveals early American ideas about death; Information about the English Reformation and how Anglo-American Protestants came to believe in the possibility of having relationships with the dead; And, the ways in which some Anglo-American Protestants forged relationships with the dead.

What You’ll Discover

Speaking with the dead in early America
Early American ideas about ghosts
Spiritualism and the spiritualism movement
Acceptance and rejection of spiritualism by early Americans
Early American understandings of death
Historical sources about death and the dead in early America
English Reformation and its attempts to change Catholic belief
Pre-Reformation ideas about purgatory
Impact of the Enlightenment on ideas about death and communicating with the dead
European ideas about spiritualism and its practice
Ghosts and ghost stories in early America
Nineteenth-century “cult of the dead”
Death practices among Native American and African cultures
Material objects that spoke to the dead in early America
What knowing more about early American death culture can reveal about early America

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Time Warp Question

In your opinion, what might have happened if the English Reformation had never happened? How might early Americans have viewed their living relationship with the dead differently? And would the Spiritualism Movement have still come about during the 19th century?