Cassadaga: The South's Oldest Spiritualist Community

Cassadaga, The South's Oldest Spiritualist Community, edited by John J. Guthrie Jr., Phillip Charles Lucas and Gary Monroe and published by the University Press of Florida in 2000, is an edited scholarly volume of essays on the Florida Spiritualist camp founded in 1894, combining historical, sociological and photographic documentation from specialist contributors. Its strength is the range of academic disciplines represented, letting the volume treat Cassadaga's founding, its mediums and its place within the wider American Spiritualist movement with more rigor than a single popular account could, backed by a university press's peer review process. Its limit is exactly that multiplicity, an edited collection offers several scholars' distinct approaches rather than one sustained argument, so a claim about a specific aspect of Cassadaga's practice, its history, its demographics or its religious doctrine, is better traced to the particular essay addressing that question than cited to the volume as a whole.