The Apparitionist by Peter Manseau

Photography was introduced to the United States at around the same time that a new religion was born in the nation. Spiritualism promised a connection to the dead in their realm through human mediums, and some thought photography might capture physical manifestations of spirits. Peter Manseau tells the story of the first spirit photographer in The Apparitionist.

The man who captured the first supposed spirit photograph was an amateur at the time. William Mumler thought he had made in error in cleaning the glass on which the photonegative was captured when a faint image appeared in a self-portrait he shot in 1862. He was using the photo studio owned by Hannah Stuart. The married photographer, soon to be widowed and soon after that to be Mrs. Mumler, was a Spiritualist, and she convinced him that the image was not an error, but an apparition. The photos caught the attention of the Spiritualist press, first in the New York-based Herald of Progress, then in Mumler’s hometown of Boston in the Beacon of Light, which published the address of the Stuart studio.

Soon the studio was producing many spirit photographs; they even took orders by mail from across the country. Bostonian Spiritualists compared photos and found evidence that Mumler was faking the images. Discredited, the Mumler’s moved to New York to quietly offer spirit photographs again. Their practice there let to criminal prosecution in 1869. Photographers knew of ways to produce such images, but no investigators could figure out what Mumler was doing. Though the judge gave did not suggest the photos actually captured images of spirits, he rejected the prosecution’s case because it did not adequately support the charges of fraud and similar crimes.

Even with such tepid vindication, the atmosphere in New York was too hot for the Mumlers, so they returned to Boston. Though Mumler continued to take spirit photos, he had developed a much deeper understanding of the art and science of photography. He developed a process that allowed for the direct reproduction of photos on newsprint; founded the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston and licensed his process to companies in other cities. This allowed newspapers and magazines to less expensively reproduce images without preparing an engraving first.

Manseau also discussed the development of photography in the United States after the art was introduced here. This includes American pioneers of photography such as Samuel Morse, also inventor of the telegraph, and Civil War battlefield photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

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Manseau, Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Barnett, Cynthia.  Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2011.

America has a problem.  We’re a thirsty nation.  Actually, it’s more like we’re addicted to water, abusing it.  We subsidize its use on a grand scale in industries that use it inefficiently, even wastefully, and in locations where it is naturally hard to come by.  We allocate it based on facts that are no longer true, and were doubtful or changing even as we made our policies.  In our sometimes blind enthusiasm, we overreached and now we are mire in unintended consequences.  To top it off, we rarely change our ways until a crisis is already upon us.

Cynthia Barnett describes these problems in her book Blue Revolution.  She also looks around the country and the world for solutions.  Her essential solution is a water ethic.

At one time, people were intimately connected to water.  Farmers watched for rain.  Children fetched pails of it from the stream or worked a pump handle.  Communities were built around watermills where people brought in grain or carried away flour. 

Of course, water is no less essential to modern life.  We depend on it for drinking, cleaning, sanitation and green lawns.  It is essential or the energy that light and cools our homes and powers our computers.  The abundance of food in our groceries stores is partly a testament to the abundance of water used to irrigate fields that don’t get enough rainfall for the crops we grow.

What is different is the way we view water.  For most of us it is cheap, nearly free in comparison to other utilities and services we use in our homes.   We can get as much as we want whenever we want by opening a valve.  Water is something we hold back with dams, divert with canals, and pump through pipes.  It bends to our will—except when it doesn’t.

Our water policies and technologies have often had unintended consequences.  We turned deserts into productive fields, but much of the water is lost to evaporation.  We moved water great distances to supply cities, but it encouraged profligacy that threatens those distant, expensive supplies.  Dams that were engineering marvels may soon stand at the ends of empty lakes.

Sure, changes in technology and policy are needed to stop, and hopefully reverse, these problems.  Barnett doesn’t stop there.  Our approach to water arises from the way we value it, think about it, and relate to it.  Our present state came from valuing water little, thinking about it little unless it was our job, and relating to it little except for those who intensely depended on a highly subsidized supply.

The water ethic Barnett proposes would value water, both in the sense of personal appreciation and economic cost and opportunity.  It would seek the best use of the water we have, especially what is locally available.  It creates opportunities for people to contact water and understand where it comes from and how it is affected by use.  It is something that spreads organically from person to person, neighborhood to neighborhood, business to business, and city to city.

It is an ethic that is within reach, too.  Barnett describes how places that have long had extreme relationships with extreme water environments, like the Netherlands, Singapore and Australia, have changed their relationship with water.  These are not just policy shifts, they are cultural changes.  Even in the United States, there are places where a new water ethic is taking hold and people understand how important and fragile water is.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Elixir by Brian Fagan

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Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

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