A “duty” to “tabulate and record”: Emma Hardinge Britten as Periodical Editor and Spiritualist Historian

Critics interested in Emma Hardinge Britten have acknowledged her status as the primary historian of the spiritualist movement via her 1870 book publication, Modern American Spiritualism. I argue that Britten’s periodicals—the American-based Western Star (1872) and British-based Two Worlds (1887–92) and Unseen Universe (1892–93)—were also central to her effort to market herself as spiritualist historian. By publishing historical serials drawn from larger projects she was working on, Britten not only provided an alternative history to combat criticism from spiritualism’s competitors but also established a space for herself in a tradition dominated primarily by men.