Each Mind a Kingdom

"Each Mind a Kingdom offers the first in-depth history of the enormously popular turn-of-the-century New Thought movement. Most historians have characterized New Thought as the popular ideology of twentieth-century capitalism, but this account reanimates the movement's complex early history."--BOOK JACKET. "This revisionist history demonstrates the centrality of New Thought to the social and political transformations that reshaped American culture at the turn of the century. It explains how a spiritual discourse that combined rigid Victorian gender norms, middle-class reformism, race ideology, and proto-psychology gave rise to wildly popular twentieth-century cults of success. In so doing, it suggests new ways of interpreting the self-help, New Age movements of our own fin de siecle."--BOOK JACKET.