In celebration of the ASPR’s centennial, five writers documented the Society’s history in the following special editions of the Journal.
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Berger traces the Society from the Rochester rappings of 1848 through its founding in 1885 — the work of Sir William Barrett, William James and Henry Bowditch — to its absorption as a branch of the London Society in 1889, and its dissolution in 1906.
A biography of the Columbia logician who gave up his chair for psychical research. Anderson follows Hyslop from the 1886 magazine piece that first caught his attention, through breakdown and resignation, to the sittings with Leonora Piper that convinced him.
What Hyslop inherited in 1907 was largely scrapbooks: Hodgson's Piper records had gone to England, and so had Mrs. Piper. Berger sets out the two shortages that shaped the next decade — new cases to study, and the money to pursue them.
After Hyslop's death in 1920 the Board pressed for physical mediumship, and the Society spent a decade on one Boston medium. Tietze traces how that pursuit divided the ASPR and left the Journal, by the mid-1930s, resembling a popular occult magazine.
Dr. Osis came to the Society as its Chester F. Carlson Research Fellow. His account runs from the 1941 reorganisation of the Society, through Gardner Murphy's reorientation to laboratory science.
Karlis Osis, PhD, was the Director of Research and the Chester F. Carlson Research Fellow at the ASPR from 1962 to 1983. His research included studies of apparitions, out-of-body experiences, surveys of deathbed visions, mediums, creativity, and the effect of meditation on ESP. He collaborated with researchers Erlendur Haraldsson, Janet Mitchell, Bonnie Perskari and Donna McCormick.
