mesmerism

Chapnick discovered Alcott’s other stories as part of his research into spiritualism and mesmerism.

Richter then turned to the master of musical mesmerism for the movie’s soundtrack, to be performed live by a 14-player chamber ensemble of strings, winds and pairs of vibraphones and pianos.

Sorey recently joined up with the pianist Aaron Diehl, one of jazz’s standard-bearing traditionalists, and the versatile bassist Matt Brewer to record “Mesmerism,” an album of jazz classics and lesser-known pieces from the canon.

This “wonderfully digressive” tale of James Jesse Strang — an early American con man — “is littered with thumbnail histories of 19th-century cross-dressing, John Brown, John Deere, the Brontës, bloomers, the Underground Railroad, mesmerism, newspaper exchanges, the Illuminati and much else,” our reviewer, Chris Jennings, wrote.

Barnum, the vogue for mesmerism, theories of the universe, the birth of the Smithsonian Institution and, not least, the careers of the important early American scientists Joseph Henry and Alexander Dallas Bache.