If you've ever wondered about the challenge of telling the story of New Orleans's free people of color, consider the surprising value of a book like Melissa Daggett's Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey . After exhaustive research that included translating many records from French, author Daggett gained a glimpse into a culture that expressed its hopes, fears, and even activism through words believed to hail from the afterlife."" - David Lee Simmons, The Advocate ""Ever since seeing the Grandjean Séance Registers at the University of New Orleans decades ago, I wondered when they would be brought to the public's attention. Author Melissa Daggett is to be thanked for skillfully and sensitively doing that."" - Mary Gehman, author of The Free People of Color of New Orleans: An Introduction ""Melissa Daggett's unrivaled grasp of a voluminous collection of French-language spiritualist texts makes Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey a must-read for anyone interested in the city's multifaceted religious culture with its links to the North, the Caribbean, and Europe. With Henry Louis Rey as her focus, the author adds a valuable new chapter to religious studies while making an important contribution to the historiography of the city's Afro-Creole Francophone community. With this first book-length study of New Orleans spiritualism, Daggett joins a new generation of revisionist scholars who view the movement seriously and consider its vision for the future as important as its concern for the past. As Daggett makes abundantly clear, her history of New Orleans spiritualism and Henry Louis Rey is long overdue.

"" - Caryn Cossé Bell, author of Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868.