Millennial movements do not always go boom and bust. As innovative responses to worlds in crisis or projections of possibilities for a world in the doldrums, millennialism has been a prime mover for many an artistic and scientific vision of the world reconfigured. Flourishing well beyond the life of any prophet, bearing fruit well beyond the waning of any redemptive scheme, these visions merit a history of their own. The End that Does tracks the interplay of the arts, the sciences, and millennial imagination across 3000 years of surprising conclusions.

In its day, spiritualism brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to seance tables and trance lectures. It has alternately been ridiculed as the apogee of fatuous credulity and hailed as a feminist movement. Its tricks have been exposed, its charlatans unmasked, and its heroes' names lost to posterity. In its day, however, its leaders were household names and politicians worried about capturing the Spiritualist vote. Cathy Gutierrez places Spiritualism in the context of the 19th-century American Renaissance. Although this epithet usually signifies the sudden blossoming of American letters,...