Dr. Kevin Dann is a historian, naturalist, and troubadour.
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From dissecting hearts to designing ornithopters, James Bell Pettigrew saw spirals as the blueprint of nature—but his grand vision was lost to history.
More about this author
Dr. Kevin Dann is a historian, naturalist, and troubadour. He is the author of a dozen books of exploration on everything from the mysteries of serpentine stone to the psychological riddle of synaesthesia to the biography Henry David Thoreau. Dann has taught at Rutgers University, the University of Vermont, and the State University of New York. Founder of the pioneering Metahistorical institution, Mermaids Are Real, Dann also writes, produces, and performs immersive street theatrical extravaganzas in New York City. Dann’s books include Enchanted New York: A Journey Along Broadway Through Manhattan’s Magical Past (2020) and Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau (2017). He leads bike tours in New York City. Find him online at: www.drdann.com.
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Why Did Everyone in the 19th Century Think They Could Talk to the Dead?
Kevin Dann on the Spiritualists of New York City and Beyond
Lit Hub | January | 2021
Dann surveys the phenomenon on spiritualists in 19th-century New York City.
A New Interpretation of His Philosophy
Co-authors: John Kaag | New York Times | January | 2017
John Kaag reviews Kevin Dann’s book Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau (2017).
Publications by this author
A Journey along Broadway through Manhattan’s Magical Past
Washington Mews Books/NYU Press | January | 2020
Enchanted New York chronicles an alternate history of this magical isle. It offers a tour along Broadway, focusing on times and places that illuminate a forgotten and sometimes hidden history of New York through site-specific stories of wizards, illuminati, fortune tellers, magicians, and more.
Progressing up New York’s central thoroughfare, this guidebook to magical Manhattan offers a history you won’t find in your Lonely Planet or Fodor’s guide, tracing the arc of American technological alchemies―from Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton to the Manhattan Project—to Mesmeric physicians, to wonder-working Madame Blavatsky, and seers Helena Roerich and Alice Bailey. Harry Houdini appears and disappears, as the world’s premier stage magician’s feats of prestidigitation fade away to reveal a much more mysterious—and meaningful—marquee of magic.
Unlike old-world cities, New York has no ancient monuments to mark its magical adolescence. There is no local memory embedded in the landscape of celebrated witches, warlocks, gods, or goddesses—no myths of magical metamorphoses. As we follow Kevin Dann in geographical and chronological progression up Broadway from Battery Park to Inwood, each chapter provides a surprising picture of a city whose ever-changing fortunes have always been founded on magical activity.The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau
TarcherPerigee | January | 2018
This biography of Henry David Thoreau sees Thoreau’s world as the mystic himself saw it: filled with wonder and mystery; Native American myths and lore; wood sylphs, nature spirits, and fairies; battles between good and evil; and heroic struggles to live as a natural being in an increasingly synthetic world.
Above all, Expect Great Things critically and authoritatively captures Thoreau’s simultaneously wild and intellectually keen sense of the mystical, mythical, and supernatural.
Other historians have skipped past or undervalued these aspects of Thoreau’s life. In this groundbreaking work, historian and naturalist Kevin Dann restores Thoreau’s esoteric visions and explorations to their rightful place as keystones of the man himself.Media by this author
Feature | May | 2021
Feature | January | 2021
Dr. Dann introduces his book, Enchanted New York.
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