Exploring the History of New Thought
NewThoughtHistory.org is an independent historical reference dedicated to exploring the people, ideas, organizations, books, publications, and events that shaped the New Thought movement.
New Thought occupies a distinctive place in the history of religion, spirituality, mental healing, and self-development. Emerging primarily in the United States during the nineteenth century, it developed through overlapping networks of teachers, writers, healers, publishers, churches, and metaphysical organizations rather than through a single founder or institution.
Our purpose is to make that complicated history easier to explore.
From Phineas P. Quimby and the early mental-healing movement to Emma Curtis Hopkins and the emergence of organized New Thought, the history includes influential figures such as Warren Felt Evans, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Malinda Cramer, Nona Brooks, Ralph Waldo Trine, Thomas Troward, Ernest Holmes, and many others.
Their ideas contributed to traditions including Unity, Divine Science, Religious Science, and numerous independent New Thought organizations and communities.
NewThoughtHistory.org documents this history while placing people and ideas within their appropriate historical context.
What We Cover
Our coverage extends beyond biographies of famous New Thought teachers.
The site explores the broader historical environment in which New Thought developed, including:
- the origins of mental healing and Mind Cure;
- nineteenth-century metaphysical religion;
- important New Thought teachers and writers;
- women in New Thought history;
- churches, schools, associations, and other organizations;
- books, magazines, pamphlets, and other publications;
- conferences and important historical events;
- concepts such as Divine Mind, affirmation, mental healing, prosperity, and affirmative prayer;
- relationships between New Thought and Christian Science, Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism, and other religious and philosophical currents;
- the development of Unity, Divine Science, and Religious Science;
- primary sources and historical archives;
- the influence of New Thought on positive thinking, self-help, prosperity literature, and later popular spirituality.
Our goal is not merely to define these subjects individually. Wherever possible, we show how they connect.
A biography may lead to a teacher’s books. A book may lead to an organization. An organization may lead to a historical event, magazine, student, teacher, or related movement.
Over time, these connections create a more complete picture of New Thought history.
A Historical, Not Devotional, Approach
NewThoughtHistory.org approaches New Thought primarily as a subject of historical research.
The site is not an official publication of Unity, Divine Science, Religious Science, the International New Thought Alliance, or any other New Thought church or organization unless explicitly stated otherwise on a particular page.
We also do not assume that every historical claim made by New Thought practitioners should be interpreted as an independently established fact.
This distinction is particularly important when studying mental and spiritual healing.
Historical New Thought literature contains numerous accounts of people who attributed recoveries or improvements in health to prayer, changes in thought, spiritual realization, or other metaphysical practices. Such accounts are important historical evidence because they help explain what participants believed and why particular movements developed.
Reporting that a historical figure claimed or believed that a spiritual practice produced healing, however, is different from establishing that the practice medically caused the recovery.
We aim to preserve that distinction.
The same principle applies to other religious and metaphysical claims. Our role is to explain what people taught, practiced, experienced, debated, and recorded—not to require readers to accept or reject those beliefs.
Research and Sources
Good history depends on good sources.
Whenever possible, research on NewThoughtHistory.org begins with materials close to the historical subject being studied.
These may include:
Primary sources such as historical books, letters, magazines, pamphlets, sermons, photographs, conference proceedings, organizational records, and contemporary newspaper reports.
They may also include secondary sources such as scholarly books, academic articles, university research projects, historical reference works, and carefully documented institutional histories.
New Thought is unusually rich in surviving printed material. Many of its early teachers were prolific writers, lecturers, publishers, and correspondence-course instructors. Organizations produced magazines and maintained records, while libraries and archives have preserved significant collections.
These materials allow the movement to be studied through the words and documents of the people who participated in it.
At the same time, primary sources require interpretation.
A memoir may contain valuable firsthand information while reflecting the author’s perspective. An organization’s history may accurately preserve dates and records while presenting events through its institutional viewpoint. A later biography may introduce interpretations that were absent from contemporary sources.
For that reason, important historical questions should be evaluated through multiple sources whenever possible.
Handling Historical Disagreements
New Thought history does not always produce simple answers.
Even the question Who founded New Thought? can lead to different interpretations.
Phineas P. Quimby is frequently presented as a foundational figure because of his role in nineteenth-century mental healing. Emma Curtis Hopkins occupies another crucial position because her teaching network influenced numerous people who subsequently helped establish major New Thought traditions.
Other historians emphasize broader philosophical, religious, and social influences rather than identifying any individual founder.
NewThoughtHistory.org does not attempt to eliminate these disagreements by choosing the most convenient version.
When reliable sources differ, we aim to explain the disagreement, identify the evidence involved, and distinguish established chronology from later interpretation.
History is often more useful when its uncertainty remains visible.
People Behind the Movement
New Thought history is not only the history of its most famous founders.
It includes ministers, healers, writers, publishers, lecturers, organizers, students, editors, and ordinary participants who carried ideas from one community to another.
Women deserve particular attention.
Figures such as Emma Curtis Hopkins, Myrtle Fillmore, Malinda Cramer, Nona Brooks, Annie Rix Militz, Elizabeth Towne, and H. Emilie Cady demonstrate the unusually prominent roles women occupied within many parts of the movement.
Recovering the stories of lesser-known participants is therefore an important part of this project.
As the site develops, our biographical coverage will extend beyond familiar names to document the networks connecting teachers, students, organizations, publications, and communities.
Books and Primary Sources
Books were fundamental to the growth of New Thought.
But books were only part of the story.
Magazines, pamphlets, lessons, correspondence courses, sermons, advertisements, convention proceedings, and personal letters helped ideas circulate across enormous distances.
NewThoughtHistory.org aims to help readers discover these materials and understand the circumstances in which they appeared.
Rather than simply summarizing an old book, a historical book page may examine:
- who wrote it;
- when and where it was published;
- what movement or organization surrounded it;
- its major ideas;
- contemporary historical context;
- subsequent editions;
- its influence on later writers;
- surviving digital copies;
- related primary sources;
- and scholarly research discussing the work.
Where reputable libraries, archives, or organizations provide digital access to historical material, we aim to direct readers toward those resources.
Building a New Thought Timeline
One of the long-term goals of NewThoughtHistory.org is to make the chronology of New Thought easier to understand.
Individual biographies can sometimes make a movement appear more orderly than it actually was.
In reality, teachers were working simultaneously. Organizations changed names. Students became teachers. Magazines appeared and disappeared. New schools emerged while older movements continued to develop.
Our timeline resources are intended to connect these parallel histories.
Readers will be able to explore important:
people, books, organizations, publications, conferences, places, and events
within a shared chronological framework.
This approach helps answer not merely what happened, but also what else was happening at the same time.
Why New Thought History Matters
The influence of New Thought reaches beyond the organizations that explicitly adopted the name.
Ideas concerning the power of thought, positive thinking, affirmation, prosperity, consciousness, mental transformation, and human potential later appeared throughout popular religious and self-help culture.
Understanding those later developments requires understanding their history.
It also requires avoiding overly simple genealogies.
Not every modern self-help idea originated with New Thought, and similarities between two teachings do not automatically demonstrate direct historical influence.
Our goal is therefore to trace connections where documentary evidence supports them and distinguish those connections from speculation.
Doing so can reveal how ideas moved from nineteenth-century metaphysical communities into religious organizations, publishing networks, twentieth-century self-help literature, and parts of contemporary spirituality.
Independent and Educational
NewThoughtHistory.org is an independent educational reference project.
Our purpose is neither to promote nor attack New Thought.
Readers may approach this history as practitioners, descendants of participants, researchers, students, historians, religious-studies readers, or simply curious visitors.
All are welcome.
The objective remains the same:
to document New Thought history as accurately, clearly, and responsibly as available evidence allows.
As additional sources become available, articles may be expanded or corrected. Historical research is an ongoing process, particularly for subjects whose records are dispersed among archives, libraries, organizations, digitized collections, old periodicals, and private collections.
Explore New Thought History
A useful place to begin is with What Is New Thought? History, Beliefs, and Origins, followed by the broader History of the New Thought Movement and New Thought Timeline.
From there, explore the people who shaped the movement, the organizations they established, the books they published, and the ideas they debated.
New Thought has more than a century of interconnected history.
NewThoughtHistory.org exists to help make that history discoverable.