Part I. from the devil to distraction -- 'Wandring or distraction' (Thomas Clayton) -- 'Satan had hidden the very object from my mind' (Jarena Lee) -- 'Hundred of thousands have their appetite so depraved' (J.H. McIlvaine) -- 'My non-compliance would almost always produce much confusion' (Frederick Douglass) -- 'Opium-like listlessness' (Herman Melville) -- 'Morbid attention' (Edgar Allan Poe) -- 'The shell of lethargy' (William James) -- Part II. reform -- 'A white man could, if he had paid as much attention' (Lydia Maria Child) -- 'The cultivation of attention as a moral duty' (Elizabeth Palmer Peabody) -- 'The heart must be cultivated' (William Watkinds) -- 'You might see him looking steadily at something' (Susan Paul) -- 'Their nobler faculties lie all underdeveloped' (William D. Kelley) -- 'Subdued and tender' (A.D. Eddy) -- 'If he wanted to kill time' (Austin Reed) -- Part III. revival -- 'All attention to the last sermon' (James Dana) -- 'The power of fixated and continuous attention' (Robert Baird) -- 'The relations of business and religion' (Henry Clay Fish) -- 'My mind was powerfully wrought upon' (William Apess) -- 'I began to direct my attention to this great object' (Nat Turner) -- 'Hear me now, love your heart' (Toni Morrison) -- 'Read these leaves in the open air' (Walt Whitman) -- Part IV. devotion -- 'Noble sentiments of devotion' (J.S. Buckminster and Ann Plato) -- 'Savoir attendre' (Adrien Rouquette) -- 'The greatest exercise of mind' (Anonymous/Abraham Jacobs) -- 'A true sauntering of the eye' (Henry David Thoreau) -- 'If we do not guard the mind' (Hannah More) -- 'The valves of her attention' (Emily Dickinson) -- 'Aroma finer than prayer' (Walt Whitman)

"When did the age of distraction begin? It might seem like a new problem, a symptom of our digital addictions, but distraction was already a source of deep concern in American culture two hundred years ago. As the industrial market economy emerged, nineteenth-century observers saw the signs: Workers were wasting time, daydreaming on the job, and the public's attention was overstimulated by new media and consumer trends. In response, social reformers designed innovative systems of moral training for the masses. Religious leaders organized far-reaching Christian revivals. And spiritual seekers like Henry David Thoreau experimented on themselves, practicing regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism. From the solitary confinement cells of the earliest penitentiaries to the shores of Walden Pond, disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age. Through twenty-eight short passages on reform, religion, and literature from the strange and beautiful archives of this nineteenth-century attention revival, Caleb Smith reads with an eye for both language and power. Disciplines of attention, he argues, often reinforce a morally conservative social order. At the same time, exercising more careful control over our own attention promises to give us some distance from the consumer marketplace-and, today, from the algorithmic manipulations of the online attention economy. Smith writes with vigilance about the history of coercion, but also with guarded hope about practices of attention, including reading itself. From the benefits of attentive reading to the darker side of enforced attention in prisons and reformatories, this book examines distraction as a moral, political, and economic problem with a long and illuminating history"--