The History of New Thought: From Mind Cure to Positive Thinking and the Prosperity Gospel

Long before The Secret, writers and healers in the New Thought movement argued that the mind shapes reality. In this clear, wide‑ranging history, John S. Haller Jr. traces New Thought from its nineteenth‑century roots—Phineas P. Quimby, Emma Curtis Hopkins, and others—through William Walker Atkinson, an early popularizer of the “law of attraction,” to its imprint on modern self‑help and popular psychology. Rather than centering on denominations, Haller follows people, practices, and ideas: ...