Word for Word: Abolition

I’m in a writers’ group that meets on Zoom, though before the pandemic we met in person. Every week, we do a writing prompt: someone gives a page number, and our organizer picks a word from a huge dictionary. We write for five minutes. In this example, the word is: abolition.

Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America by Ann Braude, the main book that inspired my response to today’s word prompt.

Spiritualism was born in upstate New York in 1848, when the Fox Sisters claimed they were communicating with ghosts that tapped on surfaces…