New Thought traces much of its organized form to Emma Curtis Hopkins, who ran a Christian Science offshoot seminary in Chicago in the 1880s after breaking with Mary Baker Eddy, and whose students went on to found several of the movement's separate institutional households. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, both former Hopkins students, founded Unity in Kansas City in 1889 after Myrtle's recovery from tuberculosis, which she attributed to the repeated affirmation that she was a child of God and therefore not subject to inherited disease; Unity calls its system Practical Christianity and has remained closely tied to Christian scripture and vocabulary even as it reads both metaphysically.
Nona Brooks, another Hopkins student, founded Divine Science in Denver in the 1880s and 1890s alongside her sisters and Fannie Brooks James, building an independent denomination on the same core claim, that a change of thought changes the thinker's experience of God, health and circumstance. Ernest Holmes, working somewhat later and drawing on Hopkins's teaching among other sources, systematized the movement's philosophy in his 1926 book The Science of Mind and founded what became Religious Science, now organized as the Centers for Spiritual Living.
Outside the American lineage, Masaharu Taniguchi founded Seicho-No-Ie in Japan in 1930, adapting New Thought's metaphysical framework, that thought and consciousness shape material reality, into a distinct Japanese religious movement with its own scripture and its own institutional life largely independent of the American New Thought bodies it draws on.