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In 1842 a group of radical abolitionists formed a community in Northampton, Massachusetts, in order to pioneer \"a better and purer state of society.\" Calling themselves the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, they envisioned a world free of poverty and inequality, religious intolerance, slavery and racial injustice. In telling the fascinating and little-known history of the Association, Christopher Clark offers insights into the \"communitarian moment\" of the 1840s which saw the establishment of dozens of utopian communities by Americans determined to challenge the tenets of their society. One of the few places in mid-nineteenth-century America where white and black people could live as equals, the Northampton community was home to almost two hundred and fifty men, women, and children during its four and a half years of existence. The membership comprised an unusual collection of individuals, among them small manufacturers, abolitionist lecturers, teachers, craftsmen, laborers, and former slaves, including Sojourner Truth. Offering biographical sketches of a variety of intriguing characters, Clark describes the inhabitants' daily routines, their struggle to support themselves through the production of silk, the roles of men and women, and tensions among members of different cultural backgrounds. Finally, he looks at the reasons for the closing of the community and follows the lives of its members, recounting the subsequent softening of their political convictions. Throughout his masterful narrative, Clark views the Northampton Association in its wider social and cultural context. He shows how, by attempting to initiate radical change, the Association and other utopian groups tested the ideological limits of antebellum society. Clark helps us understand both the significance of their vision and what was lost when that vision was abandoned. In 1842 a group of radical abolitionists formed a community in Northampton, Massachusetts, in order to pioneer \"a better and purer state of society.\" Calling themselves the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, they envisioned a world free of poverty and inequality, religious intolerance, slavery and racial injustice. In telling the fascinating and little-known history of the Association, Christopher Clark offers insights into the \"communitarian moment\" of the 1840s which saw the establishment of dozens of utopian communities by Americans determined to challenge the tenets of their society. One of the few places in mid-nineteenth-century America where white and black people could live as equals, the Northampton community was home to almost two hundred and fifty men, women, and children during its four and a half years of existence. The membership comprised an unusual collection of individuals, among them small manufacturers, abolitionist lecturers, teachers, craftsmen, laborers, and former slaves, including Sojourner Truth. Offering biographical sketches of a variety of intriguing characters, Clark describes the inhabitants' daily routines, their struggle to support themselves through the production of silk, the roles of men and women, and tensions among members of different cultural backgrounds. Finally, he looks at the reasons for the closing of the community and follows the lives of its members, recounting the subsequent softening of their political convictions. Throughout his masterful narrative, Clark views the Northampton Association in its wider social and cultural context. He shows how, by attempting to initiate radical change, the Association and other utopian groups tested the ideological limits of antebellum society. Clark helps us understand both the significance of their vision and what was lost when that vision was abandoned.

Unbridled passions threatened nineteenth-century America, a vulnerable young nation already feeling beset by foreigners, corruption, and disease. Purifying crusaders like Hamilton College philosophy professor and Presbyterian minister John W. Mears mobilized to fight every sin and carnal lure, from liquor to free love. In Upstate New York's famed Oneida Community, Mears encountered his stiffest challenge. Oneida's founder and patriarch, John Humphrey Noyes, oversaw a radical Christian commune where men and women sexually mingled through the practice of \"complex marriage.\" While others struggled to dislodge the community that had evolved since 1848 into a successful business venture and congenial neighbor, it was Mears who, after years of trying, rallied New York's church and university leaders for a final, concerted anti-Oneida campaign. In The Ministers' War, Doyle traces the full story of Mears and the crusade against the Oneida Community. He explores the ways in which Mears's multipurpose zeal reflected the passions behind the nineteenth-century temperance movement, the fight against obscenity, and the public animus toward unconventional thought. As an author, political candidate, and controversialist, Mears was a prominent moralizer at a time when public morality seemed to be most at risk.

\"A fresh and holistic treatment of a long-standing social experiment born of revival fervor and communitarian enthusiasm. The Oneida Community of upstate New York was dedicated to living as one family and to the sharing of all property, work, and love. Anthony Wonderley is a sensitive guide to the things and settings of Oneida life from its basis in John H. Noyes's complicated theology, through experiments in free love and gender equality, to the moment when the commune transformed itself into an industrial enterprise based on the production of silverware. Rather than drawing a sharp boundary between spiritual concerns and worldly matters, Wonderley argues that commune and company together comprise a century-long narrative of economic success, innovative thinking, and abiding concern for the welfare of others. Oneida Utopia seamlessly combines the evidence of social life and intellectual endeavor with the testimony of built environment and material culture. Wonderley shares with readers his intimate knowledge of evidence from the Oneida Community: maps and photographs, quilts and furniture, domestic objects and industrial products, and the biggest artifact of all, their communal home. Wonderley also takes a novel approach to the thought of the commune's founder, examining individually and in context Noyes's reactions to interests and passions of the day, including revivalism, millennialism, utopianism, and spiritualism\"-- Publisher's Web site.

\"Oneida Utopiaoffers a fresh new reading of this fascinating American experiment, freed of the sociological and religious assumptions that have guided more traditional studies of the topic. An eye-opener.\"-Ellen Wayland-Smith, author ofOneida \"Anthony Wonderley's fresh insights and wealth of knowledge illuminate the realities of communal life at Oneida, where the members created a work environment that combined fun, flirtation, and opportunity for personal and social development.\"-Carol Faulkner, author ofLucretia Mott's Heresy Oneida Utopiais a fresh and holistic treatment of a long-standing social experiment born of revival fervor and communitarian enthusiasm. The Oneida Community of upstate New York was dedicated to living as one family and to the sharing of all property, work, and love. Anthony Wonderley is a sensitive guide to the things and settings of Oneida life from its basis in John H. Noyes's complicated theology, through experiments in free love and gender equality, to the moment when the commune transformed itself into an industrial enterprise based on the production of silverware. Rather than drawing a sharp boundary between spiritual concerns and worldly matters, Wonderley argues that commune and company together comprise a century-long narrative of economic success, innovative thinking, and abiding concern for the welfare of others. Oneida Utopiaseamlessly combines the evidence of social life and intellectual endeavor with the testimony of built environment and material culture. Wonderley shares with readers his intimate knowledge of evidence from the Oneida Community: maps and photographs, quilts and furniture, domestic objects and industrial products, and the biggest artifact of all, their communal home. Wonderley also takes a novel approach to the thought of the commune's founder, examining individually and in context Noyes's reactions to interests and passions of the day, including revivalism, millennialism, utopianism, and spiritualism.

After World War II, communes and cooperative communities became internationally oriented in their membership and networking began to develop. Unlike earlier such enterprises, these groups shared an openness to international relationships. This was evident both in the groups' social composition, and in the extension of networks beyond their own country. Such globalization opened up the possibility of comparative analysis, which has become a trend in research since the 1950s. The dynamism and speed with which voluntary communities have spread throughout the world is impressive. In the 1950s there were only a few hundred such societies, but by the end of the last century there were thousands. These have taken a variety of forms. There are religious and secular communes, intentional communities, ecological communities, co-housing projects, various types of Christian communities, communities of Eastern religions, and spiritual communities inspired by New Age thought. Yaacov Oved shows that such societies maintain a community based on cooperation and expand their influence through newspapers, television, and the Internet. Their chief characteristic is their openness to the outside world, and their search for a way to move beyond a world of individualism and competitiveness. To accomplish this, they embrace all the tools of the modern world. Oved observes that those who predicted the failure of communes and intentional communities failed to appreciate the extent to which people in today's society aspire to communal life. This book answers the doubters and does so with a sense of deep historical understanding.

This book documents the wide range of contemporary communes and other intentional communities providing sanctuaries for like-minded people to pursue cooperative alternatives to media-stoked consumerism and the relentless tempo of change that characterizes mainstream life in 21st-century America and Europe. Common Purse, Uncommon Future: The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities explores the many new types of communal living being tried in America and Europe today. A growing number of people disenchanted with the pressures and demands of mainstream lifestyles are drawn by the nostalgic appeal of traditional, mostly agrarian and artisanal, lifestyles as practiced in residential communities where liminal rituals of membership serve to validate pacts to live and work together in cooperative social and economic relations. Manzella focuses on the ways in which today's most innovative and controversial ecovillages diverge from the hippie communes of yesteryear's counterculture and from older communal forms such as kibbutzim and arts and crafts colonies, and how today's nonsectarian spiritual and volunteer service communities differ from traditional religious communes and ashrams. He reports his field investigations of a whole new generation of communal living experiments, such as residential land trusts, survivalist retreats, urban cohousing, green housing cooperatives, student co-ops, and New Age organic agrarian communes.

In 1869 six London families arrived in Nemaha County, Kansas, as the first colonists of the Workingmen's Cooperative Colony, later fancifully renamed Llewellyn Castle by a local writer. These early colonists were all members of Britain's National Reform League, founded by noted Chartist leader James Bronterre O'Brien. As working-class radicals they were determined to find an alternative to the grinding poverty that exploitative liberal capitalism had inflicted on England's laboring poor. Located on 680 acres in northeastern Kansas, this collectivist colony jointly owned all the land and its natural resources, with individuals leasing small sections to work. The money from these leases was intended for public works and the healthcare and education of colony members. The colony floundered after just a few years and collapsed in 1874, but its mission and founding ideas lived on in Kansas. Many former colonists became prominent political activists in the 1890s, and the colony's ideals of national fiscal policy reform and state ownership of land were carried over into the Kansas Populist movement. Based on archival research throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, this history of an English collectivist colony in America's Great Plains highlights the connections between British and American reform movements and their contexts.