500 Years of Utopia: BOOKS UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA

The Burning Man Festival is a weeklong spasm of radical self-expression held annually just before Labour Day since 1986. In late August 2003, more than 33,000 participants converged in Nevada's Black Rock Desert for this counterculture event staged as an experiment in temporary community. The participants gather to rid themselves of the conventional structures of their life and to 'sample' the alternatives in hundreds of theme camps. The climax of the festival comes when attendees erupt into cheers and applause at the burning of a forty-foot-tall human effigy described as 'part pre-technological idol and part post-technological puppet'. Both Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen have attended Burning Man annually since 1996.

Robert S. Fogarty is Professor of History at Antioch College and editor of The Antioch Review

Felicity Scott traces an alternative genealogy of the postmodern turn in American architecture, focusing on a set of experimental practices and polemics that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Art ablaze: Self-expression in the Nevada desert   "You voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death by attending."  100 miles from the gambling town of Reno, in the wilderness of northern Nevada, lies a vast, hostile plain known as the Black Rock Desert. The region has been an empty and windswept dry lake bed for most of the past 10,000 years. Except, that is, for one brief week at the end of each summer, when a temporary city rises out of the barren clay. This is the surreal and amazing site of Burning Man. Baked by the sun, and blinded by dust, the gathering acquires different meanings for different people: Temporary community, spiritual adventure, performance stage, desert rave, social experiment. It's also the incubator of some of the most remarkable site-specific outdoor art ever made: a mechanized fire-breathing octopus, a towering wooden temple 15 meters tall, and the eponymous Man himself--a skeletal sculpture set ablaze at the event's conclusion. Here, writer and photographer NK Guy presents 16 years of Burning Man art. His dazzling images record these participatory, collective, intrinsically ephemeral installations and happenings in the desert, which exist for no clearer purpose than because someone wanted to express something. The result is testimony to a realm far beyond the ego, commerce, and power play of mainstream cultural output: It is one of the most pure, uninhibited, expressive centers of our time. With a foreword by temple designer and artist David Best and a futureword by Marian Goodell, Founding Board Member and CEO, Burning Man Project.

Huxley's story shows a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability. An ominous warning to the world's population, this literary classic is a must-read.

An architect by training and an enthusiast of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, photographer Marcel Gautherot was close to an elite group of Brazilian modernist architects such as Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx. Aesthetic and political affinities made him Niemeyer’s photographer of choice, and Gautherot had privileged access to all stages of the building of Brasilia, Brazil’s new capital and a landmark of modernist architecture and urbanism. This book brings together for the first time a large corpus of Gautherot’s work on the city, selected out of the 3,000 photographs now in the collection of the Moreira Salles Foundation in Rio de Janeiro. Gautherot’s sharp, precise, almost clinical eye captures Brasilia as both promising and ominous, tremendous and fragile, heroic and problematic. The essays are by Kenneth Frampton, Graduate School of Architecture, Columbia University; and Sergio Burgi of the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro.

Giant silver ships appear above every major city in the world. The Overlords have arrived. They eliminate ignorance, disease, poverty, and fear. After fifty years they also start eliminating humans.
Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Cities frozen in time: a snapshot of urban life, circa 1600 History's most opulent collection of town maps and illustrations The complete reprint of all 363 color plates from Braun and Hogenberg's survey of town maps, city views, and plans of Europe, Africa, Asia and Central America, with dozens of unusual details, two folding maps, as well as selected extracts from the original text and an in-depth commentary. First published in Cologne 1572-1617.

A new and challenging entry into the debates between feminism and postmodernism, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism challenges some basic preconceptions about the role of political theory today. Sargisson explores current debates within utopian studies, feminist theory and poststructuralist deconstruction. Utopian thinking is offered as a route out of the dilemma of contemporary feminism as well as a way of conceptualizing its current situation. This book provides an exploration of, and exercise in, utopian thought.

This study of American utopian fiction by women before 1950 includes exerpts from seven novels. This second edition presents a feminist revision of Edward Bellamy's influential Looking Backwards and ends with a World War II interplanetary women-centred fantasy.

This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century.

The book explores the fundamental and multifaceted dialectic between utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares within American culture. The utopian mindset in constructing and imagining different futures for society is reflected in a wide range of differential cultural texts and narratives such as novels, short stories, political discourses and treatises, journalism and scholarly and intellectual debates. Often these combine social criticism and satire, political rhetoric, religious belief systems, and biblical metaphors. Approaching the topic from various angles and throughout different historical periods, the essays in this volume collectively show how fascinating and rewarding the exploration of this utopian discourse of for an understanding of American culture.

In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the "major utopians” who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century’s "minor utopias” whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past. The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.

Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. In popular imagination, these words seem to capture the atmosphere of 1960s hippie communes. Yet when the first hippie commune was founded in 1965 outside Trinidad, Colorado, the goal wasn't one long party but rather a new society that integrated life and art. In Droppers, Mark Matthews chronicles the rise and fall of this utopian community, exploring the goals behind its creation and the factors that eventually led to its dissolution. Seeking refuge from enforced social conformity, the turmoil of racial conflict, and the Vietnam War, artist Eugene Bernofsky and other founders of Drop City sought to create an environment that would promote both equality and personal autonomy. These high ideals became increasingly hard to sustain, however, in the face of external pressures and internal divisions. In a rollicking, fast-paced style, Matthews vividly describes the early enthusiasm of Drop City's founders, as Bernofsky and his friends constructed a town in the desert literally using the "detritus of society." Over time, Drop City suffered from media attention, the distraction of visitors, and the arrival of new residents who didn't share the founders' ideals. Matthews bases his account on numerous interviews with Bernofsky and other residents as well as written sources. Explaining Drop City in the context of the counterculture's evolution and the American tradition of utopian communities, he paints an unforgettable picture of a largely misunderstood phenomenon in American history.

Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden is an eclectic, yet rigorous reflection on the relationship--historical, present and future--between humanity and the garden. Through the lens of Utopian Studies--the interdisciplinary field that encompasses fictions all the way through to actual political projects, and urban ideals; in a nutshell, addressing the human natural drive towards the ideal--Earth Perfect? brings together a selection of inspiring essays, each contributed by foremost writers from the fields of architecture, history of art, classics, cultural studies, farming, geography, horticulture, landscape architecture, law, literature, philosophy, urban planning and the natural sciences. Through these joined voices, the garden emerges as a site of contestation and a repository for symbolic, spiritual, social, political and ecological meaning. Questions such as: "what is the role of the garden in defining humanity's ideal relationship with nature?" and "how should we garden in the face of catastrophic ecological decline?" are addressed through wideranging case studies, including ancient Roman Gardens in Pompeii, Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, the Gardens of Versailles, organic farming in New England and Bohemia's secret gardens, as well as landscape in contemporary architecture. Issues relating to the utopian garden are explored thematically rather than chronologically, and organised in six chapters: "Being in nature", "inscribing the garden", "green/house", "The garden politic", "economies of the garden" and "how then shall we garden?". each essay is both individual in scope and part of the wider discourse of the book as a whole, and each is lusciously illustrated, bringing to life the subject with diverse visual material ranging from photography to historical documents, maps and artworks.

Oregon has been the home of nearly three hundred communal experiments since the Aurora Colony was established in 1856. Eden Within Eden is the first book to survey the state’s utopian history, from religious and Socialist groups of the nineteenth century to ecologically conscious communities of the twenty-first century. James J. Kopp examines Oregon’s communal history in the context of the state as a destination for those seeking new beginnings and in the framework of utopian and communal experiences across America. Eden Within Eden provides rich detail about utopian communities— some realized, some only planned—many of which reflect broader social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of Oregon’s history. From the dawn of communal groups in Oregon—the German Christian colony at Aurora—to Oregon’s most infamous communal experiment—Rajneeshpuram—this study examines the range of attempts to establish ideal communities in the state. These include the Jewish agrarian colony of New Odessa in the 1880s as well as the “new pioneers” of the 1960s and later who captured the spirit of the counterculture as well as growing concerns about the environment. The book explores other areas of Oregon’s utopian heritage as well, including literary works and idealistic city planning. There has been no comparable book published on Oregon’s communal history and few such comprehensive examinations of other states. The appendix is a rich compilation that will guide individuals to additional information on the profiled—and many other—communities. Eden Within Eden will appeal to students and scholars of communal studies and Pacific Northwest history, as well as to general readers interested in these subjects.

Setting out to make his fortune in a far-off country, a young traveller discovers the remote and beautiful land of Erewhon and is given a home among its extraordinarily handsome citizens. But their visitor soon discovers that this seemingly ideal community has its faults - here crime is treated indulgently as a malady to be cured, while illness, poverty and misfortune are cruelly punished, and all machines have been superstitiously destroyed after a bizarre prophecy. Can he survive in a world where morality is turned upside down? Inspired by Samuel Butler's years in colonial New Zealand and by his reading of Darwin's Origin of Species, Erewhon (1872) is a highly original, irreverent and humorous satire on conventional virtues, religious hypocrisy and the unthinking acceptance of beliefs.

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia accompanies an exhibition of the same title examining the art, architecture and design of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The catalogue surveys the radical experiments that challenged societal and professional norms while proposing new kinds of technological, ecological and political utopia. It includes the counter design proposals of Victor Papanek and the anti-design polemics of Global Tools; the radical architectural visions of Archigram, Superstudio, Haus Rucker Co and ONYX; the media-based installations of Ken Isaacs, Joan Hills and Mark Boyle and Helio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida; the experimental films of Jordan Belson, Bruce Conner and John Whitney; posters and prints by Emory Douglas, Corita Kent and Victor Moscoso; documentation of performances staged by the Diggers and the Cockettes; publications such as Oz Magazine and The Whole Earth Catalog and books by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller; and much, much more. While the turbulent social history of the 1960s is well known, its cultural production remains comparatively under-examined. In this substantial volume, scholars explore a range of practices such as radical architectural and anti-design movements emerging in Europe and North America; the print revolution in the experimental graphic design of books, posters and magazines; and new forms of cultural practice that merged street theater and radical politics. Through a profusion of illustrations, interviews with figures including Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan of USCO, Gunther Zamp Kelp of Haus Rucker Co, Ken Isaacs, Ron Williams and Woody Rainey of ONYX, Franco Raggi of Global Tools, Tony Martin, Clark Richert and Richard Kallweit of Drop City, and new scholarly writings, this book explores the hybrid conjunction of the countercultural ethos and the modernist desire to fuse art and life.

"This book explores the ways in which real buildings have resulted from visionary ideas, and assesses the extent to which these buildings have changed the way people live. In three sections, the editors Stephen Coates and Alex Stetter have arranged key texts together with a selection of projects which illustrate the ideas, and the built realities which followed on from them." "In the first part, Hilary French explores the development of communitarian ideas, and the ways in which utopian thinking has generated new ideas for housing. The second section, with a major text by Joe Kerr, argues that the supposedly ideal housing devised by the proponents of Garden Cities has been Disneyfied and sold to wealthy Americans in a bizarre subversion of the American Dream. In the third section, Francois Penz and Maureen Thomas explain the influence of film on the development of visionary architecture, arguing that unbuilt projects have been just as important as those realised in three dimensions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The free love Oneida Community, founded in New York state during the turbulent decades before the Civil War, practiced an extraordinary system of complex marriage as part of its sustained experiment in creating the kingdom of heaven on earth. For more than thirty years, two hundred adult members considered themselves heterosexually married to the entire community rather than to a single monogamous partner. Free Love in Utopia provides the first in-depth account of how complex marriage was introduced among previously monogamous or single Oneida Community members. Bringing together vivid, firsthand writings by members of the community - including personal correspondence, memoranda on spiritual and material concerns, and official pronouncements - this volume portrays daily life in Oneida and the deep religious commitment that permeated every aspect of it. It also presents a complex portrait of the community's founder, John Humphrey Noyes, who demanded not only complete religious loyalty from his followers but also minute control over their sexual lives. almost forced it to disband in 1852 - and the critical behind-the-scenes work of Noyes's second-in-command, John L. Miller. Most important, Free Love in Utopia describes in detail how Oneida's enlarged family was created and how its unorthodox practices affected its members. Key selections from a large collection of primary documents detailing Oneida's early years were compiled by George Wallingford Noyes, nephew of the founder. The present volume, astutely edited and introduced by noted communitarian scholar Lawrence Foster, marks the first publication of G. W. Noyes's remarkable manuscript, excerpted from the irreplaceable original documents that were deliberately burned after his death. The volume also reproduces Oneida's First Annual Report, which contains the sexual manifesto that underlay the community. George Wallingford Noyes (1870-1941) was a nephew of Oneida Community founder John Humphrey Noyes and the author of The Religious Experience of John Humphrey Noyes, Founder of the Oneida Community and John Humphrey Noyes: The Putney Community.

A major new volume that explores and assesses the phenomenon of the contemporary metropolis. With building space throughout the world at a premium and environmentally-sound development of tremendous importance to the future of the planet, Instant Cities looks ahead to creative, forward-thinking and possibly fanciful notions of the city such as biospheres, space stations and virtual realities. Touching on the historical context of humanity's earliest settlements in the ancient world, Instant Cities focuses on the development of the concept of the city and how it has been expanded to include sites from shopping malls to prisons, as well as various 'micro' communities within society. Today, over 60 per cent of the worlds' population live in cities which means that it is crucial that we comprehend the urban phenomenon, in order to adapt, develop and plan for the future and to fully understand contemporary society. Instant Cities analyses the current stratospheric rise of the city, looking at global megacities from the first to the third world, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, Milton Keynes in the UK, Lakewood, CA, Brasilia and its satellite towns, Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, and Pudong, Shanghai.

The 50th Anniversary Edition of the Lord of the Flies is the volume that every fan of this classic book will have to own! Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both students and literary critics who compared it to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in its influence on modern thought and literature. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies has established itself as a true classic. And now readers can own it in a beautifully designed hardcover edition worthy of its stature.

This is a fully revised edition of one of the most successful volumes in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series. Incorporating extensive updates to the editorial apparatus, including the introduction, suggestions for further reading, and footnotes, this third edition of More's Utopia has been comprehensively re-worked to take into account scholarship published since the second edition in 2002. The vivid and engaging translation of the work itself by Robert M. Adams includes all the ancillary materials by More's fellow humanists that, added to the book at his own request, collectively constitute the first and best interpretive guide to Utopia. Unlike other teaching editions of Utopia, this edition keeps interpretive commentary - whether editorial annotations or the many pungent marginal glosses that are an especially attractive part of the humanist ancillary materials - on the page they illuminate instead of relegating them to endnotes, and provides students with a uniquely full and accessible experience of More's perennially fascinating masterpiece.

Since 1972 the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a loosely organized and anarchistic nomadic community, has been holding large gatherings in remote forests to pray for world peace and create a model of a functioning utopian society. Michael I. Niman's People of the Rainbow, originally published in 1997, was the first comprehensive study of this countercultural group and its eclectic philosophy of environmentalism, feminism, peace activism, group sharing, libertarianism, and consensus government. It is a book yet to be superseded. This second edition of Niman's compelling and insightful work brings the Rainbow story up to date with a new introduction and two extensive new epilogues. While the big annual Rainbow "Gatherings" have drawn fewer numbers in recent years, Niman notes, the Rainbow ethos has in many ways migrated to the mainstream, as Rainbow notions about alternative medicine and environmental sustainability, for example, have gathered wider acceptance and influenced the national dialogue. Meanwhile, Rainbow movements in other regions, from Eastern Europe and the Middle East to Asia and Australia, are thriving. In addition to addressing changes within the Rainbow Family and its complex relationship to "Babylon" (what Rainbows call mainstream culture), the book's new material explores the growing harassment Rainbows now face from U.S. law enforcement agencies-- especially those associated with the National Forest Service. As Niman contends, this particular saga of a U.S. bureaucracy at war with its own citizens is a subplot in the larger--and disturbing--story of how the relationship between Americans and their government has changed during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In its nuanced portrait of an intriguing subculture, its successes, and its limitations, People of the Rainbow remains a significant contribution to the study of utopian communities in the United States and their ongoing legacy. Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and media studies in the Communication Department at Buffalo State College in New York. For additional resources related to this new edition, see http://buffalostate.edu/peopleoftherainbow.

In May 1904, the residents of Halcyon--a small utopian community on California's central coast--invited their neighbors to attend the grand opening of the Halcyon Hotel and Sanatorium. As part of the entertainment, guests were encouraged to have their hands X-rayed. For the founders and members of Halcyon, the X-ray was a demonstration of mysterious spiritual forces made practical to human beings. Radiance from Halcyon is the story not only of the community but also of its uniquely inventive members' contributions to religion and science. The new synthesis of religion and science attempted by Theosophy laid the foundation for advances produced by the children of the founding members, including microwave technology and atomic spectral analysis. Paul Eli Ivey's narrative starts in the 1890s in Syracuse, New York, with the rising of the Temple of the People, a splinter group of the theosophical movement. After developing its ideals for an agricultural and artisanal community, the Temple purchased land in California and in 1903 began to live its dream there. In addition to an intriguing account of how a little-known utopian religious community profoundly influenced modern science, Ivey offers a wide-ranging cultural history, encompassing Theosophy, novel healing modalities, esoteric architecture, Native American concepts of community, socialist utopias, and innovative modern music.

Une cité industrielle, étude pour la construction des villes [par] Tony Garnier ... Publication info: Paris, C. Massin & cie [1932] Physical description: 2 v. plates (part. col., part fold.) plans (part fold.) 34 x 43 cm. General note: On cover: Deuxième édition. General note: Issued in portfolio. Subject: City planning

The whole earth / Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm Franke -- Earthrise and the disappearance of the outside / Anselm Franke -- Pop music and the counterculture / Diedrich Diederichsen -- Visual essay. Universalism -- The politics of the whole / Fred Turner -- Whole earths, 1968-1980 / Norman M. Klein -- Navigating in and with the system / Sabeth Buchmann -- Visual essay. Frontier : at the Pacific wall -- Plan the planet / John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Territorial Agency -- From here to California / Laurence A. Rickels -- Visual essay. Whole systems -- A thousand ecologies / Erich Hörl -- The limit of limitlessness / Eva Meyer -- Visual essay. Boundless interior -- "After we knew that the Earth was a sphere" / Flora Lysen -- Medium earth / Kodwo Eshun -- Visual essay. Apocalyse, Babylon, simulation -- On the Californian : Utopia, ideology / Maurizio Lazzarato -- The power of information / Mercedes Bunz -- Visual essay. Self incorporated ; Networks and the long boom -- Visual essay. The earth is not whole -- Musical stations of the counterculture.

Co-ops in capitalist and communist nations are assessed for strengths and drawbacks. A fascinating look at co-operative forms as diverse as the kibbutz in Israel, the Kolkhoz of the former Soviet Union, the Basque co-ops in Spain, and the Hutterite communities of Western Canada. "A fascinating social history of co-operatives, from monastery to commune."--Choice

The perennial quest for a better society has, all too often, ended in disappointment, enforced conformity and even terror, yet at other times utopian vision has created a good place in which to live.

Scarsdale, New York, is a small community with a large reputation. Long before it had gained general recognition as a source of fad diets and the presumed site of sensational murders, it was well-known in upper-middle-class circles for the rigor of its zoning, the excellence of its schools, the splendor of its houses, and the wealth of its residents. Indeed, Scarsdale is, what one observer has called, a sort of utopia a capitalistic version of the ideal community. In this clear and well-written study, Professor Carol O Connor explains how Scarsdale came to be the classic rich suburb. Using a wide range of sources from local newspapers, to village and school board records, to real estate deeds and census tracts she shows how its residents have invested time, effort, and their own tax dollars in making Scarsdale a wealthy, attractive, convenient community. She also discusses the question of who rules in Scarsdale and examines one group, its domestic servants, who, at least in the past, have played an important but invisible role. Professor O Connor analyzes the reaction of residents to national events, from their unquestioning nationalism in the First World War to the deep divisiveness of the Vietnam era. What emerges in these pages is not simply a chronicle of what occurred in Scarsdale, but an insightful perspective on many national trends of the twentieth century."

"In The Plot of the Future, Dragan Klaic charts the many ways in which European and American playwrights have imagined the future in their dramatic works. Klaic argues that both idealized and nightmarish assessments of the future - utopias and dystopias - form a thematic corpus in modern drama, replete with their own conventionalized concerns and predictive scenarios." "The study begins by tracing the idea of the utopia as it has developed in Greek, Judaic, and Christian ideology and classical dramatic traditions, showing how the idea of a "dystopia" came to dominate in twentieth-century European and American plays. The author pays special attention to Central and Eastern European playwrights (Brusiov, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Capek, Rosewicz, Havel), but also demonstrates how the apocalyptic prophecy figures in the Western European and American plays of Kaiser, Artaud, Kopt, Shepard, Beckett, Weiss, Tardieu, Stoppard, Bond, Brenton, and others. These dystopian plays, argues Klaic, appear in a variety of genres and employ different authorial strategies, but are linked by their combative, polemical impulses." "The Plot of the Future's forward-looking topic, previously unexamined in the dramatic sphere, maintains its relevance in an age of increasing technological advancement. It will interest teachers and students of modern drama with its timely perspective on European theater and will also appeal to those in the social sciences who study utopian theories."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

An insightful look at the long tradition of communal societies in the United States from colonial times to the present, examining their ideological foundations, daily life, and relationships to mainstream American society. * 40 entries on specific utopian communal movements in American history, from the Puritans to the Amish to single-tax movement communities * 45 entries on special topics related to utopian life, including socialism, Bible-based communism, family roles, and leadership * 25 entries on important figures, including Robert Owen and Eberhard Arnold, and events such as the Branch Davidian disaster * A comparative chronology detailing the dates of existence of the utopias covered * Bibliographical listings with each entry, leading to further investigations in print and online

Utopia. New Jersey. For most people--even the most satisfied New Jersey residents--these words hardly belong in the same sentence. Yet, unbeknown to many, history shows that the state has been a favorite location for utopian experiments for more than a century. Thanks to its location between New York and Philadelphia and its affordable land, it became an ideal proving ground where philosophical and philanthropical organizations and individuals could test their utopian theories. In this intriguing look at this little-known side of New Jersey, Perdita Buchan explores eight of these communities. Adopting a wide definition of the term utopia--broadening it to include experimental living arrangements with a variety of missions--Buchan explains that what the founders of each of these colonies had in common was the goal of improving life, at least as they saw it. In every other way, the communities varied greatly, ranging from a cooperative colony in Englewood founded by Upton Sinclair, to an anarchist village in Piscataway centered on an educational experiment, to the fascinating Physical Culture City in Spotswood, where drugs, tobacco, and corsets were banned, but where nudity was widespread. Despite their grand intentions, all but one of the utopias--a single-tax colony in Berkeley Heights--failed to survive. But Buchan shows how each of them left a legacy of much more than the buildings or street names that remain today--legacies that are inspiring, surprising, and often outright quirky.

This first book length study of the Ruskin Colonies shows how several hundred utopian socialists gathered as a cooperative community in Tennessee and Georgia in the late nineteenth century.

Marina Leslie draws on three important early modern utopian texts--Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World Called the Blazing World--as a means of exploring models for historical transformation and of addressing the relationship of literature and history in contemporary critical practice. While the genre of utopian texts is a fertile terrain for historicist readings, Leslie demonstrates that utopia provides unstable ground for charting out the relation of literary text to historical context. In particular, she examines the ways that both Marxist and new historicist critics have taken the literary utopia not simply as one form among many available for reading historically but as a privileged form or methodological paradigm. Rather than approach utopia by mapping out a fixed set of formal features, or by tracing the development of the genre, Leslie elaborates a history of utopia as critical practice. Moreover, by taking every reading of utopia to be as historically symptomatic as the literary production it assesses, her book integrates readings of these three English Renaissance utopias with an analysis of the history and politics of reading utopia. Throughout, Leslie considers utopia as a fictional enactment of historical process and method. In her view, these early modern utopian constructions of history relate very closely to and impinge upon the narrative structures of history assumed by critical theory today.

This is a guidebook to 20 of America's 19th-centiry utopian communities, from the buildings and furnishings of Hancock Shaker Village to the gardens at Old Salem which reflect the country's long-standing fascination with idyllic societies isolated the rest of humanity.

Arguing that 'utopian' is frequently used as a pejorative term used to discredit whatever it describes, this title describes the positive contributions of the utopian tradition to theories of society and especially stresses the important contribution of socialism to the history of utopian thought.

"Decades before the communes of the sixties, nineteenth-century radicals set up isolated colonies where they hoped to insulate themselves from a corrupt mainstream America. Throughout the country experimental utopian settlements promised to fulfill the lives of ordinary citizens through abundance, equality, and free education. Utopian Episodes tells why these early, freethinking rebels could never fully achieve their goals, but how their legacy has become an integral part of today's movement for social reform." "Seymour Kesten focuses on three of the most renowned colonies: New-Harmony, Indiana; Brook Farm, Massachusetts; and Icarian Communities in Iowa and Illinois. Many more experimental groups are also discussed, including Alphadelphia in Michigan, Fruitlands and Hopedale in Massachusetts, Ohio Phalanx, and La Reunion (now Dallas, Texas)." "Unlike other studies on similar groups, Kesten's book gives us a unique insider's view into the day-to-day lives of these American radicals and thus provides a study of the human spirit. He lets us see utopian life through the eyes of those who knew it firsthand. A look at individuals' activities, work, dress, and food brings us into the realm of their souls. He draws on rare memoirs and early accounts (some published here for the first time) by well-known participants, including A. Bronson Alcott, Horace Greeley, and George Ripley, as well as relatively unknown colonists, such as Albert Brisbane, John Dwight, Elijah Grant, and Amelia Russell." "The book spans the rebirth of an intellectual movement and explores the newspapers, literature, poetry, and music of its social consciousness. Education for the masses was the essence of the utopian process, for it alone, they believed, would regenerate a civic-minded, compassionate society. Ultimately, they would eradicate evil, which was the goal of every colony."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The United States is the only modern nation in which communes have continuously existed for the past two hundred years. This definitive history of communes in America examines the major factors that have supported the existence and growth of communes throughout American history. The most impressive survey of the communal experience since the works of Noyes and Nordhoff, it is informed by a deep respect for the human subjects and organizational forms of American communes. The findings in the analytical chapters are of considerably theoretical import beyond the historical narrative. Oved details the founding, growth, development, and sometimes failure of alternative societies from 1735 to 1939: Icaria, Ephrata, Oneida, Shaker, religious, secular, and socialist communes. Extensive reference material cited will assure this work a special place in the archives of the literature on communes.

The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.