History

History 1014. Utopia: Intentional Communities in America, 1630-1997

Reading Guide and Electronic Reserve Reading Links

• Week 1
  • Introduction
• Week 2
  • Utopian Communities—Intentional Communities
  • Utopian Visions:  Revising Community, Family, Gender Roles
• Week 3
  • Early Utopian Visions and Experiments
  • Millennialists and Radical German Pietists:  The Rappites of Harmony and the Separatists of Zoar
• Week 4
  • The Community of True Inspiration at Amana
  • Mother Ann Lee and The Evolution of Shaker Beliefs and Theology
• Week 5
  • Shakers:  Revising Community, Family and Gender Roles
  • Secular Communities:  Robert Owen and New Harmony
• Week 6
  • Secular Communities:  Fourierism and “Communitarian Socialism”
  • New England:  Transcendentalism at Brook Farm
• Week 7
  • Fall Break
  • Virtual Library Tour with Barbara Levergood
• Week 8
  • Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon
  • Mormons:  Doctrine and Experience
• Week 9
  • John Humphrey Noyes And Oneida
  • Oneida:  Practice and Experience
• Note: Eastern Daylight Savings Time ends; return to EST
• Week 10
  • The End of Charles Nordhoff’s 1874 Tour and his comparative view and review of communistic efforts in the United states
  • Individual Conferences: Discuss research paper projects
• Week 11
  • Utopian Visions in Fiction
  • Jewish Agricultural Communes and Cooperative Farming
• Week 12
  • Theosophical Communities and Socialist Utopias in California
  • Counterculture (1960s) and Intentional Communities (1970s)
• Week 13
  • Visionary Communities:  1980s
  • Thanksgiving Break
• Week 14
  • Individual Conferences
  • Work-in-Progress Reports
• Week 15
  • From Utopia To Dystopia:  People’s Temple [Jonestown, Guyana, November 1978];  Branch Davidians [Waco, Texas, April 1993];  Heaven’s Gate [San Diego, California, March 1997]
  • Conclusion, or How to Design a Utopian Community