California's Utopian Colonies PDF Download

Author: Robert V. Hine
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520048850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Author: Robert V. Hine
Publisher: Course Technology
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Author: Iain Boal
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1604867167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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In the shadow of the Vietnam War, a significant part of an entire generation refused their assigned roles in the American century. Some took their revolutionary politics to the streets, others decided simply to turn away, seeking to build another world together, outside the state and the market. West of Eden charts the remarkable flowering of communalism in the 1960s and ’70s, fueled by a radical rejection of the Cold War corporate deal, utopian visions of a peaceful green planet, the new technologies of sound and light, and the ancient arts of ecstatic release. The book focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area and its hinterlands, which have long been creative spaces for social experiment. Haight-Ashbury’s gift economy—its free clinic, concerts, and street theatre—and Berkeley’s liberated zones—Sproul Plaza, Telegraph Avenue, and People’s Park—were embedded in a wider network of producer and consumer co-ops, food conspiracies, and collective schemes. Using memoir and flashbacks, oral history and archival sources, West of Eden explores the deep historical roots and the enduring, though often disavowed, legacies of the extraordinary pulse of radical energies that generated forms of collective life beyond the nuclear family and the world of private consumption, including the contradictions evident in such figures as the guru/predator or the hippie/entrepreneur. There are vivid portraits of life on the rural communes of Mendocino and Sonoma, and essays on the Black Panther communal households in Oakland, the latter-day Diggers of San Francisco, the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, the pioneers of live/work space for artists, and the Bucky dome as the iconic architectural form of the sixties. Due to the prevailing amnesia—partly imposed by official narratives, partly self-imposed in the aftermath of defeat—West of Eden is not only a necessary act of reclamation, helping to record the unwritten stories of the motley generation of communards and antinomians now passing, but is also intended as an offering to the coming generation who will find here, in the rubble of the twentieth century, a past they can use—indeed one they will need—in the passage from the privations of commodity capitalism to an ample life in common.

Author: Randall J. Soland
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467137227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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The Prairie State became a crucial testing ground for the grand American thought experiment on how a society should be constructed. Between 1839 and 1901, six different utopian communities chose Illinois as the laboratory and sanctuary to elevate their ideals into reality. The Mormons and the Icarians selected Nauvoo. The Janssonists picked Bishop Hill. The Fourierists settled on the north edge of Loami. The employees of the Pullman Railroad Car Company naturally resided in Pullman, and the Dowietes put down roots in Zion. Three were religious and the others secular. All possessed charismatic leaders and dramatic stories that drew attention from across the globe. Randy Soland examines the relationship between these havens and their legacies.

Author: Donald E. Pitzer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080789897X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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From the Shakers to the Branch Davidians, America's communal utopians have captured the popular imagination. Seventeen original essays here demonstrate the relevance of such groups to the mainstream of American social, religious, and economic life. The contributors examine the beliefs and practices of the most prominent utopian communities founded before 1965, including the long-overlooked Catholic monastic communities and Jewish agricultural colonies. Also featured are the Ephrata Baptists, Moravians, Shakers, Harmonists, Hutterites, Inspirationists of Amana, Mormons, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, Janssonists, Theosophists, Cyrus Teed's Koreshans, and Father Divine's Peace Mission. Based on a new conceptual framework known as developmental communalism, the book examines these utopian movements throughout the course of their development--before, during, and after their communal period. Each chapter includes a brief chronology, giving basic information about the group discussed. An appendix presents the most complete list of American utopian communities ever published. The contributors are Jonathan G. Andelson, Karl J. R. Arndt, Pearl W. Bartelt, Priscilla J. Brewer, Donald F. Durnbaugh, Lawrence Foster, Carl J. Guarneri, Robert V. Hine, Gertrude E. Huntington, James E. Landing, Dean L. May, Lawrence J. McCrank, J. Gordon Melton, Donald E. Pitzer, Robert P. Sutton, Jon Wagner, and Robert S. Weisbrot.

Author: Errol Wayne Stevens
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806177489
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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During the Great Depression, the Los Angeles area was rife with radical movements. Although many observers thought their ideas unworkable, even dangerous, Southern Californians voted for them by the tens of thousands. This book asks why. To find answers, author Errol Wayne Stevens takes readers through the history of such movements as the Utopian Society, Dr. Francis Townsend’s old-age revolving pension plan, Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California gubernatorial campaign, and Retirement Life Payments, known as Ham and Eggs. The book also examines the Los Angeles Communists and the free-market capitalists, both quasi-religious movements with large followings, as well as the self-help cooperatives, a spontaneous upsurge of neighbors who came together to help one another in a time of desperate need. As to these movements’ extraordinary popularity, Stevens finds the standard explanations unpersuasive. He debunks the idea that naïve, unsophisticated Southern Californians, living aimless, empty lives, suffering from ennui, and longing for community, readily supported charismatic leaders who promised a way out of the Great Depression. In Stevens’s telling, Southern Californians supported these movements because they spoke to their needs. Fearful or desperate, some elderly and hopeless, Angelenos cared less about the programs’ feasibility than about their promise of relief. As one Ham and Eggs supporter succinctly explained: “It may be a racket and maybe it won’t work more than a couple of weeks, but that will be $60 more than I ever got before for one vote.” Finding parallels between past and present, readers might wonder why people remain loyal to programs that prove unrealistic, or why voters continue to support leaders who reveal, time and again, their ignorance or dishonesty. In its illumination of a troubled time in American history not so long ago, this book offers insight into our own.

Author: Chris Jennings
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812983890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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For readers of Jill Lepore, Joseph J. Ellis, and Tony Horwitz comes a lively, thought-provoking intellectual history of the golden age of American utopianism—and the bold, revolutionary, and eccentric visions for the future put forward by five of history’s most influential utopian movements. In the wake of the Enlightenment and the onset of industrialism, a generation of dreamers took it upon themselves to confront the messiness and injustice of a rapidly changing world. To our eyes, the utopian communities that took root in America in the nineteenth century may seem ambitious to the point of delusion, but they attracted members willing to dedicate their lives to creating a new social order and to asking the bold question What should the future look like? In Paradise Now, Chris Jennings tells the story of five interrelated utopian movements, revealing their relevance both to their time and to our own. Here is Mother Ann Lee, the prophet of the Shakers, who grew up in newly industrialized Manchester, England—and would come to build a quiet but fierce religious tradition on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Even as the society she founded spread across the United States, the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen came to the Indiana frontier to build an egalitarian, rationalist utopia he called the New Moral World. A decade later, followers of the French visionary Charles Fourier blanketed America with colonies devoted to inaugurating a new millennium of pleasure and fraternity. Meanwhile, the French radical Étienne Cabet sailed to Texas with hopes of establishing a communist paradise dedicated to ideals that would be echoed in the next century. And in New York’s Oneida Community, a brilliant Vermonter named John Humphrey Noyes set about creating a new society in which the human spirit could finally be perfected in the image of God. Over time, these movements fell apart, and the national mood that had inspired them was drowned out by the dream of westward expansion and the waking nightmare of the Civil War. Their most galvanizing ideas, however, lived on, and their audacity has influenced countless political movements since. Their stories remain an inspiration for everyone who seeks to build a better world, for all who ask, What should the future look like? Praise for Paradise Now “Uncommonly smart and beautifully written . . . a triumph of scholarship and narration: five stand-alone community studies and a coherent, often spellbinding history of the United States during its tumultuous first half-century . . . Although never less than evenhanded, and sometimes deliciously wry, Jennings writes with obvious affection for his subjects. To read Paradise Now is to be dazzled, humbled and occasionally flabbergasted by the amount of energy and talent sacrificed at utopia’s altar.”—The New York Times Book Review “Writing an impartial, respectful account of these philanthropies and follies is no small task, but Mr. Jennings largely pulls it off with insight and aplomb. Indulgently sympathetic to the utopian impulse in general, he tells a good story. His explanations of the various reformist credos are patient, thought-provoking and . . . entertaining.”—The Wall Street Journal “As a tour guide, Jennings is thoughtful, engaging and witty in the right doses. . . . He makes the subject his own with fresh eyes and a crisp narrative, rich with detail. . . . In the end, Jennings writes, the communards’ disregard for the world as it exists sealed their fate. But in revisiting their stories, he makes a compelling case that our present-day ‘deficit of imagination’ could be similarly fated.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Author: Lionel Rolfe
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 098348841X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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This fascinating account of Los Angeles’ buried past tells the story of Job Harriman, a former minister turned union organizer and attorney, who in 1911 was narrowly defeated as mayor of Los Angeles running on the Socialist ticket. Behind his defeat lay an unthinkably brutal, stop-at-nothing campaign headed by Los Angeles’ de facto political boss, General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Harriman’s progressive mayoral campaign represented an epic battle for the future of Los Angeles against the bitterly reactionary forces of Otis and his backers. The authors amply demonstrate that Otis was the victor in this contest, and how that victory explains much about why Los Angeles is the way it is today. "Bread and Hyacinths" follows Harriman through his childhood as an Indiana farm boy, through his formative years as a union organizer to his emergence as a key figure in the pivotal era of American socialism. It eloquently describes his lifelong optimism and determination in the face of poor health, financial woes, and personal and political troubles. Viewed in perspective against the backdrop of a city - and a nation - torn by labor strife and political corruption, Harriman emerges as a crucial, if ultimately marginalized, figure in American political history. Viewed in the light of today's uncertain economy and political unrest, this period of California history can be seen as a disturbing omen of things to come. "Bread and Hyacinths" has been optioned as a motion picture by director Paul Haggis ("Crash", "Billion Dollar Baby", "Flags of Our Fathers"). This brief, useful book illuminates an obscure chapter in the history of Los Angeles and America’s socialist movement...The book also serves as a corrective to the Times’s distorted history of the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony, a socialist community founded by Harriman in Southern Calfornia’s Antelope Valley. – Los Angeles Times This slender but potent book draws us into an early and unfamiliar era of Southern California, when Los Angeles seemed more like Charcoal Alley than Lotusland...[A] fine example of what regional publishing can and ought to be: vigorous, knowing, committed and unafraid, even if a bit eccentric. – Los Angeles Daily News

Author: Dolores Hayden
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262580373
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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From the time of its discovery, the new world was regarded by American settlers as a new Eden and a new Jerusalem. Although individual pioneers' visions of paradise were inevitably corrupted by reality, some determined ideatists carved out enclaves in order to develop collective models of what they believed to be more perfect societies. All such communitarian groups consciously attempted to express their social ideals in their buildings and landscapes; invariably, ideological predispositions can be inferred from a close study of the environments they created. The interplay between ideology and architecture, the social design and the physical design of American utopian communities, is the basis of this remarkable book by Dolores Hayden.At the heart of the book are studies of seven communitarian groups, collectively stretching over nearly two centuries and the full breadth of the American continent-the Shakers of Hancock, Massachusetts; the Mormons of Nauvoo, lllinois; the Fourierists of Phalanx, New Jersey; the Perfectionists of Oneida, New York; the Inspirationists of Amana, Iowa; the Union Colonists of Greeley, Colorado; and the Cooperative Colonists of Llano del Rio, California. Hayden examines each of these groups to see how they coped with three dilemmas that all socialist' societies face: conflicts betweeft authoritarian and participatory processes, between communal and private territory, and between unique and replicable community plans.The book contains over 260 historic and contemporary photographs and drawings which illustrate the communitarian processes of design and building. The drawings range in scale from regional plans showing land ownership, access to transportation, and availability of natural resources, through site plans of communal domains and building plans of dwellings and assembly halls, down to detailed diagrams of furniture configurations. To aid readers in making comparisons, a series of site and building plans drawn at constant scales has been provided for all seven case studies.

Author: Mark Holloway
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Fascinating accounts of the most important and typical American utopian communities include surveys of beliefs and daily life in Shaker, New Harmony, and Brook Farm; the Fourieristic phalanxes; and the Oneida settlements.