1st Edition

Two Hundred Years of American Communes

By Yaacov Oved Copyright 1988
    516 Pages
    by Routledge

    516 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    1: The Historical Sequence; 1: Communes in the History of the United States; 2: Ephrata and the First Communes in North America; 3: The Shakers: American Religious Communes; 4: Religious Immigrant Communes; 5: Robert Owen and the First Socialist Communes; 6: Fourierist Communitarian Settlements; 7: Oneida: Commune with Complex Marriage; 8: Icaria: The Socialist Immigrant Communes; 9: Victor Considerant and the Fourierists at La Reunion; 10: New Odessa: A Jewish Commune of the Am Olam Group; 11: The Kaweah Cooperative Colony in California; 12: Ruskin: The Communitarian Settlement in Tennessee; 13: Communitarian Settlements and Socialist Parties in Washington State; 14: The Christian Commonwealth in Georgia; 15: Llano de Rio: A Socialist Commune in California and Louisiana; 16: Sunrise and Anarchist Communities; 17: The Hutterites: A Bridge between Past and Present; 2: A Collective Profile in a Comparative Approach; 18: Ideological Principles; 19: Social Activity and Management; 20: Education, Culture, and Rituals; 21: The Family and Women’s Status In the Communes; 22: Economic Assets and Liabilities; 23: Dualistic Relationships with the Outside World; 24: Dissolution of the Communes: Options or Inevitability?; 25: Epilogue

    Biography

    Yaacov Oved