San Antonio College Library

Traces the history of collective settlements in the United States and compares their organization and purpose with the communes of today.

Utopian communities in American from 1680 to 1880, including the Shakers, New Harmony, Brook Farm, the Fourieristic phalanxes, and the Oneida communities, with accounts of the constitutions, revelations, beliefs, tenets, customs dictated by religious beliefs or social principle, and more.

Here is a surprising photographic survey of communal life in the American West from 1870 to the present. Many of the nearly three hundred photographs assembled here have never before been published. Some were discovered by Paul Kagan among the remains of vanished communities. Others, taken by Kagan himself, depict the present-day ruins of once thriving communes. The communities that these photographs and the accompanying text bring so vividly to life...

"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...

Records man's quest for encounter in a technological society through a discussion of the characteristics and functions of the communal movement in America.

"The utopian socialism of Charles Fourier spread throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was in the United States that it generated the most intense excitement. Carl J. Guarneri traces the American Fourierist movement from its roots in the religious, social, and economic upheavals of the 1830s, through its bold communal experiments of the 1840s, to its lingering twilight after the Civil War. Guarneri demonstrates that Fourierist communitarianism...