San Antonio College Library

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to remove yourself wholly from the bustling, modern world and live in an atmosphere of simplicity and peacefulness? Where your daily activities consist of baking bread, crafting furniture, and singing songs in a place where men and women are true equals? Suzanne Skees found such a place at the Shaker Village in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, where for more than two hundred years men and women have cultivated not...

The Shakers, once a radical religious sect whose members were despised and harassed by their fellow Americans, have in recent years become celebrated--and sentimentalized--for their communal way of life, the simplicity of their worship, their belief in celibacy, pacifism, and equality of the sexes, and not least their superb furniture and handicrafts. This monumental book is the first general history of the Shakers from their origins in eighteenth-century...

An analysis of the Shakers, the Oneida Community and the Bruderhof.

This unique and touching program opens the doors of America's last Shaker compound, where the religious sect's nine surviving members lead lives of equality, fraternity, decency, and-most notably-simplicity. That simplicity is reflected in Shaker furniture and basketry-items which now sell for thousands of dollars at auctions throughout the world. At one antique auction, hucksters peddle Shaker furniture to the rich and famous, as the Shakers ponder...