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Location: Bowdoin / Sarah F. McMahon / Courses / hist012 / readingguide

History

History 12. Utopia: Intentional Communities in America, 1630-1997

Reading Guide and Electronic Reserve Reading Links

Week 1
- Introduction
- Utopian Communities—Intentional Communities
Week 2
- Utopian Visions: Revising Community, Family, Gender Roles
- Early Utopian Visions and Experiments
Week 3
- Millennialists and Radical German Pietists: The Rappites of Harmony and the Separatists of Zoar
- The Community of True Inspiration at Amana
Week 4
- Mother Ann Lee and The Evolution of Shaker Beliefs and Theology
- Shakers: Revising Community, Family and Gender Roles
Week 5
- Secular Communities: Robert Owen and New Harmony
- Secular Communities: Fourierism and “Communitarian Socialism”
Week 6
- Fall Break
- New England: Transcendentalists at Brook Farm
Week 7
- John Humphrey Noyes And Oneida
- Oneida: Practice and Experience
Week 8
- Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon
- Mormons: Doctrine and Experience
Week 9
- Library Tour
- The End of Charles Nordhoff’s 1874 Tour and his comparative view and review of communistic efforts in the United states
Week 10
- Jewish Agricultural Communes and Cooperative Farming
- Utopian Visions in Fiction
Week 11
- Social Gospel, Theosophy, Socialists, and Secular Alternatives
- Counterculture (1960s) and Intentional Communities (1970s)
Week 12
- Visionary Communities: 1980s
- Thanksgiving Break
Week 14
- Work-in-Progress Reports: Monday, Wednesday, Friday
Week 14
- 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