In the mid 1800s, deep in the Long Island pine barrens, Modem Times was established as an experimental community whose members would not be bound by any government, church, constitution, or bylaws. Never more than 150 strong, set on a plat of only 90 acres, here was a haven for nonconformists. lts currency was words; its religion was discussion; its standard of conduce was unfettered individual freedom. Low Living and High Thinking at Modern Times, New York rescues this model village from obscurity and demonstrates its importance in the history of American communitarianism and social reform, especially in its pursuit of economic justice, women's rights, and free love. The first full-length study of Modem Times, Wunderlich's account offers telling portraits of this small but significant group of reformers, pioneers, freethinkers, and sexual radicals. For 13 years they tested the precepts of the founders of the community, the philosophical anarchists Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews, who advocated the sovereignty of the individual and private, but profitless enterprise. Each person lived as he or she pleased, provided this did not impair the right of another to do the same; and each traded goods and services at cost, rather than market value, enabling cash-poor pioneers co own homesteads. The community championed every kind of reform, from abolitionism, women's rights, and vegetarianism co hydropathy, pacifism, total abstinence, and the bloomer costume. Indifference co marital status and the advocacy of a free-love vanguard contributed to the community's controversial and somewhat illicit reputation. In 1864, seeking to remove themselves from the limelight, Modem Times's remaining settlers renamed the village Brentwood. Wunderlich pieces together the village, person-by-person, by relying on primary sources such as land deeds, census entries, and eyewitness accounts. He also sheds new light on Warren and Andrews, two key figures in the communitarian movement, and discusses at length such important contemporaries as Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols, Robert Owen, John Humphrey Noyes, Horace Greeley, John Stuart Mill, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and George Ripley.

The Encyclopedia of New York State is one of the most complete works on the Empire State to be published in a half-century. In nearly 2,000 pages and 4,000 signed entries, this single volume captures the impressive complexity of New York State as a historic crossroads of people and ideas, as a cradle of abolitionism and feminism, and as an apex of modern urban, suburban, and rural life. The Encyclopedia is packed with fascinating details from fields ranging from sociology and geography to history. Did you know that Manhattan's Lower East Side was once the most populated neighborhood in the world, but Hamilton County in the Adirondacks is the least densely populated county east of the Mississippi; New York is the only state to border both the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean; the Erie Canal opened New York City to rich farmland upstate . . . and to the west. Entries by experts chronicle New York's varied areas, politics, and persuasions with a cornucopia of subjects from environmentalism to higher education to railroads, weaving the state's diverse regions and peoples into one idea of New York State. Lavishly illustrated with 500 photographs and figures, 120 maps, and 140 tables, the Encyclopedia is key to understanding the state's past, present, and future. It is a crucial reference for students, teachers, historians, and business people, for New Yorkers of all persuasions, and for anyone interested in finding out more about New York State.

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. In this rich and engaging narrative, 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.

An examination of women's roles, family relationships, and sexuality in three unorthodox 19th-century communal experiments, with analysis of the implications such systems may have for present-day Americans concerned with the sense of crisis in family life and sex roles.

Written in 1893 by two women from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Unveiling a Parallel is a remarkable precursor of twentieth-century feminist utopian novels like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. Couched as sentimental romance and utopian fantasy, Jones and Merchant's work satirizes nineteenth-century gender roles and discrimination against women, humorously unveiling the absurdities of socially constructed "femaleness" and "maleness." Journeying to Mars, the novel's nameless male narrator discovers a society where women enjoy equality with men. He meets Elodia, a community leader, who drinks excessively, has lovers, and uses drugs. Her behavior confounds his expectations about women's supposedly pious and pure "natures" and reveals that equality, if rooted in a patriarchal culture, is not necessarily a utopian virtue. In contrast, a more perfect state of development has been reached in a second country on Mars, where the narrator learns how unselfishness, nurture, and mutual support can offer viable alternatives to passive, chaste femininity or to greedy, lustful masculinity. By imagining a better world in women's terms and in women's language, Jones and Merchant still speak with vital insight to both women and men today.

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.

Despite the recent proliferation of scholarship on anarchism, very little attention has been paid to the historical and theoretical relationship between anarchism and philosophy. Seeking to fill this void, Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy draws upon the combined expertise of several top scholars to provide a broad thematic overview of the various ways anarchism and philosophy have intersected. Each of its 18 chapters adopts a self-consciously inventive approach to its subject matter, examining anarchism’s relation to other philosophical theories and systems within the Western intellectual tradition as well as specific philosophical topics, subdisciplines and methodological tendencies.