Around the turn of the century, the Salvation Army founded three intentional communities in Colorado, Ohio, and California in an effort to relieve urban poverty that followed in the wake of rapid industrialization. Conceived by founder William Booth, the project was organized by his son-in-law Frederick Booth-Tucker, commander of the Salvation Army in the United States. Clark Spence's account of this back-to-the-land experiment is at once agricultural, social, religious, and even political history enacted on both sides of the Atlantic: in the irrigated beet and alfalfa fields where small farmers fought hoppers, drought, or saline soil in an effort to wrest a living from their twenty acres; at the fund-raising meetings where the Booth-Tuckers garnered both applause and dollars from business leaders; and in the halls of Congress and Parliament where Army supporters argued in vain for government subsidies. - Jacket flap.

Reproduction of the original: In Darkest England and the Way out by General William Booth

Modern colonization is generally defined as a process by which a state settles and dominates a foreign land and people. This book argues that through the nineteenth and into the first half of the twentieth centuries, thousands of domestic colonies were proposed and/or created by governments and civil society organizations for fellow citizens as opposed to foreigners and within their own borders rather than overseas. Such colonies sought to solve every social problem arising within industrializing and urbanizing states. Domestic Colonies argues that colonization ought to be seen during this period as a domestic policy designed to solve social problems at home as well as foreign policy designed to expand imperial power. Three kind of domestic colonies are analysed in this book: labour colonies for the idle poor, farm colonies for the mentally ill and disabled, and utopian colonies for racial, religious, and political minorities. All of them were justified by an ideology of colonialism that argued if people were segregated in colonies located on empty land and engaged in agrarian labour, this would improve both the people and the land. Key domestic colonialists analysed in this book include Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Peter Kropotkin, Robert Owen, and Booker T. Washington. The turn inward to colony thus requires us to rethink the meaning and scope of colonization and colonialism in modern political theory and practice.

For a number of years the three industries of seed growing, canning, and trucking, through their national organizations, have discussed the need for accurate descriptions of the important varieties in the crop plants with which they are concerned.