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.

Despite its widespread popularity in antebellum America, phrenology has rarely been taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon. Charles Colbert seeks to redress this neglect by demonstrating the important contributions the theory made to artistic developmen

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.

In her 1855 fictionalized autobiography, Mary Gove Nichols told the story of her emancipation from her first unhappy marriage, during which her husband controlled her body, her labor, and her daughter. Rather than the more familiar metaphor of prostitution, Nichols used adultery to define loveless marriages as a betrayal of the self, a consequence far more serious than the violation of a legal contract. Nichols was not alone. In Unfaithful, Carol Faulkner places this view of adultery at the center of nineteenth-century efforts to redefine marriage as a voluntary relationship in which love alone determined fidelity. After the Revolution, Americans understood adultery as a sin against God and a crime against the people. A betrayal of marriage vows, adultery was a cause for divorce in most states as well as a basis for civil suits. Faulkner depicts an array of nineteenth-century social reformers who challenged the restrictive legal institution of marriage, redefining adultery as a matter of individual choice and love. She traces the beginning of this redefinition of adultery to the evangelical ferment of the 1830s and 1840s, when perfectionists like John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, concluded that marriage obstructed the individual's relationship to God. In the 1840s and 1850s, spiritualist, feminist, and free love critics of marriage fueled a growing debate over adultery and marriage by emphasizing true love and consent. After the Civil War, activists turned the act of adultery into a form of civil disobedience, culminating in Victoria Woodhull's publicly charging the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with marital infidelity. Unfaithful explores how nineteenth-century reformers mobilized both the metaphor and the act of adultery to redefine marriage between 1830 and 1880 and the ways in which their criticisms of the legal institution contributed to a larger transformation of marital and gender relations that continues to this day.

In the mid-nineteenth century successive cultural Bohemias were proclaimed in Paris, London, New York, and Melbourne. Focusing on networks and borders as the central modes of analysis, this book charts for the first time Bohemia’s cross-Channel, transatlantic, and trans-Pacific migrations, locating its creative expressions and social practices within a global context of ideas and action. Though the story of Parisian Bohemia has been comprehensively told, much less is known of its Anglophone translations. The Bohemian Republic offers a radical reinterpretation of the phenomenon, as the neglected lives and works of British, Irish, American, and Australian Bohemians are reassessed, the transnational networks of Bohemia are rediscovered, the presence and influence of women in Bohemia is reclaimed, and Bohemia’s relationship with the marketplace is reconsidered. Bohemia emerges as a marginal network which exerted a paradoxically powerful influence on the development of popular culture, in the vanguard of material, social and aesthetic innovations in literature, art, journalism, and theatre. Underpinned by extensive and original archival research, the book repopulates the concept of Bohemianism with layers of the networked voices, expressions, ideas, people, places, and practices that made up its constituent social, imagined, and interpretive communities. The reader is brought closer than ever to the heart of Bohemia, a shadowy world inhabited by the rebels of the mid-nineteenth century.

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.

Historians and biographers have struggled to reconcile these seemingly contradictory tendencies. Tuchinsky's history of the Tribune, by placing the newspaper and its ideology squarely within the political, economic, and intellectual climate of Civil War-era America, illustrates the connection between socialist reform and mainstream political thought. It was democratic socialism--favoring free labor, and bridging the divide between individualism and collectivism--that allowed Greeley's Tribune to forge a coalition of such disparate elements as the old Whigs, new Free Soil men, labor, and staunch abolitionists. This progressive coalition helped ensure the political success of the Republican Party. Indeed, even in 1860, proslavery ideologue George Fitzhugh referred to socialism as Greeley's "lost book"--The overlooked but crucial source of the Tribune's and, by extension, the Republican Party's antagonism toward slavery and its more general free labor ideology.