The industrial city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was originally settled in colonial times by Moravians from southeastern Germany. These religious utopians were noted for urban planning. In this large-format, richly illustrated volume, historian William Murtagh compares more than 20 Bethlehem landmarks with other Moravian communities for a fascinating glimpse into a part of America's past.

Incorporating more than 3,000 illustrations, Kornwolf's work conveys the full range of the colonial encounter with the continent's geography, from the high forms of architecture through formal landscape design and town planning. From these pages emerge the fine arts of environmental design, an understanding of the political and economic events that helped to determine settlement in North America, an appreciation of the various architectural and landscape forms that the settlers created, and an awareness of the diversity of the continent's geography and its peoples. Considering the humblest buildings along with the mansions of the wealthy and powerful, public buildings, forts, and churches, Kornwolf captures the true dynamism and diversity of colonial communities - their rivalries and frictions, their outlooks and attitudes - as they extended their hold on the land.

A fascinating exploration of the urbanism at the heart of Utopian thinking The vision of Utopia obsessed the nineteenth-century mind, shaping art, literature, and especially town planning. In City of Refuge, Michael Lewis takes readers across centuries and continents to show how Utopian town planning produced a distinctive type of settlement characterized by its square plan, collective ownership of properties, and communal dormitories. Some of these settlements were sanctuaries from religious persecution, like those of the German Rappites, French Huguenots, and American Shakers, while others were sanctuaries from the Industrial Revolution, like those imagined by Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and other Utopian visionaries. Because of their differences in ideology and theology, these settlements have traditionally been viewed separately, but Lewis shows how they are part of a continuous intellectual tradition that stretches from the early Protestant Reformation into modern times. Through close readings of architectural plans and archival documents, many previously unpublished, he shows the network of connections between these seemingly disparate Utopian settlements—including even such well-known town plans as those of New Haven and Philadelphia. The most remarkable aspect of the city of refuge is the inventive way it fused its eclectic sources, ranging from the encampments of the ancient Israelites as described in the Bible to the detailed social program of Thomas More's Utopia to modern thought about education, science, and technology. Delving into the historical evolution and antecedents of Utopian towns and cities, City of Refuge alters notions of what a Utopian community can and should be.

Genadendal is blessed with a rich tangible and intangible heritage. It boasts of vernacular architecture, musical traditions and language and a long tradition of humanitarian efforts and political struggle. It is with pleasure that we learned about the completion of the restoration project due to the assistance of the Dutch Government. The improvements that were effected provided the inhabitants with infrastructure to improve the quality of their lives.

The Moravians who settled Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1742 were committed to a society centered around missionary work. To free their missionaries from the need to earn a living, they formed a communal economic organization in which all workers gave their labor to the community in exchange for food, shelter, and clothing. To encourage each individual's religious development, family ties were deemphasized and members of the same sex, marital status, and age slept, worked, and worshipped together. After 20 years, the worldwide Moravian Church, facing a financial crisis, ordered Bethlehem to reorganize into a traditional community of nuclear families. It was hoped that, under this more conventional arrangement, Bethlehem could be expected to help pay the huge debts of the parent church. In The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem, Beverly Prior Smaby traces the effects of this change on Bethlehem's Moravians, demonstrating how it altered even the most intimate aspects of their lives. She analyzes the unusually accurate marriage, birth, death, migration, and census records to assess the demographic response to institutional change. She traces change in cultural norms through unique technical analyses of biographies which were read at a variety of Moravian gatherings. Within 100 years, Smaby asserts, Bethlehem grew from an egalitarian communal society of symbolic Brothers and Sisters into a privatized community of socially stratified families whose cultural ideal was no longer religious service but usefulness to family and society. Scholars of American history and folk life will find this book a valuable addition to literature on community history, social change, and historical methods. Church historians will benefit from its in-depth study of secularization on a personal level, and it will be of keen interest to members of the Moravian Church.

Looking at the crossroads between heritage and religion through the case study of Moravian Christiansfeld, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in July 2015, this anthology reaches back to the eighteenth century when the church settlement was founded, examines its legacy within Danish culture and modern society, and brings this history into the present and the ongoing heritagization processes. Finally, it explores the consequences of the listing for the everyday life in Christiansfeld and discusses the possible and sustainable futures of a religious community in a World Heritage Site.