American Utopias

Charles Nordhoff

Grandfather of the co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty, writer-editor Charles Nordhoff (1830-1901) wrote American Utopias in 1875. First published under the title The Communistic Societies of the United States, this survey of Utopian communities across l9th-century America is stranger than fiction: One hundred years before hippies and free love, there were hippies and free love. This unabridged reprint provides a fascinating glimpse into the “alternative lifestyles” of a century ago. Nordhoff’s journalistic approach is surprisingly modern: He provides balanced, detailed, first-hand observations of these mostly forgotten social experiments, from the Wallingford Perfectionists and the Separatists of Zoar to the Harmonists, who founded a town called Economy. Most poignant are the Icarians, human hermit crabs who moved into an abandoned Mormon commune called Nauvoo, succeeded where the Mormons had failed, then disintegrated after their leader decided that the best way to run a communistic society was under a dictatorship. A time capsule buried deep in our own back yard, American Utopias is a strange and memorable record of daily life as lived according to vanished religions, philosophies and cults of personality. JAB

Publisher: Berkshire House
Paperback: 449 pages
Illustrated