Before coming to the next seminar, please complete the readings for September 3, and then add a comment to this post that responds to ONE of the following questions:
- The people introduced in these readings are strikingly different in many ways and lived in diverse places and time periods. Is there any thing that their communal experiments seem to have in common?
- In our last class, we considered what a future historian might learn about American life in 2014 by studying our plan for a utopian university. Select two of the communities you read about for this week and write a comment that reflects on the same question: what can we learn about the broader culture that produced these communities by noticing what they did (or did not do) in their utopias?
- A perennial question for historians of American radicals and reformers is whether a tradition of American radicalism exists across time. One of the Drop City interviewees spoke for many communalists when he said, "Whatever we were doing, we thought we were inventing it for the first time ever." But other historians have claimed that twentieth- and twenty-first-century utopian communities often recapitulate earlier themes. Do these readings provide any evidence to support one of these two positions?
- Rosabeth Moss Kanter draws a distinction in her book between "religious" communities, "politico-economic" utopias, and "psychosocial" utopias. What characteristics does she ascribe to each, and do these distinctions hold up when applied to specific communities introduced to you in the other readings?
Whenever possible, try to point to specific examples and passages from the readings to support your points. As mentioned in class and on the syllabus, the comments only need to be about 300 to 500 words long. This post itself is about 300 words, so that should help give you an idea about length.
Your comments are due by noon on September 3. Remember that you can use your first name only or a pseudonym if you don’t wish to identify yourself, as long as I know your identity.