![]() ![]() Their vision of a society dedicated to radical equality and intense collectivism was born in the fever dream of religious revelation and the waking nightmare of early British industrialization. The model for a New World utopia was first laid down by the Shakers, a small sect named for their physically raucous method of worship. Mistakenly sensing that the world was on the brink of transformation, the 19th-century utopians built their tiny societies according to a single criterion: their own shining visions of the future. Those efforts to build a radically new type of society reveal an intellectual impulse that has flowed through the American experiment since day one. ![]() It was a time when the imminence of paradise seemed reasonable to reasonable people.Ä«etween the American Revolution and the Civil War, nearly one hundred utopian colonies were founded in the United States. Countless people on both sides of the Atlantic believed that a new and wondrous society was about to take form in the American wilderness. No place on the globe has been more crowded with utopian longing and utopian experimentation than the United States in the middle of the 19th century. ![]()
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