The Shakers and Perfectionists succeeded due to their marketable inventions, including clothespins, bear traps, and cutlery. Their aims were admirable, but they suffered from a lack of basic agricultural success. Although they either over- or understressed individuals, none of the groups could grasp the complexity or variety of human desire. Members came from a broad swath of the population, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Dana at the Fourierist Brook Farm. Each group built a small, working prototype community, and each based their group on farm, school, and home, with education and feminine equality paramount. The Industrial Revolution was eliminating the single artisan, and the arrival of factories fed the economic inequality that condemned people to filthy urban environments. The author proffers a number of plausible reasons for the rise of these groups. The Shakers, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, and Perfectionists attracted scores of people who gave up their lives to join others in search of “the dream of utopia.” All bought large tracts of land, promoted collective ownership, and adhered to a structured workday. The looming millennium egged on the leaders of these movements, who sought not a place but a time of peace, equality, and abundance. The many communes established during this time had much in common as they prepared for the second coming. Jennings demonstrates how “no moment in history or place on the globe has been more crowded with utopian longing and utopian experimentation than the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century.”

Chris jennings paradise now