| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Religious Communities, 1732–2000. By Robert P. Sutton. (Westport: Praeger, 2003. xii, 184 pp. $69.95, ISBN 0-275-97554-1.)

Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Secular Communities, 1824–2000. By Robert P. Sutton. (Westport: Praeger, 2004. x, 170 pp. $74.95, ISBN 0-275-97553-3.)

Five decades have passed since Arthur Bestor's Backwoods Utopias (1950) opened the study of American communal utopias by combining broad historical interpretation and careful site research. In the interim, most historians of utopia have emulated Bestor's microhistory of New Harmony rather than his introductory chapters on the sweep of communitarian history. Their energies are devoted more to unearthing individual communal stories than to discerning the overall shape of communitarian history and its relation to American culture. Although valuable studies of utopian millennialism, architecture, and sex roles have appeared, many are written by social scientists. By and large, historical scholarship on American utopias remains piecemeal and interpretively reticent. The latter problem is suggested by the absence of an adequate general history that situates communalism in its transatlantic and American contexts; the former by the prevalence of reference works such as Robert Fogarty's Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History (1980) and Donald E. Pitzer's anthology, America's Communal Utopias (1997).

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