| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Dreams of Paradise, Visions of Apocalypse: Utopia and Dystopia in American Culture. Ed. by Jaap Verheul. (Amsterdam: vu University Press, 2004. viii, 252 pp. Paper, €32.90, ISBN 90-5383-898-8.)
Dreams of Paradise, Visions of Apocalypse, edited by Jaap Verheul, is a collection of twenty-two essays analyzing the utopian and dystopian elements in American culture throughout the span of American history, from Peter Stuyvesant's plans for New Netherlands to the Y2K scare at the turn of the twenty-first century. Using a wide variety of materials, including novels, essays, speeches at public events, science fiction, and commentary on occasions celebrating great construction projects, such as the opening of the Panama Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge, the contributors explore the themes of projected hopes and fears in the American popular voice as well as the ambivalence and contradiction inherent in such visionary projections.	1
First presented as a group of papers at an American studies conference in 2000 in Amsterdam, the essays are by scholars, both European and American, well known for their work in Utopian Studies and other publications in the field of utopian writings. The main theme of these essays is the contrasting optimistic and pessimistic visions of idealized life, usually set in the future, sometimes expressed by the same author and sometimes by authors who were contemporaries.	. . .

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