AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
Antiques.(the Shakers)
Presently we came to the beginning of the village, and alighting at the door of a house where the Shaker manufactures are sold ... we walked into a grim room, where several grim hats were hanging on grim pegs, and the time was grimly told by a grim clock, which uttered every tick with a kind of struggle, as if it broke the grim silence reluctantly, and under protest. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, 1842
Utopian communities have been a continuing feature of American culture ever since Governor John Winthrop famously declared in 1630 that the Puritans were preordained to establish "a citty upon a hill," where "the eyes of all people are upon us."
The innocence of the new world was rapidly seen as offering the possibility of redemption from the corruption of the old. Among the first to establish utopian communities in America were the Protestant Separatists and Pietists, who settled in the backcountry close to the expanding frontier soon after Winthrop and the Puritans settled in Boston. Members of the Pietist movement, which had originated in Bohemia in the fifteenth century and was revived in German principalities in the 1670s to early 1700s, sought isolation from existing society and worldly sin by setting up communities where they could purify themselves for the millennium. One of these places was at Ephrata in Pennsylvania, founded by Johann Conrad Beissel in 1732.
During the first half of the nineteenth century some six score (by one estimate) additional communal and utopian settlements were built in the United States. "We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1840. Every reading person seemed to have "a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." By that point it had become apparent that the capitalism fostered by the industrial revolution had created great inequalities. Nonetheless, many became persuaded that the world really could be fundamentally improved. Groups sought to combat ...
- Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism.
- Magazine article from: The Christian Century Boonstra, Harry January 19, 1994 700+ words
Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism. By Sally M. Promey. Indiana University...originated in the 1750s and was particularly influenced by Ann Lee, who became known as Mother Ann. By the mid-19th...
- Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century...
- Magazine article from: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History Crosthwaite, Jane F. June 22, 1995 700+ words
...Shaker art as part of the visionary experience and the visionary work as an impulse of the generation who had not known Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the movement, personally. When Promey reads the gift images as both aesthetic and moral tokens of Mother...
- She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century.
- Magazine article from: The Women's Review of Books Loeffelholz, Mary July 1, 1997 700+ words
...The feminist recovery of nineteenth-century American women writers...Many important novels by nineteenth-century American women have been...Talks and articles on nineteenth-century American women's fiction...
- Philo-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century German Literature.(Review)
- Magazine article from: Criticism Gerstenberger, Katharina January 1, 2001 700+ words
Philo-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century German Literature by Irving...analyses of a "number of nineteenth-century works of literature, mainly...philo-Semitism at all in nineteenth-century German literature; more...
- Sisters: Relation and Rescue in Nineteenth-Century British Novels and Paintings.
- Magazine article from: Studies in the Novel Ogden, Daryl S. March 22, 1997 700+ words
...early 1990s were a productive era in nineteenth-century British--and especially Victorian...devoted to the study of women and nineteenth-century visual culture appeared, including...Misogyny: The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-Century British Classical-Subject Painting...
- The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English...
- Magazine article from: Christianity and Literature LaMonaca, Maria June 22, 2008 700+ words
...Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture. By Michael...Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture, Michael...describes how twenty-four nineteenth-century pamphlets on "The Roman...
- Between Redemption and Revival: The Jewish Yishuv of Jerusalem in the...
- Magazine article from: Middle Eastern Studies Katz, Yossi January 1, 1993 700+ words
...of the Land of Israel during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth...Eretz Israel and its Yishuv in the Nineteenth Century 1777-1917, Jerusalem, 1978...Y. Ben-Arieh Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century: The Old City (Jerusalem-New...
- Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies.(Book Reviews)(Book Review)
- Magazine article from: Victorian Studies Langley, Leanne January 1, 2004 700+ words
Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, volume...the usual problem of selling nineteenth-century Britain to a majority of musicologists...biennial Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain at the University of...
- Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction.(Book review)
- Magazine article from: Victorian Studies McKelvy, William R. January 1, 2008 700+ words
Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An...The most prominent virtue of Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature is its...during a version of the long nineteenth century, co-authors Mark Knight and...
- Nineteenth-Century English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect.
- Magazine article from: The English Historical Review Snape, M.F. April 1, 1998 700+ words
...the social history of religion in nineteenth-century Britain has come into its own. The...Britain. D. G. Paz's edition of Nineteenth-Century English Religious Traditions. Retrospect...scholarship on religious movements in nineteenth-century England (I say movements because...
Source: HighBeam Research, Antiques.(the Shakers)