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The Palgrave Companion to North American Utopias by J. Friesen Pdf
The Palgrave Companion to North American Utopias is a fascinating virtual catalogue of utopian societies and communes from past to present. The authors assert that the formation of a utopian society is both possible and feasible and give examples of how to create one of our own.
Author : Philip Resnick Publisher : University of Toronto Press Page : 177 pages File Size : 47,9 Mb Release : 2012-01-01 Category : Political Science ISBN : 9781442605527
The Labyrinth of North American Identities by Philip Resnick Pdf
What exactly does it mean to be North American? The Labyrinth of North American Identities is a long essay that attempts to learn more about North America as a unit and its individual countries by exploring the idea of a shared North American identity.
Encyclopedia of American Folklife by Simon J Bronner Pdf
American folklife is steeped in world cultures, or invented as new culture, always evolving, yet often practiced as it was created many years or even centuries ago. This fascinating encyclopedia explores the rich and varied cultural traditions of folklife in America - from barn raisings to the Internet, tattoos, and Zydeco - through expressions that include ritual, custom, crafts, architecture, food, clothing, and art. Featuring more than 350 A-Z entries, "Encyclopedia of American Folklife" is wide-ranging and inclusive. Entries cover major cities and urban centers; new and established immigrant groups as well as native Americans; American territories, such as Guam and Samoa; major issues, such as education and intellectual property; and expressions of material culture, such as homes, dress, food, and crafts. This encyclopedia covers notable folklife areas as well as general regional categories. It addresses religious groups (reflecting diversity within groups such as the Amish and the Jews), age groups (both old age and youth gangs), and contemporary folk groups (skateboarders and psychobillies) - placing all of them in the vivid tapestry of folklife in America. In addition, this resource offers useful insights on folklife concepts through entries such as "community and group" and "tradition and culture." The set also features complete indexes in each volume, as well as a bibliography for further research.
Mainstream notions of the “American Dream” usually revolve around the ownership of private property, a house of one’s own. Yet for the past 400 years, a large number of Americans have dared to dream bigger and bolder, choosing to live in intentional communities that pooled resources, and they worked to ensure the well-being of all their members. American Community takes us inside forty of the most interesting intentional communities in the nation’s history, from the colonial era to the present day. You will learn about such little-known experiments in cooperative living as the Icarian communities, which took the utopian ideas expounded in a 1840 French novel and put them into practice, ultimately spreading to five states over fifty years. Plus, it covers more recent communities such as Arizona’s Arcosanti, designed by architect Paolo Soleri as a model for ecologically sustainable living. In this provocative and engaging book, Mark Ferrara guides readers through an array of intentional communities that boldly challenged capitalist economic arrangements in order to attain ideals of harmony, equality, and social justice. By shining a light on these forgotten histories, it shows that far from being foreign concepts, communitarianism and socialism have always been vital parts of the American experience.
An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial's quest to live a more communal life under late-stage capitalism Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity. When Adrian Shirk’s father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband—both adjuncts in their midtwenties—become his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America’s broken health-care system and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity, propels Shirk into an odyssey through the history and present of American utopian experiments in the hope that they might offer a way forward. Along the way, Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than “no place,” Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn’t be able to exist—but does anyway, if only for a moment.
Bygone Utopias and Farm Protest in the Rural Midwest by Daniel Jaster Pdf
This book explores those who long for “bygone utopias,” times before rapid, culturally destructive social change stripped individuals of their perceived agency. The case of the wave of foreclosure protests that swept through the rural American Midwest during the 1930s illustrates these themes. These actions embodied a utopian understanding of agrarian society that had largely disappeared by the late 19th century: hundreds to thousands of people fixed public auctions of foreclosed farms, returning owners’ property and giving them a second chance to save their farm. Comparisons to later movements, including the National Farmers’ Organization and the protests surrounding the 1980s Farm Crisis highlight the importance of culturally catastrophic social change occurring at a breakneck pace in fomenting these types of bygone utopian actions. These activists and movements should cause scholars to re-think what it means to be conservative and how we view conservatism, helping us better understand why we’re seeing a contemporary resurgence in nationalist and reactionary movements across the globe.
American Countercultures: An Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in U.S. History by Gina Misiroglu Pdf
Counterculture, while commonly used to describe youth-oriented movements during the 1960s, refers to any attempt to challenge or change conventional values and practices or the dominant lifestyles of the day. This fascinating three-volume set explores these movements in America from colonial times to the present in colorful detail. "American Countercultures" is the first reference work to examine the impact of countercultural movements on American social history. It highlights the writings, recordings, and visual works produced by these movements to educate, inspire, and incite action in all eras of the nation's history. A-Z entries provide a wealth of information on personalities, places, events, concepts, beliefs, groups, and practices. The set includes numerous illustrations, a topic finder, primary source documents, a bibliography and a filmography, and an index.
Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice by Gary L. Anderson,Kathryn G. Herr Pdf
The Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice presents a comprehensive overview of the field with topics of varying dimensions, breadth, and length. This three-volume Encyclopedia is designed for readers to understand the topics, concepts, and ideas that motivate and shape the fields of activism, civil engagement, and social justice and includes biographies of the major thinkers and leaders who have influenced and continue to influence the study of activism.
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009 by Brandi Denison Pdf
Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009 is a narrative of American religion and how it intersected with land in the American West. Prior to 1881, Utes lived on the largest reservation in North America—twelve million acres of western Colorado. Brandi Denison takes a broad look at the Ute land dispossession and resistance to disenfranchisement by tracing the shifting cultural meaning of dirt, a physical thing, into land, an abstract idea. This shift was made possible through the development and deployment of an idealized American religion based on Enlightenment ideals of individualism, Victorian sensibilities about the female body, and an emerging respect for diversity and commitment to religious pluralism that was wholly dependent on a separation of economics from religion. As the narrative unfolds, Denison shows how Utes and their Anglo-American allies worked together to systematize a religion out of existing ceremonial practices, anthropological observations, and Euro-American ideals of nature. A variety of societies then used religious beliefs and practices to give meaning to the land, which in turn shaped inhabitants’ perception of an exclusive American religion. Ultimately, this movement from the tangible to the abstract demonstrates the development of a normative American religion, one that excludes minorities even as they are the source of the idealized expression.
Oberlin, Hotbed of Abolitionism by J. Brent Morris Pdf
By exploring the role of Oberlin--the college and the community--in fighting against slavery and for social equality, J. Brent Morris establishes this "hotbed of abolitionism" as the core of the antislavery movement in the West and as one of the most influential reform groups in antebellum America. As the first college to admit men and women of all races, and with a faculty and community comprised of outspoken abolitionists, Oberlin supported a cadre of activist missionaries devoted to emancipation, even if that was through unconventional methods or via an abandonment of strict ideological consistency. Their philosophy was a color-blind composite of various schools of antislavery thought aimed at supporting the best hope of success. Though historians have embraced Oberlin as a potent symbol of egalitarianism, radicalism, and religious zeal, Morris is the first to portray the complete history behind this iconic antislavery symbol. In this book, Morris shifts the focus of generations of antislavery scholarship from the East and demonstrates that the West's influence was largely responsible for a continuous infusion of radicalism that helped the movement stay true to its most progressive principles.
Common Purse, Uncommon Future by Joseph C. Manzella Pdf
This book documents the wide range of contemporary communes and other intentional communities providing sanctuaries for like-minded people to pursue cooperative alternatives to media-stoked consumerism and the relentless tempo of change that characterizes mainstream life in 21st-century America and Europe. Common Purse, Uncommon Future: The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities explores the many new types of communal living being tried in America and Europe today. A growing number of people disenchanted with the pressures and demands of mainstream lifestyles are drawn by the nostalgic appeal of traditional, mostly agrarian and artisanal, lifestyles as practiced in residential communities where liminal rituals of membership serve to validate pacts to live and work together in cooperative social and economic relations. Manzella focuses on the ways in which today's most innovative and controversial ecovillages diverge from the hippie communes of yesteryear's counterculture and from older communal forms such as kibbutzim and arts and crafts colonies, and how today's nonsectarian spiritual and volunteer service communities differ from traditional religious communes and ashrams. He reports his field investigations of a whole new generation of communal living experiments, such as residential land trusts, survivalist retreats, urban cohousing, green housing cooperatives, student co-ops, and New Age organic agrarian communes.
The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945 by Sherryl Vint Pdf
Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking about how to create a better world through daily practices of generosity, justice, and care. The chapters collected here emphasize utopianism as a practice of social transformation, not as a literary genre depicting a putatively perfect society, and urgently make the case for why we need utopian thought today. With chapters on climate change, economic justice, technology, and more, alongside chapters exploring utopian traditions outside Western frameworks, this book opens a new discussion in utopian thought and theory.