Angel in the Forest: An Epic of Two Utopias--A Chronicle of the Experiments by Father George Rapp and by Robert Owen in Nineteenth Century America

xiii, 331 pp. Introduction by Mark Van Doren. Marguerite Young's fascinating chronicle of two attempts to establish utopian communities in nineteenth-century America. Angel in the Forest recounts the strange tale of New Harmony, Indiana. The original community was founded in 1814 by the German mystic Father George Rapp, who, with a group of English immigrants, implemented his own theories for a perfect community, this time based on rationalism. Both experiments failed, but Young finds in both a distinctively American yearning for utopia, which continues to characterize the American spirit to this day: a tradition of faith and folly can be traced from Owen's New Moral World to George Bush's New World Order.