The New Harmony Movement

xxix, 404 pp. "In 1824 when Robert Owen purchased the town of New Harmony, Indiana, from a sect of German religionists, he had only the vaguest idea of how his intended utopia was to operate; and because of his pressing affairs in England, the settlement--a motley community of visionaries, scholars, workingmen, and freeloaders--was left largely to its own devices. Yet in the course of its four short years of existence, New Harmony became a center of progressive thought in education, women's rights, abolition of slavery, and science. Though the experiment failed, it was an important exchange where men and women--among them Audubon, William Maclure, Frances Wright, and Josiah Warren--gathered not only to interact with one another but to influence the political and social fate of the nation."--rear wrapper