Download or read book Elusive Utopia written by Gary Kornblith and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2018-12-05 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the Civil War, Oberlin, Ohio, stood in the vanguard of the abolition and black freedom movements. The community, including co-founded Oberlin College, strove to end slavery and establish full equality for all. Yet, in the half-century after the Union victory, Oberlin’s resolute stand for racial justice eroded as race-based discrimination pressed down on its African American citizens. In Elusive Utopia, noted historians Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser tell the story of how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Oberlin residents, black and white, understood and acted upon their changing perceptions of race, ultimately resulting in the imposition of a color line. Founded as a utopian experiment in 1833, Oberlin embraced radical racial egalitarianism in its formative years. By the eve of the Civil War, when 20 percent of its local population was black, the community modeled progressive racial relations that, while imperfect, shone as strikingly more advanced than in either the American South or North. Emancipation and the passage of the Civil War amendments seemed to confirm Oberlin's egalitarian values. Yet, contrary to the expectations of its idealistic founders, Oberlin’s residents of color fell increasingly behind their white peers economically in the years after the war. Moreover, leaders of the white-dominated temperance movement conflated class, color, and respectability, resulting in stigmatization of black residents. Over time, many white Oberlinians came to view black poverty as the result of personal failings, practiced residential segregation, endorsed racially differentiated education in public schools, and excluded people of color from local government. By 1920, Oberlin’s racial utopian vision had dissipated, leaving the community to join the racist mainstream of American society. Drawing from newspapers, pamphlets, organizational records, memoirs, census materials and tax lists, Elusive Utopia traces the rise and fall of Oberlin's idealistic vision and commitment to racial equality in a pivotal era in American history.
Download or read book Utopia written by Alistair Fox and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas More's Utopia remains indisputably the most potent work in the genre of writing that it initiated and in fact named. Since it was published in 1516 - in a Tudor-ruled England responding to the wave of humanist thought sweeping across Europe - this fantasy voyage has inspired centuries of social reformers, who have embraced More's fiction as a realistic blueprint for a new, ideal society. On the literary side, writers from Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have plied the genre More invented, and yet none has arrived at a conclusion more prophetic than the original: that the dogged quest for an imagined ideal generates doubt that this ideal would be as attractive in practice as in theory, and that, given what we know of human nature, such an ideal could ever be implemented. In Utopia: An Elusive Vision Alistair Fox places More's masterwork in the context of the reform aspirations of early-sixteenth-century European humanists, tracing the stages of its composition to show how and why the book came to be inherently paradoxical and showing us why the book in many ways presaged the rise of Martin Luther and the watershed Protestant Reformation. Fox lucidly explores the complex, equivocal nature of More's vision, which, he contends, was conditioned not only by More's recognition that people's desire for ideal social order conflicts with many of their most basic impulses but also by his propensity for seeing most issues simultaneously from contradictory perspectives. This paradox and tension led More to create a fiction that, according to Fox, allows human imperfection to interrogate the validity of the "ideal" society the fiction presents, without confirming or subverting it. With UtopiaMore encourages readers to explore what he reveals to be a perpetual dilemma in utopianism itself. Fox concludes that, by thus encompassing and provoking the full range of reactions that subsequent utopias and "dystopias" would likely elicit, More's Utopia is both the prototype and epitome of the utopian genre itself. Fox's engaging study is the most extensive treatment of Utopia to date, examining the work as one which evolved in response to More's changing emotional perceptions and treating More's text as a vehicle for intellectual exploration rather than a definitive proclamation. Utopia: An Elusive Vision, replete with historical detail and an overview of criticism of More's text through four centuries, allows readers to discern for themselves the features that contribute to Utopia's intellectual and rhetorical complexity.
Download or read book Illusive Utopia written by Suk-Young Kim and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-03-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rare glimpse into North Korean propaganda—in parades, posters, murals, theater, and films
Download or read book Weekend Utopia written by Alastair Gordon and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2001-05 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hamptons are hot. Gordon, who grew up there, traces the invention of the idea of the Hamptons as a resort for the elite of New York City and shows how various forces, including artists, real estate developers, and media professionals transformed what had been a quiet rural place into a modern and worldwide phenomenon. 175 illustrations.
Download or read book Cascadia written by Douglas Todd and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the unique spirituality and culture of Cascadia, which includes British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. Envied around the world, Cascadia is famous for its mountains, evergreens, and livable cities. Less well known is that Cascadia is home to the least institutionally religious people on the continent. Despite this, Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia argues that most of the region's 14 million residents feel deeply "spiritual." Many gain their sense of the sacred from the spectacular and imposing land.
Download or read book Sustainable Utopias written by Jennifer L. Allen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To reclaim a sense of hope for the future, German activists in the late twentieth century engaged ordinary citizens in innovative projects that resisted alienation and disenfranchisement. By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of crisis after the 1973 global oil shock appeared to doom dreams of a better world. The eventual victory of capitalism and, seemingly, liberal democracy relieved some fears but exchanged them for complacency and cynicism. Not, however, in West Germany. Jennifer Allen showcases grassroots activism of the 1980s and 1990s that envisioned a radically different society based on community-centered politicsÑa society in which the democratization of culture and power ameliorated alienation and resisted the impotence of end-of-history narratives. BerlinÕs History Workshop liberated research from university confines by providing opportunities for ordinary people to write and debate the story of the nation. The Green Party made the politics of direct democracy central to its program. Artists changed the way people viewed and acted in public spaces by installing objects in unexpected environments, including the Stolpersteine: paving stones, embedded in residential sidewalks, bearing the names of Nazi victims. These activists went beyond just trafficking in ideas. They forged new infrastructures, spaces, and behaviors that gave everyday people real agency in their communities. Undergirding this activism was the environmentalist concept of sustainability, which demanded that any alternative to existing society be both enduring and adaptable. A rigorous but inspiring tale of hope in action, Sustainable Utopias makes the case that it is still worth believing in human creativity and the labor of citizenship.
Download or read book Petrified Utopia written by Marina Balina and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taken together, these essays redefine the preconceived notion of Soviet happiness as the product of official ideology imposed from above and expressed predominantly through collective experience, and provide evidence that the formation of the concept of individual happiness was not contained by the limitations of important state projects, controlled by state policies and aimed toward the creation of a new society.
Download or read book Towards Cascadia written by Ryan C. Moothart and published by Hillcrest Publishing Group. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards Cascadia is about the unique region of Cascadia, and explores themes of bioregionalism, identity, freedom, civics, and more so as to make one comprehensive, coherent argument in support of Cascadia. The goal of this book to propose a different way of understanding the Pacific Northwest and regional differentiation in upper North America that readers find legitimate.
Download or read book Elusive Hope written by M. L. Tyndall and published by Barbour Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Their friends are in search of a Southern utopia. But Hayden is seeking revenge--relentlessly. And Magnolia is seeking a way out--desperately. Falling in love was never part of their plans. . . .
Download or read book Utopia Method Vision written by Tom Moylan and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection addresses the ways in which the contributors approach their study of the objects and practices of utopianism (understood as social anticipations and visions produced through texts and social experiments) and of how, in turn, those objects and practices have shaped their intellectual work and research perspectives.
Download or read book The Last Utopia written by Samuel Moyn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.
Download or read book Utopia written by Alistair Fox and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas More's Utopia remains indisputably the most potent work in the genre of writing that it initiated and in fact named. Since it was published in 1516 - in a Tudor-ruled England responding to the wave of humanist thought sweeping across Europe - this fantasy voyage has inspired centuries of social reformers, who have embraced More's fiction as a realistic blueprint for a new, ideal society. On the literary side, writers from Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have plied the genre More invented, and yet none has arrived at a conclusion more prophetic than the original: that the dogged quest for an imagined ideal generates doubt that this ideal would be as attractive in practice as in theory, and that, given what we know of human nature, such an ideal could ever be implemented. In Utopia: An Elusive Vision Alistair Fox places More's masterwork in the context of the reform aspirations of early-sixteenth-century European humanists, tracing the stages of its composition to show how and why the book came to be inherently paradoxical and showing us why the book in many ways presaged the rise of Martin Luther and the watershed Protestant Reformation. Fox lucidly explores the complex, equivocal nature of More's vision, which, he contends, was conditioned not only by More's recognition that people's desire for ideal social order conflicts with many of their most basic impulses but also by his propensity for seeing most issues simultaneously from contradictory perspectives. This paradox and tension led More to create a fiction that, according to Fox, allows human imperfection to interrogate the validity of the "ideal" society the fiction presents, without confirming or subverting it. With UtopiaMore encourages readers to explore what he reveals to be a perpetual dilemma in utopianism itself. Fox concludes that, by thus encompassing and provoking the full range of reactions that subsequent utopias and "dystopias" would likely elicit, More's Utopia is both the prototype and epitome of the utopian genre itself. Fox's engaging study is the most extensive treatment of Utopia to date, examining the work as one which evolved in response to More's changing emotional perceptions and treating More's text as a vehicle for intellectual exploration rather than a definitive proclamation. Utopia: An Elusive Vision, replete with historical detail and an overview of criticism of More's text through four centuries, allows readers to discern for themselves the features that contribute to Utopia's intellectual and rhetorical complexity.
Download or read book A Modern Utopia written by Herbert George Wells and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1967-01-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Well's uncanny ability to highlight the problems which are now most acute and supply tentative solutions that allow a maximum of individual freedom merits serious consideration. Recommended reading for students and teachers dealing with government, science, and the contemporary dilemma of a world facing war, famine, and racial unrest."--Choice A Modern Utopia is one of the first important blueprints for the modern welfare state and an early major statement of Wells's idea of the World State, an idea that is perhaps his greatest contribution to the intellectual history of this century. In this "quintessential utopia," as Lewis Mumford calls it, Wells "sums up and clarifies the utopias of the past, and brings them into contact with the world of the present." The Bison Books edition, with an introduction by Mark R. Hillegas, associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University, brings back into print a work that has stimulated three generations of thinkers. "This is not flight into fancy no voyage into whimsy. It is a sober attempt to imagine what kind of society men would create if they really used their heads and worked at it. The result is one of the most plausible utopias ever written."--Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare "It is a beautiful Utopia beautifully seen and beautifully thought: and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint one finds in News from Nowhere."--Van Wyck Brooks, The World of H.G. Wells
Download or read book Elusive Utopia written by Lisa Daniels and published by . This book was released on 2018-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Utopia Parkway written by Deborah Solomon and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deborah Solomon’s definitive biography of Joseph Cornell, one of America’s most moving and unusual twentieth-century artists, now reissued twenty years later with updated and extensively revised text Few artists ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell, the self-taught American genius prized for his enigmatic shadow boxes, who stands at the intersection of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. Legends about Cornell abound—the shy hermit, the devoted family caretaker, the artistic innocent—but never before has he been presented for what he was: a brilliant, relentlessly serious artist whose stature has now reached monumental proportions.
Download or read book Commitment and Community written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1972 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosabeth Kanter offers a unique analysis of the nature and process of enduring commitment, basing her theory of commitment mechanisms on exhaustive research of nineteenth–century utopias, sharpened by first–hand knowledge of a variety of contemporary groups.
Download or read book Godless Utopia written by Roland Elliott Brown and published by Fuel Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the early Soviet atheist magazines Godless and Godless atthe Machine, and postwar posters by Communist Party publishers, the authorpresents an unsettling tour of atheist ideology in the USSR.
