Download or read book Utopia New Jersey written by Perdita Buchan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia. New Jersey. For most people—even the most satisfied New Jersey residents—these words hardly belong in the same sentence. Yet, unbeknown to many, history shows that the state has been a favorite location for utopian experiments for more than a century. Thanks to its location between New York and Philadelphia and its affordable land, it became an ideal proving ground where philosophical and philanthropical organizations and individuals could test their utopian theories. In this intriguing look at this little-known side of New Jersey, Perdita Buchan explores eight of these communities. Adopting a wide definition of the term utopia—broadening it to include experimental living arrangements with a variety of missions—Buchan explains that what the founders of each of these colonies had in common was the goal of improving life, at least as they saw it. In every other way, the communities varied greatly, ranging from a cooperative colony in Englewood founded by Upton Sinclair, to an anarchist village in Piscataway centered on an educational experiment, to the fascinating Physical Culture City in Spotswood, where drugs, tobacco, and corsets were banned, but where nudity was widespread. Despite their grand intentions, all but one of the utopias—a single-tax colony in Berkeley Heights—failed to survive. But Buchan shows how each of them left a legacy of much more than the buildings or street names that remain today—legacies that are inspiring, surprising, and often outright quirky.
Download or read book New Jersey written by Maxine N. Lurie and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-07 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Jersey: A History of the Garden State presents a fresh, comprehensive overview of New Jersey’s history from the prehistoric era to the present. The findings of archaeologists, political, social, and economic historians provide a new look at how the Garden State has evolved. The state has a rich Native American heritage and complex colonial history. It played a pivotal role in the American Revolution, early industrialization, and technological developments in transportation, including turnpikes, canals, and railroads. The nineteenth century saw major debates over slavery. While no Civil War battles were fought in New Jersey, most residents supported it while questioning the policies of the federal government. Next, the contributors turn to industry, urbanization, and the growth of shore communities. A destination for immigrants, New Jersey continued to be one of the most diverse states in the nation. Many of these changes created a host of social problems that reformers tried to minimize during the Progressive Era. Settlement houses were established, educational institutions grew, and utopian communities were founded. Most notably, women gained the right to vote in 1920. In the decades leading up to World War II, New Jersey benefited from back-to-work projects, but the rise of the local Ku Klux Klan and the German American Bund were sad episodes during this period. The story then moves to the rise of suburbs, the concomitant decline of the state’s cities, growing population density, and changing patterns of wealth. Deep-seated racial inequities led to urban unrest as well as political change, including such landmark legislation as the Mount Laurel decision. Today, immigration continues to shape the state, as does the tension between the needs of the suburbs, cities, and modest amounts of remaining farmland. Well-known personalities, such as Jonathan Edwards, George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Dorothea Dix, Thomas Edison, Frank Hague, and Albert Einstein appear in the narrative. Contributors also mine new and existing sources to incorporate fully scholarship on women, minorities, and immigrants. All chapters are set in the context of the history of the United States as a whole, illustrating how New Jersey is often a bellwether for the nation..
Download or read book A New Jersey Anthology written by Maxine N. Lurie and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Jersey classic comes to life once more, and it's better than ever . . . "This excellent collection of essays covers the sweep of New Jersey history from the colonial, proprietary era to the recent politics of Mount Laurel. It brings together some of the finest writing on the state, and raises questions relevant to major themes in American history more generally. Maxine N. Lurie has provided an excellent introductory essay to contextualize each piece in the collection, and each essay also comes with suggestions for further reading on the topic." -Paul G. E. Clemens, history department, Rutgers University Praise for the prior edition . . . "An absolutely superb collection in every aspect, this covers all of the chronological and topical bases with remarkable comprehensiveness. Contributions are not only appropriate to the purpose of the book; they have the additional merit of being very significant pieces of scholarship on their own, not only in the history of New Jersey but in American history in general. . . . Lurie's illuminating headnotes for each article, which include not only shrewd interpretive insights but also bibliographical references, set this book significantly apart." -Douglas Greenberg, Dean of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University MAXINE N. LURIE is a professor of history at Seton Hall University. She is the author of a number of articles and book chapters on early American and New Jersey history, the editor of the first edition of this anthology, and the coeditor of the Encyclopedia of New Jersey and Mapping New Jersey (all Rutgers University Press).
Download or read book Utopia Project written by Billy Dering and published by Pinewald Press. This book was released on 2021-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Covid pandemic of 2020, several decades of escalating civil crises have ensued. The governments of many countries have conspired to develop the ultimate solution for controlling the lives of their citizens. The new society, forged in the secret Utopia Project, provides for all of your needs without cost, offers recreational group sex, raises offspring without parents and offers a life without stress. When the project's true purpose is revealed, a nightmare weapon turns the rest of the world into a mass grave of melted corpses. Inexplicably, not everyone died as planned. On the east coast of America, Sara Hyland and boyfriend Kid Carlson somehow survive. Hunted by the merciless forces of the Utopia Project, a single thread of hope is discovered in a gift box, given to Sara by her military father the night of the destruction. But is it too late to save humanity from extinction?
Download or read book Smart Cities Big Data Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New Utopia written by Anthony M. Townsend and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our smart, mobile, connected future. From Beijing to Boston, cities are deploying smart technology—sensors embedded in streets and subways, Wi-Fi broadcast airports and green spaces—to address the basic challenges faced by massive, interconnected metropolitan centers. In Smart Cities, Anthony M. Townsend documents this emerging futuristic landscape while considering the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings of the key actors—entrepreneurs, mayors, philanthropists, and software developers—at work in shaping the new urban frontier.
Download or read book Seven American Utopias written by Dolores Hayden and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the time of its discovery, the new world was regarded by American settlers as a new Eden and a new Jerusalem. Although individual pioneers' visions of paradise were inevitably corrupted by reality, some determined ideatists carved out enclaves in order to develop collective models of what they believed to be more perfect societies. All such communitarian groups consciously attempted to express their social ideals in their buildings and landscapes; invariably, ideological predispositions can be inferred from a close study of the environments they created. The interplay between ideology and architecture, the social design and the physical design of American utopian communities, is the basis of this remarkable book by Dolores Hayden.At the heart of the book are studies of seven communitarian groups, collectively stretching over nearly two centuries and the full breadth of the American continent-the Shakers of Hancock, Massachusetts; the Mormons of Nauvoo, lllinois; the Fourierists of Phalanx, New Jersey; the Perfectionists of Oneida, New York; the Inspirationists of Amana, Iowa; the Union Colonists of Greeley, Colorado; and the Cooperative Colonists of Llano del Rio, California. Hayden examines each of these groups to see how they coped with three dilemmas that all socialist' societies face: conflicts betweeft authoritarian and participatory processes, between communal and private territory, and between unique and replicable community plans.The book contains over 260 historic and contemporary photographs and drawings which illustrate the communitarian processes of design and building. The drawings range in scale from regional plans showing land ownership, access to transportation, and availability of natural resources, through site plans of communal domains and building plans of dwellings and assembly halls, down to detailed diagrams of furniture configurations. To aid readers in making comparisons, a series of site and building plans drawn at constant scales has been provided for all seven case studies.
Download or read book Radical Innocent Upton Sinclair written by Anthony Arthur and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few American writers have revealed their private as well as their public selves so fully as Upton Sinclair, and virtually none over such a long lifetime (1878—1968). Sinclair’s writing, even at its most poignant or electrifying, blurred the line between politics and art–and, indeed, his life followed a similar arc. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur weaves the strands of Sinclair’s contentious public career and his often-troubled private life into a compelling personal narrative. An unassuming teetotaler with a fiery streak, called a propagandist by some, the most conservative of revolutionaries by others, Sinclair was such a driving force of history that one could easily mistake his life story for historical fiction. He counted dozens of epochal figures as friends or confidants, including Mark Twain, Jack London, Henry Ford, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Camus, and Carl Jung. Starting with The Jungle in 1906, Sinclair’s fiction and nonfiction helped to inform and mold American opinions about socialism, labor and industry, religion and philosophy, the excesses of the media, American political isolation and pacifism, civil liberties, and mental and physical health. In his later years, Sinclair twice reinvented himself, first as the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934, and later, in his sixties and seventies, as a historical novelist. In 1943 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Dragon’s Teeth, one of eleven novels featuring super-spy Lanny Budd. Outside the literary realm, the ever-restless Sinclair was seemingly everywhere: forming Utopian artists’ colonies, funding and producing Sergei Eisenstein’s film documentaries, and waging consciousness-raising political campaigns. Even when he wasn’t involved in progressive causes or counterculture movements, his name often was invoked by them–an arrangement that frequently embroiled Sinclair in controversy. Sinclair’ s passion and optimistic zeal inspired America, but privately he could be a frustrated, petty man who connected better with his readers than with members of his own family. His life with his first wife, Meta, his son David, and various friends and professional acquaintances was a web of conflict and strain. Personally and professionally ambitious, Sinclair engaged in financial speculation, although his wealth-generating schemes often benefited his pet causes–and he lobbied as tirelessly for professional recognition and awards as he did for government reform. As the tenor of his work would suggest, Sinclair was supremely human. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur offers an engrossing and enlightening account of Sinclair’s life and the country he helped to transform. Taking readers from the Reconstruction South to the rise of American power to the pinnacle of Hollywood culture to the Civil Rights era, this is historical biography at its entertaining and thought-provoking finest.
Download or read book Unsettling Utopia written by Jessica Namakkal and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists today. Unsettling Utopia presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Jessica Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires. Namakkal examines the colonial histories of the Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, arguing that their continued success shows how decolonization paradoxically opened new spaces of settlement, perpetuating imperial power. Challenging conventional markers of the boundaries of the colonial era as well as nationalist narratives, Unsettling Utopia sheds new light on the legacies of colonialism and offers bold thinking on what decolonization might yet mean.
Download or read book The Utopian Alternative written by Carl J. Guarneri and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The utopian socialism of Charles Fourier spread throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was in the United States that it generated the most intense excitement. In this rich and engaging narrative, Carl J. Guarneri traces the American Fourierist movement from its roots in the religious, social, and economic upheavals of the 1830s, through its bold communal experiments of the 1840s, to its lingering twilight after the Civil War.
Download or read book New Jersey Ghost Towns written by Patricia A. Martinelli and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2012-02-16 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores settlements and towns that have been deserted, transformed into tourist attractions, or have less than 200 residents and are mere shadows of their former selves.
Download or read book Utopia Dystopia written by Michael D. Gordin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-23 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.
Download or read book Political Uses of Utopia written by S. D. Chrostowska and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia has long been banished from political theory, framed as an impossible—and possibly dangerous—political ideal, a flawed social blueprint, or a thought experiment without any practical import. Even the "realistic utopias" of liberal theory strike many as wishful thinking. Can politics think utopia otherwise? Can utopian thinking contribute to the renewal of politics? In Political Uses of Utopia, an international cast of leading and emerging theorists agree that the uses of utopia for politics are multiple and nuanced and lie somewhere between—or, better yet, beyond—the mainstream caution against it and the conviction that another, better world ought to be possible. Representing a range of perspectives on the grand tradition of Western utopianism, which extends back half a millennium and perhaps as far as Plato, these essays are united in their interest in the relevance of utopianism to specific historical and contemporary political contexts. Featuring contributions from Miguel Abensour, Étienne Balibar, Raymond Geuss, and Jacques Rancière, among others, Political Uses of Utopia reopens the question of whether and how utopianism can inform political thinking and action today.
Download or read book Anarchy State and Utopia written by Robert Nozick and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1974 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Nozicka s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a powerful, philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age ---- liberal, socialist and conservative.
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 Utopia and Terror in Contemporary American Fiction written by Judie Newman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the quest for/failure of Utopia across a range of contemporary American/transnational fictions in relation to terror and globalization through authors such as Susan Choi, André Dubus, Dalia Sofer, and John Updike. While recent critical thinkers have reengaged with Utopia, the possibility of terror — whether state or non-state, external or homegrown — shadows Utopian imaginings. Terror and Utopia are linked in fiction through the exploration of the commodification of affect, a phenomenon of a globalized world in which feelings are managed, homogenized across cultures, exaggerated, or expunged according to a dominant model. Narrative approaches to the terrorist offer a means to investigate the ways in which fiction can resist commodification of affect, and maintain a reasoned but imaginative vision of possibilities for human community. Newman explores topics such as the first American bestseller with a Muslim protagonist, the links between writer and terrorist, the work of Iranian-Jewish Americans, and the relation of race and religion to Utopian thought.
Download or read book Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia written by Nathaniel Robert Walker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of suburbs and the disinvestment from cities have been defining features of life in many countries over the course of the twentieth century, especially English-speaking countires. The separation of different aspects of life, such as living and working, and the diffusion of the population in far-flung garden homes have necessitated the enormous consumption of natural lands and the constant use of mechanized transportation. Why did we abandon our dense, complex urban places and seek to find 'the best of the city and the country' in the flowery suburbs? Looking back at the architecture and urban design of the 1800s offers some answers, but a missing piece in the story is found in Victorian utopian literature. The replacement of cities with high-tech suburbs was repeatedly imagined and breathlessly described in the socialist dreams and science-fiction fantasies of dozens of British and American authors. Some of these visionaries -- such as Robert Owen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Ebenezer Howard, and H.G. Wells -- are enduringly famous, while others were street vendors or amateur chemists who have been all but forgotten. Together, they fashioned strange and beautiful imaginary worlds built of synthetic gemstones, lacy metal colonnades, and unbreakable glass, staffed by robotic servants and teeming with flying carriages. As different as their futuristic visions could be, however, most of them were unified by a single, desperate plea: for humanity to have a future worth living, we must abandon our smoky, poor, chaotic Babylonian cities for a life in shimmering gardens.
Download or read book Communal Utopias and the American Experience written by Robert P. Sutton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-02-28 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important study begins with America's first secular utopia at New Harmony in 1824 and traces successive utopian experiments in the United States through the following centuries. For the first time, readers will come to realize that American communalism is not a disjointed, erratic, almost ephemeral part of our past, but has been an on-going, essential part of American history. We have a communal utopian motif that sets the history of the United States apart from any other nation. The utopian communal story is just one other dimension of the Puritan concept that America was a city upon a hill, a beacon light to all the world where the perfect society could be built and could flourish. After discussing New Harmony and other Owenite communities, the author examines nine Fourierist utopias that were built before the Civil War. Next, he analyzes the five Icarian colonies that, collectively, were the longest-lived, non-religious communal experiments in American history. Then, discussion moves to the seven Gilded Age socialist cooperatives, followed by the utopian communities created during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Finally, Sutton turns to the hippie colonies and intentional communities of the last half of the 20th century.
