A Socialist Utopia in the New South

The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894-1901

• Author(s): William Fitzhugh Brundage,
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Pages: 263
• ISBN_10: 0252065484
  ISBN_13: 9780252065484
  
• Language: en
• Categories: Art / Criticism & Theory , History / General , History / United States / General , History / United States / 19th Century , History / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV) , Political Science / Political Ideologies / Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism , Political Science / Utopias , Social Science / Sociology / General , Social Science / Women's Studies ,

Description:... "A definitive account
of the Ruskin colonies and of their place in the larger social radical
strivings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. . . .
Well written and solidly researched, it gives us an understanding of an
important quest for heaven on earth." -- Edward K. Spann, author
of Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for a Cooperative Society in America,
1820-1920
This first book-length study
of the Ruskin colonies shows how several hundred utopian socialists gathered
as a cooperative community in Tennessee and Georgia in the late nineteenth
century. The communitarians' noble but fatally flawed act of social endeavor
revealed the courage and desperation they felt as they searched for alternatives
to the chaotic and competitive individualism of the age of robber barons
and for a viable model for a just and humane society at a time of profound
uncertainty about public life in the United States.