Oneida Community;: An autobiography, 1851-1876

The Oneida Community was founded in 1848 in upstate New York under the leadership of John Humphrey Noyes. Of all of the 19th-century utopian experiments in communal living, it was the most enduring and the most successful. In this compilation from the Community newspapers and other documents, the men and women themselves describe life in the Oneida Community--the way they lived, how they worked and played, their views on raising children, personal relationships, education, religion. The book is alive with a sense of joy, intelligence, commitment, and practical common sense. Noyes and his followers came to Oneida after being driven out of Putney, Vermont, where the Community had worked out the basic tenets and practices of Perfectionism, the religious concept by which they lived. Noyes believed it necessary for the Community to publish information about its members and activities, so that interested outsiders--and sister communes--could read the truth about life at Oneida.--From publisher description.… (more)