Throughout American history, groups of people have worked together to build new utopian communities, designed to be purer or happier or fairer than the society around them. In this talk, Sandra Opdycke will describe three notable utopian projects that flourished during the 19th century: the Shakers, who established dozens of villages in eight different states; the explosion of utopia-building in the 1840s based on the ideas of Charles Fourier; and the unique community established by the Oneida community in upstate New York.

Sandra Opdycke, Ph.D. is an historian. She recently published When Women Won the Vote, about the woman suffrage movement. She has also written books about the flu epidemic of 1918, the WPA of the 1930s, and Bellevue Hospital, as well as a biography of Jane Addams, an historical atlas of American women’s history, and several co-authored books and articles on social policy. She worked for a number of years at Hudson River Psychiatric Center, and later taught American History and Urban History at Bard, Vassar, and Marist Colleges. She serves as an occasional lecturer at the Center for Lifetime Studies in Poughkeepsie.