The encyclopedic guide to American intentional communities

"Commune! The word conjures up images of a few isolated idealists, religious fanatics, and social misfits. A commune is a decidedly marginal blip on the American landscape. Nevertheless communes have studded American history--many thousands of them from the seventeenth century to the present. Although many have heard of the Shakers and (perhaps) the Hutterites and the Harmonists, communes--most of which now prefer to be known as intentional communities--represent a largely hidden slice of American history, despite the fact that they have been home to over a million Americans. Many small studies and surveys of American communal movements have been published over the last two hundred years, but the phenomenon of communal living in its fullness remains largely in the shadows. This work has been compiled to dispel those shadows by providing brief sketches of as many American intentional communities as I have been able to identify from the early days of European colonization down to the present [approximately 3,000]. The work also seeks to provide a few reliable references to primary and secondary sources of information on each community."--P. xi.