Publications
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Shaker Studies, no. 20. 229 pages, 2026.
ISBN: 978-1-937370-44-2 ($45)In the small New England town of Harvard, Massachusetts, some thirty miles from Boston, there grew a small but significant Shaker society that thrived between 1781 and 1918. Planted by Mother Ann Lee herself, this communal society established four farms in the northeastern part of Harvard and in neighboring Ayer and Littleton. Their membership in the nineteenth century grew to as many as 180 Believers living and working in over eighty buildings on more than three thousand acres. Despite scant water resources, and poor-quality crop lands, their creative management of these, along with plentiful timber, left behind not only eleven surviving buildings, but numerous signs on the landscape of their skill and perseverance. Ned Quist uses documentary evidence and the landscape itself to tell the story of this remarkable cultural landscape the Harvard Shakers left behind.
Ned Quist is a retired academic librarian, having spent his career as a music librarian and library administrator at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and Brown University. In addition to his interest in Shaker studies, he builds reproduction Shaker- and Arts and Crafts-style furniture in his basement in Warwick, Rhode Island.
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One year subscription to the American Communal Societies Quarterly
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Two year subscription to the American Communal Societies Quarterly
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- Gift of Daguerreotype of Shaker Sister by David D. Newell
- “Tis pure pure brightness” – Considering an Early Shaker Daguerreotype by Carol Medlicott
- “Radicals” and “Libertines” in a Shaker Society: The Union Village Lyceum, 1871–1878. by Thomas Sakmyster
- Shaker Celibacy: A Cover for Sexual Scandal? by Richard Marshall
Front cover illustration: William North, Unidentified Shaker sister (possibly Betsy Bates?), ca. 1852, Cleveland, Ohio. Gift of Marcy Hermansader, in memory of Jonathan Flaccus.
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American Communal Societies Series, no. 19. 256 pages, 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-937370-43-5 ($40)In response to the trauma of industrialization and urbanization in the late-nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement took America by storm. Art exhibits, workshops, and societies dedicated to handicraft, worker dignity, and the production of beautiful art for the masses sprouted from California to Boston. Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Elbert Hubbard, and William Lightfoot Price were so enamored with the movement that they decided to build entirely new worlds—intentional communities—dedicated to pursuing those ideals. Englishman Whitehead founded an art colony named Byrdcliffe in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Hubbard, a former soap salesman, established an Arts and Crafts community business, Roycroft, outside Buffalo, New York. Price, an architect, built the Rose Valley Association outside Philadelphia. They endeavored to reform the economic and social inequalities of industrial capitalism through communal living, artistic development, craft, and the sale of finely crafted furniture, architecture, metalwork, and more. This was what they believed was living “the art that is life.” For these community members, this meant producing and selling art with a social message as well as living everyday life as if it was a work of art. In imagining a compromise between machine-dominated industry and handicraft, these artisans sought to critique industrial capitalism and carve out a space where craftspeople could once again flourish in community. Rose Valley, Byrdcliffe, and Roycroft were total sensory installations of the Arts and Crafts Movement that stood as community-workshops that were an alternative to brutal industrialization.
Thomas A. Guiler (Ph.D., Syracuse University) is the director of museum affairs at the Oneida Community Mansion House in Oneida, New York. He was assistant professor of history and public humanities at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Wilmington, Delaware. He also served at the president of the Communal Studies Association. He has published on the history and material culture of intentional communities such as Oneida and of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
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- “You are to do what we say”: The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle and His Spirit Guide Pheneas, Michael W. Homer
- “I am all sympathy with Theosophy”: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Final Conversion, Michael W. Homer
Front cover illustration: Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) taken in 1923.
Back cover illustration: A photo of the Cottingley Fairies that appeared in
The Coming of the Fairies, 1921. -
- From the Editor
- New Light on the Holy City
- "Explanation of the Holy City," 1843
Front cover illustration: Anonymous, The Holy City, 1843 (detail). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Zieget, 1963. Accession no. 1963-160-5. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Back cover illustration: Fountain stone, Shirley, Massachusetts, late-nineteenth century. Photograph. Communal Societies Collection, Hamilton College.
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- From the Editor
- The Gospel of Thomas Hammond
- A Reconsideration of the Neal(e) Family
- “Blanche to Church all alone”: Canterbury’s Evolving Religious Praxis
Front cover illustration: The Qui Vive Quartette (sisters Jennie Fish, Jessie Evans, Josephine Wilson, and Helena Sarle) often performed at venues across the region.
Courtesy of Canterbury Shaker Village.
Back cover illustration: Frederick Demont visiting his aunts at the Ann Lee Cottage, c. 1938. Seated: Sarah Neale, Emma Neale, Ethel May Demont Peterson holding Douglas Lee Peterson, Neale Lawrence Peterson. Courtesy of Canterbury Shaker Village. -
American Communal Societies Series, no. 18. 362 pages, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-937370-42-8 ($40)
The utopian socialism of Charles Fourier inspired the most popular and influential communal movement during America’s pivotal “utopian moment” in the pre-Civil War era. Far from a colorful curiosity, the Fourierists were serious participants in the debate over the future of the young republic. This collection of essays supplements Carl Guarneri’s award-winning earlier volume on the Fourierists by examining such topics as Emerson’s private fascination with Fourierism, the experience of women in Fourierist communities, and the utopian socialists’ relation to slavery and the Civil War. Pursuing unexplored affinities and connections, Guarneri demonstrates the Fourierists’ influence on the free-love Oneida Community, documents exchanges between American and European social reformers, and situates the Fourierist movement in the larger context of American, transatlantic, and communal history.
Carl Guarneri is Brother James Ash Professor of History, Emeritus at Saint Mary’s College of California and Affiliated Scholar in History at Colgate University. He has published a dozen books on utopian socialism, the Civil War, and American history in global context, as well as numerous articles and reviews. His earlier volume on the utopian socialists, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (1991), was awarded the annual book prize of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Guarneri received the Communal Studies Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award in 2006.
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- From the Editor
- “God loves such a building”: Three Diagrammatic Shaker
- Drawings at Library of Congress by Carol Medlicott
- Alpha and Omega: The 1804 Shaker Church of Christ
- Missionary Letter and Richard McNemar’s 1838 Response by Christian Goodwillie
- Document: “The Church of Christ,” 1804
- Document: Church of Christ as printed by Richard McNemar, ca. 1831
- Document: Richard McNemar, Draft of an Answer, ca. 1838
- Document: BIGOTRY.
Front cover illustration: Drawing of three Shaker buildings. For reasons that are not clear, this drawing was catalogued together with, “A Plan of Alfred, Maine,” by Joshua H. Bussell, 1845. Library of Congress Call Number G3734.A432 1845.B8.
Back cover illustration: BIGOTRY. Ear Am 20, Book Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
