Fall 2023 | T | 3:30-6:15 PM | Professor Sarah Phillips
Fall 2023 – Sarah Phillips
| Day | Start | End | Type | Bldg | Room |
| T | 3:30 pm | 6:15 pm | IND | HIS | 304 |
Explores groups who not only dissented from mainstream American society, but constructed entire alternative communities. Considers the ideas of freedom, religion, sex, family, community, justice, ecology, and survival that inspired such experiments from the country’s beginnings to the present day. Effective Fall 2023, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Social Inquiry I.
Additional Course Materials:
Expanded course description: When have groups of people not only dissented from mainstream American society, but also attempted to construct entire alternative communities? What ideas—about freedom, money, religion, sex, family, justice, and ecology—inspired them? Can we draw a line between an intentional community and a cult? In this seminar we will explore the history of Alternative America from the freedom colonies of post-Civil War Blacks to the Jonestown suicides; from free love in the antebellum East to polygamy in the West; and from bohemian enclaves in the early twentieth century to the counterculture of the 1960s and Heaven’s Gate.
Readings include: Erik Reece, Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea, Anthony Wonderley, Oneida Utopia: A Community Searching for Human Happiness and Prosperity, Benjamin Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier, Sitton and Conrad, Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow, Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, Julia Scheeres, A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown, and Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults.
Instructor:
