In nineteenth-century Europe, utopia became a powerful mode of imagining, debating, and enacting alternative worlds. Political and social debates opened up a horizon of expectation and post-revolutionary opportunity, in which America appeared as a place where history might begin anew. Religious dissenters and millenarian communities, social reformers and revolutionaries projected hopes of renewal onto America, which could appear as Zion, as a land of liberty, as a field of experiment, or as the site on which a new social order might be built from the beginning.
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Handcart pioneers, Mormons, Iowa, 1865. Unknown
These developments have often been analyzed from the perspective of national histories, thereby obscuring their transatlantic dimensions and the longer history of ideas and movements shaped by the American Revolution and its afterlives. This workshop approaches them as entangled discourses in which religion, revolution, emigration, and social transformation were closely intertwined. Against the backdrop of the 250th anniversary of American independence, the workshop explores how post-revolutionary America became a privileged space for projecting ideas of rupture, refoundation, and collective renewal? And how did the religious history of the early republic and the American frontier—with its revivalist movements, millenarian expectations, settlement projects, Native American religions, and competing visions of sacred community—interact with these transatlantic formations of utopian thought.