Transcendental Utopias

Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands and Walden (a study of ideas in 1840s New England)

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

I explore three utopian experiments undertaken in Massachusetts in the 1840s, all of which represented attempts by a group of thinkers known as the New England Transcendentalists to reconcile the contingent world of history with what they saw as the stable structure of nature.

“Francis does historians an important service by suggesting that they should move beyond such artificial dichotomies as individual versus community in their attempt to understand the complexities of transcendentalism.” (Journal of American History)