The 60s Communes

Author : Timothy Miller
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 0815605501
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The 60s Communes written by Timothy Miller and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatest wave of communal living in American history crested in the tumultuous 1960s era including the early 1970s. To the fascination and amusement of more decorous citizens, hundreds of thousands of mostly young dreamers set out to build a new culture apart from the established society. Widely believed by the larger public to be sinks of drug-ridden sexual immorality, the communes both intrigued and repelled the American people. The intentional communities of the 1960s era were far more diverse than the stereotype of the hippie commune would suggest. A great many of them were religious in basis, stressing spiritual seeking and disciplined lifestyles. Others were founded on secular visions of a better society. Hundreds of them became so stable that they survive today. This book surveys the broad sweep of this great social yearning from the first portents of a new type of communitarianism in the early 1960s through the waning of the movement in the mid-1970s. Based on more than five hundred interviews conducted for the 60s Communes Project, among other sources, it preserves a colorful and vigorous episode in American history. The book includes an extensive directory of active and non-active communes, complete with dates of origin and dissolution.

Author : Timothy Miller
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 0815654766
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Communes in America, 1975-2000 written by Timothy Miller and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communes in America: 1975–2000 is the final volume in Miller’s trilogy on the history of American intentional communities. Providing a comprehensive survey of communities during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Miller offers a detailed study of their character, scope, and evolution. Between 1975 and 2000, the American communal experience evolved dramatically in response to social and environmental challenges that confronted American society as a whole. Long-accepted social norms and institutions—family, religion, medicine, and politics—were questioned as the divorce rate increased, interest in spiritual teachings from Asia grew, and alternative medicine gained ground. Cohousing flourished as a response to an increasing sense of alienation and a need to balance community and private lives. At the same time, Americans became increasingly concerned with environmental protection and preservation of our limited resources. In the face of these social changes, communal living flourished as people sought out communities of like-minded individuals to pursue a higher purpose. Organized topically, each chapter in the volume provides basic information about various types of communities and detailed examples of each type, from ecovillages and radical Christian communities to pagan communes and cohousing experiments. Miller also takes a step back to look at the prevalence of communal living in American life over the twentieth century. Based on exhaustive research, Miller’s final volume provides an indispensable survey and guide to understanding utopianism’s enduring presence in American culture.

Author : Mark Matthews
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN 13 : 080618308X
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Droppers written by Mark Matthews and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. In popular imagination, these words seem to capture the atmosphere of 1960s hippie communes. Yet when the first hippie commune was founded in 1965 outside Trinidad, Colorado, the goal wasn’t one long party but rather a new society that integrated life and art. In Droppers, Mark Matthews chronicles the rise and fall of this utopian community, exploring the goals behind its creation and the factors that eventually led to its dissolution. Seeking refuge from enforced social conformity, the turmoil of racial conflict, and the Vietnam War, artist Eugene Bernofsky and other founders of Drop City sought to create an environment that would promote both equality and personal autonomy. These high ideals became increasingly hard to sustain, however, in the face of external pressures and internal divisions. In a rollicking, fast-paced style, Matthews vividly describes the early enthusiasm of Drop City’s founders, as Bernofsky and his friends constructed a town in the desert literally using the “detritus of society.” Over time, Drop City suffered from media attention, the distraction of visitors, and the arrival of new residents who didn’t share the founders’ ideals. Matthews bases his account on numerous interviews with Bernofsky and other residents as well as written sources. Explaining Drop City in the context of the counterculture’s evolution and the American tradition of utopian communities, he paints an unforgettable picture of a largely misunderstood phenomenon in American history.

Author : Iain Boal
Publisher : PM Press
ISBN 13 : 1604867167
Total Pages : 412 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book West of Eden written by Iain Boal and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the shadow of the Vietnam War, a significant part of an entire generation refused their assigned roles in the American century. Some took their revolutionary politics to the streets, others decided simply to turn away, seeking to build another world together, outside the state and the market. West of Eden charts the remarkable flowering of communalism in the 1960s and ’70s, fueled by a radical rejection of the Cold War corporate deal, utopian visions of a peaceful green planet, the new technologies of sound and light, and the ancient arts of ecstatic release. The book focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area and its hinterlands, which have long been creative spaces for social experiment. Haight-Ashbury’s gift economy—its free clinic, concerts, and street theatre—and Berkeley’s liberated zones—Sproul Plaza, Telegraph Avenue, and People’s Park—were embedded in a wider network of producer and consumer co-ops, food conspiracies, and collective schemes. Using memoir and flashbacks, oral history and archival sources, West of Eden explores the deep historical roots and the enduring, though often disavowed, legacies of the extraordinary pulse of radical energies that generated forms of collective life beyond the nuclear family and the world of private consumption, including the contradictions evident in such figures as the guru/predator or the hippie/entrepreneur. There are vivid portraits of life on the rural communes of Mendocino and Sonoma, and essays on the Black Panther communal households in Oakland, the latter-day Diggers of San Francisco, the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, the pioneers of live/work space for artists, and the Bucky dome as the iconic architectural form of the sixties. Due to the prevailing amnesia—partly imposed by official narratives, partly self-imposed in the aftermath of defeat—West of Eden is not only a necessary act of reclamation, helping to record the unwritten stories of the motley generation of communards and antinomians now passing, but is also intended as an offering to the coming generation who will find here, in the rubble of the twentieth century, a past they can use—indeed one they will need—in the passage from the privations of commodity capitalism to an ample life in common.

Author : Richard Fairfield
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781459621688
Total Pages : 620 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Modern Utopian written by Richard Fairfield and published by . This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portraits of several 70s communes and experimental groups and the trend of intentional communities of today

Author : John Curl
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780595423439
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Memories of Drop City written by John Curl and published by . This book was released on 2006-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memories of Drop City follows a group of people and their radical movement, in the Southwest and on both coasts, in a decade that shaped the rest of the century. "John Curl's characters in Memories of Drop City aspire to be '100 years' ahead of the rest of us, but Curl shows, through his highly crafted and brilliant novelistic memoir, that they often succumb to the same social flaws as the rest of us. This might be the most balanced memoir or novel yet published about the Sixties." Ishmael Reed, National Book Award nominee "With this compelling evocation and portrayal of breathing people, John Curl unpacks the boxed lunch myth of America's alternative lifestyle Sixties, and restores the day to day flavor of a deeply fabled era still key to understanding the way we live (and don't live) now." Al Young, poet laureate of California "Memories of Drop City is an extraordinary book which brings the Sixties back to life in vivid detail and conveys the spirit of the Sixties better than almost anything else I've read." Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe "Memories of Drop City brings vibrantly to light the flower children who returned to the land seeking peace and by that act were committing revolution. John Curl captures the idealism of a generation and their demonstrations against war in a revolution with a smile.." Floyd Salas, author of Tattoo the Wicked Cross

Author : Raymond Mungo
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1940436044
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life written by Raymond Mungo and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In making her selection for Pharos Editions, Dana Spiotta tells us how drawn she was by the work of Raymond Mungo. "[He] writes . . . about his own joy and his own pain, he is particularly good when he describes the land around him and how it feels on his body." Indeed, if Henry David Thoreau had downed a handful of liberty caps before penning Walden it would have read much like Mungo's Total Loss Farm, a rollicking memoir of the late 1960's back–to–the–earth movement. Written in a limber prose style formed by the tempo of the times, Mungo takes us into the cultural tsunami of a failed radical politics as it broke on the shoals of a drug–fueled personal freedom and washed inland across the farmlands of Vermont, leaving a trail of damage and redemption in its wake. Total Loss Farm attracted widespread critical and commercial attention in 1970, when the "back–to–the–land" hippie commune movement first emerged. The book's first section, "Another Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," appeared as the cover article in the May 1970 issue of Atlantic Monthly. The hardcover first edition from Dutton was quickly followed by paperback editions from Bantam, Avon, and Madrona Publishers, keeping the book in print for several decades. Very recently, Dwight Garner in the New York Times Book Review cited Total Loss Farm as "the best and also the loopiest of the commune books."

Author : Arthur Kopecky
Publisher : UNM Press
ISBN 13 : 9780826333957
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book New Buffalo written by Arthur Kopecky and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kopecky's journals take us back to the beginnings of New Buffalo, one of the most successful of the communes that dotted the country in the 1960s and 1970s, where he and his comrades encountered magic, wisdom, a mix of people, the Peyote Church, planting, and hard winters.

Author : W. J. Rorabaugh
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107049237
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Hippies written by W. J. Rorabaugh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This short overview of the United States hippie social movement examines hippie beliefs and practices.

Author : Crescent Dragonwagon
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Commune Cookbook written by Crescent Dragonwagon and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: