Oneida Community

Progressive Era Arts and Crafts Communities

October 21, 2025 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

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.

The Handcrafted Utopia: Arts and Crafts Communities in America’s Progressive Era (Couper Press, 2025) examines these utopian communities in the Arts and Crafts Movement. [Read more…] about Progressive Era Arts and Crafts Communities

Burned-Over District Documentary Being Produced

March 5, 2025 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

A new trailer for an in-production feature-length documentary film about the Burned-Over District of 19th-century New York State has just been released. Burned Over focuses on Spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the dead, and the Oneida Community, a free love commune.

Both began in 1848 in the Burned-Over District, an area famous as an incubator of radical religious practice and progressive politics, inspired in part by the Second Great Awakening. [Read more…] about Burned-Over District Documentary Being Produced

“Locusts of the East”: The Yankee Invasion of New York

March 9, 2024 by Guest Contributor 3 Comments

New York by 1820 was becoming a “colony from New England” to use the phrase of President Timothy Dwight of Yale. The “Puritan Pope,” as he was some times called, estimated that 60 to 67 percent of the people of New York had originated in the “land of steady habits.”

The few thousand Puritans who had established a new Zion around Boston in the 1630s were a remarkably energetic, prolific, and self-assertive people. The thin soils on the hilly lands, the harsh winters, and the stern theology of John Calvin created a distinct community spirit and shaped a unique character. [Read more…] about “Locusts of the East”: The Yankee Invasion of New York

Assassin in Utopia: The Oneida Community & The Garfield Assassination

February 9, 2023 by Editorial Staff 3 Comments

The new book An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder (Pegasus Crime, 2023) by Susan Wels is a true crime odyssey that explores a forgotten, astonishing chapter of American history, leading the reader from a free-love community in Upstate New York to the shocking assassination of President James Garfield. [Read more…] about Assassin in Utopia: The Oneida Community & The Garfield Assassination

New Documentary About NY’s Burned Over District In The Works

November 2, 2021 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

A new documentary film about the religious history of 19th century Western New York is in production.

Burned Over, a reference to the region’s nickname, “The Burned-over District,” focuses on the history of the Oneida Community, a commune led by John Humphrey Noyes, and the Fox sisters, the two girls from outside Rochester that launched the phenomenon of spiritualism.

The film was halted by the pandemic, but now a new fundraising campaign on Kickstarter has been launched and a new teaser has been released. [Read more…] about New Documentary About NY’s Burned Over District In The Works

The Campaign Against the Oneida Community

May 25, 2018 by Bob Cudmore Leave a Comment

This week on The Historians podcast Michael Doyle discusses his new book on a 19th century utopian community in Upstate New York, The Ministers’ War: John W. Mears, the Oneida Community, and the Crusade for Public Morality.

Listen to the podcast here. [Read more…] about The Campaign Against the Oneida Community

Oneida Community And The Crusade For Public Morality

April 25, 2018 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Michael Doyle’s The Ministers’ War: John W. Mears, The Oneida Community, and the Crusade for Public Morality (Syracuse University Press, 2018) takes a look at Hamilton College philosophy professor and Presbyterian minister John W. Mears and his fight against every sin and carnal lure, from liquor to free love.

In The Ministers’ War, Doyle explores the ways in which Mears’ multipurpose zeal reflected the passions behind the nineteenth-century temperance movement, the fight against obscenity, and the public animus toward unconventional thought. As an speaker, author and political candidate, Mears was a prominent moralizer. [Read more…] about Oneida Community And The Crusade For Public Morality

Uncle Johnny’s Girl Farm: Pulp Magazines and Utopian Fantasies

March 7, 2017 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

On Sunday, March 19th at 1 pm, the Oneida Community Mansion House (OCMH) will host Dr. Molly Jessup as she speaks about mid-twentieth century male escapism and pulp fiction fantasies in her presentation Uncle Johnny’s Girl Farm: Escapism Through Utopian Fantasy.

Today, the Oneida Community is known for its utopian social practices, including equality between women and men. But in the 1950s and 1960s, a number of men’s magazines, such as Man’s Conquest and Men, published salacious stories about “Uncle Johnny’s girl farm” and “the sex cult that rocked New York.” [Read more…] about Uncle Johnny’s Girl Farm: Pulp Magazines and Utopian Fantasies

Oneida Community

We Need Your Help Now More Than Ever

New York Almanack receives no public funds.

It’s supported only by readers like you.

Please give today (a monthly recurring gift is best)