Item Detail
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19674
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0
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0
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English
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Paradise on the Plains : The Development of Cooperative Alternatives in Kansas, 1850-1900
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Salt Lake City, UT
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The University of Utah
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Ph.D.
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"The seemingly open and isolated regions of the American West appeared to offer a refuge to groups anxious to separate from the confusion and social polarization of western industrial society. Small, cooperative settlements flourished throughout the nineteenth-century, and after the Civil War many organizations looked to the Great Plains as the ideal location to build an alternative model of the good society. Most failed within a few years, and their dreams of cooperative villages became subordinate to the dominant capitalist system. Nevertheless, their beliefs outlived the failed cooperatives, and once transplanted to the American West, these ideas had a lasting impact. This dissertation analyzes the development of cooperative ideas through an examination of three failed, working-class movements that planted separatist colonies in 1870s Kansas. The British artisans who established the English Workingmen's Co-operative Colony (Llewellyn Castle) hoped that a social utopia in the United States would prove the justness of their ideas in radical social democracy. Zion Valley emerged as the gathering site for a group of Pennsylvania coal miners who found comfort in the Book of Mormon 's millennial promise of spiritual restoration. The former Tennessee slaves responsible for founding the Singleton Colony at Dunlap saw cooperation as a means of transcending the degradation of poverty and racism. While none of the colonies lasted longer than five years as independent entities, the members remained in their adopted western homes and continued pushing their beliefs. The study is divided into three parts, with each part divided into three chapters. Part One examines the origins of each group in pre-Civil War reform movements. Part Two chronicles the three colonies in Kansas and the strategies each organization used in dealing with external challenges and internal dissent. Part Three looks at the impact each group had in Kansas after the colonies failed. Some associations broke into factions while others remained united, but all continued pushing for their particular interpretation of reform in the American West. Nevertheless, individual group leaders like John Radford, William Bickerton, and Benjamin Singleton recognized that they had lost their primary dream, and each died in bitter frustration." [Author's abstract]