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This article provides an introduction to the scholarship on religious communal experiments in nineteenth-century United States for scholars and students of history. The author approaches this scholarship from the perspective of a historian, thus primarily exploring historians' scholarship on these communities. In a similar vein, this article highlights historical communities, as opposed to those utopias that remained exclusively within the literary genre. This article first explains the history of communal studies scholarship and its traditional focus on the "big three" communities: Oneida, the Shakers, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, previously referred to as the Mormons. The article then explores the evolution of the scholarship since the mid-twentieth century, including the implementation of new historical methodologies and emphases on race and gender in the study of these communities. Finally, this article looks toward the future of communal studies scholarship, anticipating the next direction this scholarship will take.

This paper explores social and political events of the late 1950s and '60s that

Throughout the 1840s, numerous intentional communities based on a cooperative financial model were organized across the United States. Primarily led by social reformers and often based on the writings of French utopian Charles Fourier, these communities acted as a response to social and economic inequity. As part of their challenge to nineteenth-century social conventions, these communities refrained from including any religious test or expectation of religious adherence for members. The result was the development of spaces where new religious movements and diverse religious expressions emerged, sometimes resulting in communal strife. This article argues that diverse religious expressions were cultivated across these communities, if unevenly. The article highlights three case studies in which religious expression proved a central component of communal organization, social harmony, or community discord. These communities include Trumbull Phalanx in Ohio, Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts, and Ceresco in Wisconsin.

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