The End of Distance and the End of War

This chapter addresses the potent US utopianism that greeted the Atlantic Telegraph Cable of 1858. US Americans tethered perfection to new telegraph technology with all the idealism utopia has come to connote but without the spatial or temporal inaccessibility that we traditionally associate with the “no-place” coined by Thomas More in his 1516 Utopia. In most formulations, utopia is set in a far-off land or distant future. Yet for many US Americans, the moment the Atlantic Telegraph Cable was strung across the ocean and Morse code was sent pulsing beneath the waves, this technologically empowered utopian world began to arrive. With an anchoring focus on the Oneida Community, a small religious community that became obsessed with the telegraph’s possibilities for unity among all people and with God, this chapter argues that in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, utopia was not understood as a distant land or future event. Rather, the utopianism of this network imaginary demands a redefinition of utopia as proximate.

Challenging Love, Marriage, and the Nuclear Family, 1820–1870

Chapter 2 zooms in on the ideal of a loving two-generation family and how it was shaped and embedded in the republican society and its structures. The chapter unfolds this story from a contemporaneous critical perspective by presenting it through the eyes of John H. Noyes, the leader of the Oneida Community, which provided a religious and sexual countermodel to life in a nuclear family. Yet by looking at Noyes and his utopian and seemingly progressive commune, the chapter unfolds the meanings and significance of religion and sex in the republic, and it also shows how patriarchal patterns persisted in the new American society. The chapter draws on Noyes’s many writings and the papers of the Oneida Community in the Syracuse University Library.

The Oneida Community and the utility of liberal capitalism

Historians studying the utopian Oneida Community have often located its demise in rising internal dissent and failing consensus among its members, with special emphasis on the personal jealousies and generational tensions that its practice of group marriage may have produced. Those studies step past the essential place of work and industry in communal life and especially the community’s theology, which equated economic prosperity with Christian virtue. This essay reframes our understanding of the political economy of the Oneida Community, with specific attention to their last decade, and the social tensions stoked by their reliance upon market capitalism and waged labour. While acknowledging the internal dissent that accompanied the structural demise of the commune, the present study asks how such discord arose from business-centred theology within the social environment of competition and a prolonged economic depression. The Community’s dependence upon the surrounding capitalist economy challenged their self-described ‘Bible communism’ and precipitated its demise.

Food Sovereignty Practices at the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin Tsyunhehkw^ Farm

The paper looks at the role of traditional foodways and related cultural practices in Oneida’s contemporary food sovereignty efforts, and the various understandings of the continuity of food and agricultural traditions in the community. The tribe’s Tsyunhehkw^’s (joon-hen-kwa) farm, whose name loosely translates into “life sustenance” in English, serves important cultural, economic and educational purposes. It grows Oneida white flint corn, which is considered sacred by the tribe and is used for ceremonial purposes, it grows the tobacco used for ceremonies and runs a traditional Three Sisters Garden. The Three Sisters – corn, beans and squash, are an important part of the Oneida creation story, as well as the vision of Handsome Lake – a Seneca prophet from the turn of the 19th century, who played an significant role in the revival of traditional religion among the People of the Longhouse.[1] They inform the work done at Tsyunhehkw^ to provide healthful food for the Oneida community. [1]The Oneida form part of the Iroquois Confederacy (as called by the French), referred to as the League of Five Nations by the English, or the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, as they call themselves. Haudenosaunee translates into the People of the Longhouse. The Confederacy, which was founded by the prophet known as Peacemaker with the help of Hiawatha, is made up of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. It was intended as a way to unite the nations and create a peaceful means of decision making. The exact date of the joining of the nations is unknown and it is one of the first and longest lasting participatory democracies in the world (“About the Haudenosaunee Confederacy” 2019).