Chasing Utopia
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 July 2023
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
July 8, 1843. Amidst the rolling hills of rural Massachusetts, a group of Transcendentalists come together to form a collective built around self-perfection and reverence for nature. And on this day poet Ralph Waldo Emerson stops by for a visit. Their name for this experimental Eden? Fruitlands. But every Eden has its fall, and by the time autumn winds blow over their 90 acres, the Fruitlanders are in trouble. How did a group of thinkers, writers, and educators come together to form one of the most famous utopian failures of the 19th century? And what can we learn from their attempt?
Special thanks to our guests, Richard Francis, author of Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia. And Catherine Shortliffe, Engagement Manager of the Fruitlands Museum and the Old Manse at The Trustees.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, Original Podcast. |
| 0:04.8 | History this week. July 8, 1843. |
| 0:13.4 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:17.9 | Massachusetts, a hillside overlooking the Nashua Valley. |
| 0:22.2 | Woods, fields, a view of the mountains. |
| 0:26.2 | There's a house and a tumbledown barn and a couple of apple trees. |
| 0:31.2 | It may not sound like much, but two men have looked at this piece of land and said, |
| 0:38.1 | this will be our paradise. |
| 0:43.8 | Bronson Alcott, an educator and Charles Lane, an editor, are on a mission. |
| 0:51.2 | They want to live by the ideals of transcendentalism. |
| 0:55.7 | That movement is surging at this moment in the United States, |
| 0:59.5 | and it holds that nature has a central role to play in our spiritual development. |
| 1:06.4 | The transcendentalists want to live close to the land so that they can feel more fully alive. |
| 1:13.9 | So Alcott and Lane have brought their families out here to create a rural commune, |
| 1:22.0 | and they've given the place a name. |
| 1:24.6 | Despite the fact that there are only those couple of apple trees, |
| 1:28.4 | they're calling it fruitlands. |
| 1:32.3 | And now, on this summer day, the founding father of transcendentalism drops by for a visit. |
| 1:39.6 | He's Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he likes what he sees. |
| 1:45.4 | Later, he'll write, |
| 1:46.9 | the sun and the evening sky do not look calmer than Alcott and his family at fruitlands. |
| 1:54.0 | But Emerson also sounds a note of caution. |
... |
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