Mainstream notions of the “American Dream” usually revolve around the ownership of private property, a house of one’s own. Yet for the past 400 years, a large number of Americans have dared to dream bigger and bolder, choosing to live in intentional communities that pooled resources, and they worked to ensure the well-being of all their members. 
 
American Community takes us inside forty of the most interesting intentional communities in the nation’s history, from the colonial era to the present day. You will learn about such little-known experiments in cooperative living as the Icarian communities, which took the utopian ideas expounded in a 1840 French novel and put them into practice, ultimately spreading to five states over fifty years. Plus, it covers more recent communities such as Arizona’s Arcosanti, designed by architect Paolo Soleri as a model for ecologically sustainable living.
 
In this provocative and engaging book, Mark Ferrara guides readers through an array of intentional communities that boldly challenged capitalist economic arrangements in order to attain ideals of harmony, equality, and social justice. By shining a light on these forgotten histories, it shows that far from being foreign concepts, communitarianism and socialism have always been vital parts of the American experience.

On May 19, 1968, the minister of the Congregational Church of Watertown, Wisconsin, was fired. Alan Kromholz was 29 when he came to Watertown with his wife and two small boys. Kromholz began his ministerial duties in February 1967, seven months before Father James Groppi began marching in Milwaukee. In the middle of September Watertown's city attorney received a model fair housing ordinance from the state, with a recommendation that it be adopted. Thus the polarization began. It was sharpened by the publication of an underground newspaper and the establishment of a coffee house, by feelings that Kromholz was neglecting his pastoral duties and providing a subversive example for the young, by rumors of a black invasion. On May 19, 1968, Reverend Kromholz was fired. Visiting Watertown two years later, Lynn Eden captured the voices of protest and approval —voices that you have heard in your own town, in your own neighborhood, in yourself. The result is Crisis in Watertown: a true and remarkable document of our times.