Digital Commons Network^™

An Interview With Spencer Klaw, Mary Beth Hinton

The Courier

Mr. Klaw's recently published book, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community,1 has provoked varying, but generally enthusiastic, responses jrom coast to coast. A few reviewers took him to task for failing to see Oneida leader,]ohn Humphrey Noyes, as the wicked tyrant that he was. Conversely, one reviewer chided him for judging Mr. Noyes too harshly. Since graduating from Harvard University in 1941, Mr. Klaw has been a writer and editor. His other books include The Great American Medicine Show (1975) and The New Brahmins: Scientific Life in America (1968). Between 1947 and 1952 he was a …

Foreword And Preface, From Courier, Vol. Xxviii, No. 2, Fall 1993, Robert Fogarty, Mark F. Weimer

The Courier

FOREWARD: When in 1962, I first visited the rare book collection of the Syracuse University Library to begin researching the history of the Oneida Community, I explored the foundation of what is now a distinguished and growing body of material related to America's most complex communal venture. That foundation had been laid when Lester G. Wells, then curator, acquired a full run of the Community periodicals and a substantial body of pamphlets. The "O. C. Collection" as outlined by Wells in his 1961 bibliography* provided me with enough data to grasp the details of Community life reported in their own …

John Humphrey Noyes And Millennialism, Michael Barkun

The Courier

WHEN JOHN HUMPHREY NOYES was twenty, he was obsessed with knowing the nature and timing of the Last Days. As he recalled later, "My heart was fixed on the Millennium, and I was resolved to live or die for it".1 His fascination with the end of history was neither novel for his own time nor for ours-indeed, the recent events at the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, suggest that we are in the throes of a period of millenarian fervor every bit as intense as that of the 1830S and'40s. Although we can see Noyes as representative, gripped like …

Breaching The "Wall Ofpartition Between The Male And The Female": John Humphrey Noyes And Free Love, Louis J. Kern

The Courier

ONEIDA, ITS CRITICS MAINTAINED, was a "seedbed of free love, the nursery of anarchic doctrines" that threatened "the total destruction of the marriage relation".2 This paper will examine the cultural and religious contexts within which John Humphrey Noyes developed and implemented his ideas about free love. Although the Putney Community (1843-48) and the Oneida Community (1848-79) were both theocratic, socialistic communities, critics were most concerned about the social and moral implications of their ideas-especially their Perfectionist claims of having irreversibly transformed the "Man of Sin" into the "Spiritual Man". Apologists for traditional evangelical denominationalism and self-appointed conservators of public morals …

Building Perfection: The Relationship Between Physical And Social Structures Of The Oneida Community, Janet White

The Courier

Architectural history has traditionally focused on formal aesthetics and the monuments of a "high culture". This approach accedes no place in the canon to the buildings of the Oneida Community. While they tend to be nicely sited, spacious, and constructed of handsome materials, they are not architectural masterpieces. The main complex combines elements from a jumble of styles; it has awkward joints where the products of three different building campaigns were unskillfully linked; and its towers are either stubby and ungraceful or capped by overwrought roofs.

It is, however, possible to approach the study of architectural history from another direction. …

Courier, Volume Xxviii, Number 2, Fall 1993, Syracuse University Library Associates

The Courier

Foreward / Robert Fogarty, p. 3 -- Preface / Mark F. Weimer, p. 7 -- John Humphrey Noyes and Millennialism / Michael Barkun, p. 11 -- Building Perfection: The Relationship between Physical and Social Structures of the Oneida Community / Janet White, p. 23 -- Women, Family, and Utopia: The Oneida Community Experience and Its Implications for the Present / Lawrence Foster, p. 45 -- "Mingling the Sexes": The Gendered Organization of Work in the Oneida Community / Marlyn Klee-Hartzell, p. 61 -- Breaching the "Wall of Partition Between the Male and the Female": John Humphrey Noyes and Free Love …

"Mingling The Sexes": The Gendered Organization Of Work In The Oneida Community, Marlyn Klee-Hartzell

The Courier

AFTER RECONCILIATION WITH God and the reorganization of sexual relations, John Humphrey Noyes placed labor as the third great challenge to be dealt with by those living in a state of perfect holiness on earth. He claimed that his holy community would "mingle the sexes" in work assignments to an unusual degree not found in mainstream American society of the nineteenth century. But in fact, most women in the Oneida Community were assigned traditional female work roles.

From The Collections, From Courier, Vol. Xxviii, No. 2, Fall 1993, Syracuse University Library Associates

The Courier

This exchange of letters between Hope Emily Allen and George Bernard Shaw of November 1924 is published here for the first time. The letters reveal Shaw's interest in the Oneida Community and the descendants' apprehensions about public exposure of their historical documents, forty-four years after the breakup of the Community.

The archives were guarded by George Wallingford Noyes, nephew ofJohn Humphrey Noyes and Community historian, until his death in 1941. Thereafter some descendants who were part of Oneida Community Ltd. destroyed most of the original manuscripts, a tragedy mitigated only by the fact that G. W. Noyes had placed, in …

Power Revisited; Or, How We Became A Department, Rebecca Moore Howard

Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reviews And End Matter

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Francis: Beads of the World: A Collector's Guide with Price Reference reviewed by Stefany Tomalin

Picard and Picard: Beads from the West African Trade Series -Volume VII reviewed by Marvin T. Smith

Crystal Myths, Inc.: Lewis C. Wilson on Glass Bead Making (video) and Lewis C. Wilson on Lampworking: Advanced Beads, Bracelets, Marbles (video) reviewed by Karlis Karklins

Jargstorf: Baubles, Buttons and Beads: The Heritage of Bohemia reviewed by Anita von Kahler Gumpert

De Vore: Beads of the Bison Robe Trade: The Fort Union Trading Post Collection reviewed by Timothy K. Perttula

Bedford (ed.): Ezakwantu: Beadwork from the Eastern Cape …

"This Song" Conspicuous Poetry In Hebrew Prose, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

The Hebrew Bible contains many passages in which prose narrative surrounds conspicuous poetry. The various theoretical and practical difficulties in distinguishing Hebrew prose from verse in other texts do not negate this observation. Explicit genre labels often appear in both the prose frameworks and the beginnings of poems, telling readers that the genre and mode have changed. The interpretive problem then becomes, not whether this is verse, but why poetry appears precisely here. What does poetic expression accomplish that Hebrew prose narrative cannot or will not do?

Comparative study of conspicuous inset poetry suggests that Hebrew narratives use it to …