Atheist isn't really the right word because they tended to believe in some sort of Enlightenment, capital 'N' Nature kind of god. But these were people who in their times were criticized as infidels.

They [Oneida people] didn't want to fix problems one at a time. If someone invited them to a feminist convention, their answer would have been, 'In the new world women will have total equality, so lets spend our energy creating that whole new world.' And to their credit, the women at Oneida probably had far greater practical equality than what any of the women gathered at Seneca Falls experienced in their lifetimes.

I worry that I may have overstated the impact of Civil War on the utopians. By the time the Civil War comes, most of the communities were quite separated from the wider American society. Their rhetoric is still about transforming the world, but they're not having that much traffic with their neighbors.

There are two instances I studied in which a community moved, amazingly, into an preexisting village built by other, earlier communalists. The Rappites were a German millenarian sect I mostly leave out of the story, even though they are fascinating, because they're focused on salvation and retreating from the world, as opposed to transforming it, like the other groups I write about.

The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal in fiction because it's not a story.

One of the things that's amazing about reading the private writing of these folks is that they enthusiastically describe things which we have now seen, and which are widely regarded as unappealing. They'll write, "It's going to be beautiful, we're going to have a town of 1,000 stone buildings that are all identical." And we as modern readers think, we've seen that; that's bad Soviet architecture or a public housing project. Nobody fantasizes about living there.

They're people who probably imagine that they would have had a better time in the past. I wouldn't imagine you'd encounter a lot of black people saying 'Oh, the '50s, that was when America was great.' It's very dangerous because the past was imperfect, and you can't go back anyway.