Visions of Utopia

• Author(s): Egerton, John
• Series: Tennessee Three Star Series
• Imprint: Univ Tennessee Press
• Publication Date: 1977-10-29
• Status: Active
• Available in Paper: Price $14.95 | Buy Now

Visionaries of all ages and places have pursued Utopias, dreaming impossible dreams of starting over in new communities fashioned more closely to their ideals. In Visions of Utopia, John Egerton traces the fascinating history of the experimental communities founded by such groups in Tennessee. He focuses in particular on three extraordinary colonies of the 19th century, each of them widely known in its time: Nashoba, and interracial settlement near Memphis in 1825; Rugby, an English cooperative community on the Cumberland Plateau in 1880; and Ruskin, a socialist community in Dickson County in 1894.

John Egerton (1935–2013) was Georgian by birth, a Kentuckian in his childhood and youth, a Floridian during the early 1960’s, and a Tennessean from 1965. He is a grandson of one of the English colonists who started the Rugby settlement in 1880. As a journalist and author, he wrote widely and published over a dozen books, includingThe Americanization of Dixie (1974) and Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987). He founded the Southern Foodways Alliance in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in 1999.