Richard Francis

We are all going to be made perfect . . . In 1843, with all their possessions loaded onto a single wagon, ten-year-old Louisa May Alcott and her family bravely set out into the wilderness to make a new home for themselves on a farm called Fruitlands. Louisa's father has a dream of living a perfect, simple life. It won't be easy, but the family has vowed to uphold his high ideals. In her diary -- one she shares with her parents -- Louisa records her efforts to become the girl her parents would like her to be. But in another, secret diary, she reveals the hardships of this new life, and pours out her real hopes and worries. Can Louisa live up to her father's expectations? Or will trying to be perfect tear the family apart?

"Ann Lee may be one of the most extraordinary and mysterious women in the history of Western culture. From humble origins in Manchester, England, where she was born in 1736, this illiterate daughter of a blacksmith became a visionary religious leader who was thought by her followers to have been the second incarnation of Christ. When she died in America at age forty-eight, having brought her faithful to a new land on the eve of the Revolution, she left behind a religious movement that was to have thousands of followers and become our most important and successful utopian community."--BOOK JACKET.

New England Transcendentalism was a vibrant and many-sided movement whose members are probably best remembered for their utopian experiments, their attempts to reconcile the contingent world of history with what they perceived as the stable and patterned world of nature. Richard Francis has written the first book to explore in detail the ideological basis of the three famous experiments during the 1840s: Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Henry David Thoreau's "community of one" on the shores of Walden Pond. Francis suggests that at the heart of Transcendentalism was a belief that all phenomena are connected in a repetitive sequence. The task was to explain how human society could be reordered to benefit from this seriality. Some members of the movement believed in evolutionary progress, whereas others hoped to be the agents of a sudden millennial transformation. They differed, as well, in their views on whether the fundamental social unit was the individual, the family, the phalanstery, or the community. The story of the three communities was, inevitably, also the story of particular individuals, and Francis highlights the lives and ideas of such leaders as George Ripley, W. H. Channing, Bronson Alcott, Charles Lane, and Theodore Parker.

"In Crane Pond, Richard Francis reveals a side of the history that is not often recounted, as he skillfully constructs a portrait of Samuel Sewall, the only judge to later admit that a terrible mistake had been made. In a colony on the edge of survival in a mysterious new world where infant mortality is high and sin is to blame, Sweall is committed to being a loving family man, a good citizen, and a fair-minded judge. Like any believing Puritan, he agonizes over what others think of him, while striving to act morally correct, keep the peace, and (hopefully make time to) enjoy a hefty slice of pie. His one regret is that only months before he didn't sentence a group of pirates to death. What begins as a touching story of a bumbling man tasked with making judgements in a society where reason is often ephemeral, quickly becomes the chilling narrative we know too well. And when public opinion wavers, Sweall learns that what has been done cannot be undone."--Amazon.com. Salem, a colony on the edge of survival in a mysterious new world. Infant mortality is high and sin is to blame. Samuel Sewall is committed to being a loving family man, a good citizen, and a fair-minded judge. He agonizes over what others think of him, while striving to act morally correct and keep the peace. When reports begin of witchcraft and spectral visitations in Salem, Sewall presides over the trials and then the hangings. But when public opinion wavers, he learns that what has been done cannot be undone. Now he must search for atonement and a renewal of hope.