The Shape of Utopia

In the tumultuous atmosphere of the decades leading up to the Civil War, the combined effects of religious millennialism, technological revolutions, and the growth of a capitalist economy led numerous Americans to propose radical schemes for transforming their society. At least a hundred cooperative colonies were founded in the 1830s to 50s, leading Ralph Waldo Emerson to famously observe that it seemed every "reading man" had a "draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." This dissertation explores a unique strain of mid-nineteenth-century utopianism that featured geometrically distinct architectural and urban plans. These schemes include a square land reform grid and radial republican village proposed by the National Reform Association, phrenologist Orson Fowler's octagon house, Henry Clubb's anti-slavery vegetarian Octagon Settlement Company, a hexagonal city published by the anarchist Josiah Warren, and an ovoid house and circular institution of Equitable Commerce proposed by the Spiritualist John Murray Spear and his followers. I also analyze Thomas Jefferson's octagonal houses and square land grids as precedents for the nineteenth-century utopian projects. The creators