Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: IN OCTOBER OF 1679 two men entered what is now the state of Maryland on an extraordinary mission.Traveling under aliases to obscure their true connection with a European religious sect called the Labadists, Peter Sluyter and Jasper Danckaerts had been sent to America to secure land for colonization.1 Their efforts were eventually successful and led to the founding of the first significant European communal Utopian society in the New World. 2 A portion of land was purchased from a much larger manorial grant known as Bohemia Manor, located between the Elk and Sassafras Rivers in present-day Cecil County, Maryland.By 1683 the colony had been established.Though never numbering more than one hundred and meeting with little success in proselytizing, the community survived until at least 1722 as a distinct religious sect.The ascetic lifestyle of the Labadists reappeared in other mid-Atlantic communal Ernest J. Green is professor of sociology at Prince George's Community College in Maryland.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the National Historic Communal Societies Association, Bishop Hill, Illinois, October 1987.1.The two emissaries kept a journal of the trip.In 1864 the journal was discovered in an old book store in Amsterdam by a member of the Long Island Historical Society, who translated and published the manuscript.The book, Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies (Brooklyn: Long
Source: Communal Societies
Author: Ernest J. Green
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7128811763
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: