Publications

• From the Editor
• "A great blessing to mankind!": The Medicated Vapour Bath at the Shaker Community of New Lebanon by Kerry Hackett
• Mothers and Daughters at White Water Shaker Village by Thomas Sakmyster
• Six Scenes from the Sixties by Tom Fels

Front cover illustration: Tony Matthews relaxing on the front steps, Montague Farm. Photo: Laura Bradley. Collection of the author. Back cover illustration: Milking time: writer Jesse Kornbluth and farmer Tony Matthews, Montague, 1969. Photo: Tom Fels. Collection of the author.

 July and October 2020

• From the Editor
• "The Price of Blood": Shaker Revolutionary War Veterans and Military Pensions by Christian Goodwillie.
• Shaker Revolutionary War Veterans: Pension Narratives and Related Documents

Front cover illustration: Nathaniel Draper's Discharge Certificate. M804, Record Group 15, Records of the Veterans Administration, National Archives. Back cover illustration: Carte Generale Des Colonies Angloises Dans L'Amerique Septentrionale, 1779.

• From the Editor
• The "Christian German Agricultural and Benevolent, Society of Ora et Labora" by Walter Brumm
• Document: "The Ora Labora Colony" by Emil Baur
• Plans Underway For Cabins From Ora Labora Colony To Be Restored by Mike Hardy
• Document: The Shakers. [A Visitor's Account of Hancock, Massachusetts, 1858]. by Therese Albertine Luise von Jakob Robinson

Front cover illustration: Ora et Labora Colony map. "The colored lands belong to the Ora Labora Colony." Manuscript Group 185: Harmony Society Papers, Business File. Courtesy of Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Old Economy Village Archives. Back cover illustration: Ora Labora, Mish. Lithograph by Ehrgott, Fororiger & Co. Lithogr. Cinicinnati. Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Shaker Studies, no. 16. approx. 550 pages, 2020.
ISBN: 978-1-937370-29-9 ($55)

The Shaker community at Enfield, Connecticut, lasted from 1792 to 1914. Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee gathered converts there, and her successor Father Joseph Whittaker ministered to them before he died there in 1787. This is the first book devoted to telling the 130-year story of this relatively unknown celibate Christian community. Additionally, eighteen appendices provide rich primary source information for further research.

• From the Editor
• The Shaker Meetinghouse: 230 Years of Worship, Tourism, and Preservation by Christian Goodwillie
• The White Water, Ohio, Shaker Community: A Newly Discovered 1877 Visitor's Account by Thomas Sakmyster
• The Shakers. A Day with the Communists of the Whitewater Valley. Westliche Blatter (May 22, 1877)
• A Photograph of the 1908 Print Shop at the Israelite House of David by Brian Ziebart
• Portraits: Sister Mary Purnell and Brother Benjamin Purnell

Front cover illustration: Brother Hiram Baker and his bicycle in the meeting room of the 1793 meetinghouse at Enfield, New Hampshire. Salt print by Lewis Johnson, August 1902. Courtesy of Robert P. Emlen. Back cover illustration: Print Shop, Israelite House of David, prior to the 1908 fire that destroyed the building. Courtesy of the Israelite House of David.

194 Pages, Richard W. Couper Press, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-937370-34-3 ($35)

This Chart, comprising four huge copperplates engraved in 1775 by Du Chenteau himself, is a monumental attempt to unite ceremonial magic, Kabbalah, alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, and the science of number. In memorable images, many borrowed from the Rosicrucian philosopher Robert Fludd, it depicts a cosmos emanating from the mind of God, structured by correspondences, and culminating in the human being (the Microcosm), whose body and soul reflect the Macrocosm. Du Chenteau, a practicing alchemist and member of esoteric Masonic orders, represents an “enlightenment” very different from the secular and materialistic trends of his time. His work is a visual encyclopedia, forming a bridge between the late Renaissance world view and the occult revival of the nineteenth century. This edition sets Du Chenteau’s Chart in its historical context, traces all its sources, translates its texts from the original French, and explains its arcane imagery. An Appendix by Antoine Faivre, Professor at the Sorbonne, tells of Du Chenteau’s life, his friends, and his bizarre spiritual practices.

Joscelyn Godwin is Emeritus Professor of Music, Colgate University. He has published two books on Robert Fludd and many other works on esoteric topics, including Harmonies of Heaven and Earth, The Theosophical Enlightenment, Music and the Occult, Upstate Cauldron, and, co-authored with Christian Goodwillie, Symbols in the Wilderness: Early Masonic Survivals in Upstate New York (Couper Press of Hamilton College and Upstate Institute of Colgate University, 2016).
 

American Communal Societies Series, no. 14. 126 pages with illustrations, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-937370-31-2 ($20)

Daughter colony of America's most successful utopian experiment (1848-1880), the Wallingford commune was the Oneida Community's pastoral getaway. It was also the place silverware was created, the industry that would support Oneida's successor organization, Oneida Ltd., through the twentieth century. Although a substantial part of Oneida's history, Wallingford's story has never been told. This first study features about a dozen accounts by the communards, nearly forty vintage photographs and other illustrations, and commentaries by the editor.

About the editor:
Anthropologist Anthony Wonderley worked for the Oneida Indian Nation in its cultural management and preservation program and for the Oneida Community Mansion House (Oneida, New York) as curator of collections and interpretation.

40 Pages, Richard W. Couper Press, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-937370-32-9 ($15)

Gordon Ball first saw San Francisco as a small child, traveling there by train with his Ohio River Valley family to join his father in Japan after his narrow escape from Shanghai before Mao Zedong took it. In My San Francisco he recounts incidents and experiences from family furlough visits in the City of Hills every few years, followed by hitchhiking there in the war-torn 1960s and embarking on a six-month stay a few years later, the culmination of a cross-country journey with poet Allen Ginsberg—a stay marked by a failed love affair and the start of a lifelong friendship. My San Francisco, a large format chapbook with several photographs including two by the photographer author, is both a highly personal memoir of and tribute to the city, vitalized by imagistic gists and brief encounters melded with longer narratives; it is, as some readers have celebrated it, “honest,” “brave,” and “beautiful.”
Author Bio: Gordon Ball edited Allen Verbatim and two volumes of journals with Allen Ginsberg. He’s the author of three memoirs (’66 Frames, Dark Music, and East Hill Farm) and a volume of short stories, On Tokyo’s Edge. His films and photographs have been shown and acclaimed widely. He’s currently at work on a half-century of family history from the Ohio River through 1920s Shanghai to prison camp World War II. He teaches at Washington and Lee University and with his wife Kathleen lives outside Lexington, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley.

July and October 2019

• From the Editor
• A Short History of the Columbian Phalanx by Julieanna Frost
• Document: "A Journal of a Journey from Canterbury to Enfield [Connecticut]" introduced and edited by Stephen J. Paterwic
• Why Historians Should Examine Shaker Novels and Short Stories: Exposing Century-Old Misconceptions of Shaker Life by Richard Marshall
• Personal Visits and Observations: Charles Nordhoff's Remarkable Tour of American Communal Societies by Peter Hoehnle

Front and back cover illustrations from: J.F. Witherell, ed., The Anti-Millerite and Scriptural Expositor (Concord, N.H.: 1843).

• From the Editor
• Shaker Brothers in the Spirit: The Exchange of Ideas and Spiritual Gifts between Seth Youngs Wells and Calvin Green by Jane F. Crosthwaite
• Document: "A Beautiful Box of Gifts and Emblems of Presence Given to Calvin Green as a Token of Eternal Blessings....Copied November 25th 1847"
• "Blacksmith by Trade" : The Journey of African- American Shaker Justinian Cartwright by Rebekah Brummett
• Document: An Account of an American Commune in the Soviet Union during the 1920s by Arthur B. Ruhl

Front and back cover illustrations: "A Beautiful Box of Gifts and Emblems of Presence Given to Calvin Green as a Token of Eternal Blessings....Copied November 25th 1847." Canterbury Shaker Village Archives, #788.