ABSTRACT
European utopian thought during the Age of Revolutions drove much of the early history of New Harmony, Indiana.1 The Industrial, American, and French Revolutions and the aftermath of the Reformation all influenced this experiment in communal living on the banks of the Wabash River. George Rapp, a Swabian dissenter who had fought with the Lutheran Church and local officials in his home town of Württemberg since the 1780s, sensed the approach of the Second Coming. In 1803 he set off for the wilderness in search of a place for his followers that would be safe from the wrath of God when judgment came down upon the decadent and ungodly in Europe. The wilderness, as it had been for three hundred years by that time, was North America.
