ABSTRACT
Robert Owen believed America to be a land of opportunity and that it was a perfect place where he could set up a Village of Cooperation, New Harmony, to escape the curse of poverty that had plagued Britain. However, this Promised Land became blighted by economic crisis and industrial warfare. Many utopian enterprises that had begun in the 1820s and 1830s began to fail, and with the Civil War (1861–1865) the likelihood of establishing new communities also faded. The American Civil War was one of the earliest true industrial wars. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, and mass-produced weapons were employed extensively in this period, increasing America’s industrial capacity. 1
