Re-Run: Road Trip Through History–The Utopian Communities of New Harmony
My Own True Love and I dearly love a road trip, especially if it includes a historical site or three, a quirky museum, a regional delicacy to try, walking paths, and plenty of roadside historical markers. (Anyone who thinks she might want to travel with us, be warned. We are the kind of people who turn off the road to find the historical marker rumored to be three miles to the west. )
Last weekend we packed cooler, notebook and walking shoes, said "hasta la bye-bye" to The Cat, and headed to southern Indiana.
New Harmony, Indiana, has been on our gotta-see list since last October, when I wrote about Robert Owen's utopian community as part of a book on socialism. (Pausing for a blatant piece of self promotion. Close your eyes if it makes you queasy.)
New Harmony was home to two successive utopian communities.
The first was the Harmony Society, informally known as the Rappites: a German Pietist sect who split off from the Lutheran church at the end of the eighteenth century. They believed that the end of the world was near, but that didn't stop them from hard work while they waited. Over the course of ten years, they successfully built a communal Christian republic in the Indiana wilderness.
In 1824, the Harmony Society sold their land and settlement to British reformer Robert Owen. Owen was a self-made factory owner with dreams of reforming society on communal lines. Self-sufficient Villages of Cooperation would replace private property. Owen's New Harmony was less successful than that of the Harmony Society: too many artists and intellectuals and not enough farmer and tradesmen made self-sufficiency any more than a dream. In 1828, Owen sold the land to individuals at a loss.
Today the historic sites of New Harmony are well preserved and well presented, run by the University of Southern Indiana, the Indiana Historical Museums, and enthusiastic local volunteers.
We weren't surprised that locals emphasize the achievements of the Harmony Society rather than Robert Owen's failed experiment. We were surprised at their emphasis on weaving the past into the future. Museum architect Richard Meier, who later created the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, designed the visitor's center, called the Atheneum in memory of Owen's cultural experiment. Philip Johnson's Roofless Church houses a statue by Jacques Lipschitz.
All told, we had a great visit: well designed historical exhibits, good food (eat at the Red Geranium if you go), a labyrinth to walk, old houses to look at, lots of historical markers along the way, and a few surprises. Just what a history road trip should be.
Everywhere you look, from the web site to the entrance of the Athenaeum, New Harmony asks its visitors, "What's your vision of Utopia?" I don't have an answer. What about you?
Re-Run: Muslim Spain–The Soundtrack
The perversity of the universe being what it is, the final stages of renovating our new-old house and finishing my book proposal have collided. Instead of driving myself mad trying to write blog posts or letting History in the Margins go blank for a few weeks, I decided to run some of my favorite posts from the days when only a handful of people read along. I hope to produce some new content along the way*, so re-runs will be clearly marked.
And now, without further ado, I bring you
Muslim Spain: the Soundtrack
These days, I'm spending a lot of time in Muslim Spain--a golden age of cross-cultural pollination by any standard. At a time when most of Europe was wallowing in the Dark Ages, Muslim Spain was a center of wealth, learning--and tolerance. If you wanted libraries, hot baths, or good health care, Spain was the place to be.
I recently discovered the perfect soundtrack for thinking about Muslim Spain: the ladino music of Yasmin Levy.
Ladino is the Sephardic equivalent of Yiddish. (Sephardic comes from the Hebrew word for Spain.) Spoken by the Jews of Muslim Spain, ladino began as a combination of Hebrew and Spanish. When their most Catholic majesties Isabella and Ferdinand expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, most of them sought protection in the Muslim states of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Over time, their language took on elements of Arabic, Greek, Turkish, French, and the Slavic languages of the Balkans.
Ladino music, like the language itself, carries the history of the Sephardic community in its sound. It has elements in common with Portuguese fado, Spanish flamenco, Jewish klezmer music, and Turkish folk songs.
Today the ladino speaking community is small. Perhaps 20,000 speakers. Like other embattled language groups--the Gaelic speakers of Ireland, the French-speaking Cajuns of southwest Louisiana--Sephardic activists are working to keep their language alive.
Take a moment to check out this video of Jasmine Levy in performance:**
Remember. You heard it here first.
*I have some stories I'm dying to tell you. I want to tell you about Flat Arthur. I want to ponder the Roman Empire in the Middle East. I want to remember the Alamo. But first I need to get this dang proposal off to my agent and get a house finished.
**If you subscribe to History in the Margins by e-mail, you need to go to the website to see the video clip. Just click on the title.
An Extra Helping
I've recently started posting on Tumblr. Like History in the Margins, my Tumblr posts focus on history, writing, and writing about history, plus an occasional odd bit. Unlike my posts here, they are snapshots (sometimes literally) of what I'm working on, thinking about, and reading. I suppose you could describe them as Marginalia.
If you'd like a quick bite of history in between History in the Margin posts, drop on by: http://pdtoler.tumblr.com/.