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Theodore Kallman illuminates the brief life of a Christian socialist community founded by four men a minister, an editor, a professor, and an engineer on a worn-out cotton plantation just outside Columbus, Georgia, in 1896. Inspired by primitive Christianity, postmillennial optimism, and American democracy, its courageous, yet naïve, members labored for over four years to achieve their goal, the “Kingdom of God” on earth.
Radical by some perspectives, they were emulating two great traditions: the apostolic Christianity of the followers of Christ and the Puritan desire to found a “city upon the hill.” Kallman explains how Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and the anarchism of Leo Tolstoy took root in west-central Georgia and attracted worldwide attention, including that of Tolstoy and Jane Addams.