SOURCE: “Early Fictional Futures: Utopia, 1798-1864,” in America as Utopia, edited by Kenneth M. Roemer, Burt Franklin & Company, 1981, pp. 254-91.

In the following essay, Nydahl surveys the utopian vision expressed in American fictional works of the late eighteenth century.

The earliest utopian visions in and of America were of millennial expectations fulfilled: Columbus saw on the shores of the New World a stage upon which would be acted out Saint John's great prophetic drama; John Winthrop's “Citty on a Hill” was to be a society of godly men waiting for, and working to bring about, the final apocalyptic defeat of the forces of Satan; John Eliot's missionary work with the Indians (in his view the Lost Tribes of Israel. …) was an attempt to fulfill scriptural prophecies leading up to the Second Coming and the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth; and the earliest speculative writings portraying...