Front Cover: Welsh industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen (1771–
1858). Courtesy Don Blair Collection, University of Southern Indiana. Robert
Owen was one of the most influential thinkers in the English-speaking
world in the first half of the nineteenth century, and his cooperative communities
at New Lanark, Scotland, and New Harmony, Indiana, remain
landmarks for their alternative visions of social life in the wake of the
Industrial Revolution. The results of the cooperative schemes established
in these places proved to be mixed, but by the late 1820s Owen sought
to extend them further, including to the Texas frontier, then a part of
Mexico, as José María Herrera shows in “Vision of a Utopian Texas: Robert
Owen’s Colonization Scheme.” A few years later, French reformer Etienne
Cabet (1788–1856), after spending time in exile in England, came under
the influence of Owen, and eventually he would undertake his own
scheme for establishing a colony in Texas (by this time part of the United
States). The short-lived Denton County settlement is described in Donald
J. Kagay’s “Icaria: An Aborted Utopia on the Texas Frontier.”