Recorded Talks & Videos
Scholars, museum professionals, and documentary filmmakers have turned their cameras on New Harmony, capturing lectures, panel discussions, oral histories, and visual explorations of the Owen-Maclure community's brief but consequential history. We've gathered recorded talks and videos that examine the Owen-Maclure years and the legacy that followed. This is content created by researchers and institutions who recognized this story's complexity and continued relevance.
Whether you're a visual learner, an educator seeking classroom materials, or a researcher wanting to hear directly from specialists, these videos offer engaging ways into New Harmony's layered history. We'll continue adding content as we discover new talks and recordings throughout the bicentennial.
Dr. Tristra Newyear / USI Center for Communal Studies
Indiana was home to some of America’s most radical progressive voices in the early 19th century–and some of them were women. Frances Wright, writer, speaker, and activist, came to New Harmony out of curiosity and left changed, beginning a career that won her praise and infamy in her day. Her work against slavery and for women’s broader role in society set the stage for a transformation of American society we are still experiencing today. In this lecture, we will explore her life and the other women who were like her, working toward an America more in line with our stated value of liberty and justice for all. Dr. Tristra Newyear, earned her Ph.D. in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University. She is a creative artist (writer, audio creator, instigator) devoted to the history of New Harmony and community creativity. Currently, she is the Chief Strategy Officer at Rock Paper Scissors, a Bloomington-based PR/marketing agency. Newyear is also an artist who published several novels, most recently Starfall, dubbed “visionary” by NUVO Indianapolis, based on New Harmony’s history. She also wrote and produced a limited-run podcast on early 19th-century firebrand Frances Wright and has been interviewed on NPR stations (WNIN, WVXU Cincinnati).
Rebecca May Hope / Working Men's Institute Museum & Library
Travel back to 1825 and join the passengers of the “Philanthropist”, the keel boat that traveled from Pittsburgh to New Harmony and would later be known as the Boatload of Knowledge. Rebecca May Hope, 2023 recipient of the Arlene Feiner Memorial Research Grant for Women’s Studies, takes us through the stories of the fifteen women aboard the Philanthropist, as well as their descendants to explore the legacy these women left on New Harmony and around the world.
Dr. Tristra Newyear Yeager and Dr. Eleanor Rust / Working Men's Institute Museum & Library
Join Tristra Newyear Yeager and Eleanor Rust as they explore the life and times of Frances Wright and discuss their new 8-episode podcast documentary. Dr. Yeager and Dr. Rust were co-recipients of the WMI’s Arlene Feiner Memorial Research Grant for Women’s Studies in 2023. The Bloomington Area Arts Council provided additional support.
In 2024, Historic New Harmony and the University of Southern Indiana released a new orientation film about the town of New Harmony, Indiana. Shown to visitors at the Atheneum Visitors Center, this film focuses on the modern community with commentary by scholars, business owners, and local residents.
Many authors have written about the economic difficulties Robert Owen’s utopian community in Indiana was facing between 1825 and 1827, underlining the rapid demise of the Social System, which occurred in less than two years. In their eyes, Owen’s experiment in Indiana was a failure, whereas in fact, the impact of Robert Owen and William Maclure’s efforts goes way beyond New Harmony. As early as October 1825, Maclure invited French scientist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur to come to New Harmony as a teacher. Together with Robert Owen’s sons, Robert Dale, David Dale and Richard Owen, Lesueur lay the groundwork for two major institutions that would shape the future of America. These institutions still exist today. Two decades of research, by Dutch historian Ritsert Rinsma, author of the book Eyewitness to Utopia, in which he analyzes unpublished and never-seen-before materials from over twenty different archives in France, Great Britain and the United States - including primary documents from the Natural History Museum in Le Havre, France, as well as little-known notes and letters in the Working Men’s Institute of New Harmony - enable us to completely redefine this utopian experiment in America. The researcher’s strong connections with descendants of the families that lived in New Harmony between 1825 and 1833 allowed him to have access to numerous other unpublished sources. These essential documents provide new insight and a better understanding of this avant-garde community and its educational and scientific goals.
Jan Kahle / Working Men's Institute Museum & Library
The Friends of the Working Men’s Institute continue their year-long celebration of women by examining one of the first feminists - Frances “Fanny” Wright. From her humble beginnings in Scotland to her explorations of America and time spent in New Harmony, Frances Wright introduced many thought-provoking concepts about the evolution of society that proved too radical for the early 19th century. Jan Kahle walks us through Fanny’s life, relationships, activism, and her repeated efforts to encourage new views on slavery, interracial marriage, communal living, equal rights, and much more.
Dr. Victoria Wolcott / Historic New Harmony / University of Southern Indiana
Although not widely recognized, there is a long history of African American experimentation with cooperatives modeled after Robert Owen’s utopian communities. In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an all-black town modeled on Owen’s utopian ideas, cooperatives thrived and the town served as a refuge for Black activists throughout the civil rights movement. In the early twentieth century W.E.B. DuBois became a major proponent of cooperatives, founding the Negro Cooperative Guild in 1918 and traveling the country promoting them. With the advent of the Great Migration, activists worked to replicate southern rural and small town cooperatives in the urban North. Join Dr. Wolcott as she examines Robert Owen’s influence on the African American cooperative movement and explores its significance for the long civil rights movement. Victoria W. Wolcott is Professor of History at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She has published two books: Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit (2001) and Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America (2012). Her book Living in the Future: The Utopian Strain in the Long Civil Rights Movement, was published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2022. In addition, she has published articles in The Journal of American History, The Radical History Review, and the Journal of Women’s History among others.
Docey Lewis / Historic New Harmony / University of Southern Indiana
As a Robert Owen descendant who chose to live in New Harmony almost twenty years ago, Docey Lewis continues to be inspired by his prescient vision for a “New Moral World.” Owen funded his vision for an American utopia through success in his Scottish textile business, New Lanark Mill. Ms. Lewis' own long career in textiles has afforded her the opportunity to work globally and to participate in businesses, organizations and communities that often live and work cooperatively to improve the lives of artisans. Their co-creation with nature, ancestral knowledge, artisans and the marketplace never ceases to bring her both joy and a deep respect for their interconnectivity. Having not been able to make her usual international travels for the past year and a half, Ms. Lewis has spent time in her New Harmony, Indiana studio, making art, entangled in a myriad of recycled materials, rejects, studio detritus and her own hopes and fears for the future. Utopia is much on her mind. Her story is not one of ground-breaking ideas, but rather, the tale of a foot soldier on the path of trying to do good through commerce. One does not need the fortune of a Robert Owen to do the right thing, but one must have a vision, and not be afraid to work hard, play well with others and be somewhat fearless. “Entangled” weaves a tale of how Robert Owen entered Docey Lewis' life as an ancestor-mentor, whose ideas she studied and attempted to apply throughout her career. Docey Lewis has worked for forty years in over forty-five countries as a designer and sourcing consultant for commercial companies, governments and international development organizations. She began her career in San Francisco as an artist, weaver and yarn designer, developing fabrics for fashion and interiors. In the 1980s Docey founded IMA Designs, a weaving factory and commercial design studio in the Philippines with a focus on fashion, interiors and natural fiber wall coverings. Docey and her son Owen currently operate a studio, DESIGN BANK 505 in New Harmony, and are advisors to a weaving and papermaking factory in Kathmandu, Nepal. Docey is the chief design consultant for 3form, Inc’s Full Circle product line. She has been a senior consultant to Aid to Artisans (ATA) since 1988, most recently working on organic cotton in Senegal and loom weaving in Mexico and has served on ATA’s board as well as on the boards of the Full Circle Foundation, Vital Edge Aid, the HandEye Fund (HEF), and the Robert Lee Blaffer Foundation (RLBF). Returning to her self-taught art roots, Docey is exploring how to unplug from a fast international life with slow cloth, to a slower creative life in her own backyard, at least while the pandemic lasts. This has resulted in art exhibits at the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art (2019/2020), 4ll Gallery (Columbus, IN, October/November 2021), and the Big Car Collaborative (Indianapolis, IN, October 2022).
Dr. William Elliott / Historic New Harmony / University of Southern Indiana
In January 1826, the passengers of the Philanthropist arrived in New Harmony, Indiana to participate in a social experiment led by Robert Owen and William Maclure focusing on communal living. Although this experiment dissolved by 1828, the community continued to innovate through art, education, music, printing, scientific investigation, and social justice. Specifically, the children of Robert Owen found success in a diversity of endeavors, attracting many well-known artistic, political, and scientific influencers of the day.
Dr. Matthew Roberts / Historic New Harmony / University of Southern Indiana
Universal happiness was the goal of Robert Owen’s ‘new moral world’ or the ‘rational system of society’, and he promised to eradicate bad passions. If Owen’s story is well known, much less has been said about what, exactly, he meant by happiness. In Owenite formulation, happiness meant something quite specific and tended to be used relatively: in short, happiness denoted the absence of negative feelings and was to be achieved in quite prescriptive ways. As this presentation will show, the feeling of happiness for Owenites was inseparable from its practice. Focusing on the tensions and contradiction in Owen’s formulation of happiness – and feelings more generally – sheds new light on the reasons why Owenism failed on both sides of the Atlantic. Matthew Roberts is an Associate Professor in Modern British History at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom. He is a historian of nineteenth-century Britain and the Anglophone Atlantic World, and works mainly on the history of popular politics and protest, the visual and material culture of politics and more recently the history of emotions. His book Chartism, Commemoration and the Cult of the Radical Hero was published by Routledge in 2020 and is now available in paperback. His talk on Robert Owen arises from his book project, Democratic Passions: The Politics of Feeling in British Radicalism, 1809–1848, published by Manchester University Press in 2022.
Dr. Casey Harison / Historic New Harmony / University of Southern Indiana
Robert Owen influenced well beyond his native Great Britain. France is a logical place to look for Owen’s influence because it was the home of like-minded reformers and social innovators, who, like Owen himself, famously were labeled by Karl Marx as “utopian socialists.” Many also struggled with ways to answer the century’s Social Question: how to bridge the gap between the promises of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and French Revolution and the unhappy conditions of social and economic life in their own day. Most examinations of the Social Question in nineteenth-century France focus on the utopian socialists or the other revolutionaries, reformers and political thinkers of varying fame who took part in the country’s tumultuous political history of the era. Instead, this presentation will examine the impact of Owen on two political personalities who are less well known to us today, though they were influential figures in their own time: the revolutionary insurrectionist Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) and the working-class reformer Martin Nadaud (1815-1898). Casey Harison is Professor Emeritus of History and former director of the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana, where he has taught courses in Modern European and World History since 1992. He has written books and articles on French and Atlantic social and cultural history. His books include a survey of modern Paris designed for the college classroom, Paris in Modern Times: From the Old Regime to the Present Day (Bloomsbury, 2019) and a Transatlantic history of the British rock and roll band The Who, Feedback: The Who and Their Generation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). Harison also edited A New Social Question (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), which is a collection of papers drawn from a conference in New Harmony to celebrate the 200th anniversary of its founding.
Abigail Owen-Pontez / Historic New Harmony / University of Southern Indiana
On July 4, 1826, Robert Owen's "Oration, Containing a Declaration of Mental Independence" was published in The New Harmony Gazette. The speech was originally given eight days earlier at the Public Hall in New Harmony during the Celebration of the Fourth of July. In this video, Abigail Owen-Pontez, Robert Owen's great great great great granddaughter, shares his original speech.
Imagine stepping aboard an experimental ship and making a two year journey to study alien life. Thomas Say begins with the story of his 1819 zoological expedition to the Rocky Mountains, touching on his start in science, malaria on the journey, extinction and finally his move to New Harmony. Timepiece Theatre offers educational outreach theatre for diverse audiences. Sparking interest in History and Science through personal stories of discovery, exploration and innovation.
Dr. Gregory Claeys / Historic New Harmony / University of Southern Indiana
Join Dr. Gregory Claeys as he examines Robert Owen's idea of exchanging conspicuous consumption for a rational frugality. Owen's opposition to fashion, in particular, indicates an attitude of rational consumption in which competition for the esteem of others, most notably through clothing, was to be substituted for the extraordinary flamboyance in display which marked his own time, and which in his view produced additional hardship for the working classes. Owen unfolded these views at various points, and several efforts were made to implement them at New Harmony and other communities. Dr. Gregory Claeys is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of London. His eleven books include two studies of Owenism, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism 1815 - 1860 (Princeton University Press, 1987) and Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 1989). He has also edited Robert Owen: A New View of Society and Other Writings (Penguin Books, 1991), The Selected Works of Robert Owen (4 vols., Pickering and Chatto, 1993), and Owenite Socialism: Pamphlets and Correspondence (10 vols., Routledge, 2005).
On December 9, 2011, Dr. Don Pitzer conducted an oral history interview with Dr. David L. Rice, first President of the University of Southern Indiana (USI). One of the topics discussed is the connection between USI and New Harmony, including the Robert Owen Bicentennial Conference in 1971 and the establishment of the Center for Communal Studies in 1976. Specific conversations about New Harmony and the Owen-Maclure legacy occur at minutes 16:50-22:02 and 27:15-35:09 in the video.