Utopian communities inspired the first Norwegian emigrants

The great wave of emigration from Norway and other European countries to America began in the 1860s.

Dirk Johannsen is a professor of cultural history at the University of Oslo. He is particularly interested in certain utopian communities that left as early as the beginning of the 19th century.

Who were they?

“On the 'religious' side, these were groups that sought to build the New Jerusalem as the starting point for an age of righteousness,” says Johannsen.

Among the best known were the Shakers, a religious community originating in England.

Other groups included the Harmonists and Zoarites, religious societies founded in America by German radical Pietists, the researcher explains.

On the ‘secular’ side were early socialists, communists, and anarchists, such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony Society and the Icarians.

The latter were followers of the French communist and novelist Étienne Cabet. In his novel The Voyage to Icaria, he imagined a society in which people lived and worked together collectively.

These new settlements and their social experiments were well documented in newspapers in Norway and elsewhere in Europe, inspiring the first Norwegian emigrants.

Learning to see the world anew

Johannsen and his researcher colleagues have studied the narrative culture that developed within these utopian communities. He has focused particularly on the Harmonists.

Narrative culture refers to how we use stories to understand the world, pass on values, and create a sense of community.

Across the United States, archives and museums have preserved everything from sermons, speeches, newspapers, and agricultural manuals to poetry, fiction, diaries, and letters, Johannsen explains.

As we speak, he is working in a Shaker archive in New Hampshire.

“Narratives are absolutely central to defining what's relevant and what's background noise in a culture. They are a fantastic source for understanding how the new settlements construct and experience their world,” he says.

What these groups have in common is that they turned their gaze towards America to seek alternatives to the state, the monarchy, and the established economic models and ways of life in Europe, he explains.

Living in celibacy and with communal ownership

For the Harmonists, for example, the monarchy represented the seven‑headed beast in the Book of Revelation.

They were a Pietist movement of around 700 people, established in Germany at the end of the 18th century, who emigrated to the USA in 1804.

There they founded several religious communal settlements:

• Harmony, Pennsylvania, around 1805.

• Harmony, Indiana, founded in 1814. Sold to the socialist Robert Owen in 1825 and renamed New Harmony.

• Economy, Pennsylvania. Existed from 1825 to 1905, the longest-lasting and best‑known settlement.

The Harmonists believed they were living in the final phase of world history. Since Jesus would soon return, it made no sense to have children, and in 1807 they held a vote in which they decided to live in celibacy, the professor explains.

It may sound bleak, but the archival material Johannsen has found suggests the opposite.

“They describe their surroundings in epic songs, in which the settlements are revealed as Solomon’s Temple, and the rich natural world, every creature and every action, heralds the return of Jesus,” he says, pointing to a text:

'Here all of creation seems renewed, as if one were already in Eden (…) Here murder‑guns never thunder, no small patch is reddened with blood, even if it were only from a little worm; in paradise there is no death (…) every little flower shall be set free; not one perished uselessly.'

These are narratives in which they first created in the form of a narrated world, Johannsen explains.

From story to reality

The researchers view the narrative culture in two ways.

They serve as documentation of what happened, and as the realisation of what they call 'regimes of attention.' These are ways of telling a story that shape, direct, and coordinate attention within the groups towards a particular way of experiencing, thinking about, and acting in the world.

One example is the poems and songs the Harmonists composed for different occupations.

Some worked in agriculture, others in the textile trade, and all had their own poems to guide them in their work. Every practical task was simultaneously presented as part of the larger biblical plan for a new earth and a new heaven.

“In the songs, the settlement is the ever‑growing centre of the kingdom of righteousness. When they drain river plains and build factories, they are building the economy of the millennial kingdom,” says Johannsen.

And this narrated world was in fact built. The Harmonists quickly became the wealthiest community in North America.

“The settlements are still standing to this day, because they were built to such a high standard. They went to America’s frontier regions and transformed the wet river plains into an entire world built from the ground up. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about them, disregarding the fact that they were religious, because their collective way of living was so successful,” says Johannsen.

New Harmony and socialism

Do religious and secular people experience the world differently? That is one of the questions the researchers are asking.

The Welsh socialist and factory owner Robert Owen, who ran the cotton mill at New Lanark in Scotland, was another person who went to America to test the idea of communal ownership.

He had given up on trying to introduce socialist measures in Britain.

For Owen, the monarchy was not the seven‑headed beast of Revelation, but rather an expression of superstition and prejudices that stood in the way of reason and human progress.

In 1825, he bought Harmony, the Harmonists’ second settlement, to establish his own secular communal society: New Harmony.

“What the Harmonists regarded as divine was, for Owen, science, and it was Owen himself who first used the word ‘secular’ in its modern sense. They built open schools, and the first experiment with a kindergarten was carried out here," Johannsen says.

The New Harmony Society lasted only two years and has subsequently been regarded as a failed attempt. But Johannsen points out that it had an enormous influence: ideas about public schools, kindergartens, and public libraries spread from there.

Another feature they shared with the Harmonists was that Owen and his followers were concerned with equality between men and women. For the Harmonists, God was both male and female.

Inspired the first Norwegian emigrants

Dirk Johannsen reveals the link between the first organised Norwegian emigration and the Harmonist community:

“It was Quakers and Haugeans who had heard about the Harmonist community and their successful way of life, and who hoped they might support them in their search for a new life in America. We have found letters that were exchanged between them,” he says.

They travelled aboard Restoration from Stavanger to New York in 1825, and became known as the Sloopers. But there was no further contact with the Harmonists.

They ended up in Illinois, where many converted to Mormonism – another group that aimed to build a New Jerusalem.

“After the first organised Norwegian emigration, there's still a village left called Norway in Illinois. And it would be another ten years before the next larger group emigrated from Norway to America,” says Johannsen.

Misinterpretation – no tyrannical leader

What does it take to create a new world? Johannsen believes that 'belief' and 'conviction' are not very useful categories when writing religious history.

The group had a strong sense of community. They chose to emigrate and build a new society. They also achieved considerable economic success.

Historians have often explained this by claiming the group had a strong tyrannical leader, a clear hierarchy, experienced persecution, and possessed fanatical religious beliefs.

"What we find in the archives, however, are narratives about a world in which an alternative social order becomes self-evident. Once the world was narrated in this way, the new social form followed by itself. No strong leader was needed to force it through,” says Johannsen.

References:

Johannsen, D. Narrative cultures in the Anthropocene: World-making as active inference, In Bjærke et al. (Eds.) Cultural History and the Anthropocene: Old Turns, New Encounters, Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. DOI: 10.5040/9781350532632.ch-016

Kirsch, A. Johannsen, D. Here and There Early 19th-Century Transatlantic Emigration and the Discourse on Social Reform, Tidsskrift for kulturforskning, 2025.

This content is paid for and presented by the University of Oslo

This content is created by the University of Oslo's communication staff, who use this platform to communicate science and share results from research with the public. The University of Oslo is one of more than 80 owners of ScienceNorway.no. Read more here.

More content from the University of Oslo:

• 

  Researchers: No guarantee against another terrorist attack, despite increased surveillance

• 

  Can a swarm of AI agents create better music?

• 

  The likelihood of relationship breakdown may be influenced by our genes

• 

  Technology is making the music industry more individualistic and less equal

• 

  Researchers: Digital ID management in Norway is a catastrophe

• 

  Archaeology is helping researchers understand the effects of forced displacement