Cover

Front cover illustration: Only known photograph of the museum in situ in the Brethren’s South Shop (ca. 1877–1917). (Communal Societies Collection, Hamilton College

Schools: The Gender Playground An Analytic Approach to How Elementary School Children Learn About Gender

Sociologists emphasize that gender is a social construct so pervasive in our everyday lives that it often goes unnoticed (West and Zimmerman 1967). The two-category system ultimately perpetuates inequalities that don’t regard men and women as equals. In order to further understand how children learn about gender, ethnographic fieldwork was conducted at Hillside Elementary School in a first-grade and a fifth-grade class for three weeks. Results indicate that the formal class curriculum, behavioral sanctions, and the activities that students participate in all perpetuated the gender regime and made the rigid categorical differences of “boys” and “girls” salient in the classroom. My findings mirror previous research while also providing insight into gendered dynamics in a homogenous school district. Both teachers and peers work to upkeep gender norms, and my findings demonstrate how gender remains a taken-for-granted aspect of the social world

Being Italian: The Peculiar Journey of Blackness

Generations of African and Black Italians are extending the boundaries of what it means to be Italian, in the face of denial, diversion, and an insistence on whiteness as the measure of inclusion, and humanity. Drawing on Allan Pred’s work on racist geographies of the everyday and taken-for-granted in Sweden, I advance the concepts of B/black spaces and relational places to approach to the study of identity, belonging, and place in Black Europe, with a focus on Italy. Black and African Italians from diverse origins and generations are asserting their belonging in Italy. Pred’s work on every day situated practices, power relations, taken-for-granted knowledge, and silences, is useful to contemporary scholarship in Black geographies, antiracist and decolonial scholarship. Pred’s holistic studies of modernity and the impacts of global political and economic transformations in lived experiences demonstrate the centrality of racism to national societies and cultures. His work is valuable to scholars of modern Western colonial systems of knowledge production and power, advancing insights and encouraging new directions based on abundant, ordinary yet silenced everyday realities and experiences. This paper expands on Pred’s work through an analysis of Blackness, place and belonging in Italy, offering an approach to the study of African Diaspora in Europe

Front Matter

Information relating to the publisher, publication frequency, editorial staff, purchase options, submission requirements, and contact information for the American Communal Societies Quarterly

How Did They Do It? The Path to Upward Mobility for Underprivileged African Americans

Much research has focused on how African Americans have been hindered from building generational wealth due to historic and contemporary acts of racism. This study seeks to address an understudied group, namely upper class Black Americans, and examine the steps they take to achieve social mobility. I conduct 14 in-depth interviews with African American alumni from an elite liberal arts college to investigate their financial and educational backgrounds, as well as their strategies for overcoming obstacles to wealth accumulation. The findings revealed that these individuals placed a strong emphasis on gaining social and cultural capital to build and preserve their wealth. Additionally, a majority of participants employed a conservative investment approach as a key strategy for achieving generational wealth. Overall, this study sheds light on the experiences of an understudied population and provides valuable insights into the strategies employed by successful African American individuals to overcome systematic barriers to wealth accumulation

“This imperfect scrawl”: Neighbor Maria G. Ham Remembers the Canterbury Shakers, 1839-1908

Sometime between 1915 and 1925, the then elderly Maria Gerrish Ham (1833–1925) corresponded with Oakes K. Lawrence (1899–1971), the young son of former tenants who had rented a farmhouse on her family property in Canterbury, New Hampshire, fifteen to twenty years earlier. Ham’s property abutted the religious commune in Canterbury owned by the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming, commonly known as the Shakers, one of America’s most enduring communal religious societies. The Ham family had been neighbors of the Shakers since the founding of the community in the early 1790s. Maria was their neighbor for seventy-six years, had good relations with them, and counted dozens of Shaker brothers and sisters from the village as friends and acquaintances. One of the letters from Ham’s correspondence with Lawrence survives and is mixed in with Canterbury’s town records in the collections of the New Hampshire State Archives in nearby Concord. The unpublished eight-page letter is a reminiscence of Ham’s dealings with Canterbury Shakers, providing remarkable insight as to how their neighbors, and Ham in particular, a close friend and ally, interacted with them during the peak years of the community’s history

Maturity in Children\u27s Literature

In this day and age, it is very common for children\u27s media to be viewed as more as a form of distraction rather than a source of education. By taking such a notion into account, this project aims to create a children\u27s book which is not only appealing to younger readers, but also manages to treat them with respect by exploring mature topics and themes. This project is an illustrated, 80-page children\u27s short story which explores natural disasters, sickness, and the importance of family in times of hardship. The story follows a semi-autobiographical retelling of the author\u27s experiences during a series of earthquakes which occurred in Nicaragua in 2014, and during a period in which his grandfather was very sick. These topics were chosen due to how they relate to modern day problems, especially those regarding the recent pandemic; an event which many children are still be processing. Through these experiences, the author creates a story which not only aims to entertain, but also help young readers gain a better understanding of complicated emotions and events

Places to Pray: A Survey of Inspirationist Meeting Houses

Various “plain” religious groups have used the term “meeting house” to refer to their worship spaces for centuries. These groups, including the Quakers (Religious Society of Friends), Shakers, Harmonists, and others, adopted forms of worship that were intentionally in contrast with mainstream Christian religious systems. This study examines the development of the Versammlungssaal (meeting house) and related worship structures in the Community of True Inspiration, better known today as the Amana Society after its later incarnation as one of the longest-lived and most successful communal societies in the United States (1842-1932). The Inspirationist