Publications

40 Pages, Richard W. Couper Press, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-937370-32-9 ($15)

Gordon Ball first saw San Francisco as a small child, traveling there by train with his Ohio River Valley family to join his father in Japan after his narrow escape from Shanghai before Mao Zedong took it. In My San Francisco he recounts incidents and experiences from family furlough visits in the City of Hills every few years, followed by hitchhiking there in the war-torn 1960s and embarking on a six-month stay a few years later, the culmination of a cross-country journey with poet Allen Ginsberg—a stay marked by a failed love affair and the start of a lifelong friendship. My San Francisco, a large format chapbook with several photographs including two by the photographer author, is both a highly personal memoir of and tribute to the city, vitalized by imagistic gists and brief encounters melded with longer narratives; it is, as some readers have celebrated it, “honest,” “brave,” and “beautiful.”
Author Bio: Gordon Ball edited Allen Verbatim and two volumes of journals with Allen Ginsberg. He’s the author of three memoirs (’66 Frames, Dark Music, and East Hill Farm) and a volume of short stories, On Tokyo’s Edge. His films and photographs have been shown and acclaimed widely. He’s currently at work on a half-century of family history from the Ohio River through 1920s Shanghai to prison camp World War II. He teaches at Washington and Lee University and with his wife Kathleen lives outside Lexington, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley.

July and October 2019

• From the Editor
• A Short History of the Columbian Phalanx by Julieanna Frost
• Document: "A Journal of a Journey from Canterbury to Enfield [Connecticut]" introduced and edited by Stephen J. Paterwic
• Why Historians Should Examine Shaker Novels and Short Stories: Exposing Century-Old Misconceptions of Shaker Life by Richard Marshall
• Personal Visits and Observations: Charles Nordhoff's Remarkable Tour of American Communal Societies by Peter Hoehnle

Front and back cover illustrations from: J.F. Witherell, ed., The Anti-Millerite and Scriptural Expositor (Concord, N.H.: 1843).

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• From the Editor
• Shaker Brothers in the Spirit: The Exchange of Ideas and Spiritual Gifts between Seth Youngs Wells and Calvin Green by Jane F. Crosthwaite
• Document: "A Beautiful Box of Gifts and Emblems of Presence Given to Calvin Green as a Token of Eternal Blessings....Copied November 25th 1847"
• "Blacksmith by Trade" : The Journey of African- American Shaker Justinian Cartwright by Rebekah Brummett
• Document: An Account of an American Commune in the Soviet Union during the 1920s by Arthur B. Ruhl

Front and back cover illustrations: "A Beautiful Box of Gifts and Emblems of Presence Given to Calvin Green as a Token of Eternal Blessings....Copied November 25th 1847." Canterbury Shaker Village Archives, #788.

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278 Pages, Richard W. Couper Press, 2019 ISBN: 978-1-937370-26-8 ($25)

The President's Medium collects and carefully examines the available material on the colorful but nearly forgotten life of spiritualist medium John Benjamin Conklin and concludes that he most likely conducted private seances at the White House for a receptive Abraham Lincoln during the time the president was weighing the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. It also examines Conklin's association with communitarians and health reformers Thomas L. and Mary S. Gove Nichols, as well as his connections within the theatrical community of New York City during the 1850s.

Dr. John B. Buescher is the author of books and articles on the history of 19th-century American Spiritualism. He is a co-director of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP).

• From the Editor
• Utopia, Ohio, 1844-1847: Seedbed for Three Experiments in Communal Living by Cori L. Flatt and Peter A. Hoehnle
• From Württemberg to Zoar: Origins of a Separatist Community by Eberhard Fritz
• Document: Questioning of the Separatists of Rottenacker after the Quartering of a Military Command, May 1804
• Document: Visitor's Account of the Shaker Community at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, by Clara von Gerstner

Front cover illustration: A Separatist star, the only one known to exist in Württemberg. It is attached to a document in the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. Courtesy of the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart A 213 Bü 3091 Back cover illustration: Clermont Phalanx, as painted by A.J. MacDonald. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University, GEN MSS 1394.

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Shaker Studies, no. 15. 338 pages, full color illustrations, 2019.
ISBN: 978-1-937370-28-2 ($45)

In the half century between 1830 and 1880 the visual culture of America's oldest, largest, and most distinctive communal religious society was portrayed in scores of printed images published in the popular illustrated press. In this complement to his 1987 book Shaker Village Views , Robert P. Emlen identifies and explicates every known engraving or lithograph that pictured the Shakers in the years of their greatest prosperity and before photography became popular in Shaker communities. Many of these images are reproduced here for the first time.

• July and October 2018

• Gentile's Invitation to Shiloh, House of David by Henry M. Yaple
• Descriptive Bibliography of Imprints in the House of David Collection by Shannon McRae and Brian Ziebart
• The Quest for 392 by Brian Ziebart

Front cover illustration: The Star of Bethlehem. 2nd. ed. Book 1. 1903 M-048. Collection of the Israelite House of David Back cover illustration: Information for Excurstionists!. ca. 1910. M-007. Collection of the Israelite House of David.

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• “Hope on - work ever”: The Valley Forge Community and the Shakers by Stephen Paterwic
• List of People from the Valley Forge Community who Joined the Shakers compiled by Stephen Paterwic
• Natural Man Illumined: Johann Gichtel’s Mystical Figures at Ephrata by Nick Siegert

Front cover illustration: Jacob Martin, Mystical Figure (ca. 1760’s?) (Courtesy of Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Ephrata Cloister.)

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• From the Editor
• The Success and Failure of Oneida Community Architecture by Kevin Coffee
• Document: Reasons For Uniting with the people called Shakers: Comprised in a short sketch of the Author’s Religious Exercises, and a brief Statement of the Peculiar Doctrines and Practices of that People, by Proctor Sampson
• Hamilton College Library “Home Notes” Communal Societies Collection New Acquisitions, by Mark Tillson

Front cover illustration: The Oneida Community Mansion House. (Courtesy of the Oneida Community Mansion House.)

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Shaker Studies, no. 13. 153 pages, 2018.
ISBN: 978-1-937370-25-1 ($20)

For some time there has been a consensus among scholars that the last substantial Shaker apostate account was that of Hervey Elkins, which appeared in 1853. In this book Professor Tom Sakmyster provides an analysis of a previously unknown apostate account written by Augustus Wager in 1872, shortly after he left Union Village, the Shaker society located near Lebanon, Ohio. Wager, who had lived for fourteen years at Union Village, was embittered by his experiences as a Shaker and determined to destroy the increasingly favorable public image of the Shakers, which he believed was based on ignorance and misconceptions. He wanted to alert Americans to the darker aspects of Shaker life and the fact that Shakerism was in its death throes. Wager’s apostate account, which appeared as a series of articles in a Cincinnati newspaper, is reprinted in this book. The account throws important new light on everyday life and economic activity in a Western Shaker village during the period of decline in the post-Civil War era.