The Prime Minister of Paradise: The True Story of a Lost American History

ISBN-13: 9780812994971 / Angielski / Twarda / 2027 / 368 str.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

Opis

The award-winning author of Pulphead chases one of colonial America's greatest, most elusive Utopians through decades of forgotten history in an epic twenty-year search that tracks the power of ideas and the nature of obsession.

In 1735, charismatic German lawyer and accused atheist Christian Gottlieb Priber fled Germany, under threat of arrest, bound for colonial South Carolina. When he arrived, he sold his possessions and hiked 400 miles west, into the woods of what is now Tennessee. There, in the Cherokee village of Grand Tellico, Priber created a utopian society that he named Paradise.
For six years, Paradise was governed by a set of revolutionary ideas that included racial equality, sexual freedom, and a lack of private property. Most troublingly for the English, Priber spoke against colonialism itself. Many of his ideas - which he chronicled in a mysterious manuscript he called Paradise -- went on to inform the American and French Revolutions, as well socialist theory.
Priber's ideas were so subversive that he was hunted for half a decade and eventually captured by the British - making headlines in London -- and was imprisoned until his death. At that point, the only copy of his book was apparently burned.