"The Angel and the Serpent is a book which combines scholarship and literary grace, and which recreates for us both the world of the Rappites and the Owenites." —Henry Steele Commager, The New York Times Book Review

Here is the story of George Rapp's German Harmonists and Robert Owen's Idealists—the two vastly different communities that shaped the history of New Harmony, Indiana Both the Rappites and the Owenites came to New Harmony to conduct communal living experiments—Rapp expecting the millennium; Owen believing he had brought the millennium with him.