What communities do when they expect the world to change

Again and again, in very different times and places, groups of people have become convinced that the world they knew was about to be swept away and a better one would take its place. Scholars call such movements millenarian. In 1962 Sylvia L. Thrupp edited this collection, which grew out of discussions among scholars at the University of Chicago, to set them side by side and ask what they have in common.

The contributors come at the question from history, anthropology, sociology and comparative religion, and their examples range across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific and the Americas. Read together, the essays ask what such hopes share across cultures and centuries, and what happens when people act on them. The book went on to be cited often as an early reference on the subject.

This is the original 1962 softcover, published by Mouton & Co. in The Hague as Supplement II to Comparative Studies in Society and History, and not the later Schocken paperback. Its blue wrappers are heavily faded along the spine and outer edge and scuffed, with tanned edges; the text pages shown are reasonably clean.