	The years of the late 1870s and 1880s were marked by a series of strikes and economic crises in the United States — problems which raised questions about the basic structure of the American economy in the minds of many American intellectuals. For some, a prospective answer lay in the pages of writer Edward Bellamy's 1888 work of utopian imagination, "Looking Backward, 2000-1887," which imaginatively depicted a future world of organized and regimented economic production and social peace.