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.