Arndt, Karl John Richard.

Karl Arndt, born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1903, was a scholar of German-American history specializing in utopian societies. He was a professor at Louisiana State University from 1935 until 1947, and at Clark University, where he was head of the German Department from 1950 to 1969. He served in the United States Military Government in Germany, in the Office of Church-State Relations, from 1945 to 1950. Arndt wrote several volumes of history on the Harmony Society, including George Rapp's Harmony Society, 1785-1847 (Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972).

Bernhard Muller, also known as Count Leon, Proli, and Archduke Maximilian von Este, was born near Frankfurt, Germany in 1788 and as a young man gave sermons predicting the onset of the millennium, which created conflict with Church and State officials. He immigrated to the United States in 1831, first living in the Harmony Society in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and later founding the separatist New Philadelphia Congregation (in present-day Monaca, Pennsylvania) and, in 1833, the settlement of Germantown, in Grand Ecore, Lousiana. Muller died of yellow fever in Germantown in 1834.

From the guide to the Karl John Richard Arndt collection of Bernhard Muller and the Harmony Society, 1721-1984, (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)