Author: Janis Lee Thiessen Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 1442660597 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
Manufacturing Mennonites examines the efforts of Mennonite intellectuals and business leaders to redefine the group's ethno-religious identity in response to changing economic and social conditions after 1945. As the industrial workplace was one of the most significant venues in which competing identity claims were contested during this period, Janis Thiessen explores how Mennonite workers responded to such redefinitions and how they affected class relations. Through unprecedented access to extensive private company records, Thiessen provides an innovative comparison of three businesses founded, owned, and originally staffed by Mennonites: the printing firm Friesens Corporation, the window manufacturer Loewen, and the furniture manufacturer Palliser. Complemented with interviews with workers, managers, and business owners, Manufacturing Mennonites pioneers two important new trajectories for scholarship - how religion can affect business history, and how class relations have influenced religious history.
Author: James O. Lehman Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 9780801886720 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 390
Book Description
Explores the moral dilemmas faced by various religious sects and how these groups struggled to come to terms with the effects of wartime Americanization-- without sacrificing their religious beliefs and values.
Author: Leonard G. Friesen Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 148750568X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
Mennonites in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union is the first history of Mennonite life from its origins in the Dutch Reformation of the sixteenth century, through migration to Poland and Prussia, and on to more than two centuries of settlement in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Leonard G. Friesen sheds light on religious, economic, social, and political changes within Mennonite communities as they confronted the many faces of modernity. He shows how the Mennonite minority remained engaged with the wider empire that surrounded them, and how they reconstructed and reconfigured their identity after the Bolsheviks seized power and formed a Soviet regime committed to atheism. Integrating Mennonite history into developments in the Russian Empire and the USSR, Friesen provides a history of an ethno-religious people that illuminates the larger canvas of Imperial Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet history.
Author: John C. Wenger Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1579104568 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 487
Book Description
A comprehensive and sympathetic history of all branches of the Mennonites and Amish, including a portrayal of their doctrine, life, and piety. It attempts to present a true picture of the Christian bodies in Indiana and Michigan which are descended from the European Anabaptists of the sixteenth century.
Author: Daniel B. Lee Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 9780830415731 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
Lee focuses on the Weaverland Conference of Old Order Mennonites, a group formed in 1893 and now consisting of over 5,000 members. A large concentration of Weaverland Mennonites live in upstate New York near Seneca Falls, and Lee focuses his easily readable sociological study on that community. Individual chapters deal with the worship, rituals, rules, and discipline of the group, and with a number of recent defections to a more mainstream Mennonite Church located in the same area. Lee argues that Weaverland Mennonites are held together by their practices alone, rather than by a common underlying set of beliefs. --Choice Magazine
Author: James Urry Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press ISBN: 0887554113 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Mennonites and their forebears are usually thought to be a people with little interest or involvement in politics. Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood reveals that since their early history, Mennonites have, in fact, been active participants in worldly politics. From western to eastern Europe and through different migrations to North America, James Urry’s meticulous research traces Mennonite links with kingdoms, empires, republics, and democratic nations in the context of peace, war, and revolution. He stresses a degree of Mennonite involvement in politics not previously discussed in literature, including Mennonite participation in constitutional reform and party politics, and shows the polarization of their political views from conservatism to liberalism and even revolutionary activities. Urry looks at the Mennonite reaction to politics and political events from the Reformation onwards and focusses particularly on those people who settled in Russia and their descendants who came to Manitoba. Using a wide variety of sources, Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood combines an inter-disciplinary approach to reveal that Mennonites, far from being the “Quiet in the Land,” have deep roots in politics.
Author: Royden Loewen Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421442043 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
A comparative global history of Mennonites from the ground up. Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize by the Canadian Historical Association, Nominee of the Margaret McWilliams Award by the Manitoba Historical Society Mennonite farmers can be found in dozens of countries spanning five continents. In this comparative world-scale environmental history, Royden Loewen draws on a multi-year study of seven geographically distinctive Anabaptist communities around the world, focusing on Mennonite farmers in Bolivia, Canada, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Russia, the United States, and Zimbabwe. These farmers, who include Amish, Brethren in Christ, and Siberian Baptists, till the land in starkly distinctive climates. They absorb very disparate societal lessons while being shaped by particular faith outlooks, historical memory, and the natural environment. The book reveals the ways in which modern-day Mennonite farmers have adjusted to diverse temperatures, precipitation, soil types, and relative degrees of climate change. These farmers have faced broad global forces of modernization during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from commodity markets and intrusive governments to technologies marked increasingly by the mechanical, chemical, and genetic. Based on more than 150 interviews and close textual analysis of memoirs, newspapers, and sermons, the narrative follows, among others, Zandile Nyandeni of Matopo as she hoes the spring-fed soils of Matabeleland's semi-arid savannah; Vladimir Friesen of Apollonovka, Siberia, who no longer heeds the dictates of industrial time of the Soviet-era state farm; and Abram Enns of Riva Palacio, Bolivia, who tells how he, a horse-and-buggy traditionalist, hired bulldozers to clear-cut a farm in the eastern lowland forests to grow soybeans, initially leading to dust bowl conditions. As Mennonites, Loewen writes, these farmers were raised with knowledge of the historic Anabaptist teachings on community, simplicity, and peace that stood alongside ideas on place and sustainability. Nonetheless, conditioned by gender, class, ethnicity, race, and local values, they put their agricultural ideas into practice in remarkably diverse ways. Mennonite Farmers is a pioneering work that brings faith into conversation with the land in distinctive ways.
Author: C. Henry Smith Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1725218844 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 518
Book Description
Although the story of the religious life of the Mennonites may be told in few words, yet they have been the founders of the first German colony in America and have been among the pioneers in many of the frontier settlements in the westward expansion of the American people. And for this reason their history is of interest also to the student of general American history. I have attempted therefore to trace in this volume not only the history of the Mennonite church but also the complete life story of the Mennonite people, and have treated such phases of the subject as I could find material for. I have attempted further to cover the entire field of American Mennonite history and have tried to place every event of importance in its proper perspective. So far as possible I have tried to be impartial toward the various branches of the church and have given each the amount of space which according to my judgment is importance deserved. --from the Introduction
Author: Janis Lee Thiessen
Author: James O. Lehman
Author: Leonard G. Friesen
Author: John C. Wenger
Author: Daniel Kolb Cassel
Author: Daniel B. Lee
Author: James Urry
Author: Royden Loewen
Author: C. Henry Smith
Author: C. Henry Smith