From the Inside Out

From the Inside Out

Author: Royden Loewen

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 1999-10-12

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0887552625

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Historian Royden Loewen has brought together selections from diaries kept by 21 Mennonites in Canada between 1863 and 1929, some translated from German for the first time. By skillfully comparing and contrasting a wide cross-section of lives, Loewen shows how these diaries often turn the hidden contours of household and community "inside out." The writers featured were ordinary rural people: young women and grandmothers, rural preachers and landless householders. They include a teenaged boy who immigrated from Russia to Manitoba in 1875 as well as a successful merchant, a traveling evangelist, and a devout, conservative church elder. An elderly grandfather recounted the daily circuit of his children's homes, while 19-year-old Marie Schoeder wrote of her literary aspirations, her "secret hope" that some day she would "write things that have a real worth, things that are worth printing, and things that other folks would love to read and pay for." From the Inside Out also contrasts diaries from two distinct Mennonite communities in Canada. The Swiss-American Mennonites in Waterloo County, Ontario, faced rapid urbanization, while the Dutch-Russian Mennonites in southern Manitoba maintained their more rural environment. The diaries mirror their writers' preoccupations with work and weather, but they also reveal a communityís social structure and round of activities such as weddings, funerals, and worship services. In the process of diary-keeping, the writers sought to make sense of a dynamic and often unpredictable world. Reading what they chose to record is to learn much about their culture. Their writings provide glimpses of their lives, their collective mindset, and their history as a people.


Cultivating Connections

Cultivating Connections

Author: Alison R. Marshall

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2014-06-18

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 077482803X

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In the late 1870s, thousands of Chinese men left coastal British Columbia and the western United States and headed east. For these men, the Prairies were a land of opportunity; there, they could open shops and potentially earn enough money to become merchants. The result of almost a decade’s research and more than three hundred interviews, Cultivating Connections tells the stories of some of Prairie Canada's Chinese settlers – men and women from various generations who navigated cultural difference. These stories reveal the critical importance of networks in coping with experiences of racism and establishing a successful life on the Prairies. This book offers an incisive look at the organizations, relationships, and ties that were critical in forging and sustaining life – yet it also serves as a remarkable record of the voices of some of the Prairies’ most resilient and resourceful pioneers.


Mennonite Farmers

Mennonite Farmers

Author: Royden Loewen

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1421442043

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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.


Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood

Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood

Author: James Urry

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2011-07-15

Total Pages: 782

ISBN-13: 0887554113

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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. Urry 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 focuses 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.


In Subordination

In Subordination

Author: Mary Kinnear

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1995-02-20

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 077356523X

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Kinnear presents five case studies of professional women in Manitoba: university teachers, physicians, lawyers, nurses, and schoolteachers. Although the unrelenting efforts of nineteenth-century feminists won women access to higher education and the professions, the author reveals that most women, whether in male- or female-dominated professions, were forced to accept subordinate positions. They responded with acquiescence, indifference, resentment, or resistance. Kinnear considers the reasons for and the cost of these various strategies. In addition to quantitative data culled from census and other records, Kinnear has collected testimony from more than two hundred professional women, a rich mine of information. A significant contribution to the growing literature on women and the professions, In Subordination helps explain why professional women continue to fight for equality today.


A Female Economy

A Female Economy

Author: Mary Kinnear

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780773517356

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Kinnear (history, U. of Manitoba) analyzes women's work in Manitoba from 1870 to 1970 and shows it was, in every domain, undervalued. She describes how early pioneers, East European immigrants, and professional women lived, and provides insight into what they thought of the work world, often in their own words. Canadian card order number: C98-900861-4Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


A Chorus of Different Voices

A Chorus of Different Voices

Author: Angelika E. Sauer

Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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German Canadians are generally considered well assimilated, and inconspicuous, their presence in Canada going virtually unnoticed. Scholars over the past decades have struggled to explain this relative invisibility, taking the existence of a German-Canadian ethnic group with a distinct culture for granted. The contributors question this assumption and take a fresh look at definitions of German Canadians and the processes of identity formation. A Chorus of Different Voices represents a kaleidoscopic image of German-Canadian identities, past and present.