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.

Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War
Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War

Author: James O. Lehman

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2007-11-05

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780801886720

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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.

Johann Cornies, the Mennonites, and Russian Colonialism in Southern Ukraine
Johann Cornies, the Mennonites, and Russian Colonialism in Southern Ukraine

Author: John R. Staples

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2023-11-01

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1487549172

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In the late eighteenth century, the Russian Empire opened the grasslands of southern Ukraine to agricultural settlement by new colonists, among them Prussian Mennonites. Mennonite colonization was one aspect of the empire’s consolidation and modernization of its multi-ethnic territory. In the colony of Molochnaia, the dominant personality of the early nineteenth century was Johann Cornies (1789–1848), a hard-driving modernizer and intimate of senior Russian officials whose papers provide unique access into events in Ukraine in this era. Johann Cornies, the Mennonites, and Russian Colonialism in Southern Ukraine uses the life story of Johann Cornies to explore how colonial subjects interacted with Russian imperial policy. The book reveals how tsarist imperial policy shifted toward Russification in the 1830s and 1840s and became increasingly intolerant of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious minorities. It shows that Russia employed the Mennonite settlement as a colonial laboratory of modernity, and that the Mennonites were among Russia’s most economically productive subjects. This microhistory illuminates the role of Johann Cornies as a mediator between the empire and the Mennonite colonists, and it ultimately aims to bring light to the history of nineteenth-century Russia and Ukraine.

Manufacturing Mennonites
Manufacturing Mennonites

Author: Janis Lee Thiessen

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1442660597

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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.

Exiled Among Nations
Exiled Among Nations

Author: John P. R. Eicher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-02

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1108486118

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Explores how religious migrants engage with the phenomenon of nationalism, through two groups of German-speaking Mennonites.

California Mennonites
California Mennonites

Author: Brian Froese

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2015-02-19

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1421415127

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"Books geographically focused on the midwestern and eastern states dominate the study of Mennonites in America. The intriguing history of Mennonites in the American West remains untold. In From Digging Gold to Saving Souls, Brian Froese introduces readers for the first time to the California Mennonite experience. Although a few Mennonites did dig for gold in the 1850s, the real story of Mennonites in California begins in the 1890s with westward migrations for fertile soil and healthy sunshine. By the mid-twentieth century, the Mennonite story in California had developed into an interesting tale of religious conservatives--traditional agrarians--finding their way in an increasingly urban and religiously pluralistic California. Some California Mennonites negotiated new identities by endorsing conservative evangelicalism; some found them in reclamations of sixteenth-century Anabaptists. Still other Mennonites found meaningful religious experience by engaging in social action and justice even when these actions appeared in "secular" forms. These emerging identities--Evangelical, Anabaptist, and secular--covered a broad spectrum, yet represented a selective retaining and discarding of Mennonite religious practices and expressions. From Digging Gold to Saving Souls touches on such topics as migration, pluralism, race, gender, pacifism, institutional construction, education, and labor conflict, all of which defined the experience of Mennonites of California. Brian Froese shows how this experience was a rich, complex, and deliberate move into modern society. In From Digging Gold to Saving Souls, he introduces readers to a dynamic people who did not simply become modern, but who chose to modernize on their own terms"--

Mennonites in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union
Mennonites in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union

Author: Leonard G. Friesen

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2022-11-17

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 148750568X

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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.

Mennonite Women in Canada
Mennonite Women in Canada

Author: Marlene Epp

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2011-07-15

Total Pages: 698

ISBN-13: 0887554105

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Mennonite Women in Canada traces the complex social history and multiple identities of Canadian Mennonite women over 200 years. Marlene Epp explores women’s roles, as prescribed and as lived, within the contexts of immigration and settlement, household and family, church and organizational life, work and education, and in response to social trends and events. The combined histories of Mennonite women offer a rich and fascinating study of how women actively participate in ordering their lives within ethno-religious communities.

Chosen Nation
Chosen Nation

Author: Benjamin W. Goossen

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-05-28

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 069119274X

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During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the global Mennonite church developed an uneasy relationship with Germany. Despite the religion's origins in the Swiss and Dutch Reformation, as well as its longstanding pacifism, tens of thousands of members embraced militarist German nationalism. Chosen Nation is a sweeping history of this encounter and the debates it sparked among parliaments, dictatorships, and congregations across Eurasia and the Americas. Offering a multifaceted perspective on nationalism's emergence in Europe and around the world, Benjamin Goossen demonstrates how Mennonites' nationalization reflected and reshaped their faith convictions. While some church leaders modified German identity along Mennonite lines, others appropriated nationalism wholesale, advocating a specifically Mennonite version of nationhood. Examining sources from Poland to Paraguay, Goossen shows how patriotic loyalties rose and fell with religious affiliation. Individuals might claim to be German at one moment but Mennonite the next. Some external parties encouraged separatism, as when the Weimar Republic helped establish an autonomous "Mennonite State" in Latin America. Still others treated Mennonites as quintessentially German; under Hitler's Third Reich, entire colonies benefited from racial warfare and genocide in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Whether choosing Germany as a national homeland or identifying as a chosen people, called and elected by God, Mennonites committed to collective action in ways that were intricate, fluid, and always surprising. The first book to place Christianity and diaspora at the heart of nationality studies, Chosen Nation illuminates the rising religious nationalism of our own age.

Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites
Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites

Author: Donald B. Kraybill

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0801899117

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Donald B. Kraybill has spent his career among Anabaptist groups, gaining an unparalleled understanding of these traditionally private people. Kraybill shares that deep knowledge in this succinct overview of the beliefs and cultural practices of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites in North America. Found throughout Canada, Central America, Mexico, and the United States, these religious communities include more than 200 different groups with 800,000 members in 17 countries. Through 340 short entries, Kraybill offers readers information on a wide range of topics related to religious views and social practices. With thoughtful consideration of how these diverse communities are related, this compact reference provides a brief and accurate synopsis of these groups in the twenty-first century. No other single volume provides such a broad overview of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites in North America. Organized for ease of searching—with a list of entries, a topic finder, an index of names, and ample cross-references—the volume also includes abundant resources for accessing additional information. Wide in scope, succinct in content, and with directional markers along the way, the Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites is a must-have reference for anyone interested in Anabaptist groups.