Manufacturing Mennonites

Manufacturing Mennonites PDF Author: Janis Thiessen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442611138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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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.

Manufacturing Mennonites

Manufacturing Mennonites PDF Author: Janis Thiessen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442611138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

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.

Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War

Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War PDF Author: James O. Lehman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801886720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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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.

Mennonites in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union

Mennonites in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union PDF Author: Leonard G. Friesen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148750568X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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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.

Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood

Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood PDF Author: James Urry
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887554113
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 782

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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. 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.

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

Johann Cornies, the Mennonites, and Russian Colonialism in Southern Ukraine PDF Author: John R. Staples
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487549172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
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.

Mennonite Farmers

Mennonite Farmers PDF Author: Royden Loewen
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421442043
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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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.

Wise as Serpents, Innocent as Doves

Wise as Serpents, Innocent as Doves PDF Author: Keith Graber Miller
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870499364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
"In July 1968, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) opened an office in Washington, D.C., for monitoring the actions of the federal government's various branches. Given American Mennonites' long history of noninvolvement in political affairs, this shift toward engagement was dramatic indeed. In this in-depth study, Keith Graber Miller shows how the church's distinctive traditions of pacifism, humility, and service have informed and shaped the nature of its activities in Washington." "Graber Miller argues that Mennonites have both influenced the national policymaking debate and have themselves been influenced by their increasing exposure to it." "Wise As Serpents, Innocent as Doves not only explores the twentieth-century transformations among American Mennonites but illuminates the larger issues of religious lobbying in the nation's capital. Graber Miller suggests that the Mennonites have helped redefine what it means to be a lobbyist. Because the Mennonites' numbers are too few to make them a politically significant force, he argues, their only credibility in Washington lies in an astute and accurate analysis of how the world is and in the integrity of their witness to the truth as they see it."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Daily Demonstrators

Daily Demonstrators PDF Author: Tobin Miller Shearer
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801899435
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
The Mennonites, with their long tradition of peaceful protest and commitment to equality, were castigated by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. for not showing up on the streets to support the civil rights movement. Daily Demonstrators shows how the civil rights movement played out in Mennonite homes and churches from the 1940s through the 1960s. In the first book to bring together Mennonite religious history and civil rights movement history, Tobin Miller Shearer discusses how the civil rights movement challenged Mennonites to explore whether they, within their own church, were truly as committed to racial tolerance and equality as they might like to believe. Shearer shows the surprising role of children in overcoming the racial stereotypes of white adults. Reflecting the transformation taking place in the nation as a whole, Mennonites had to go through their own civil rights struggle before they came to accept interracial marriages and integrated congregations. Based on oral history interviews, photographs, letters, minutes, diaries, and journals of white and African-American Mennonites, this fascinating book further illuminates the role of race in modern American religion.

Not Talking Union

Not Talking Union PDF Author: Janis Thiessen
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773598952
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
How does one write a labour history of a people who have not been involved in the labour movement in significant numbers and, historically, have opposed union membership? While North American Mennonites have traditionally been associated with rural life, in light of the adjustments demanded by post-1945 urbanization and industrialization, they in fact became very involved in the workforce at a time of important labour foment. Drawing on over a hundred interviews, Janis Thiessen explores Mennonite responses to labour movements such as Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, as well as Mennonite involvement in conscientious objection to unions. This innovative study of the Mennonites - a people at once united by an ethnic and religious identity, yet also shaped by differences in geography, immigration histories, denomination, and class position - provides insights into how and why they have resisted involvement in organized labour. Not Talking Union adds a unique perspective to the history of labour, exploring how people negotiate tensions between their commitments to faith and conscience and the demands of their employment. Not Talking Union breaks new methodological ground in its close analysis of the oral narratives of North American Mennonites. Reflecting on both oral and archival sources, Thiessen shows why Mennonite labour history matters, and reveals the role of power and inequality in that history.

Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites

Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites PDF Author: Donald B. Kraybill
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801899117
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
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.