Amish Women and the Great Depression

by Katherine Jellison

Author	: Katherine Jellison
Publisher	: JHU Press
Total Pages	: 201
Release	: 2023-11-21
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 1421447983

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A detailed look at how Amish women sustained family farming during the Great Depression. At the end of the Great Depression, the US Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) designated the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the most economically and culturally stable agricultural community in the nation. In Amish Women and the Great Depression, Katherine Jellison and Steven D. Reschly examine the integral role that Amish women played in this Depression-era success story. Making unprecedented use of quantitative data as well as qualitative accounts by and about Amish women, Jellison and Reschly reveal how Amish women sustained family farming during this devastating time. Using information from the federal government's 1935–1936 Study of Consumer Purchases (SCP), they closely examine the quantitative data related to Old Order Amish families and their neighbors in Lancaster County. SCP investigators approached women in these families to learn about household spending habits, farm crops and income, farm and household equipment, family size, home production, recreational practices, and dietary habits. Jellison and Reschly analyze the production and consumption activities of Amish women and their families as well as comparative data about the practices of their neighbors. Amish Women and the Great Depression also incorporates a variety of qualitative sources to enliven the statistical analysis, including Old Order Amish women's diaries and memoirs; newspaper accounts by and about Amish women; government reports and related correspondence about the Lancaster County Amish; oral histories with elderly Old Order Amish people about their experiences in the 1930s; an oral history with Walter M. Kollmorgen, the author of the 1942 BAE study of Old Order Amish community stability; and photographs by New Deal photographers. This unique portrait of Depression-era farm life provides a historic look into the farming practices and daily lives of Amish women.

Amish Women and the Great Depression

by Katherine Jellison

Author	: Katherine Jellison
Publisher	: JHU Press
Total Pages	: 201
Release	: 2023-11-21
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1421447975

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"This book examines the role that Amish women played in their community's successful survival of the Great Depression"--

Little Heathens

by Mildred Armstrong Kalish

Author	: Mildred Armstrong Kalish
Publisher	: Bantam
Total Pages	: 306
Release	: 2008-04-29
Genre	: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN	: 0553384244

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I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For many years I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest it vanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinct to share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy and excitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite a romp. So begins Mildred Kalish’s story of growing up on her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the Great Depression. With her father banished from the household for mysterious transgressions, five-year-old Mildred and her family could easily have been overwhelmed by the challenge of simply trying to survive. This, however, is not a tale of suffering. Kalish counts herself among the lucky of that era. She had caring grandparents who possessed—and valiantly tried to impose—all the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers who inspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals ready to be tamed and loved. She and her siblings and their cousins from the farm across the way played as hard as they worked, running barefoot through the fields, as free and wild as they dared. Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world’s best head cheese (start by scrubbing the head of the pig until it is pink and clean), Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work tempered by simple rewards. There was the unsurpassed flavor of tender new dandelion greens harvested as soon as the snow melted; the taste of crystal clear marble-sized balls of honey robbed from a bumblebee nest; the sweet smell from the body of a lamb sleeping on sun-warmed grass; and the magical quality of oat shocking under the light of a full harvest moon. Little Heathens offers a loving but realistic portrait of a “hearty-handshake Methodist” family that gave its members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered pleasures. Recounted in a luminous narrative filled with tenderness and humor, Kalish’s memoir of her childhood shows how the right stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like “quite a romp.”

Selling the Amish

by Susan L. Trollinger

Author	: Susan L. Trollinger
Publisher	: JHU Press
Total Pages	: 219
Release	: 2012-03-15
Genre	: Business & Economics
ISBN	: 1421404192

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More than 19 million tourists flock to Amish Country each year, drawn by the opportunity to glimpse "a better time" and the quaint beauty of picturesque farmland and handcrafted quilts. What they may find, however, are elaborately themed town centers, outlet malls, or even a water park. Susan L. Trollinger explores this puzzling incongruity, showing that Amish tourism is anything but plain and simple. Selling the Amish takes readers on a virtual tour of three such tourist destinations in Ohio’s Amish Country, the world’s largest Amish settlement. Trollinger examines the visual rhetoric of these uniquely themed places—their architecture, interior decor, even their merchandise and souvenirs—and explains how these features create a setting and a story that brings tourists back year after year. This compelling story is, Trollinger argues, in part legitimized by the Amish themselves. To Americans faced with anxieties about modern life, being near the Amish way of life is comforting. The Amish seem to have escaped the rush of contemporary life, the confusion of gender relations, and the loss of ethnic heritage. While the Amish way supports the idealized experience of these tourist destinations, it also raises powerful questions. Tourists may want a life uncomplicated by technology, but would they be willing to drive around in horse-drawn buggies in order to achieve it? Trollinger's answers to important questions in her fascinating study of Amish Country tourism are sure to challenge readers’ understanding of this surprising cultural phenomenon.

Why the Amish Sing

by D. Rose Elder

Author	: D. Rose Elder
Publisher	: JHU Press
Total Pages	: 213
Release	: 2014-09-15
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1421414651

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An intimate portrait of the diverse music-making at the center of Amish faith and life. Singing occurs in nearly every setting of Amish life. It is a sanctioned pleasure that frames all Amish rituals and one that enlivens and sanctifies both routine and special events, from household chores, road trips by buggy, and family prayer to baptisms, youth group gatherings, weddings, and “single girl” sings. But because Amish worship is performed in private homes instead of public churches, few outsiders get the chance to hear Amish people sing. Amish music also remains largely unexplored in the field of ethnomusicology. In Why the Amish Sing, D. Rose Elder introduces readers to the ways that Amish music both reinforces and advances spiritual life, delving deep into the Ausbund, the oldest hymnal in continuous use. This illuminating ethnomusicological study demonstrates how Amish groups in Wayne and Holmes Counties, Ohio—the largest concentration of Amish in the world—sing to praise God and, at the same time, remind themselves of their 450-year history of devotion. Singing instructs Amish children in community ways and unites the group through common participation. As they sing in unison to the weighty words of their ancestors, the Amish confirm their love and support for the community. Their singing delineates their common journey—a journey that demands separation from the world and yielding to God's will. By making school visits, attending worship services and youth sings, and visiting private homes, Elder has been given the rare opportunity to listen to Amish singing in its natural social and familial context. She combines one-on-one interviews with detailed observations of how song provides a window into Amish cultural beliefs, values, and norms.

The Amish and the Media

by Diane Zimmerman Umble

Author	: Diane Zimmerman Umble
Publisher	: JHU Press
Total Pages	: 288
Release	: 2008-04-21
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0801887895

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"Of all the religious groups in contemporary America, few demonstrate as many reservations toward the media as do the Old Order Amish. Yet these attention-wary citizens have become a media phenomenon, featured in films, novels, magazines, newspapers, and television - from Witness, Amish in the City, and Devil's Playground to the intense news coverage of the 2006 Nickel Mines School shooting. But the Old Order Amish are more than media subjects. Despite their separatist tendencies, they use their own media networks to sustain Amish culture. Chapters in the collection examine the influence of Amish-produced newspapers and books, along with the role of informal spokespeople in Old Order communities.".

Social History of the United States [10 volumes]

by Brian Greenberg

Author	: Brian Greenberg
Publisher	: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages	: 4860
Release	: 2008-10-23
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1598841289

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This ten-volume encyclopedia explores the social history of 20th-century America in rich, authoritative detail, decade by decade, through the eyes of its everyday citizens. Social History of the United States is a cornerstone reference that tells the story of 20th-century America, examining the interplay of policies, events, and everyday life in each decade of the 1900s with unmatched authority, clarity, and insight. Spanning ten volumes and featuring the work of some of the foremost social historians working today, Social History of the United States bridges the gap between 20th-century history as it played out on the grand stage and history as it affected—and was affected by—citizens at the grassroots level. Covering each decade in a separate volume, this exhaustive work draws on the most compelling scholarship to identify important themes and institutions, explore daily life and working conditions across the economic spectrum, and examine all aspects of the American experience from a citizen's-eye view. Casting the spotlight on those whom history often leaves in the dark, Social History of the United States is an essential addition to any library collection.

Shipshewana

by Dorothy O. Pratt

Author	: Dorothy O. Pratt
Publisher	: Indiana University Press
Total Pages	: 224
Release	: 2004-10-19
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 0253023564

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A cultural history of a northern Indiana Amish community and its success in maintaining itself and resisting assimilation into the larger culture. While most books about the Amish focus on the Pennsylvania settlements or on the religious history of the sect, this book is a cultural history of one Indiana Amish community and its success in resisting assimilation into the larger culture. Amish culture has persisted relatively unchanged primarily because the Amish view the world around them through the prism of their belief in collective salvation based on purity, separation, and perseverance. Would anything new add or detract from the community’s long-term purpose? Seen through this prism, most innovation has been found wanting. Founded in 1841, Shipshewana benefited from LaGrange County’s relative isolation. As Dorothy O. Pratt shows, this isolation was key to the community’s success. The Amish were able to develop a stable farming economy and a social structure based on their own terms. During the years of crisis, 1917–1945, the Amish worked out ways to protect their boundaries that would not conflict with their basic religious principles. As conscientious objectors, they bore the traumas of World War I, struggled against the Compulsory School Act of 1921, negotiated the labyrinth of New Deal bureaucracy, and labored in Alternative Service during World War II. The story Pratt tells of the postwar years is one of continuing difficulties with federal and state regulations and challenges to the conscientious objector status of the Amish. The necessity of presenting a united front to such intrusions led to the creation of the Amish Steering Committee. Still, Pratt notes that the committee’s effect has been limited. Crisis and abuse from the outer world have tended only to confirm the desire of the Amish to remain a people apart, and lends a special poignancy to this engrossing tale of resistance to the modern world. “In this careful community study, Pratt (a professor and assistant dean at Notre Dame) analyzes the tension between assimilation and cultural distinctiveness among the northern Indiana Amish in the 19th and 20th centuries. . . . A worthy case study of resistance to change.” —Publishers Weekly

Religion, Attire, and Adornment in North America

by Marie W. Dallam

Author	: Marie W. Dallam
Publisher	: Columbia University Press
Total Pages	: 236
Release	: 2023-05-23
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 0231555547

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Clothing, dress, and ornamentation are crucial parts of individual and communal religious life and practice, yet they are too often overlooked. This book convenes leading scholars to explore the roles of attire and adornment in the creation and communication of religious meaning, identity, and community. Contributors investigate aspects of religious dress in North America in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, considering adornment practices in a wide range of religious traditions and among individuals who straddle religious boundaries. The collection is organized around four frameworks for understanding the material culture of religion: theological interpretation, identity formation, negotiation of tradition, and activism. Religion, Attire, and Adornment in North America features essays on topics such as Black Israelites’ use of African fabrics, Christian religious tattoos, Wiccan ritual nudity, Amish “plain dress,” Mormon sacred garments, Hare Krishna robes, and the Church of Body Modification. Spanning the diversity of religious practice and expression, this book is suitable for a range of undergraduate courses and offers new insights for scholars in many disciplines.