The history of the twentieth century is one of modernization, a story of old ways being left behind. Many traditionalist Mennonites rejected these changes, especially the automobile, which they regarded as a symbol of pride and individualism. They became known as a “horse-and-buggy” people. Between 2009 and 2012, Royden Loewen and a team of researchers interviewed 250 Mennonites in thirty-five communities across the Americas about the impact of the modern world on their lives. This book records their responses and strategies for resisting the very things—ease, technology, upward mobility, consumption—that most people today take for granted. Loewen’s subjects are drawn from two distinctive groups: 8,000 Old Order Mennonites, who continue to pursue old ways in highly urbanized southern Ontario, and 100,000 Old Colony Mennonites, whose history of migration to protect traditional ways has taken them from the Canadian prairies to Mexico and farther south to Belize, Paraguay, and Bolivia. Whether they live in the shadow of an urban, industrial region or in more isolated, rural communities, the fundamental approach of “horse-and-buggy” Mennonites is the same: life is best when it is kept simple, lived out in the local, close to nature. This equation is the genius at the heart of their world.

Mennonite literature has long been viewed as an expression of community identity. However, scholars in Mennonite literary studies have urged a reconsideration of the field’s past and a reconceptualization of its future. This is exactly what Reading Mennonite Writing does. Drawing on the transnational turn in literary studies, Robert Zacharias positions Mennonite literature in North America as “a mode of circulation and reading” rather than an expression of a distinct community. He tests this reframing with a series of methodological experiments that open new avenues of critical engagement with the field’s unique configuration of faith-based intercultural difference. These include cross-sectional readings in nonnarrative literary history; archival readings of transatlantic life writing; Canadian rewritings of Mexican film’s deployment of Mennonite theology as fantasy; an examination of the fetishistic structure of ethnicity as a “thing” that has enabled Mennonite identity to function in a post-identity age; and, finally, a tentative reinvestment in ideals of Mennonite community via the surprising routes of queerness and speculative fiction. In so doing, Zacharias reads Mennonite writing in North America as a useful case study in the shifting position of minor literatures in the wake of the transnational turn. Theoretically sophisticated, this study of minor transnationalism will appeal to specialists in Mennonite literature and to scholars working in the broader field of transnational literary studies.

With Bibles and baptism, a movement was born. From renegade gatherings of Christian believers in the 1500s to a global communion of more than 2.1 million members, the Anabaptist-Mennonite movement has been marked by faithfulness and failure, continuity and conflict, radicalism and reformation. In this engaging history, Radicals and Reformers traces the origins and development of the Anabaptist and Mennonite movements from their beginnings in Europe through their spread across the globe. In this new authoritative introduction to Anabaptist history, historian Troy Osborne reflects on the ways that Anabaptists have defined their identity in new settings and in response to new theological, intellectual, geographic, and political contexts. Drawing from current scholarship and a range of written and visual sources, this book provides an overview of how Mennonites from Zurich to Zimbabwe have adapted to or resisted the world around them.

Mennonites are often associated with food, both by outsiders and by Mennonites themselves. Eating in abundance, eating together, preserving food, and preparing so-called traditional foods are just some of the connections mentioned in cookbooks, food advertising, memoirs, and everyday food talk. Yet since Mennonites are found around the world – from Europe to Canada to Mexico, from Paraguay to India to the Democratic Republic of the Congo – what can it mean to eat like one? In Eating Like a Mennonite Marlene Epp finds that the answer depends on the eater: on their ancestral history, current home, gender, socio-economic position, family traditions, and personal tastes. Originating in central Europe in the sixteenth century, Mennonites migrated around the world even as their religious teachings historically emphasized their separateness from others. The idea of Mennonite food became a way of maintaining community identity, even as unfamiliar environments obliged Mennonites to borrow and learn from their neighbours. Looking at Mennonites past and present, Epp shows that foodstuffs (cuisine) and foodways (practices) depend on historical and cultural context. She explores how diets have evolved as a result of migration, settlement, and mission; how food and gender identities relate to both power and fear; how cookbooks and recipes are full of social meaning; how experiences and memories of food scarcity shape identity; and how food is an expression of religious beliefs – as a symbol, in ritual, and in acts of charity. From zwieback to tamales and from sauerkraut to spring rolls, Eating Like a Mennonite reveals food as a complex ingredient in ethnic, religious, and personal identities, with the ability to create both bonds and boundaries between people.

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.

Canada has become a leader among the modern nations of the world. It has emerged as a modern industrial nation, and as a key player in the resource, commodities, and financial institutions that make up today’s world. This third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Canada contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. It includes over 700 cross-referenced entries on a wide range of topics, covering the broad sweep of Canadian history from long before European contact until present day. Topics include Indigenous peoples, women, religion, regions, politics, international affairs, arts and culture, the environment, the economy, language, and war. This is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Canada. It introduces readers to the successes and failures, the conflicts and accommodations, the events and trends that have shaped Canadian history.

This book brings together theories of world society with poststructuralist and postcolonial work on modern subjectivity to understand the universalising and particularising processes of globalisation. It addresses a theoretical void in global studies by attending to the co-constituted process through which modern subjectivities and global processes emerge and interact. The editors outline a key problem in global studies, which is a lack of engagement between the local/particular/individual and the ‘universalising’ processes in which they are situated. The volume deals with this concern with contributions from historical sociologists, poststructuralist and postcolonial scholars and by focusing in the Middle East, religion in global modernity and non-human subjectivities.