This first comparative study sketches the differences as well as the common threads that bind these groups together.

The world's longest-lasting and most successful communal society, the Hutterites have a model of governance that has served them well for almost five hundred years. In the past the colony was an "ark," isolated from both the secular world and the host society. But today colonies face new challenges because of globalization and digital technologies and are losing much of their ability to exclude these influences from their lives. Based on extensive fieldwork with the Schmiedeleut branch of the Hutterites, the book includes the Conference Letters and Regulations, published for the first time in English translation, that provide invaluable insights into strategies for managing change.

Murphy explores whether technological development inadvertently constructed new vulnerabilities, thereby manufacturing a natural disaster. As the extreme weather in the ice storm may foreshadow what will occur with global warming, Leadership in Disaster also explores the politics, economics, ethics, and cultural predispositions involved in climate change, investigating how modern societies create both the risks they assume are acceptable and the burden of managing them. An innovative comparison with Amish communities, where the same extreme weather had trivial consequences, is instructive for avoiding future socio-economic catastrophes.

Tracing Amish settlement in New York from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner draws on more than thirty years of participant-observation, interviews, and archival research to introduce the Amish to their non-Amish neighbors. In the last decade, New York State has had the fastest-growing Amish population. This work highlights the diversity of Amish settlement in New York State and the contribution of New York's Amish to the state’s rich cultural heritage. The second edition of New York Amish updates settlement areas to acknowledge recently established communities and to demonstrate the impact of growth, schism, and migration on existing settlements. In addition, chapters treating external and internal challenges to Amish settlement and the challenges Amish settlement poses to neighboring non-Amish communities have been updated, and a new chapter looks to the future of New York’s Amish. All maps have been updated, and a new map showing all of New York’s Amish communities has been added.

A Geography of the Hutterites in North America explores the geographical diffusion of the Hutterite colonies from the "bridgehead" of Dakota Territory in 1874 to the present distribution across North America. Looking further than just maps of location, this book analyzes the relationship between parent and daughter colonies as the Hutterite population continues to grow and examines the role of cultural and demographic forces in determining the diffusion process. Throughout this geographical analysis, Simon M. Evans pays due attention to the Hutterites' contribution to the cultural landscape of the Canadian Prairies and the American Great Plains, as well as the interactions that the Hutterites have with the land, including their agricultural success. With over forty years of research and personal interactions with more than a hundred Hutterite colonies, Evans offers a unique insight into the significant role that the Hutterites have in North America, both currently and historically. This study goes beyond the history, life, and culture of this communal brotherhood to present a new geographical analysis that reports on current and ongoing research within the field. The first narrative to be published regarding Hutterites in nearly a decade, A Geography of the Hutterites in North America is a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.

This compelling history is drawn from the papers of the Crouse-Eikle family, discovered in their ancestral home in Crousetown on Nova Scotia's South Shore. Millwright John Will Crouse (1844–1914) kept a meticulous diary spanning five decades. Reflective by nature, he recorded the challenges of work, pondered the intricacies of communal life, and wrote movingly of his personal and spiritual struggles. His daughter Elvira Crouse Eikle reported on village events for local newspapers, and her son, Harold Eikle (1912–1977), a gifted teacher and musician, wrote letters and family history. Harold's correspondence celebrated the social liberations of the 1930s and beyond, but also showed their limits in the suffering he experienced as a gay man in a heterosexual world. Using the family papers, other unpublished documents and oral history, Robert M. Mennel connects the experiences of the Crouse-Eikle family and their community to larger themes of social and cultural change in North America. A story of vivid personalities and episodes, by turns sad, conflicted, joyful, bitter, funny and reflective, Testimonies and Secrets will be read with pleasure by scholars and general readers alike.