In the 1870s, approximately 18,000 Mennonites migrated from the southern steppes of Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine) to the North American grasslands. They brought with them an array of cultural and institutional features that indicated they were a “transplanted” people. What is less frequently noted, however, is that they created in their everyday lives a world that ensured their cultural longevity and social cohesiveness in a new land. Their adaptation to the New World required new ...

Perhaps the most inclusive, sweeping, and insightful history ever written about the North American Mennonite saga. Both authors are eminent historians. Royden Loewen is Professor of History, with a chair in Mennonite Studies, at the University of Winnipeg. Steven M. Nolt is Professor of History at Goshen (IN) College. Both authors of this book bring to the task the insights of "social history." As such, they focus on people in many geographical environments rather than on institutional dev...

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 ...

A comparative global history of Mennonites from the ground up.Winner of the Dale W. Brown Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Shortlisted for the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize by the Canadian Historical Association, Nominee of the Margaret McWilliams Award by the Manitoba Historical SocietyMennonite farmers can be found in dozens of countries spanning five continents. In this comparative world-scale environmental history, R...

From the 1930s to the 1980s, the North American countryside faced a profound cultural transformation in which a once-unified rural society became fragmented and dispersed. Families wishing to remain on the farm were required to accept new levels of automation, while others, unwilling or unable to make the change, migrated to nearby towns or regional cities. The cultural reformulation that resulted saw the emergence of a genuine rural diaspora. The growing cultural and physical separation w...

Between the 1920s and the 1940s, 10,000 traditionalist Mennonites emigrated from western Canada to isolated rural sections of Northern Mexico and the Paraguayan Chaco; over the course of the twentieth century, they became increasingly scattered through secondary migrations to East Paraguay, British Honduras, Bolivia, and elsewhere in Latin America. Despite this dispersion, these Canadian-descendant Mennonites, who now number around 250,000, developed a rich transnational culture over the y...

Sometime in 1866, a Spaniard named Josep Soler (1840–1906) arrived in Whanganui, Aotearoa New Zealand. Born in Constantí in the Camp de Tarragona winemaking region south of Barcelona, Soler came from a winemaking family and was a winemaker himself before leaving Spain. He planted his first New Zealand vineyard shortly after arriving in Whanganui, and his business life was one of uninterrupted success. In 1880, the New Zealand Herald proclaimed him its “New Zealander of the Year” for “his f...

Over the course of the twentieth century, sequential waves of immigrants from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa settled in the cities of the Canadian Prairies. In Immigrants in Prairie Cities, Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen analyze the processes of cultural interaction and adaptation that unfolded in these urban centres and describe how this model of diversity has changed over time. The authors argue that intimate Prairie cities fostered a form of social diversity characte...

Between 1973 and 1978, six thousand Chileans leftists took refuge in central Canada after the Pinochet coup d’état. Once resettled at the northern extreme of the Americas, these political exiles had to find ways of coping with an abrupt and violent separation from their homeland that had deep material and emotional repercussions.In Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable, Francis Peddie documents the experiences of twenty-one Chileans as they navigate their newfound identity a...

Historian Royden Loewen has brought together selections from diaries kept by 21 Mennonites in Canada between 1863 and 1929, some translated from German for the first time. By skillfully comparing and contrasting a wide cross-section of lives, Loewen shows how these diaries often turn the hidden contours of household and community "inside out." The writers featured were ordinary rural people: young women and grandmothers, rural preachers and landless householders. They include a teenaged bo...