There’s one favorite “book” of mine. It has no plot, characters, or author bio. But it’s one which I can spend hours with. That book is a road atlas. One of my favorite killing-time activities is paging through atlases, looking for interesting geographic features, roads, and especially, place names. It’s fun to wonder why there’s a Mexico in Missouri or what’s so normal about Normal,…
A few months ago we looked at three, frankly, off-the-wall Amish myths I’d come across in various places online. Donald Kraybill has a new article out on six other, I would say more widely-held, myths about the Amish. They are: 1. The Amish Are Slowly Dying Out 2. The Amish Are Technophobes 3. The Amish Don’t Pay Taxes or Vote 4. Amish Elders Arrange Marriages 5. Because…
Certain Amish surnames occur with great frequency. Here are ten of the most common: 1. Miller The most common of all Amish last names. Joseph Stoll writes: “The German spelling was Müller, and because there were many Millers in Europe, the name was very common, with no common ancestor for many people of this name. There were a number of Anabaptists of this name in…
A new Amish settlement is started, on average, every few weeks. Today there are around 700 Amish communities in North America. Most were founded over the past 20-some years. Amish migration has gotten much attention recently. New settlements appearing in places like Colorado, Maine, and New York attest to a pioneer spirit which has not waned since Amish first settled the Americas in the…
You might have heard something about the Amish that made you wonder, “now where did that come from?” Myths are typically the child of a grain of truth…and a lot of imagination. We want explanations for things that puzzle us. When they’re not forthcoming, people fill in the blanks. And sometimes the things they come up with are, frankly, bizarre. Below, three Amish myths I’ve…
How do Amish spend their free time? Amish fill their leisure hours with a variety of activities, including: 1. Board games Tailor-made to winter days around the kitchen table. Scrabble, Settlers of Catan, Monopoly are among the favorites. 2. Hunting A male pastime. Occasionally females participate as well (more likely if you’re sister to, say, 8 older brothers). 3. Birding Hunting without the guns. Amish…
It’s safe to say the past few years have seen increased interest in the Amish. We can see this, among other ways, by the sheer amount of cultural offerings–books, TV, films, and so on–appearing on the scene. This Washington Post slideshow provides a brief listing of reasons why. It accompanies a column on Amish interest which takes as its jumping-off point the popularity of the Amish Mafia…
Amish live in over 600 locations across North America. Some are places of great natural beauty. Scenery is something Amish appreciate – so much so that it may even weigh in the decision of where to start a new settlement. Amish, of course, create their own scenery by their very presence – buggies, windmills, and rural agrarian landscapes have a special charm. Which are the…
In 1991, there were 215 Amish settlements in North America. 20 years later, the number was 427 (see this 20-year review at the Amish Studies site). The Amish population doubles every 2 decades (give or take). But this doesn’t mean that existing communities just double in size. As they grow, Amish move. Big communities lose members to daughter settlements. Smaller settlements shed residents too, as Amish form new churches…
I thought I’d share a bit more on one of the most obvious visual markers of Amish – the buggy. As you probably know, buggy styles can vary across the hundreds of Amish settlements in North America. Below are the five main styles I encountered on a recent trip. Four of them are not commonly seen, driven by only a minority of Amish in certain…