A couple of things I wanted to bring to your attention:
Gravatar
Recently I was asked again about getting an image which will appear next to your name when you leave comments. You’ll notice some commenters have custom images and some have the grey silhouette figure (the default image).
We use the widely-used “Gravatar” system (“globally-recognized avatar”). If you’d like one, go to gravatar.com and follow the simple instructions.
You’ll need to upload an image, which will then appear on gravatar-enabled sites (not just this one) whenever you leave a comment.
JSTOR
If you like to read journal articles about the Amish (or any other topic, for that matter), try the academic resource JSTOR. You can search their database of thousands of scholarly articles, books and reviews.
Many are only available for purchase, but there is a free service which allows you to read select articles.
The way it works: 1) register for a free account. 2) You are then allowed to place up to three qualifying articles on your “shelf”. Once placed on the shelf, an article cannot be removed for a period of 14 days.
After the 14-day period has run out, you can replace it with another qualifying article. This limits your access to a maximum of three articles every two weeks. Not bad at all unless you are doing a lot of research and reading.
Some of these articles go back many decades, and some cover rather obscure topics, so you have to do a little hunting.
Available Amish-themed articles you might find of interest include ones on yodeling among Indiana Swiss Amish, a critique of Wisconsin v. Yoder, technological change and church conflict, and library use in Amish Illinois.
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Thanks for reminding us of this resource. I haven’t used JSTOR in years, and back when I did I don’t remember the free service being worth anything (I think you could only read abstracts for free, or something like that?).
Some of the Amish articles are rather old, but can still be of value. Plus there are some more recent interesting ones available for free. I believe they just started the free service in the last year or two.