New JPAC Issue Released: Amish Migration, Fertility, the Dawdyhaus & More

Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities, Volume 5, Issue 2 now released

New milestones have been reached for both the Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities (JPAC) and Anabaptist scholarship in general. JPAC is blessed with nearly 500 registrants, but there is room for many, many more, as its tenth issue is now released.

It is now the “go-to” journal for Anabaptist studies, particularly scholarship about the Amish, with over 124,000 views and downloads so far from its first nine issues.

The release of Volume 5, Issue 2 comes only a week before the July 22-24 Young Center Conference at Elizabethtown College (PA) on “Early Anabaptism in Global Perspective: Past, Present and Future at 500 Years.”

Lead Article: “Vaccination Risk through the Lens of Faith, Family, and Community”

The lead article includes three scholars from West Virginia University (Rachel Stein, Katie Corcoran, and Corey Coyler) on “Vaccination Risk through the Lens of Faith, Family, and Community”.

This article advances the study of health and culture by using both the concept of vaccine hesitancy and how “worldviews” of various religious groups shape beliefs about health and health care options.

Amish Migration to Wisconsin

This is followed by an analysis of “Migration to Wisconsin’s Amish settlements” by Professor Emeritus John Cross (University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh). Cross offers a very detailed account of “source counties” of Amish households moving to several of the larger settlements in the Badger State.

As both the number of Amish increases, along with the number of new settlements, understanding the pattern of population movement becomes an increasingly important topic.

Swiss Amish Birth Rates

From The Ohio State University, Joe Donnermeyer, a member and former chair of the OSU Emeritus Academy, examined both the total fertility and birth intervals among the four largest communities of Amish known as the “Swiss Amish.”

Total fertility refers to the number of live births for women age 45 years and older, that is, with only a few exceptions, no longer have children. His findings confirm that Swiss Amish communities display some of the highest total fertility numbers of any Amish group.

Amish Men’s Longevity

Henry Troyer, another retired professor who remains an active scholar and continues to examine the population dynamics of the Amish, focused in this issue of JPAC on longevity of men.

Specifically, he uses the 1965 Ohio Amish directory to first identify slightly over 1,500 men, most of whom were born in the 1940s, and then uses more recent Ohio Amish directories and various genealogies to determine their date of death and calculate their ages.

He compares those results with data from the Social Security Administration for Caucasian men from Ohio, and discovers that Amish men do live longer.

The Dawdyhaus, and Amish Tourism

Beyond research articles, there are two more submissions under the JPAC section titled “fieldwork and reflections.” The first is by Claire Mensack at Lander University in South Carolina. Her focus is an account of the dawdyhaus and its place in the lives two Amish families.

Following this are the observations of Susan Trollinger (University of Dayton) on the “weaponizing of Amish country tourism.” It is subtitled an update of her monograph, “Selling the Amish” (published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2012).

Mennonite Life Library & Archives: An Overview

Rounding out the tenth issue of JPAC is an overview by Julia Wiker, the archivist/librarian at Mennonite Life, located in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. In previous issues of JPAC, a number of other libraries containing large collections of books, genealogies and historical documents about Anabaptists groups were featured.

Book Reviews

Finally, there are two book reviews. One is by Corey Colyer (West Virginia University) of James Cates’ book, “Dancing on the Devil’s Playground: The Amish Negotiate with Modernity”. The subtitle refers to the a concept from the previous work of Don Kraybill, especially his classic book “The Riddle of Amish Culture.” He uses the concept to examine the diversity of ways that various Amish fellowship deal with issues from drug use to family violence.

Rod Janzen, Professor Emeritus of History from Fresno Pacific University, examines the recently published book by Astrid von Schlachta’s titled “Holding Fast to What is Good? Tradition and Renewal in Hutterite History.” This book was published by the Hutterian Brethren Book Centre.

Janzen describes it as “…an impressive collection of essays on the entire experience of the first 350 years of Hutterite life in Europe, and important period when the sermons (still read today) and many organizations and theological principles were institutionalized for the benefit of future generations.”

Subscribe and read JPAC for free

The Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities is published twice each year, and is dedicated to advancing scholarship about Amish, conservative Mennonites, Amish-Mennonites, Apostolic Christians, Brethren, Bruderhof, Hutterites and other plain Anabaptist groups.

It is co-sponsored by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, Behalt, the Amish & Mennonite Information Center, Berlin, Ohio, the Amish America website, and The Ohio State University libraries.

To subscribe (no charge), go to the JPAC website of The Ohio State University Libraries, and follow the windows found in the upper right-hand corner. Registering requires only a few minutes to complete.

Read the latest issue of JPAC for free here