Symposium Review of "The Amish" by Donald Kraybill, Karen Johnson-Weiner, and Steven Nolt

The Amish is a 500-some page university press-sized handbook that touches on a variety of topical areas. The book is the culmination of two and a half decades each of Kraybill’s, Johnson-Weiner’s, and Nolt’s work about the Amish. Karen Johnson-Weiner published a series of linguistic studies through the 1990s, and from these spring-board works later explored more fully schools and New York settlements. Donald Kraybill’s first Amish-focused publication was a Durkheimian study of the Amish and suicide in 1986. From then on he has maintained this functionalist orientation in comparative studies of plain Anabaptists and Amish responses to cultural, economic, and political change. Steven Nolt’s work follows two threads: Amish history, of which his A History of the Amish (1992) stands as the premiere testament, and Amish identity, realized most fully in Plain Diversity (2007), co-authored with Thomas Meyers. While Kraybill and Nolt have collaborated on seven publications, this is Johnson-Weiner’s first publication with either.