| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Diaspora in the Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities and Mid-Twentieth-Century Rural Disjuncture. By Royden Loewen. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. xxiv, 331 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03178-6. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-252-07425-7.)

Royden Loewen, a professor of history and chair of Mennonite studies at the University of Winnipeg, explores rural social history across three generations of Mennonites in two corners of the North American grassland: southeastern Manitoba and southwestern Kansas. In particular, he focuses on the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites, a group that immigrated en masse in the 1870s from imperial Russia and settled in those areas. In 1930 the group remained remarkably homogeneous, despite the geographic distance that separated them from each other and the social and religious distances that separated them from their neighbors. By 1980, Loewen contends, the story of the group's heirs is one of profound fragmentation. Some farmers remained, but their nations' respective agricultural policies had transformed agribusiness in divergent ways. Others had moved to regional towns, while increasing numbers ended up in major cities, developing a new symbolic ethnicity in Winnipeg or quickly assimilating in Denver. As well, a group of committed traditionalists left Manitoba in 1948, eventually settling in British Honduras.

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