| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Donald B. Kraybill and Carl F. Bowman. On the Backroad to Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish, and Brethren. (Center Books in Anabaptist Studies.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, in association with the Center for American Places, Santa Fe, N. Mex. 2001. Pp. xvi, 330. $29.95.

Old Order groups may limit their own peoples' education to the eighth grade, but as actual subjects of study, they are no strangers to scholarship. Particularly the Amish, and to a lesser degree the Hutterites, have received much scrutiny by social historians and sociologists (including a number of significant contributions by one of the authors of this volume, Donald B. Kraybill). Here Kraybill and his compatriot, Brethren scholar Carl F. Bowman, attempt to break new ground in Old Order scholarship by bringing into focus four of the principal groups through an explicitly comparative framework, an approach that they see as "the unique contribution of our work" (p. xii). Historians of the Old Orders stand to learn much from such a comparative analysis and to profit from this book, as long as they are careful not to ask from it more than it is able to give. 1

After an opening chapter designed to provide an introductory overview of the groups in question, the authors devote four successive chapters to each. They begin with an inquiry into the life and ethos of the Hutterite communities of North America, then proceed to examine, in order, the Old Order (or "Team") Mennonites, the Old Order Amish, and the Old German Baptist Brethren. Given the shape of this analysis, one soon realizes that the sequence of investigation is intentional. The authors clearly envision these groups standing in some kind of Old Order continuum, in terms of their strictness of discipline and degree of separation from the world. . . .

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