| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David Weaver-Zercher. The Amish in the American Imagination. (Center Books in Anabaptist Studies.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. Pp. xv, 280. $39.95.

David Weaver-Zercher interrogates the popular representations of the Amish in a cultural history that spans the twentieth century. His focus is not on the Amish themselves but on how the Amish have functioned ideologically and as commodities for their mediators over time. In a series of five carefully documented case studies, Weaver-Zercher explores the ways in which novels, magazine articles, children's books, tourist literature, films, and some scholarly work have "domesticated" the Amish, and he analyzes how these mediators used the Amish to "mark boundaries, express fears, support causes and, in many cases, make a profit" (p. 5). His account traces the making and remaking of the Amish as religious sectarians, exotic Americans, saving remnants, and fallen saints. 1

The first case focuses on the efforts of the Pennsylvania German Society (PGS) to neutralize the negative image of Pennsylvania Germans as uncultured and intellectually deficient by portraying the Amish as exemplars of piety, models of a strong work ethic, and skillful agriculturalists. Weaver-Zercher argues that by portraying Amish virtues and overlooking their resistance to assimilation, the PGS worked to secure the cultural position of Pennsylvania Germans as worthy Americans. . . .

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