| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 264 words from this article are provided below; about 272 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Amish on the Iowa Prairie, 1840 to 1910. By Steven D. Reschly. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xii, 268 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8018-6388-0.)

Steven D. Reschly's book borrows concepts and methods from sociology and economics and applies them to Amish history. Its method is very different from that of, say, Steven M. Nolt's definitive A History of the Amish (1992), Paton Yoder's work on the emergence of the Old Order pattern, or my Old Order chapter in Peace, Faith, Nation (1988). Instead of dwelling on sources, issues, and developments generated by the Amish themselves, Reschly drew quite heavily on sociological theory and public data, especially census and land records. Those choices helped him show the significance of Amish patterns for larger national history, but they also brought some problems, especially three: a danger of exploiting a defenseless group for ulterior purposes, a tendency toward jargon, and the applying of quantitative methods without adequate data. 1

Reschly was respectful of the Amish, not exploitative, but on the other two problems he did rather less well. His book began as his dissertation, and its opening chapter and some other parts read too much as if he were still in graduate school. As for data, he tried admirably to correlate various conflicts and other developments in the Amish community with size of family, extent of landholdings, and changes in such statistics over time. But his evidence remains essentially anecdotal. Often, inherently, the data he offered are too sketchy for his method. Even some honest statements about lack of statistical significance hardly help. . . .

There are about 272 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.