| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Amish in the American Imagination. By David Weaver-Zercher. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xv, 280 pp. Cloth, $34.95, ISBN 0-8018-6681-2.)

This book is far less about the Amish than about American culture. David Weaver-Zercher, now a teacher of religious history at Messiah College in central Pennsylvania, did not imitate John A. Hostetler's or Donald B. Kraybill's sociologies or Steven M. Nolt's or Paton Yoder's straightforward Amish histories. Instead, he examined how other Americans have presented and interpreted the Amish. To do so, he discussed some very specific and public depictions of the Amish (made since about 1900, the time when the Amish began to stand out in American society). Some depictions come from novels--usually obscure ones, but appropriate. Other sources range from advertisers and tourist promoters to serious scholars, from a Hollywood producer to Mennonites as close cousins of the Amish. In viewpoint they range from fawning idealizers of the Amish such as Randy-Michael Testa in his 1992 book After the Fire to exposés as ruthless as a segment of the ABC news magazine 20/20 in 1997. . . .

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