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Holding the Line

The Telephone in Old Order Mennonite and Amish Life

Diane Zimmerman Umble

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An unexpected history of the Mennonites and Amish

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Among the Old Order Mennonite and Amish communities of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the coming of the telephone posed a serious challenge to the longstanding traditions of work, worship, silence, and visiting. In 1907, Mennonites crafted a compromise in order to avoid a church split and grudgingly allowed telephones for lay people while prohibiting telephone ownership among the clergy. By 1909, the Amish had banned the telephone completely from their homes. Since then, the vigorous...

An unexpected history of the Mennonites and Amish

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Among the Old Order Mennonite and Amish communities of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the coming of the telephone posed a serious challenge to the longstanding traditions of work, worship, silence, and visiting. In 1907, Mennonites crafted a compromise in order to avoid a church split and grudgingly allowed telephones for lay people while prohibiting telephone ownership among the clergy. By 1909, the Amish had banned the telephone completely from their homes. Since then, the vigorous and sometimes painful debates about the meaning of the telephone reveal intense concerns about the maintenance of boundaries between the community and the outside world and the processes Old Order communities use to confront and mediate change.

In Holding the Line, Diane Zimmerman Umble offers a historical and ethnographic study of how the Old Order Mennonites and Amish responded to and accommodated the telephone from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. For Old Order communities, Umble writes, appropriate use of the telephone marks the edges of appropriate association—who can be connected to whom, in what context, and under what circumstances. Umble's analysis of the social meaning of the telephone explores the effect of technology on community identity and the maintenance of cultural values through the regulation of the means of communication.

Reviews

Reviews

Umble offers a historic perspective on how members of the close-knit communities and their leaders responded to the challenges posed by the intrusion of the telephone into long-standing traditions of work, silence, and visiting in the early 1900s... A book that is useful in fostering understanding of the origins, philosophy, and lifestyle of the Plain People and enjoyable for its often humorous account of what life was like in America before the telephone reached out and touched everyone.

An excellent piece of work that makes an original and substantial contribution to multiple fields: anthropology, sociology, American studies, communication, history, and cultural studies. The scholarship is sound and the analysis is superb. Well-written and highly readable, this book is wonderful.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
192
ISBN
9780801863752
Illustration Description
20 b&w illus.
Author Bio
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Diane Zimmerman Umble, Ph.D.

Diane Zimmerman Umble is a professor of communication at Millersville University, author of Holding the Line: The Telephone in Old Order Mennonite and Amish Life, and coeditor of Strangers at Home: Amish and Mennonite Women in History, both published by Johns Hopkins.
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