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The Life Of Pioneering Amish Studies Scholar Walter Kollmorgen: Transcript Of The Reschly-Jellison Interviews, Steven Reschly, Katherine Jellison Jun 2023

The Life Of Pioneering Amish Studies Scholar Walter Kollmorgen: Transcript Of The Reschly-Jellison Interviews, Steven Reschly, Katherine Jellison

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

On March 20, 1994, we interviewed Walter Kollmorgen. Reschly also conducted a follow-up interview March 8, 1995. Herein, we provide the transcripts of these interviews, which are of particular historical value since Kollmorgen was one of Amish studies’ first researchers. Kollmorgen was a native speaker of German from having grown up in a Lutheran family in rural Nebraska. He and his younger sister, Johanna, both contracted polio at a very young age. The combination of German and physical limitations enabled both to establish rapport in a short time with the Amish community in Lancaster County for his rural community study. …


Subjectivity In The Lancaster Amish Community Study Of 1940-42: 'Economic Conquest' In Loomis’S Diary And Rosinow’S Photographs, Elizabeth Bennett Jun 2023

Subjectivity In The Lancaster Amish Community Study Of 1940-42: 'Economic Conquest' In Loomis’S Diary And Rosinow’S Photographs, Elizabeth Bennett

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

The American Farm Community Study (1940), funded by the USDA’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics, was a social investigation that sought to determine why some rural communities thrive while others fail. To conduct the Study, the Bureau sent social scientists to six rural communities across the country to investigate and document the most and least “stable” American communities. Geographer Walter Kollmorgen, sociologist Charles Loomis, and photographer Irving Rusinow documented the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, PA, as the “most stable” community in the Study. In Lancaster, the men found a people thriving in the midst of english neighbors still economically …