Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Rethinking German Sectarians: Compound Singularity in Colonial PennsylvaniaEighteenth-century Mennonites and Brethren were but a small slice of the colonial Pennsylvania German world.Among the more than 80,000 German-speakers who passed through the port of Philadelphia in the 1700s were some 5,500 Rhine Valley Anabaptists and Anabaptist-inflected Radical Pietists, namely Mennonites (including Amish Mennonites) and Schwarzenau Brethren. 1 Although few in number compared with their more numerous Lutheran and German Reformed compatriots, these newcomers attracted attention, even in the colonial era, for their concentrated numbers in Pennsylvania, and have garnered perhaps more than their expected share of scholarship.Yet such scholarship, while impressive and still valuable, merits reconsideration.Key synthetic works on colonial Pennsylvania German sectarians, produced in the 1960s-1980s and remaining foundational in the twenty-first century, often assumes too much in terms of their subject's singularity.2 We might, instead, consider how these communities lived with what political scientists have called "compound singularity," in which a group sees itself "as distinct and sometimes … unique, while recognizing cultural as well as [other] ties to" those around it.3 Pennsylvania's origins have long been associated with being a haven for religious refugees, a place of remarkable ethno-religious diversity, even when compared with other Midatlantic colonies.4 The resulting pluralism is sometimes mythologized in these tellings, but it does reflect a real fact: there was something unusual going on in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century.Yet an emphasis on Pennsylvania's diversity has had a problematic byproduct.Pennsylvania-as-a-haven has had the effect, perhaps unintentionally, of
Author: Steven M. Nolt
Institution: Elizabethtown College
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7103135350
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