Sunday, March 15, 2015

Mennonite history

Exploring and learning about our family history, especially within the context of Mennonite and even world history, has never been more convenient than it is today. In addition to resources such as the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online and the Grandma database, many websites and webpages offering both primary historical records and guides to accessing those records (see, e.g., here).

Even those of us who prefer a traditional book format are well served these days. For example, all those reading this post have easy access to one of the standard histories of the Mennonites, C. Henry Smith’s The Mennonites: A Brief History of Their Origin and Later Development in Both Europe and America (1920).




The book is old enough that it has entered the public domain (i.e., it is no longer under copyright), so the Internet Archive has scanned it and made it available for free to anyone who wants to read it. You can read it online in a page-flip format as shown above (go ahead and click on the right page to turn it to the next page) or download it to your computer, tablet, or phone to read it whenever you want (see further below).

Although the work is now nearly a hundred years old, it remains a reliable, informative, and engaging guide to the birth of the Anabaptists and then Mennonites and their journey through and spread across Europe and North America.

I especially recommend chapters 1 and 2, on the Anabaptists and Menno Simons; chapter 6.1, on Moravia; chapter 7, on Russia; and chapter 16, on immigration from Russia. York County makes a brief appearance in this last chapter.

To read the book online in a page-flip format, go here.

To download the book as a PDF, EPUB, or Kindle file, go here. (The EPUB and Kindle files offer uncorrected text created by optical character recognition, I assume, so they may be typographically “messy.”)

As I find them, I will alert you to other online books of interest. Happy reading!


Source

Smith, C. Henry. 1920. The Mennonites: A Brief History of Their Origin and Later Development in Both Europe and America. Berne, IN: Mennonite Book Concern.


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