Harvest of Hazards: Family Farming, Accidents, and Expertise in the Corn Belt, 1940–1975

Review of: Harvest of Hazards: Family Farming, Accidents, and Expertise in the Corn Belt, 1940–1975, by Derek S. Ode

Review of \u3ci\u3eMennonite Women in Canada: A History\u3c/i\u3e By Marlene Epp

Marlene Epp\u27s overview of two hundred years of Mennonite women\u27s history in Canada focuses largely on the two major sites of Mennonite settlement-Ontario and the Great Plains of Manitoba. Her discussion of the Manitoba settlers-so-called Russian Mennonites whose Germanic ancestors migrated to Russia in the early nineteenth century-encompasses their history from the group\u27s arrival on the Plains in the 1870s to the present. Her study provides a wealth of material for historians of Great Plains women, immigrants, and religious minorities

The Life of Pioneering Amish Studies Scholar Walter Kollmorgen: Transcript of the Reschly-Jellison Interviews

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. It seems he communicated more with male leaders than female members, so his observations about women in the community were fairly general. He offered several insights concerning the internal politics at the USDA and the sources of the impulse to research rural communities on a theorized stability-instability continuum. Several officials were quite attracted to the Amish lifestyle, for example. As a geographer, Kollmorgen moved on to other academic topics during a long career at the University of Kansas and he often had to search his memory to recall aspects of his research in Lancaster County. Without much previous work to build on, Kollmorgen produced one of the first scholarly studies of Amish sociology, oriented to the questions of how and why they survived the Great Depression economically and culturally. [Abstract by author.

Working Together: Women and Men on the Amish Family Farm in 1930s Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

Old Order Amish men did not own gasoline tractors or other large power farm implements to amplify their manhood, and Amish women did not own mechanical household appliances to symbolize their feminine role as housekeepers. Rejecting the notion of mechanized, capital-intensive agriculture in favor of traditional, labor-intensive family farming, the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, practiced a system of labor that necessarily required the crossing of strict gender-role boundaries. Although men primarily identified as farmers and women as homemakers, agricultural success among the Amish necessitated a significant degree of cooperation and mutual labor. In the words of one Old Order Amish wife of the 1930s, “On our farm I did whatever needed to be done.” Employing data from the federal government’s Study of Consumer Purchases, the authors investigate how the traditional gender arrangements of the county’s Amish population enabled them to survive the Great Depression more successfully than other agrarian communities. [Abstract by author.

Biology of Francisella tularensis Subspecies holarctica Live Vaccine Strain in the Tick Vector Dermacentor variabilis

Background: The c-proteobacterium Francisella tularensis is the etiologic agent of seasonal tick-transmitted tularemia epizootics in rodents and rabbits and of incidental infections in humans. The biology of F. tularensis in its tick vectors has not been fully described, particularly with respect to its quanta and duration of colonization, tissue dissemination, and transovarial transmission. A systematic study of the colonization of Dermacentor variabilis by the F. tularensis subsp. holarctica live vaccine strain (LVS) was undertaken to better understand whether D. variabilis may serve as an inter-epizootic reservoir for F. tularensis. Methodology/Principal Findings: Colony-reared larva, nymph, and adult D. variabilis were artificially fed LVS via glass capillary tubes fitted over the tick mouthparts, and the level of colonization determined by microbial culture. Larvae and nymphs were initially colonized with 8.860.8610 1 and 1.160.03610 3 CFU/tick, respectively. Post-molting, a significant increase in colonization of both molted nymphs and adults occurred, and LVS persisted in 42 % of molted adult ticks at 126 days post-capillary tube feeding. In adult ticks, LVS initially colonized the gut, disseminated to hemolymph and salivary glands by 21 days, and persisted up to 165 days. LVS was detected in the salivary secretions of adult ticks after four days post intra-hemocoelic inoculation, and LVS recovered from salivary gland was infectious to mice with an infectious dose 50 % of 3 CFU. LVS in gravid female ticks colonized via the intra-hemocoelic route disseminated to the ovaries and then t