What the Amana Inspirationists Were Reading

WHEN WE EXAMINE the history of communal Amana for evidence of boundary crossing, we need to consider the movement of people, material objects, and ideas.Of the three, ideas are certainly the vaguest and hardest to define, which may account for the largely impressionistic treatment that the movement of ideas-especially into Amana from the outside-has received from students of Amana history and culture.Changes in the community have often been attributed to the influence of "worldly" ideas, but without any documentation of how and when those ideas made their way into the community.The usual assumption is that they came in at the beginning of the twentieth century as Amana's boundaries weakened.In this paper I attempt to give some empirical grounding to the flow of exogenous ideas into Amana, not by treating the ideas themselves, but by focusing instead on the medium of their entry, specifically printed matter published outside the community.To my knowledge, this source of information has been completely ignored by earlier students of Amana.Glimpses of the ideas themselves will appear, but a full analysis of them will require more space.My purpose here is simply to demonstrate that a significant number of books, magazines, and newspapers found their way into the Colonies and presumably were read by the Colonists even prior to 1900.Together they reveal that the people of Amana were in touch with the world beyond the Colonies earlier and much more than students of Amana have appreciated.Literally hundreds of publications printed outside of Inspirationist communities and written by non-members have been preserved in the research library of the Museum of Amana History and