A People of Two Kingdoms II: Stories of Kansas Mennonites in Politics

Jim Juhnke tells the story of Kansas Mennonites in state and national-level politics and stories of Kansas Mennonite politicians, including his own political activities, from 1940 to 2005. This book is a continuation of his 1975 volume A People of Two Kingdoms which covered the 1870s to 1940.

"Half a century ago, James C. Juhnke was a graduate student in history at Indiana University, completing a dissertation on his people, Kansas Mennonites, and their experiences in politics from the 1870s to 1940. Juhnke's analysis, published in 1975 as A People of Two Kingdoms, told of Mennonites whose heritage as a semi-autonomous colony in southern Ukraine gave them the potential for deep political involvement. Yet these were Mennonites who still held back from this engagement because of deep tendencies toward theological and cultural separation. Now retired as a professor of history at Bethel College, Juhnke has completed the second half of this study, tracing the stories of Kansas Mennonites in politics from the 1940s to the present. What he found was a people whose politics have been transformed - not just as partisan political activity (though Kansas Mennonites, in Juhnke's telling, have exhibited plenty of that) but as a broader interaction with society on a multitude of levels. 'This book,' he writes, 'is a study of Mennonite engagement in the American political world.'"

-Anabaptist World