This ambitious and thought-provoking anthology provides a comprehensive survey of the Pennsylvania Germans, aiming to broaden the scope of interdisciplinary study of the culture as a modern, dynamic American identity. Rather than focus on the culture's preindustrial, agrarian past, this work emphasizes the Pennsylvania German diaspora throughout North America, past and present, as a hybrid culture, both shaping and shaped by the American experience. Aspects of these interactions are highlighted in a series of essays, ranging from immigration history and geography to language, religion, folkways, and the arts. Religious expression, as an essential, defining factor in the culture's manifold identities, occupies a central place within the work, emphasizing both present-day populations of the Pennsylvania Germans: the Anabaptist communities as well as the descendants of the larger Lutheran and Reformed congregations. A defining and pivotal aspect of this work is Bronner and Brown's intentional shift beyond the regional hearth of southeastern Pennsylvania in order to provide social and geographic coverage to the broader Pennsylvania German experience, which includes one of the largest and steadily growing populations of Pennsylvania Germans of the Old Order Amish and Mennonite communities throughout North America. This population of Plain People proceeds from a very small minority of the original eighteenth-century immigrant ancestors of the Pennsylvania Germans, but which today comprises the single largest demographic that has maintained both the everyday use of the Pennsylvania German language and cultural traditions. This anthology is not only relevant to Pennsylvania Germans but parallels the study of other diverse American groups, with an emphasis on hybridity, diaspora, and identity.