Four Penn Press authors received praise for their recent books in the September issue of The Journal of American History.
Here's what reviewer Julia Grant wrote about Stir it Up: Home Economics in American Culture by Megan J. Elias:
She does a marvelous job of demonstrating that what is now perceived as an obscure relic of an antique era was at its inception solidly mainstream, progressive, and pro-woman. . . . Not only historians of women and the professions, but also people in fields that are the offspring of this legacy of women’s professionalism, should take stock of the many insights that this book has to offer.
Catherine Nickerson called Susan Branson’s Dangerous to Know: Women, Crime, and Notoriety in the Early Republic “both highly readable and intricate.” Nickerson went on to say that “Branson’s book offers a rich, detailed account of an illustrative set of crimes and of the fine grain of the emergence of the penny press out of sentimental culture. Branson is to be commended for her scholarly rigor and sophisticated narrative technique.”
Wayne J. Urban reviewed Bruce Kuklick’s Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine and wrote that “Kuklick seems to have succeeded at placing Fontaine socially and intellectually within the swirling currents of African American intellectual life of the first half of the twentieth century.”
Finally, Thomas Aiello commended the contributors to Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States, edited by Marguerite S. Shaffer, for their ability to "find shared identities and shared definitions through multiple avenues,
whether systematically imposed, pulled from the wreckage of conflict
and compromise, or housed in the process of memorialization and
collective memory. We are left with difference, but also with shared
spaces, shared ideas, and—in varying degrees—a shared identity."
The full reviews are available at The Journal of American History website and through The History Cooperative.
