The academic year is just starting back up, and Penn Press has released a range of titles in July and August that will prove enriching for students and scholars of American History, Political Science, Anthropology, Medieval Studies, and much more. Read on to explore all of these exciting new releases!
Jump to: Featured Titles | American History | Anthropology | Literature | Medieval and Renaissance Studies | Political Science and Human Rights | Urban Studies
FEATURED TITLES
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"In recent decades, American politics has been transformed by the explosion of right-wing media outlets—from Rush Limbaugh and talk radio to Roger Ailes and Fox News to countless publishing imprints, websites, and little magazines. With Messengers of the Right, historian Nicole Hemmer has written the single best book to date about the roots and growth of the ideas and networks underneath it all. Deeply researched, subtly argued, and lucidly and often humorously written, this first-rate work of scholarship instantly joins the must-read list for any student of the history of conservatism, the history of modern media, or indeed the history of the polarized political culture in which we find ourselves today."—David Greenberg, author of Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency "Read Nicole Hemmer's superb new book, and you'll never see 'liberal mainstream media' in the same way again. With rigorous research and sparkling prose, Messengers of the Right tells the fascinating stories of the people whose core convictions and communications artistry helped create modern conservatism. This is political history—and American history—at its finest."—Margaret O'Mara, University of Washington Messengers of the Right tells the story of the media activists who built the American conservative movement and transformed it into one of the most significant and successful movements of the twentieth century—and in the process remade the Republican Party and the American media landscape. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 336 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus. |
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"This is an exceptionally intelligent book about a notoriously slippery, yet essential, political concept. Jan-Werner Müller's sweeping critique of populism will both instruct and challenge anyone who seeks to understand the roots and nature of the political conflicts that are roiling Europe and the United States."—Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History "Populism is not just antiliberal, it is antidemocratic—the permanent shadow of representative politics. That's Jan-Werner Müller's argument in this brilliant book. There is no better guide to the populist passions of the present."—Ivan Krastev, International New York Times "No one has written more insightfully and knowledgeably about Europe's recent democratic decay than Jan-Werner Müller. Here Müller confronts head on the key questions raised by the resurgence of populism globally. How is it different from other kinds of politics, why is it so dangerous, and how can it be overcome? Müller's depiction of populism as democracy's antipluralist, moralistic shadow is masterful."—Dani Rodrik, Harvard University Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 136 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 |
Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics
What Is Populism?AMERICAN HISTORY
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"The intimate relationship between capitalism and slavery has been too-long dismissed, and with it, the centrality of African and African American labor to the foundation of our modern economic system. Slavery's Capitalism announces the emergence of a new generation of scholars whose detailed research into every nook and cranny of emerging capitalism reveals the inextricable links between the enslavement of people of African descent and today's global economy."—Leslie Harris, Emory University "The centrality of slavery to the economic development of the United States is revealed here more fully, in more dimensions, than in any other book. Anyone who wants to understand this profound revolution in historical thinking will find no better place to start."—Edward L. Ayers, author of In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America "This fascinating collection of essays adds striking new insights to the venerable debate over the relationship between capitalism and slavery. It demonstrates slavery's centrality to the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy, and how slavery was fully compatible with technological, managerial, and financial innovation, but also why southern slavery differed from northern capitalism in ways that helped to produce the irrepressible conflict."—Eric Foner, author of Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad "With some of the best work in one of the hottest fields in American history, Slavery's Capitalism re-centers the history of American capitalism on racial slavery as the U.S. economy's initial engine for development. I admire the ambition of the scholarly project and applaud the topical range of the essays."—Gary J. Kornblith, coeditor of Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America Slavery's Capitalism explores the role of slavery in the development of the U.S. economy during the first decades of the nineteenth century. It tells the history of slavery as a story of national, even global, economic importance and investigates the role of enslaved Americans in the building of the modern world. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 416 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus. |
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"Seasons of Misery is a smart, provocative work that belongs on the bookshelf of scholars working in the fields of seventeenth-century Anglo-American history, literature, and culture, as well as scholars interested in the cultural history of violence."—American Historical Review "Donegan rightly calls attention to the tenuous nature of early English colonization efforts, highlighting the violence, deprivation, and contingency that marked efforts to establish permanent colonies. Her perceptive reading of texts offers many rewards, not least of which is a rich sense of how disoriented early colonists were by the catastrophes they confronted—and often created—in the novel social and physical circumstances of the New World."—Reviews in American History "Seasons of Misery . . . not only recovers texts or textual episodes that historians and literary critics alike seldom read or integrate into studies of early America, but it offers new ways of narrating American literary and cultural history."—Early American Literature "A provocative and remarkably original contribution that considers the agony of settlement in early America. Donegan writes so beautifully that readers might miss the audacity and innovation of her argument."—Jill Lepore, Harvard University "Harrowing, moving, and revelatory, Seasons of Misery offers up a new and unfamiliar vision of the settlement of early America—one that tells of unsettlement and trauma at the heart of the experience of early colonialism and encounter. In stunning prose, Donegan opens a heretofore unseen space in narratives of early America and the field of early American studies."—Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University "Elegantly written and persuasively argued, Seasons of Misery provides sophisticated close readings of the early historical eyewitness accounts of English settlements in the New World."—Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland Seasons of Misery offers a boldly original account of early English settlement in American by placing catastrophe and crisis at the center of the story. Donegan argues that the constant state of suffering and uncertainty decisively formed the colonial identity and produced the first distinctly colonial literature. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 272 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus. |
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"A striking and original study that will engage both scholars and students in its vivid exploration of families and people in eighteenth-century Atlantic France. Extensive and detailed archival research undergirds each narrative gem. The prose is simple and lively, hiding the author's hard work of empirically verifying familial and historical connections."—Sue Peabody, Washington State University "Intimate Bonds is a deeply-researched book that offers an important intervention in the fields of early modern French and French Atlantic history. Analyzing a broader range of actors than previous historians, Jennifer L. Palmer sheds important new light on the contested, constructed, and shifting meanings of 'race' in the French Atlantic world."—Brett Rushforth, University of Oregon Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean, Intimate Bonds shows how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 280 pages | 6 x 9 | 6 illus. |
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"This is clearly the best work to date on the manner in which domesticity justified Manifest Destiny. Shire offers a unique and compelling examination of the role of Southern women in territorial expansion, combined with a first-rate historical analysis of the Seminole and their relationship to native groups elsewhere in the Southwest, placing Florida itself in the larger context of expansion in the early American republic."—Amy Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University Among the many contentious frontier zones in nineteenth-century North America, Florida was an early and important borderland where the United States worked out how it would colonize new territories. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 8 illus. |
Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development
Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic
The Threshold of Manifest Destiny: Gender and National Expansion in FloridaANTHROPOLOGY
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"Combining magnificent writing with meticulous scholarship, Stavroula Pipyrou discreetly opens multiple windows onto the souls and lives of the Grecanici, a secretive people who live in shadows that obscure even the edges of their own identity as Greek-speakers in an Italian landscape. Her valuable study is free of the nationalistic exaggeration so often associated with the romantic image of rediscovered ethnic outliers and offers rich insights into the dynamics of identity in southern Europe."—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University "Deploying superb ethnographic skills and the (closely read) anthropology of Italy and the Mediterranean, Pipyrou shows how the Grecanici construct relationships of kinship, friendship, clientage, and association in an impressive exploration of what she usefully conceptualizes as 'fearless governance.'"—Jane Schneider, The Graduate Center, CUNY "Stavroula Pipyrou's lucid account of the hard-edged performance by which the Grecanici control and regulate their lives together makes for brilliant ethnography. Her narrative brings the anthropological archive to life."—Douglas Holmes, Binghamton University "Stavroula Pipyrou mounts a theoretically progressive and empirically documented analysis of the Greek linguistic minority of Calabria, combined with a rare and compelling ethnography of 'Ndrangheta social forms to present an outstanding study of cultural solidarity and political resistance."—Charles Stewart, University College London In this groundbreaking ethnography of "fearless governance", Stavroula Pipyrou shows how Grecanici—the Greek linguistic minority of Calabria, Southern Italy—have crafted the means to invert hegemonic culture and participate in the power games of minority politics on local and national scales. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 256 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. |
The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority PoliticsLITERATURE
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Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title "Pratt seeks to reanimate time as plural, fragmented, and rich with multiple narrative possibilities, which the notion of a singular, national time forecloses. This is an ambitious goal, and Pratt does a persuasive job of reorienting the reader's sightlines; his research is impeccable—all in all a fine book."—American Literature "Lloyd Pratt's Archives of American Time is an ambitious, erudite, and important book that . . . astutely engages with central problems in the history of modernity and nineteenth-century American print culture."—Novel "Archives of American Time examines the pluralization of temporalities in a series of chapters each of which contributes to the study of a distinct literary genre: the historical romance, Southwestern humor, and African-American life writing. . . . Scrupulously examining Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, and Joseph C. Hart's Miriam Coffin, he teases out how the eruption of premodern temporalities, especially the 'persistence of the past in the present,' disturbs those texts' narratives of linear progression and encourages forms of affiliation that cut across those favored by the centripetal forces of nationalism."—American Literary History "A highly readable, accessible study of the way in which certain literary genres incorporated conceptions of time into forms of language. . . . [Archives of American Time] illuminates the way in which the concept of nation serves as a crucial term in the vexed relation between time and modernity."—Nineteenth-Century Literature "Essential."—Choice "Archives of American Time does something only a few special books have been able to do quite so well in recent years: it makes nineteenth-century American literature relevant to some of the most important arguments being made right now by scholars in other areas—arguments about temporality and spatial scale, print, postcoloniality, and global literary culture."—Trish Loughran, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign In a bold revision of traditional historical narratives, Pratt analyzes nineteenth-century American literature to disclose the competing temporalities and racial identities that in fact defined the antebellum period. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 264 pages | 6 x 9 | 6 illus |
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES
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"Although I have brushed up against suggestions of fairy lore and activity many times in the materials with which I work, I have taken them for granted up to now, which also means I did not think very hard about them. Reading this book has illuminated a large expanse of material much more deeply and intimately than I imagined possible."—Claire Fanger, Rice University Starting from the assumption of a far greater cultural gulf between the learned and the lay in the medieval world than between rich and poor, Elf Queens explores the church's systematic campaign to demonize fairies and infernalize fairyland and the responses this provoked in vernacular romance. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 328 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"Miguel Martínez has identified something rare in early modern studies, a middle- to working-class republic of letters, rooted in a coherent social practice, and self-consciously set off against its putative betters. Front Lines is not just about war, soldiers, and empires, but about the social location of the Renaissance."—Ricardo Padrón, University of Virginia "Front Lines highlights a series of 'gunpowder epics' whose aesthetic and ideological priorities openly defied those of both learned epic and Carolingian romance. I know of no other work that evokes so fully the existence of an entire subculture of soldier-writers with their bracingly direct take on military life and often experimental way with received genres."—Michael Armstrong-Roche, Wesleyan University Front Lines documents the literary practices of imperial Spain's common soldiers. The epic poems, chronicles, ballads, and autobiographies that these soldiers wrote at the front provide a critical view from below on state violence and imperial expansion. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 320 pages | 6 x 9 | 12 illus. |
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"This book is absolutely needed for its depiction of Clare not as a woman destined to be the founder of the Order of San Damiano but as a woman caught in the middle of a struggle between the papacy and the larger grassroots reform movement of the vita apostolica."—Carolyn Muessig, University of Bristol In a work based on a meticulous analysis of sources, many of them previously unexplored, Catherine M. Mooney upends the received account of Clare of Assisi's founding of the Order of San Damiano, or Poor Clares. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 344 pages | 6 x 9 | 3 illus. |
Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church
Front Lines: Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World
Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church: Religious Women, Rules, and ResistancePOLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
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"Su-kyoung Hwang offers not just an invaluable work of historical recovery but also a work of relentless moral and scholarly bravery. Based on research ranging from challenging oral histories to deep dives in the National Archives and Korean-language sources, Korea's Grievous War provides an unflinching and harrowing analysis of anticommunist political violence that is heartbreaking and inspiring."—Christian Appy, author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Korea's Grievous War presents the historical background, political motivations, legal bases, and social consequences of anticommunist violence, tracing the enduring legacy of this destruction in the testimonies of survivors and bereaved families that only now can give voice to the lived experience of the grievous war and its aftermath. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 264 pages | 6 x 9 | 21 illus. |
Korea's Grievous WarURBAN STUDIES
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"Discussions of fixing the U.S. housing finance system often devolve into theoretical tussles that do not connect to the real world complexities of transforming a ten-trillion-dollar market. Not so with the practical, analytical and reasonable recommendations contained in Principles of Housing Finance Reform which provides a well-researched roadmap for reform."—Andrew Davidson, President, Andrew Davidson & Company "Principles of Housing Finance Reform provides an instructive and realistic assessment of key legal, regulatory, and marketplace issues facing policymakers in reshaping the Nation's housing finance system."—Ed DeMarco, former Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and current Senior Fellow, Milliken Institute "The shortcomings of America's housing finance system were vividly exposed after the crash of 2007, but we have yet to meaningfully reform that system. This edited volume provides an excellent guide to how reform should occur. Wachter and Tracy have brought together a terrific set of papers which map out the intellectual terrain and provide a rich set of ideas about fixing America's housing system. Anyone who is hoping that our future housing policies will be better than our past housing policies would do well to read this book."—Edward Glaeser, Harvard University "Principles of Housing Finance Reform is full of interesting, often highly idiosyncratic information about how the U.S. housing finance system works, or often doesn't work. By collecting the essays of leading scholars into one volume, editors Susan M. Wachter and Joseph Tracy provide a very useful public service."—Robert Buckley, The New School Nearly a decade after the housing market's collapse triggered the Great Recession, members of both sides of the political aisle are calling for reform. Principles of Housing Finance Reform lays out a roadmap for reforms for a new housing finance system to achieve liquidity, access, and sustainability. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 23 illus. |
Principles of Housing Finance ReformBook reviewers: To request a press copy of a Penn Press book, send your name, shipping address, and the title of your publication to glamm@upenn.edu.
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