Hot Off Penn Press: Dangerously Sleepy, Seasons of Misery, In My Mother’s House, and Why Don’t American Cities Burn?

Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness

Dangerously Sleepy explores the fraught relations between overwork, sleep deprivation, and public health. Health and labor historian Alan Derickson charts the cultural and political forces behind the overvaluation—and masculinization—of wakefulness in the United States. Read more.

Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America

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. Read more . . .

This book examines how ordinary families and communities of minority groups in Sri Lanka have dealt with prolonged civil war and resulting issues as diverse as child recruitment, generational and gender conflicts, political terror, refugee camp life, ethnic nationalism, and migration and mobility. Read more . . .

Urban historian Michael B. Katz traces the collision of urban transformation with the rightward-moving social politics of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America. Read more . . .