While hibernating animals sleep snug in their burrows, the rest of us wait with bated breath for winter to end. We here at Penn Press occupy our minds by publishing some great books. Here’s what came out in February, including a bevy of new works in Political Science.
Jump to: American History | Anthropology | Literature | Medieval Studies | Politics and Human Rights | Religious Studies
AMERICAN HISTORY
Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America
Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson, Editors
“A valuable addition to the rapidly growing literature on the history of capitalism in the United States.”—Gary Kornblith, Oberlin College
“This engagingly presented volume is a truly important contribution to the economic and cultural history of the nineteenth century and to the history of capitalism.”—Rosanne Currarino, Queens University
A compelling history of nineteenth-century economic, social, and cultural life, Capitalism by Gaslight explores the blurred boundary between legitimate and illegitimate economic activity, describing the dealings of prostitutes, dealers in dirty books and used goods, mock auctioneers, illegal slavers, and other entrepreneurs.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
328 pages | 6 x 9 | 19 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4689-6 | $49.95s | £32.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9102-5 | $49.95s | £32.50
A volume in the Early American Studies series
ANTHROPOLOGY
Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India
Sara Shneiderman
“An entirely unique and stunning ethnography. Shneiderman finds herself assisting the Thangmi’s drive to manifest their distinctiveness and seek recognition. She manages a high-wire performance herself: one full of compassion, acute theoretical insight, exemplary balance, and respect for the sacredness of the quest—doing as much credit to ethnography as a craft as to the Thangmi as a people. Few have been as fortunate in their ethnographer as the Thangmi.”—James C. Scott, Yale University
The first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, a marginalized community who migrate between Himalayan border zones, Rituals of Ethnicity explores Thangmi cultural worlds and regional political histories to offer a new explanation for the persistence of enduring ethnic identities despite the realities of mobile, hybrid lives.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
328 pages | 6 x 9 | 24 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4683-4 | $75.00s | £49.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9100-1 | $75.00s | £49.00
A volume in the Contemporary Ethnography series
LITERATURE
An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850
Siobhan Carroll
“Siobhan Carroll takes the reader on a voyage of discovery through some unusual texts and proves a patient and trustworthy guide. She adds considerably to scholarship on literature’s representation of foreign places and other worlds.”—Timothy Fulford, DeMontfort University, Leicester
Examining newspapers, voyage narratives, and literary works by Romantic and Victorian writers (including Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Dickens), An Empire of Air and Water examines the role that polar, oceanic, subterranean, and atmospheric spaces played in the British imperial imagination.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
304 pages | 6 x 9 | 6 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4678-0 | $59.95s | £39.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9185-8 | $59.95s | £39.00
MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Adam Usk’s Secret
Steven Justice
“In prose that is extraordinarily alive both to its subject and to its own suspenseful disclosures, Steven Justice teaches us to read a Latin chronicle as a piece of written craft, and few have sustained that attention this far or this finely. More importantly, Justice assesses and advances major principles of narrative interpretation, concerning how narratives relate to contexts, how rhetorical traditions foster or undermine particular visions of history, and how the discipline of literary analysis maintains a delicate balance between rigorous adherence to its established tenets and wider connections to other questions and explanations—matters that must surely energize discussion among humanities scholars of all periods.”—Andrew Galloway, Cornell University
Adam Usk, a fifteenth-century professor, royal advisor, schismatic, and spy, wrote a peculiar book in a reticent, nervous prose better suited to keeping secrets than setting them in writing. Steven Justice sets out to find what Usk wanted to hide and comes to surprising conclusions about the foundations of literary and historical study.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
224 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4693-3 | $49.95s | £32.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9105-6 | $49.95s | £32.50
A volume in the Middle Ages Series
POLITICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
The Markets for Force: Privatization of Security Across World Regions
Molly Dunigan and Ulrich Petersohn, Editors
“A well-conceived and well-researched book, with unique and detailed case studies that will add significantly to the field.”—Elke Krahmann, Brunel University London
The Markets for Force compares the markets for private military and security services across the globe, examining how local markets evolve and interact with regional politics and geostrategic context.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
224 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4686-5 | $55.00s | £36.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9143-8 | $55.00s | £36.00
Pakistan’s Enduring Challenges
C. Christine Fair and Sarah J. Watson, Editors
“Pakistan’s Enduring Challenges draws the portrait of a country trapped in its own contradictions, and where the search for security and status has only exacerbated existing fragilities and people’s sense of insecurity. The book accurately describes the many tensions, domestic and external, that have led the country to become its own worst enemy, without ignoring the positive societal developments that have taken place in Pakistan’s recent past. A must-read for anyone with an interest in South Asia and its future.”—Frederic Grare, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
In Pakistan’s Enduring Challenges, experts on the region survey Pakistan’s prospects following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, examining the country’s security concerns, its domestic political and economic issues, and the withdrawal’s ramifications on Pakistan’s ongoing relationships with foreign powers like the United States.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
320 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4690-2 | $69.95s | £45.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9096-7 | $69.95s | £45.50
Election 2014: Why the Republicans Swept the Midterms
Ed Kilgore
“Election 2014 is wise, comprehensive and indispensable—the one book you must read to understand the last midterms of the Obama Era. Ed Kilgore draws on the best data, the shrewdest journalism, and, above all, his own superb instincts and extensive knowledge to create a small masterpiece of electoral analysis. Here’s hoping that Kilgore commits to analyzing every future midterm, a species of election that is always overanalyzed but insufficiently understood.”—E. J. Dionne, author of Why Americans Hate Politics and Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent
How did the GOP trounce the Democrats in 2014? Acclaimed political analyst Ed Kilgore crunches the data, examines structural factors, places the vote in historical context, and reflects on implications for the 2016 presidential race in this bracing commentary on the recent Republican sweep.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
118 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | 5 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4744-2 | $16.95t | £11.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9166-7 | $9.95t | £6.50
Nationalism, Language, and Muslim Exceptionalism
Tristan James Mabry
“An entirely original and important contribution to the study of nationalism, this book brings together a broad range of ideas about ethnicity, language, and religion and deftly weaves together an elegant theory that not only explains why some Muslim societies choose to turn toward or away from fundamentalism but what to do about it.”—John A. Hall, James McGill Professor in Sociology, McGill University
Drawing on fieldwork in Iraq, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, Nationalism, Language, and Muslim Exceptionalism compares the politics of six Muslim separatist movements, locating shared language and print culture as a central factor in Muslim ethnonational identity.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
264 pages | 6 x 9 | 6 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4691-9 | $69.95s | £45.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9101-8 | $69.95s | £45.50
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series
Globalization: The Crucial Phase
Brian Spooner, Editor
Globalization: The Crucial Phrase brings together scholars of anthropology and social science, as well as law and medicine to examine the challenges and opportunities introduced by rapid globalization, including economic diversity, education, labor, health, and environmental concerns.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
392 pages | 6 x 9 | 51 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-1-934536-78-0 | $69.95s | £45.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-1-934536-79-7 | $69.95s | £45.50
Distributed for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West
Philippe Buc
“In this challenging study, Philippe Buc deploys his vast knowledge of the history and complex influence of scripture and its exegesis to explore the themes of holy war, martyrdom, and terror in the culture of the Christian and post-Christian West. He has little patience with conventional, polarized constraints of religion/secularization, historical periodization, and the anachronistic dismissal of the power of religious thought and language. Buc’s is a quick, learned, and contentious mind, and his identification of a distinctly western kind of identity determination and the related contours of public violence in the West is a major contribution to a fundamental historical debate.”—Edward Peters, University of Pennsylvania
Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror examines the ways Christian theology has shaped centuries of violence from Christianity’s first centuries up to our own day, through the crusades, the French Revolution, and more recent American wars.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
496 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4685-8 | $49.95s | £32.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9097-4 | $49.95s | £32.50
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series
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