Don't miss our latest slate of new titles, with topics spanning from the philosophy of the far right to the life of Meriwether Lewis, from Christianity in Mozambique to the history of eighteenth-century slavery advertisements. Dig in below!
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FEATURED TITLES
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"This is a great book. If it proves anything, it's that ideas have consequences, often profound and dangerous ones. One perhaps unintended benefit of the emergence of the New Right is that it forces readers of Nietzsche and Heidegger to see them for what they are—apostles of a resurgent fascism. For those accustomed to reading these thinkers as prophets of individual liberation and moral self-realization, Ronald Beiner has a clear message: think again."—Steven Smith, Yale University In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deeper philosophical roots of such far-right ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon, to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 176 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 |
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"In the past decade the world's politics and economies have changed in ways that are as surprising as they are befuddling. In this short book professor Mauro Guillén tackles the big questions of our time with verve, erudition and originality. He offers powerful answers and asks interesting questions. A must read."—Moises Naím, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace In Rude Awakening, Mauro F. Guillén affirms the potential of liberalism still to provide a flexible framework for governments, businesses, workers, and citizens to explore and make necessary compromises and coalitions for a better future. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 168 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 |
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"[Kurie's] sensitivity to, and affection for, the various community subgroups often shine through. The result is a testament to a Hershey identity that is still strong . . . [Kurie] demonstrates how a philanthropic institution can continue to reflect a founder's vision while shaping and being shaped by the community that grows up around it, one whose bonds can often be bittersweet."—The Wall Street Journal An inside look at the transformation of Hershey, Pennsylvania, from a model industrial community into a twenty-first century suburbia powered by a $12 billion philanthropy. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 216 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"Bitterroot offers a refreshing and overdue new perspective on the complicated and often contradictory life of Meriwether Lewis. Patricia Tyson Stroud carefully separates the verifiable facts from the quick judgments of history that have obscured Lewis' character for more than two centuries. This is an arresting portrait that challenges the conventional wisdom and makes a compelling case to restore Lewis's reputation to the luster he enjoyed in his lifetime."—Landon Jones, author of William Clark and the Shaping of the West Through a retelling of Lewis's life, from his resourceful youth to the brilliance of his leadership and accomplishments as a man, Patricia Tyson Stroud shows that Jefferson's unsubstantiated claim of his protégé's suicide is the long-held bitter root at the heart of the Meriwether Lewis story. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 392 pages | 6 x 9 | 12 color, 24 b/w illus. |
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"Frank Furness's architecture brought together two seemingly opposed realms: one derived from the newly developing industrial machine, the other from nature. There is a fantastical juxtaposition of ferocious hissing, steam-driven piston power coupled with lyrically delicate ornament derived from leaves and stems of plant life (and, almost paradoxically, implanted in stone by the then newly invented steam-powered chisel). George Thomas's book places Furness's architecture in the apocalyptic climax of this moment when nature and industry could be thought of as one organic, dynamic whole."—Turner Brooks, Yale School of Architecture A sweeping assessment of the entire career of Frank Furness that features more than one hundred illustrations, George E. Thomas's book argues that American modern architecture, in design and genealogy, is rooted in the industrial culture of Philadelphia and the office of Frank Furness. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 312 pages | 7 x 10 | 34 color, 84 b/w illus. |
Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right
Rude Awakening: Threats to the Global Liberal Order
In Chocolate We Trust: The Hershey Company Town Unwrapped
Bitterroot: The Life and Death of Meriwether Lewis
Frank Furness: Architecture in the Age of the Great MachinesAMERICAN HISTORY
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"In Colonial Complexions, historian Sharon Block offers a subtle and profound reading of the processes of race-making in colonial North America. Drawing on thousands of advertisements for the return of servant and enslaved laborers of African, European, and Native American descent, Block offers a careful and critical reading of how colonial slave and contract owners consolidated racial meaning on bodies through specific language, evaluation, and the naturalization of status over the eighteenth century. After reading this book, scholars will be compelled to deconstruct colonial terms of racial designation that have been uncritically reproduced and to change the way we think and write about race and racial meaning in the past and the effects of these terms in our present."—Marisa Fuentes, Rutgers University How did descriptions of individuals' appearance reinforce emergent categories of race? In Colonial Complexions, more than 4000 advertisements for runaway slaves and servants reveal how colonists transformed seemingly observable characteristics into racist reality. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 232 pages | 6 x 9 | 17 illus. |
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"How and why did Christianity, seemingly built on spiritual emancipation and equality, give blessing to African slavery in the Americas? Christian Slavery is a powerful new interpretation of this question that will inspire scholars to rethink the connections between religion, race, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic world."—Jon Sensbach, University of Florida Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? Christian Slavery shows how debates about slavery transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 296 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus. |
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"Dispossessed Lives exemplifies the best new historical scholarship on slavery and gender. Marisa Fuentes's compelling study of women's lives in and around Bridgetown leaves the reader with a clear sense of who these women were and how they navigated the terrain of a Caribbean slave society. At the same time, Fuentes's engagement with the problems of the archive testifies to the powerful entanglements that constitute the afterlife of slavery. This is an important study that fundamentally reshapes the questions we are compelled to ask about the histories of slavery in the Atlantic world."—Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University Vividly recounting the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive, Marisa J. Fuentes challenges how histories of vulnerable and invisible subjects are written. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 232 pages | 6 x 9 | 8 illus. |
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"A 'new America' or an America inheriting a version of Christianity that sanctioned the violence of holy war and the imperative of eliminating idolatry? In Susan Juster's fresh and intelligent retelling of our seventeenth-century beginnings, she uncovers what the rest of us have overlooked, themes of this kind that the colonists brought with them. A feat of research and argument."—David D. Hall, Harvard University Susan Juster explores different forms of sacred violence—blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction, and iconoclasm—to uncover how European traditions of ritual violence developed during the Reformation were introduced and ultimately transformed in the New World. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 17 illus. |
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"This important new work takes what some have called 'the f-word' of American history (frontier) and returns it to polite conversation. Starting with the common-sense idea that we should try to understand what colonists meant when they called themselves 'frontier people,' Patrick Spero suggests how Pennsylvania, 'the Keystone State,' can indeed be a keystone for understanding not only early America but the 'frontier country' that followed after 1776."—James H. Merrell, author of Into the American Woods Synthesizing the tensions between high and low politics and eastern and western regions in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, Patrick Spero recasts the importance of frontiers, as eighteenth-century Pennsylvanians would have understood them, to the development of colonial America and the origins of American Independence. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 22 illus. |
Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America
Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World
ANCIENT STUDIES
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Featuring over 120 illustrations, The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times is an essential reference for those interested in the religion, culture, and history of the ancient Mediterranean. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 512 pages | 7 x 10 | 23 color, 104 b/w illus. |
The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial TimesANTHROPOLOGY
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"At last anthropology comes to Kashmir. And its entry is dazzling. Each of the essays in this volume takes us in directions never traversed before in any book on Kashmir."—Mridu Rai, Presidency University, Kolkata Resisting Occupation in Kashmir considers the social and legal dimensions of India's occupation of Kashmir and the ways in which Kashmiri youth are drawing on the region's history of armed rebellion to reimagine the freedom struggle in the twenty-first century. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus. |
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"Faith in Flux brilliantly realizes the potential of ethnography not only to illuminate other lifeworlds but to offer incisive critiques of current theoretical assumptions in religious studies and the social sciences. In lucid and enthralling prose, Devaka Premawardhana takes us deep into the world of the Makhuwa, offering new ways in which global Christianity, tradition, mobility, conversion, and social change may be understood."—Michael Jackson, author of How Lifeworlds Work: Emotionality, Sociality, and the Ambiguity of Being Recent reports on Pentecostalism in the global South give the impression of an inexorable trajectory of massive growth, but Faith in Flux examines the religion's ambivalent reception in northern Mozambique, locating vital insight in the overlooked places where this religion has failed to take root. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 232 pages | 6 x 9 | 8 illus. |
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"Alicia Peter's ethnography provides the most lucid analysis of the immensely contested operations of human trafficking response that I have ever read. It illuminates how cultural beliefs and values about gender, sexuality, and victimization have fractured the interpretation and implementation of the law in different sites."—Sealing Cheng, author of On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea Responding to Human Trafficking explores how cultural and symbolic frameworks of sex, gender, and prostitution dominate the interpretation and implementation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and provides a detailed ethnography of its ramifications for the persons it is designed to protect. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 256 pages | 6 x 9 | 4 illus. |
Resisting Occupation in Kashmir
Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique
MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES
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"A brilliant and daring achievement, one that ventures beyond most medievalists' scholarly experience."—John D. Niles, University of Wisconsin-Madison Daniel Donoghue shows how the earliest readers of Old English poems deployed a unique set of skills that enabled them to navigate a daunting task with apparent ease. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 248 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus. |
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"City of Saints is an exceptional piece of scholarship, readable, even inviting. It might be the most important analysis of popular Christianity for the city of Rome in the early Middle Ages."—George Demacopoulos, Fordham University City of Saints explores how Byzantine Rome naturalized saints from throughout the Mediterranean world to build a new sacred topography. As a result, an exhausted city with a limited Christian presence metamorphosed into the spiritual center of Western Christianity. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 320 pages | 7 x 10 | 21 color, 33 b/w illus. |
How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems
City of Saints: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle AgesPOLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
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"Addressing a mix of technology, politics, culture, and philosophy of science, the essays in Mastery of Nature connect the intellectual stages of philosophical and scientific development with unusual precision and depth. The collection amounts to a rare exchange between philosophical critics of the modern scientific project and its serious defenders."—Robert Faulkner, Boston College Ranging from ancient Greek thought to contemporary quantum mechanics, Mastery of Nature investigates to what extent nature can be conquered to further human ends and to what extent such mastery is compatible with human flourishing. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. |
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"Manfred Nowak's experience as UN Special Rapporteur on Torture; his long and distinguished career in the human rights field; his keen intelligence, compassion, insight, and humanity; and his talent for telling a good story combine to make this an invaluable and indispensable document for anyone interested in human rights, prisoners' rights, or torture. From the first sentence to the last, Torture is filled with information and analysis you will not find elsewhere. If you want to understand what causes torture and how to end it, this is the book to read."—Jamie Mayerfeld, University of Washington In Torture, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak recounts his experience visiting countries, reviewing documents, collecting evidence, and conducting interviews with perpetrators, witnesses, and victims of torture. His story offers vital insights for human-rights scholars and professionals. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 208 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"Argentina Betrayed is a powerful book that attempts to parse the constructions and continual reconstructions of the key concepts of trust, trauma, betrayal, memory, accountability, and mourning as analytical tools to understand repressive state violence and its legacy for Argentine society. Antonius C. G. M. Robben is to be commended for his examination of the question of what the legacies of repression portend for Argentine democracy and the future of its political projects."—Jennifer Schirmer, International State Crime Initiative This riveting analysis of the aftermath of Argentina's massive disappearances uncovers a dynamic of trust and betrayal that has driven relentless confrontations between the state, the military, former insurgents, and bereaved relatives about how to remember, mourn, and punish atrocities committed against fellow citizens. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. |
Mastery of Nature: Promises and Prospects
Torture: An Expert's Confrontation with an Everyday Evil
Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and AccountabilityBook 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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