Hot Off Penn Press: New books for spring

Our latest round-up of new releases is here! Take a look below, with highlights including a family history that upends the traditional story of Reconstruction, an intellectual history of Survival, a close look at the transformation of the Democratic Party and the crossroads it finds itself at today, and much more!

Jump to: Featured Titles | American History | Intellectual History | Jewish Studies | Literature and Cultural Studies | Medieval and Renaissance Studies | Political Science and Human Rights

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FEATURED TITLES


I've Been Here All the WhileI've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
Alaina E. Roberts

"Roberts's original book will cause historians to reexamine generalities about Indigenous and Black people in Oklahoma and their empowerment and identity; and to extend the story of Reconstruction and its aftermath westward in time and space."—Library Journal

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

First Edition
224 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 b/w
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5303-0 | $34.95a | £26.99
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9798-0 | $34.95a | £26.00
A volume in the America in the Nineteenth Century series


AMERICAN HISTORY


Battle Green VietnamBattle Green Vietnam: The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston
Elise Lemire

"Elise Lemire focuses on one of the most interesting protests in the latter years of the U.S.'s engagement in its war in Southeast Asia, when using the hallowed sacred spaces of the martial birthplace of the nation, a group of Vietnam vets sought to contrast what they understood as a disastrous, criminal war with what they understood as the founding principles of the nation."—Edward Linenthal, author of Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields

Based on more than one hundred interviews with participants and accompanied by nearly forty photographs and maps, Battle Green Vietnam tells the story of the 1971 antiwar protest by Vietnam veterans that resulted in the largest mass arrest in Massachusetts history.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

248 pages | 6 x 9 | 33 b/w halftones, 6 maps
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5297-2 | $45.00s | £36.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9795-9 | $45.00s | £33.50

Fighting for the Higher LawFighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery
Peter Wirzbicki

"In these pages, with an eloquence worthy of William Cooper Nell and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Peter Wirzbicki urges us to hear the hidden harmonies between abolitionist and Transcendentalist thought, while never failing to notice the dissonances, too. This is an inspiring book that ranges as widely as the thinkers it follows. It demonstrates anew why intellectuals and the life of the mind mattered in the struggle to end slavery."—Caleb McDaniel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America

In Fighting for the Higher Law, Peter Wirzbicki explores how important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy that fired the radical struggle against American slavery.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

384 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5291-0 | $39.95s | £32.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9789-8 | $39.95s | £30.00
A volume in the America in the Nineteenth Century series


INTELLECTUAL HISTORY


The Belief in IntuitionThe Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler
Adriana Alfaro Altamirano

The Belief in Intuition shows that intuition, as Henri Bergson and Max Scheler understood it, leads to a conception of freedom grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity," thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self.

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264 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 bw halftones, 1 table
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5293-4 | $75.00s | £60.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9791-1 | $75.00s | £56.00
A volume in the Intellectual History of the Modern Age series

Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah ArendtViolence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt
Caroline Ashcroft

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost theorists of the twentieth century to wrestle with the role of violence in public life. In Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, Caroline Ashcroft argues that what Arendt opposes in political violence is the use of force to determine politics, an idea central to modern sovereignty.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

320 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5296-5 | $69.95s | £56.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9794-2 | $69.95s | £52.00
A volume in the Intellectual History of the Modern Age series

SurvivalSurvival: A Theological-Political Genealogy
Adam Y. Stern

"Adam Stern's remarkable book offers a set of lucidly argued readings of twentieth-century German-Jewish thinkers through the prism of 'survival.' Joining biopolitics to theology, he constructs a revelatory critical genealogy of survival by tracing the importance of a Christian-inflected discussion of survival in Jewish thought, and outlines its political forms. Casting a critical eye on competing claims to sovereignty, Stern shows how all sacralizing discourses about survival—including Israeli military mobilizations—paper over the fragility of the mortal body. His is an original, highly innovative work that is deeply informed and rigorously argued."—Carolyn J. Dean, Yale University

In Survival, Adam Stern asks what texts and traditions have made survival a recognizable element of our current political vocabulary. Examining works by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud, Stern shows that survival belongs to a history of debates about the sovereignty and subjection of Christ's body.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

320 pages | 6 x 9 | 0
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5287-3 | $75.00s | £60.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9786-7 | $75.00 | £56.00
A volume in the Intellectual History of the Modern Age series

Kant and the Possibility of ProgressKant and the Possibility of Progress: From Modern Hopes to Postmodern Anxieties
Edited by Paul T. Wilford and Samuel A. Stoner

"From Immanuel Kant through Walter Benjamin, philosophy of history was a vital way of grappling with the question 'what may I hope?' This incisive volume of essays is both a splendid guide for exploring these enduringly important discussions and a timely call to investigate them anew."—Isaac Nahkimovsky, Yale University

Through a reexamination of Immanuel Kant and his philosophical legacy, this volume explores the philosophic presuppositions of the possibility of progress and our belief in reason's capacity not only to improve the material well-being of humanity but also to promote our true vocation as moral beings.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

328 pages | 6 x 9 | 2
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5282-8 | $65.00s | £52.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9779-9 | $65.00s | £48.50


JEWISH STUDIES


Invisible EnlightenersInvisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation
Federica Francesconi

"In this meticulously researched book, Federica Francesconi focuses on the mercantile Jewish elites of Modena to complicate our understanding of the modernity and integration of Jews in European society, a subject that has for too long been dominated in historiography by the study of the German Jewish context."—Magda Teter, Fordham University

In Invisible Enlighteners, Federica Francesconi writes the history of the Jewish merchants who prospered in the northern Italian city of Modena during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their sociocultural transformation and legal and political integration evolved through a dialogue between their Italian and Jewish identities.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

400 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 halftones, 5 line art
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5314-6 | $79.95s | £64.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9962-5 | $79.95s | £59.50
A volume in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series


LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES


Resounding the SublimeResounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670-1850
Miranda Eva Stanyon

What does the sublime sound like? Miranda Stanyon traces competing varieties of the sublime, a crucial modern aesthetic category, as shaped by the antagonistic intimacies between music and language. In resounding the history of the sublime over the course of the long eighteenth century, she finds a phenomenon always already resonant.

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304 pages | 0
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5308-5 | $75.00s | £60.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9956-4 | $75.00s | £56.00
A volume in the Sound in History series


MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES


Thou Art the ManThou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages
Ruth Mazo Karras

Exploring the different configurations of David in biblical and Talmudic commentaries, in Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular literatures across Europe, in liturgy, and in the visual arts, Ruth Mazo Karras offers a rich case study of how ideas and ideals of masculinity could bend to support a variety of purposes within and across medieval cultures.

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368 pages | 6 x 9 | 28 halftones
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5302-3 | $59.95s | £48.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9799-7 | $59.95s | £44.50
A volume in the Middle Ages Series


POLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS


True BluesTrue Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party
Adam Hilton

Tracing the rise of the advocacy party from the fall of the New Deal order through the presidency of Barack Obama, True Blues explains how and why the Democratic Party has come to its current crossroads and suggests a bold new perspective for comprehending the dynamics driving American party politics more broadly.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

280 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5299-6 | $55.00s | £44.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9796-6 | $55.00s | £41.00
A volume in the American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law series


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