Don't miss our latest batch of new titles on topics from the origins of racial thought in Medieval English literature to urban development in India—and so much more in between. Take a look below!
Jump to: Featured Titles | American History | Ancient Studies | Medieval Studies | Political Science and Human Rights | Urban Studies
To receive email announcements about new books—which include a 30% discount on all titles—sign up here.
FEATURED TITLES
|
"An innovative intellectual history of black possibility, The Black Republic wonderfully recovers a forgotten period in American history when the future of the world was unknown and Haiti loomed over the political visions of white supremacists and black revolutionaries alike. Brandon R. Byrd demonstrates how merely the idea of Haiti has long been central to the Western political imagination—as a litmus test for black self-determination, a warning about the dangers of Negro rule, or as a crossroads for America's imperial ambitions."—Davarian L. Baldwin, author of New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life The Black Republic explores the critical but overlooked place of Haiti in black thought in the post-Civil War era. Following emancipation, African American leaders considered Haiti a singular example of black self-governance whose fate was inextricably linked to that of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus. |
|
"Her Neighbor's Wife is a revelation. Lauren Jae Gutterman locates lesbian histories not at the margins but at the center of postwar American life, often accommodated within marriages with men and family life. Alert to the complex meanings of married women's desire for women, beyond the poles of protest and conformity, Gutterman queers postwar marriage, the family, and normativity itself."—Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor's Wife explores the personal experiences and public perceptions of women who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 328 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus. |
|
"Captives of Liberty shines brilliant new light on the question of just how brutal the American Revolutionary War really was. Based on extensive archival research, T. Cole Jones presents overwhelming evidence that prisoners of war regularly endured retaliatory privation, horrible suffering, and death. Along the way, Jones helps shatter longstanding images of a restrained, almost civilized military conflict. Beautifully written, Captives of Liberty is a magisterial work."—James Kirby Martin, author of Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered Examining how America's founding generation grappled with the problems posed by prisoners of war, Captives of Liberty reveals a cycle of violence, retaliation, and revenge that spiraled out of control, transforming a struggle for colonial independence into a revolutionary war. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 336 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. |
|
"Ian Lustick has written a richly informed and persuasive account of how the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians has become the seemingly dead-end tragedy it is today. This book provides an especially insightful analysis of why Israeli attitudes toward this issue evolved as they did. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about this conflict and hungry for new ways to think about it."—Paul R. Pillar, former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia Paradigm Lost argues that negotiations for a two-state solution between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River are doomed and counterproductive. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs can enjoy the democracy they deserve but only after decades of struggle amid the unintended but powerful consequences of today's one-state reality. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 232 pages | 6 x 9 |
|
"Cord J. Whitaker performs an archaeology of how blackness came to be embedded as a fixture of persuasion, religious thought, and poetic imagery. Exploring the logic of 'contrariety' through medieval poetics and argumentation, he reveals the long intimacy of rhetoric and racial discourse from the Middle Ages to the present."—Rita Copeland, author of Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker argues that rhetoric and theology establish blackness and whiteness as metaphors for sin and purity in medieval English and European writing. Whitaker shows how these metaphors came to guide the development of notions of race in the centuries that followed. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 256 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus. |
AMERICAN HISTORY
|
"For more than two decades, Erik R. Seeman has been the leading authority on attitudes toward death in the early modern Atlantic world, and Speaking with the Dead in Early America is his most imaginative and compelling work to date. Seeman reconstructs the surprising history of Protestant communication with the dead during the two centuries prior to the advent of nineteenth-century Spiritualism, examining an impressive array of manuscript and published texts and material culture artifacts. The resulting book is deeply researched, compellingly written, and entirely persuasive."—Douglas L. Winiarski, University of Richmond In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, Erik Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead, from Elizabethan England to the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Through prodigious research and careful analysis, he boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 344 pages | 6 x 9 | 25 illus. |
ANCIENT STUDIES
|
"Jennifer Taylor Westerfeld presents a logical narrative, with a clear arc, describing how Christian writers made use of the cultural heritage of pharaonic Egypt. An excellent treatment of a very complicated subject."—Richard Jasnow, Johns Hopkins University Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination argues that, in the absence of any genuine understanding of hieroglyphic writing, late antique Christian authors were able to take this powerful symbol of Egyptian identity and manipulate it to serve their particular theological and ideological ends. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 256 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus. |
MEDIEVAL STUDIES
|
"Exhaustively researched, meticulously argued, and beautifully written, That Most Precious Merchandise engages questions hotly debated among historians about how 'premoderns' conceptualized and understood differences between peoples. At the same time, it conclusively demonstrates how the slave markets of medieval Italy and Mamluk Egypt were two branches of a single system."—Debra Blumenthal, University of California, Santa Barbara Reading notorial registers, tax records, law, merchants' accounts, travelers' tales and letters, sermons, slave-buying manuals, and literary works as well as treaties governing the slave trade and crusade propaganda, Hannah Barker gives a rich picture of the context in which merchants traded and enslaved people met their fate. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 328 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 18 illus. |
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
|
"Botting's intervention in Frankenstudies is an important one."—Times Literary Supplement In Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting contends that Frankenstein is a profound work of speculative fiction designed to engage a radical moral and political question: do children have rights? Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 232 pages | 6 x 9 |
URBAN STUDIES
|
"Shareholder Cities brings nearly every big development question and debate in India into sharp focus. Through deep and rich case studies of cities along one of India's largest infrastructure corridors (Mumbai-Pune), Balakrishnan shows how large-scale land use changes are being driven, negotiated, and contested. Weaving together central themes in the most influential paradigms of developmental transformation, Sai Balakrishnan shows how capital, farmers, castes, state logics, and local democratic institutions all intersect in producing a range of outcomes. Shareholder Cities is that rare book that does not merely theorize but actually makes us understand how big structural forces of development work themselves out through the local."—Patrick Heller, Brown University In Shareholder Cities, Sai Balakrishnan argues that some of India's most decisive conflicts over its urban futures will unfold in the regions along the new economic corridors, such as the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, where electorally strong agrarian propertied classes directly encounter financially powerful incoming urban firms. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 256 pages | 6 x 9 | 29 illus. |
Book 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.
Educators: To request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.
*Enter "PE14" in the promo code field on the shopping cart page. The email subscriber discount cannot be applied to the purchase of desk or exam copies.
