Hi all (& happy halloween!). We have another raft of new titles out this month, including an account of the Supreme Court's most recent term, a look at welfare reform and gender, a social history of Chicago in the immediate aftermath of WWII, a wide-ranging look at Islam in late antiquity, and much more. Browse the latest and greatest below!
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FEATURED TITLES
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"Todd Ruger's American Justice 2018 reads like a political thriller, tracing in lively, smart writing a consequential year that included the first full term of a new Supreme Court justice and a creeping politicization that showed the Court susceptible to the same forces roiling the rest of Washington. Ruger's crisp style, deep knowledge of the Court, and gimlet eye for detail make this volume both essential and accessible."—Julie Mason, host of the Press Pool on Sirius XM's POTUS channel Todd Ruger covers the Supreme Court 2018 term that saw newly appointed conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch finding his footing and swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy retiring. Examining cases that dealt with contentious issues, Ruger provides a glimpse of where the court is likely to shift over the coming years: further to the right. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 144 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 |
American Justice 2018: The Shifting Supreme CourtAMERICAN HISTORY
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"An immensely thought-provoking book. In his sophisticated reconsideration of late-medieval European characterizations of sub-Saharan Africans, Herman L. Bennett troubles the traditional account of the rise of the West."—David Wheat, Michigan State University Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as simple economic transactions: rather, according to Herman L. Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 240 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"M. Scott Heerman provocatively muddies the waters, demonstrating how slavery survived in 'free' Illinois all the way through the Civil War. His reinterpretation does much to link the history of Middle America to the global history of slavery."—Christina Snyder, Penn State University The Alchemy of Slavery foregrounds diverse and adaptable slaving practices that masters deployed to build a slave economy in Illinois, innovating in response to antislavery pressures. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 248 pages | 6 x 9 | 12 illus. |
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"Written with incredible skill and humanity, Postwar offers a fresh look at American life after World War II. Laura McEnaney has produced a remarkably engaging history of the diverse working-class migrants to and residents of the city of Chicago, telling new stories about where and how they lived, how hard this living was, and how many fought their own wars to ameliorate their difficulties. It's a book that no scholar of World War II or postwar America can afford to miss."—Jennifer Mittelstadt, Rutgers University Featuring a fine-grained history of Chicago's working class, Postwar investigates what the aftermath of World War II meant to a broad swath of Americans and finds a working-class war liberalism—a conviction that the wartime state had taken things from people and that the postwar era was about reclaiming those things with the state's help. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 16 illus. |
African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic
The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865
Postwar: Waging Peace in ChicagoLITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES
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"Colonial Revivals pays close attention to the materiality of historical recovery and provides a discerning analysis of the ideological and methodological contents that attended it. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of early American literature and culture."—Thomas Augst, New York University Colonial Revivals examines the rise of American antiquarianism and historical reprinting in antebellum America. Not merely vehicles for preserving the past, reprinted colonial books testified to the inveterate regional, racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical landscape. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus. |
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"No one has pursued the arguments for and against theatricalizing justice across the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods as thoroughly as Yann Robert does in this excellent book."—Jeffrey S. Ravel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dramatic Justice offers an alternate history of French theater and judicial practice and advances new explanations for several pivotal moments in the French Revolution, including the trial of Louis XVI and the Terror, by showing the extent to which they were shaped by the period's conflicted relationship to theatrical justice. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 344 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. |
Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books
Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French RevolutionMEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES
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"An excellent book, truly groundbreaking in approach, and an important contribution to the understanding of late medieval English literary manuscripts, their production, and their illustration."—Richard K. Emmerson, Florida State University Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, 27 of them in color, The Art of Allusion amply exhibits the critical role book artists played in the formation of the English literary canon. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 352 pages | 7 x 10 | 27 color, 97 b/w illus. |
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"Daniel Hershenzon persuasively shows how captivity both tore slaves from their communities and connected those communities across the Western Mediterranean. Extensively researched and bracingly argued, The Captive Sea demonstrates the agency and impact of captives in an enduringly entangled Mediterranean world."—Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles The Captive Sea explores the entangled histories of Muslim and Christian captives—and, by extension, of the Spanish Empire, Ottoman Algiers, and Morocco—in the seventeenth-century to argue that piracy, captivity, and redemption helped shape the Mediterranean as an integrated region at the social, political, and economic levels. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. |
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"Marcela K. Perett rightly points out that most scholarship on the Hussite Revolution focuses on the clerical leadership of the movement and its attempts to communicate their political and theological messages to their opponents. Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion offers a welcome correction and complement by taking seriously how the clerical elite adapted their message through translation into the vernacular in order to persuade the laity to adopt certain positions and behaviors."—Phillip Nelson Haberkern, Boston University Marcela K. Perett examines the early phases of the so-called Hussite revolution and illustrates how vernacular discourse diverged from Latin debates on the same issues, often appealing to emotion rather than doctrinal positions. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"A brilliant, thoughtful, and innovative book. Writing lucidly and elegantly, Amy J. Rodgers establishes not only the possibility but also the necessity of our coming to understand the ways in which the notion of audience and spectatorship was conceptualized, discussed, and imagined during the early modern period."—Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame In A Monster with a Thousand Hands, Amy J. Rodgers argues that the early modern discursive spectator played as significant a role in shaping early modern viewers and viewing practices as did changes to staging technologies, exhibition practices, and generic experimentation. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 240 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus. |
The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476
The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean
Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement
A Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern EnglandPOLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
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"Jamie Aroosi has a nuanced appreciation for the complexities of the reception of Kierkegaard and Marx in the twentieth century. In a new, refreshing, and useful comparison, The Dialectical Self shows how these two thinkers have much more in common than one might immediately imagine. It deserves our careful attention."—Jon Stewart, Slovak Academy of Sciences By drawing out important themes bequeathed them by their shared predecessor G. W. F. Hegel, Jamie Aroosi shows that Marx and Kierkegaard were engaged in parallel projects of making sense of the modern, "dialectical" self, as it realizes itself through a process of social, economic, political, and religious emancipation. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 248 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"With highly recognized contributors, including many with a great deal of practical experience, Human Rights Transformation in Practice merits a wide readership throughout the field of social science research into human rights."—Barbara Oomen, Utrecht University Human rights are increasingly described as being in crisis, but the ideals inherent in them remain appealing. Human Rights Transformation in Practice demonstrates how these ideals are embedded in everyday social practice and activism, and how they can be reinterpreted and redefined in a variety of contexts and for a range of problems. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 296 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus. |
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"Placing feminist analysis front and center in the ongoing public debate about welfare policy, Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink offer a much-needed corrective to the standard historical narrative about welfare reform that normalizes the most gendered and retrograde provisions of the welfare 'ending' Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act."—Alice O'Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara In Ensuring Poverty, Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink assess the gendered history of welfare reform, foregrounding arguments advanced by feminists for a welfare policy that would respect single mothers' rights while advancing their opportunities and assuring economic security for their families. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 240 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"In this unprecedented work, Hans Ingvar Roth casts a spotlight on the life and times of Chinese philosopher Peng Chun Chang, who has remained in the shadows too long—in spite of his signal contributions to the making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Gathering much new evidence and insisting on Chang's relevance even today to a movement that seeks cross-cultural and global purchase, Roth has made a noteworthy contribution to the history and theory of human rights."—Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first biography of P. C. Chang (1892-1957), who lived an eventful and cosmopolitan life and was one of the key writers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, responsible for its defining features of universality and religious ecumenism. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 320 pages | 6 x 9 | 14 illus. |
The Dialectical Self: Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Making of the Modern Subject
Human Rights Transformation in Practice
Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective
P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human RightsRELIGIOUS STUDIES
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"A brilliant and original book. In its reach, in its synthetic analysis, in its fluid, dynamic thought, Virginia Burrus creates something conceptually and imaginatively audacious. No one has attempted such a project before, not like this and not with such sophistication."—Douglas Christie, Loyola Marymount University In Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, Virginia Burrus facilitates a provocative encounter between ancient Christian theology and contemporary ecological thought. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 296 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus. |
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"A work of vast scholarship, original insights, and with a masterful linguistic grasp of primary sources, some of which are being noted by Stephen J. Shoemaker for the first time. The Apocalypse of Empire successfully spans the conceptually and linguistically problematic divide between late antiquity and early Islam."—David Cook, Rice University Stephen J. Shoemaker argues that earliest Islam was a movement driven by urgent eschatological belief that focused on the conquest, or liberation, of the biblical Holy Land and situates this belief within a broader cultural context of apocalyptic anticipation that includes early Byzantine Christianity, Judaism, and Sasanian Zoroastrianism. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 272 pages | 6 x 9 |
Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things
The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early IslamUNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
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The emergence and adoption of metallurgy is one of the seminal topics of investigation in the history of archaeology, particularly in the history of archaeological research in Southeast Asia. The site of Ban Chiang, Thailand, is a central site in debates surrounding the chronology and significance of early metallurgy in the region. This book is the first in a series of four volumes that review the contributions of Ban Chiang and three related sites in northeast Thailand excavated by the Penn Museum to an understanding early metallurgy in Thailand. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 296 pages | 8 1/2 x 11 | 27 illus. |
Ban Chiang, Northeast Thailand, Volume 2A: Background to the Study of the Metal RemainsBook 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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