Hot Off Penn Press: We’re back!

Hello all! After a delay due to a transition to a new book distributor, we're back with a fresh slate of newly released titles. Take a look at the latest round-up below, including an illuminating history of the forgotten practice of Northern slavery, a reassessment of Nietzsche in light of his historical context, an examination of the role of animals in early Christian thought, and much more!

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

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FEATURED TITLES


Slavery in the NorthSlavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory
Marc Howard Ross

"Slavery in the North examines our collective memory of slavery and enslavement in the North: why and how a widespread and important practice that spanned over two hundred years could be erased from our cultural discourse, and why the recovery of such history has been resisted and fraught with conflict. With race and slavery, and their histories and legacies, very much in the forefront of American cultural and political life today, this is an important book."—Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky

Inviting the reader to accompany him on his own journey of discovery, Ross recounts the processes by which northerners had collectively forgotten 250 years of human bondage and the recent—and continuing—struggles over recovering, and commemorating, the stories of what it entailed.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

320 pages | 6 x 9 | 31 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5038-1 | $39.95t | £32.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9528-3 | $39.95s | £26.00


AMERICAN HISTORY


People Must Live by WorkPeople Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan
Steven Attewell

"Steven Attewell does the important work of recapturing the history of direct job creation in the United States. Based on impressive archival research, deep knowledge of policy debates, and a willingness to engage and challenge conventional wisdom from the perspective of history, People Must Live by Work illustrates how forgotten or abandoned policy strategies can expand our political imagination as we consider the social and economic challenges of the twenty-first century."—Guian McKee, University of Virginia

People Must Live by Work traces the rise and fall of direct job creation policy—how it was put into practice, how it came within a hairbreadth of becoming a permanent feature of American economic and social administration, and why it has been largely forgotten or discounted today.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

336 pages | 6 x 9 | 12 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5043-5 | $75.00s | £60.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9531-3 | $75.00s | £49.00
A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series

The Commerce of VisionThe Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America
Peter John Brownlee

"The Commerce of Vision is an original, rich, and engaging study of an antebellum culture intrigued by questions of seeing and visual representation yet unsettled by the energies of rapidly expanding urban and market economies. Ranging over visual, material, and archival evidence—from paintings and daguerreotypes to broadsides, typeface, and newspapers, from ophthalmology and eyeglasses to paper currency and signboards—it will interest readers in visual and material culture studies, American studies, and the history of science."—Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware

In The Commerce of Vision, Peter John Brownlee integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

264 pages | 7 x 10 | 93 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5042-8 | $45.00s | £36.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9530-6 | $45.00s | £29.50
A volume in the Early American Studies series

William Livingston's American RevolutionWilliam Livingston's American Revolution
James J. Gigantino II

"By documenting New Jersey Gov. William Livingston's struggles to mobilize reluctant militiamen, rein in loyalists as well as his own rambunctious legislature, and staunch the flow of intel into British-held New York City, James J. Gigantino II makes a convincing case that 'military bureaucrats' like Livingston contributed as much to the American victory in the Revolutionary War as the heroes of the battlefield."—Woody Holton, author of Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia

William Livingston's American Revolution explores how New Jersey's first governor guided the daily operations of a revolutionary-era government and examines the complex nature of the conflict, including the limits of patriot governance and the ways in which wartime experiences affected the creation of the Constitution.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

280 pages | 6 x 9 | 6 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5064-0 | $39.95s | £32.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9550-4 | $39.95s | £26.00
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series

A Not-So-New WorldA Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America
Christopher M. Parsons

"Christopher M. Parsons tells a new and highly original story about how various people involved in the French colonization of North America understood the landscape of the New World and how these changing understandings affected and shaped the larger project of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French colonialism."—Robert Morrissey, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

264 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5058-9 | $45.00s | £36.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9545-0 | $45.00s | £29.50
A volume in the Early American Studies series


ANTHROPOLOGY


The Israeli Radical LeftThe Israeli Radical Left: An Ethics of Complicity
Fiona Wright

"In her fine-grained ethnography, Fiona Wright offers a compelling account of the complexities and ambivalences that attend anti-occupation activism in Israel. Beyond its mooring in Israel and Palestine, The Israeli Radical Left is a powerful examination of the ways in which anticolonial politics can become intimately entangled with the colonial logic it opposes."—Rebecca L. Stein, Duke University

Fiona Wright traces the ethics and politics of radical Jewish Israeli leftwing activists who challenge the violence perpetrated by their state and in their name. She imparts the ways in which activists constantly negotiate their own condition of complicity and the impossibility of reconciling their principles with their everyday lives.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

208 pages | 6 x 9 | 8 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5047-3 | $69.95s | £56.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9535-1 | $69.95s | £45.50
A volume in the Ethnography of Political Violence series


INTELLECTUAL HISTORY


Nietzsche in the Nineteenth CenturyNietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions
Robert C. Holub

"Nietzsche famously described himself as an 'untimely' thinker. Yet his thought was deeply embedded in the debates of his time. In nine sharp chapters ranging from the women's question and colonialism to anti-Semitism and eugenics, Robert Holub sheds revealing light on the oftentimes surprising origin and development of Nietzsche's ideas from out of the arguments and disputes that shaped intellectual life during the latter half of the nineteenth century. A must read for anyone interested in understanding Nietzsche and his importance for us today."—Hugo Drochon, University of Cambridge

Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century shows how Nietzsche formulated his thought in an ongoing dialogue with the concerns of his contemporaries and how his philosophy can be conceived as a contribution to the debates taking place in Europe at the time in the realms of politics, society, and science.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

536 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5023-7 | $85.00s | £68.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9514-6 | $85.00s | £55.50
A volume in the Intellectual History of the Modern Age series

History After HitlerHistory After Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise
Philipp Stelzel

"With knowledge and insight, Philipp Stelzel brings together two stories that are usually told separately—the writing of German history in the United States and in the Federal Republic of Germany—and shows their deep interconnections in the postwar years. In History After Hitler we come to see the emergence of a genuine transatlantic community of scholars and its powerful impact on the writing of history."—Helmut Walser Smith, Vanderbilt University

A comprehensive account of how German and American historians after World War II tackled the question of the roots of National Socialism, History After Hitler traces the development of a transatlantic scholarly community as a key part of the intellectual history of the Federal Republic and of Cold War German-American relations.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

248 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5065-7 | $69.95s | £56.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9554-2 | $69.95s | £45.50
A volume in the Intellectual History of the Modern Age series


JEWISH STUDIES


Dominion Built of PraiseDominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy Among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean
Jonathan Decter

"Dominion Built of Praise is clear and surefooted, its historical contextualization deft, and its revisionism refreshing and never heavy-handed. Jonathan Decter has a profound and intimate knowledge of medieval Hebrew poems and other texts, many of them unpublished and all of them in some ways overlooked. Medieval Hebrew praise poetry has never been taken so seriously, and Decter demonstrates why it should be."—Marina Rustow, Princeton University

In Dominion Built of Praise, Jonathan Decter looks at the phenomenon of panegyric in Mediterranean Jewish culture from several overlapping perspectives—social, historical, ethical, poetic, political, and theological—and finds that they depict how representations of Jewish political leadership varied across space and evolved over time.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

400 pages | 6 x 9 | 12 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5041-1 | $79.95s | £64.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9524-5 | $79.95s | £52.00
A volume in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series


LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES


Slantwise MovesSlantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America
Douglas A. Guerra

"Slantwise Moves recovers forgotten nineteenth-century games from obscurity and interprets them as part of a history of American selfhood or agency, reading them against and in relation to other nineteenth-century cultural productions. This important and original book will prove compelling for Americanists, especially scholars of nineteenth-century literature and the history of the book, but will also find readers among anyone with an interest in games and game studies."—Lisa Gitelman, New York University

Highlighting meaningful overlap in the production and reception of books and games, Slantwise Moves identifies what they have in common as material texts and as critical models of the mundane pleasures and intimacies that defined agency and social belonging in the nineteenth century.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

264 pages | 6 x 9 | 21 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5061-9 | $69.95s | £56.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-9122-9548-0 | $69.95s | £45.50
A volume in the Material Texts series

Literature, American StyleLiterature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic
Ezra Tawil

"This is a beautifully written, well-structured, and impressively informed study of early national American literature. Drawing on pre-romantic aesthetic philosophy and deft stylistic analysis, Ezra Tawil succeeds in elucidating a significant late eighteenth-century cultural paradox: the transatlantic roots of American literary originality."—Paul Downes, University of Toronto

Literature, American Style finds early U.S. authors self-consciously imitating European literary forms even as they claimed radical originality. The notion of style helped them manage this peculiar contradiction. It was their American use of style, they claimed, that marked their departure from literary precedents.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

272 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5037-4 | $75.00s | £60.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9529-0 | $75.00s | £49.00

Singing in a Foreign LandSinging in a Foreign Land: Anglo-Jewish Poetry, 1812-1847
Karen A. Weisman

"Ground-breaking and beautifully written, Singing in a Foreign Land is an extraordinary contribution to our knowledge of religious diversity during the Romantic era. Karen A. Weisman is better equipped than any critic today to give us a fine-tuned picture of Romantic Jewish cultural production, one that refuses to see it as either merely oppositional or conformist."—Mark Canuel, University of Illinois at Chicago

In Singing in a Foreign Land, Karen A. Weisman examines the uneasy literary inheritance taken from British cultural and poetic norms by early nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish authors.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

264 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5034-3 | $75.00s | £60.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9526-9 | $75.00s | £49.00
A volume in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series


MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES


Mixed Faith and Shared FeelingMixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London
Musa Gurnis

"Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling is an unusually compelling book. It is artfully conceived and exhaustively researched and takes its readers on a thoroughly engaging, wide-ranging, and profoundly interactive journey through the material—confessional on the one hand, theatrical on the other. And it does this in a way that successively explodes a number of received ideas and unexamined myths, chief among which is that card-carrying Puritans never attended, much less tolerated, public theater plays."—Thomas Cartelli, Muhlenberg College

Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling explores the mutually generative relationship between post-Reformation religious life and London's commercial theaters. By engaging with dramatic texts and performance practices, Musa Gurnis demonstrates how early modern theater drew mixed-faith playgoers into new relations with a complex religious culture.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

272 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5025-1 | $59.95s | £48.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9518-4 | $59.95s | £39.00

Law and the Imagination in Medieval WalesLaw and the Imagination in Medieval Wales
Robin Chapman Stacey

"A field-changing book. Robin Chapman Stacey's approach not only offers a valuable corrective to those histories that treat legal texts as straightforward representations of practice; it also gets us out of the mire of speculation about lost manuscripts, dating, and provenance."—Emily Steiner, University of Pennsylvania

Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales explores the idea of law as a form of political fiction: a body of literature that blurs the lines generally drawn between the legal and literary genres.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

344 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5051-0 | $89.95s | £72.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9542-9 | $89.95s | £58.50
A volume in the Middle Ages Series


POLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS


Truth Without ReconciliationTruth Without Reconciliation: A Human Rights History of Ghana
Abena Ampofoa Asare

"Through an examination of the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), Abena Ampofoa Asare paints a nuanced history of Ghana, one in which Ghanaian citizens themselves narrate the violence of the country's past. These testimonies enlightened me, one or two even made me laugh, and, many times, I had to pause and look away, horrified at the scale of terror people suffered. By presenting the NRC in all its contradictions and in giving voice again to everyday Ghanaians, Asare's Truth Without Reconciliation makes us critically consider the image of Ghana as a peaceful country and reminds us that there are human rights abuses we as a nation still have to confront."—Ayesha Harruna Attah, author of The Hundred Wells of Salaga

Abena Ampofoa Asare identifies the documents, testimonies, and petitions gathered by Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission as a portal to an unprecedented public archive of Ghanaian political history as told by the self-described survivors of human rights abuse.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

256 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5039-8 | $79.95s | £64.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9527-6 | $79.95s | £52.00
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

For the Love of HumanityFor the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq
Ayça Çubukçu

"This remarkable book about the World Tribunal on Iraq (set up shortly after the U.S. invasion by a multinational network of activists and scholars) is at once a valuable ethnography and a timely history of the present. It forces the reader to confront the conflicts between the legal and political perspectives that dominate our understanding of international affairs. For anyone concerned with global justice, For the Love of Humanity is essential—because thought-provoking—reading."—Talal Asad, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Based on two years of fieldwork with the transnational network of antiwar activists who constituted the World Tribunal on Iraq, For the Love of Humanity addresses the contemporary challenges and ambiguities of forging global solidarity through an anti-imperialist politics of human rights and international law.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

240 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5050-3 | $65.00s | £52.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9537-5 | $65.00s | £42.50
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

Are Markets Moral?Are Markets Moral?
Arthur M. Melzer and Steven J. Kautz, Editors

"A unique collection of essays on morality and the market: no other volume I know of gathers as many different voices or as many concerns with non-Western economies."—Samuel Fleischacker, University of Illinois at Chicago

Are Markets Moral? explores the vexed relationship between moral values and free market economics. Essays consider whether the principles and practical workings of the capitalist system erode moral character and prevent the just distribution of goods or whether, on the contrary, they promote good character and just outcomes.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

256 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5052-7 | $49.95s | £40.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9540-5 | $49.95s | £32.50


RELIGIOUS STUDIES


In the Eye of the AnimalIn the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity
Patricia Cox Miller

In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity complicates the role of animals in early Christian thought by showing how ancient texts and images celebrated a continuum of human and animal life.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

280 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5035-0 | $79.95s | £64.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9522-1 | $79.95s | £52.00
A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series


URBAN STUDIES


Metropolitan DenverMetropolitan Denver: Growth and Change in the Mile High City
Andrew R. Goetz and E. Eric Boschmann

Metropolitan Denver reveals the purposeful civic decisions made regarding tourism, downtown urban revitalization, and cultural-led economic development that make the city a destination.

Full Description, Table of Contents, and More

248 pages | 6 x 9 | 27 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5045-9 | $49.95s | £40.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9532-0 | $49.95s | £32.50
A volume in the Metropolitan Portraits series


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