It may not be harvest time yet, but June yielded a bumper crop of new books. Check them out below, and to receive subject-specific email announcements about new books, sign up here.
Jump to: General Interest | American History | Art and Landscape Design | Literature | Politics and Human Rights | Religious Studies
GENERAL INTEREST
A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora
Daniel Boyarin
"After two decades of exciting debate, the theory of diaspora studies is now in gridlock and in need of new interventions. This is such an intervention—a strong and exhilarating book."—Khachig Tölölyan, Wesleyan University
"Daniel Boyarin demolishes the long-standing notion that diaspora was born out of despair and sorrow. A Traveling Homeland is a highly erudite, suggestive, and provocative study on the concept of diaspora, and the Jewish diaspora in particular."—Oded Irshai, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
In A Traveling Homeland, Daniel Boyarin makes the case that the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto producing and defining the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
192 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4724-4 | $24.95s | £16.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9139-1 | $24.95s | £16.50
A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series
AMERICAN HISTORY
Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy
Daniel Geary
"A concise, lucid, and wonderfully readable account. With remarkable acuity and grace, Beyond Civil Rights provides an utterly persuasive history of both the Moynihan Report and the ongoing argument about it."—Howard Brick, University of Michigan
"Daniel Geary provides a fresh portrait and insightful analysis of Daniel Patrick Moynihan during his heyday, and a nuanced framework for assessing the famous report and its wide-ranging impact—and more. Beyond Civil Rights is a path-breaking study of the limits of liberalism during a time of racial crisis and transformation."—Patricia Sullivan, University of South Carolina
The definitive history of the Moynihan Report controversy, Beyond Civil Rights examines the cultural assumptions embedded in the report's analysis of "the Negro family" and demonstrates its significance for liberals, conservatives, neoconservatives, civil rights leaders, Black Power activists, and feminists.
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288 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4731-2 | $45.00s | £29.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9152-0 | $45.00s | £29.50
A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series
ART AND LANDSCAPE DESIGN
Edna Andrade
Debra Bricker Balken, Editor
Edna Andrade is the first book-length study of the aesthetic influences, creative development, and enduring legacy of this dynamic twentieth-century American artist, tracing her career from her early surrealist landscapes, through decades of the geometric patterns of Op Art to her late-life studies of the Atlantic coastline.
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176 pages | 10 x 12 1/4 | 170 color
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4739-8 | $49.95t | £32.50
"The Planetary Garden" and Other Writings
Gilles Clément. Translated by Sandra Morris. Foreword by Gilles A. Tiberghien
"Gilles Clément, horticultural engineer, entomologist, landscape architect, and writer, occupies a special place in French professional circles. . . . All Clément's concepts speak about nature as well as about humanity; they evoke a possible community of humans and nonhumans, a way of constantly inventing new forms for living better together."—From the Foreword, by Gilles A. Tiberghien
In these three essays, brought together and translated into English for the first time, Gilles Clément outlines his interpretation of the laws that govern the natural world as well as the principles that should guide our stewardship of the global garden of Earth.
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192 pages | 6 x 9 | 30 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4712-1 | $34.95t | £23.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9138-4 | $34.95t | £23.00
A volume in the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series
NOW IN PAPERBACK
Paint, Pattern, and People: Furniture of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1725-1850
Wendy A. Cooper and Lisa Minardi
Paint, Pattern, and People explores the fascinating and diverse furniture of southeastern Pennsylvania through the people who made, owned, inherited, and collected it.
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304 pages | 9 x 12 | 300 color illus.
Paperback | ISBN 978-0-912724-74-4 | $45.00t | £29.50
Framing Fraktur: Pennsylvania German Material Culture and Contemporary Art
Judith Tannenbaum, Editor
Fraktur is a manuscript-based folk art tradition brought from Europe by German-speaking immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century. Framing Fraktur takes a unique approach to the study of traditional fraktur by connecting it to the work of contemporary artists who similarly combine images with texts.
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104 pages | 8 x 10 | 110 color illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4745-9 | $39.95t | £26.00
LITERATURE
The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America
Michael C. Cohen
"A truly magisterial work, brimming with extraordinary original research. The book is rich, precise, and emphatically various in details, but not lost in them."—Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Amherst College
"Richly grounded in archival research, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America works outward from individual cases to make broadly important, powerful, and persuasive claims about the central role of poetry in the formation of a nineteenth-century racial and national imaginary."—Eliza Richards, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America illuminates the connections between poems and critical ideas about poetic genres, and tracks the emergence and disappearance of poems and poets in American culture by examining how people encountered and made sense of poetry.
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296 pages | 6 x 9 | 23 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4708-4 | $55.00s | £36.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9131-5 | $55.00s | £36.00
A volume in the Material Texts series
POLITICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
The Workfare State: Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats
Eva Bertram
"How did the United States end up with a safety net that no longer protects its people? Eva Bertram's superb analysis explains precisely how the United States reconstructed (and restricted) its welfare state. The Workfare State provides a fresh look at the Democrats, the South, inequality, social justice, and more. Broad ranging, urgent, thoughtful, elegant, meticulously researched, and highly recommended."—James A. Morone, Director, Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University
The Workfare State recounts the history of the evolving social contract for poor families from the New Deal to the present. Challenging conventional accounts, Eva Bertram argues that conservative Southern Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s led the way in developing the modern workfare state, well before Republican campaigns in the 1980s.
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336 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4707-7 | $75.00s | £49.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0625-8 | $75.00s | £49.00
A volume in the American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law series
Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights
Edited by Francisco Ferrándiz and Antonius C. G. M. Robben. Foreword by Richard Ashby Wilson
"This excellent and timely volume . . . opens up new avenues of global comparison and investigation. As if the task of understanding the past were not daunting in itself, the chapters in this collection provide fascinating accounts of the political and legal struggles surrounding exhumations, and these often include popular mobilizations that are both intensely local and globally connected. I know of no other volume that addresses the topic of exhumations as profoundly, and in as many disparate cases in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia."—From the Foreword by Richard Ashby Wilson
This remarkable book demonstrates through in-depth case studies from ten countries around the world how the forensic exhumation of mass graves is inextricably intertwined with grassroots initiatives, national political developments, international human rights advocacy, and transnational claims of transitional justice.
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280 pages | 6 x 9 | 20 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4720-6 | $59.95s | £39.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9132-2 | $59.95s | £39.00
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series
The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept
Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts, Editors
"An empirically rich, diverse, and informative contribution to sociological citizenship studies."—Karolina S. Follis, Lancaster University
The Human Right to Citizenship provides an accessible overview of citizenship around the globe, focusing on empirical cases of denied or weakened legal rights. This wide-ranging volume provides a theoretical framework to understand the particular ambiguities, paradoxes, and evolutions of citizenship regimes in the twenty-first century.
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328 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4717-6 | $65.00s | £42.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9142-1 | $65.00s | £42.50
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series
Constitutions and Conflict Management in Africa: Preventing Civil War Through Institutional Design
Alan J. Kuperman, Editor
"Based on careful case studies and new data, this excellent volume reflects an important new set of ideas relating to constitutional design and conflict."—Terrence Lyons, George Mason University
Presenting the first database of constitutional design in all African countries, and seven original case studies, Constitutions and Conflict Management in Africa explores the types of domestic political institutions that can buffer societies from destabilizing changes that otherwise increase the risk of violence.
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304 pages | 6 x 9 | 22 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4658-2 | $65.00s | £42.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9033-2 | $65.00s | £42.50
A volume in the National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century series
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times
Ari Joskowicz and Ethan B. Katz, Editors
"This is an important book. It deals intelligently with the issues of secularism from many different perspectives and contexts and will be of great interest to students and scholars of modernization, Jewish studies, and religion."—Richard I. Cohen, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Secularism in Question examines how twentieth-century revivals of religion prompt a reconsideration of many issues concerning Jews and Judaism in the modern era. Scholars of Jewish history, religion, philosophy, and literature illustrate how the categories of "religious" and "secular" have frequently proven far more permeable than fixed.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
424 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4727-5 | $65.00s | £42.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9151-3 | $65.00s | £42.50
A volume in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series
Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World
Michael Philip Penn
"A sophisticated and well-conceived study of the evolving depictions of Muslims in Syriac texts that will shed new light on the socially complicated history of early Islam."—Sydney H. Griffith, the Catholic University of America
The earliest and largest corpus of Christian writings on Islam was written in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Envisioning Islam shows how these previously neglected texts problematize modern perceptions of an exclusively hostile Christian reaction to Islam and revolutionize our understanding of the early Islamic world.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
304 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4722-0 | $59.95s | £39.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9144-5 | $59.95s | £39.00
A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series
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