A bevy of new titles have been published by Penn Press since the turn of the year, and it's high time they were featured here on the Log. So, this week is New Books Week. Starting today, and continuing for the rest of the week, we'll highlight all of the books that have been released in 2014. Up today, we have General Interest and American History titles.
GENERAL INTEREST
Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic
Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown
"Taming Lust performs a remarkable double feat of historical reconstruction. On the one hand, it uncovers the tangled roots of a pair of highly anomalous trials for bestiality in late eighteenth-century New England. On the other, it unfolds a broad panorama of the social, political, and sexual culture of an entire era. These paired objectives inform a writing that is strongly constructed, elegantly expressed, and larded with fascinating detail." —John Demos, author of The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic
"Strange sexual perversities can provide a window into basic values of ordinary people at a particular time and place. Taming Lust does just that, offering a perceptive peek at New England near the end of the eighteenth century, and doing so in prose that almost sings." —Joseph J. Ellis, author of Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence
"Impeccably researched, vividly narrated, and persuasively argued, Taming Lust opens up a compelling prospect of a society in crisis, at once attracted and repelled by the seductions of a modern, cosmopolitan world fast advancing all over the new American republic. The conflict between old and new ways briefly erupted in the two fascinating cases at the heart of this immensely readable book, when judicial authorities took the rare step of prosecuting ancient men on the margins of their communities for a capital offense that had not occupied the courts since the last days of Puritan rule. As Ben-Atar and Brown show us, the true mystery of these episodes lies not in the alleged behavior of two elderly men but in the decisions by public officials to haul them into court and seek their deaths on the gallows." —Robert A. Gross, author of The Minutemen and Their World
This fascinating history examines the circumstances of two elderly New Englanders who were prosecuted and sentenced to death for bestiality at the turn of the eighteenth century. Their astonishing cases become a springboard to examine the Enlightenment Era political and religious turmoil of the region.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
216 pages | 6 x 9 | 21 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4581-3 | $34.95t | £23.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0925-9 | $34.95t | £23.00
A volume in the Early American Studies series
Getting a PhD in Economics
Stuart J. Hillmon
"A good guide written with wit and an honesty that reflects an economist's way of viewing reality." —David Colander, Middlebury College
"Clear, direct, and fun to read, this book captures all the major aspects of applying to and succeeding in a Ph.D. program in economics." —Mark C. Foley, Davidson College
The first manual designed to meet the specific needs of economics graduate students, Getting a Ph.D. in Economics walks the reader through the total experience, from the Ph.D. admissions process to arduous first-year coursework and qualifying exams to armoring up for the volatile job market.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
152 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paperback | ISBN 978-0-8122-2288-3 | $24.95s | £16.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0913-6 | $24.95s | £16.50
AMERICAN HISTORY
Contested Spaces of Early America
Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, Editors
"Bold, innovative, and ambitious, Contested Spaces of Early America is an excellent volume that engages with the state of the field like few others." —Andrés Reséndez, University of California, Davis
Contested Spaces of Early America is a wide-ranging, eclectic volume that seeks to reconcile the parallel histories and historiographies of European and Indian spaces created throughout the hemisphere during the colonial era.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
444 pages | 6 x 9 | 4 color, 25 b/w illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4584-4 | $49.95s | £32.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0933-4 | $49.95s | £32.50
A volume in the Early American Studies series
The Bishop's Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru
Emily Berquist Soule
"Astonishingly original and highly readable. With this ground-breaking study of the monumental work of Bishop Martínez Compañón, Emily Berquist Soule opens up a whole new world of research on the eighteenth century in Peruvian history. This is cultural, intellectual, and art historical writing at the very highest level." —Gary Urton, Harvard University
"A deeply researched, beautifully written account of a fascinating man. Bishop Martínez Compañón was a brilliant iconoclast who saw the need for change and did everything he possibly could to promote it. Emily Berquist Soule's impressive archival work and fine pen brought him to life." —Charles Walker, University of California, Davis
"A superb study of a neglected figure of the Spanish-American Catholic Enlightenment whose capacious mind and broad cultural, political, and social reforming agenda here expertly come alive. Berquist Soule casts her net widely, utilizing documentation from over a dozen archives, to reconstruct the bishop's agenda and struggles. Her work marvelously reminds readers that his utopia was disciplined by reality: competing and conflicting agendas of the locals taught the eager bishop the limits of his vision." —Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas
Based on intensive archival research and the unique visual data of more than a thousand extraordinary watercolors, The Bishop's Utopia seamlessly weaves cultural history, natural history, art, and imperial politics into a cinematic retelling of the life of Spanish Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón and the northern Peru in the 1780s.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
336 pages | 6 x 9 | 24 color, 1 b/w illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4591-2 | $45.00s | £29.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0943-3 | $45.00s | £29.50
A volume in the Early Modern Americas series
Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston
Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger
"My admiration for what the authors have done in Robert Love's Warnings grew with each chapter. They have made the streets of colonial Boston come alive in ways no other scholar has done. And their achievement in research is simply amazing. . . . What a book!" —Alfred F. Young, author of The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution
Robert Love's Warnings follows the walks of one otherwise obscure townclerk, Robert Love, as he warned itinerants and sojourners to depart the town in fourteen days. Love's meticulous records reveal the complex legal, social, and political landscape of New England in the decade before the Revolution.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
272 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4593-6 | $34.95s | £23.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0632-6 | $34.95s | £23.00
A volume in the Early American Studies series
Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World
Michael Guasco
"With an admirable global perspective and a breathtaking array of sources, Michael Guasco recasts the history of the English experience with slavery." —Alison Games, Georgetown University
Michael Guasco traces the broad spectrum of ways slavery shaped the way Englishmen and Anglo-Americans thought about and interacted with the world even before the rise of plantation-based economies.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
328 pages | 6 x 9 | 8 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4578-3 | $45.00s | £29.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0988-4 | $45.00s | £29.50
A volume in the Early Modern Americas series
Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights
Christine Knauer
"A valuable contribution to histories of the black freedom struggle. Christine Knauer draws on prodigious research and thorough analysis to bring to life the story of African Americans in the military following World War II." —Adriane Lentz-Smith, Duke University
"Could the Supreme Court have ordered public school integration in 1954 if the military had remained segregated? In Let Us Fight As Free Men, Christine Knauer demonstrates that the battle to desegregate the U.S. armed services was key to the more extensive racial integration of American life that followed. By giving a history to events usually told episodically, Knauer demonstrates important connections between the 1940s and 1950s, and between civil rights in the military and in civilian life. This book fills temporal and theoretical gaps vital to the African American freedom struggle." —Glenda Gilmore, Yale University
Let Us Die as Free Men explores the African American fight for the desegregation of the American military between the Second World War and the Korean War. The book credits black soldiers and civilian efforts, more than Truman's executive order, for achieving integration in the context of the Cold War.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
352 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4597-4 | $49.95s | £32.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0959-4 | $49.95s | £32.50
A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series
Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism
David R. Swartz
"Moral Minority is a vivid topography of a little-understood corner of evangelical thought." —New York Times
"In this remarkably rigorous, richly contextualized, and generally exhaustive exploration of the evangelical Left, David R. Swartz returns readers to a time when theologically conservative Protestantism was 'politically up for grabs.'" —Journal of American History
"David Swartz has written a book of colorfully portrayed characters and credible storyline that strikes an elegant balance between politics, theology, social history and biographical narratives." —American Society of Church History
"In this superbly written study, David Swartz offers an excitingly fresh and compelling look at evangelical activists who forged a different ideological path in the age of Nixon and Reagan, one that veered left, away from the rightward trends of their day. Blending big-picture perspective with the colorful insight of biography, Swartz vividly describes his subjects' gospel of social justice and their struggles to win their church over to this progressive faith. In doing so, he forcefully reminds us that modern evangelicalism is neither monolithic nor static in its political persuasions and quest for impact. As both good history and timely observation, this is an important book." —Darren Dochuk, author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism
"Swartz restores the evangelical left to its important place in the annals of post-sixties American evangelicalism. A striking work of research, recovery, and analysis, Moral Minority will stand as an essential contribution to the new history of American evangelicalism." —Steven P. Miller, author of Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South
Moral Minority charts the rise and fall of the evangelical left, a movement ignored by the Democratic Party in the 1970s and alienated by the Republican Party in the 1980s—but whose activism pointed broader evangelicalism toward social justice.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More
384 pages | 6 x 9 | 25 illus.
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4441-0 | $47.50s | £31.00
Paperback | ISBN 978-0-8122-2306-4 | $24.95s | £16.50
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0768-2 | $24.95s | £16.50
A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series
