This Week’s New Books: The City After Abandonment, This Noble House, Pornographic Archaeology, and The Language of Human Rights in West Germany

The City After Abandonment

Edited by Margaret Dewar and June Manning Thomas

400 pages | 6 x 9 | 25 illus

Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4446-5 | $75.00 | £49.00

Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0730-9 | $75.00 | £49.00

A volume in the City in the Twenty-First Century series

Looking at the shrinking cities of the Midwest and Northeast as well as New Orleans, urban planning experts examine the conditions of disinvested places and lay out ways policymakers and planners can approach the future through processes and ideas that differ from those applicable to growing cities.

This Noble House: Jewish Descendants of King David in the Medieval Islamic East

Arnold E. Franklin

320 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus.

Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4409-0 | $65.00 | £42.50

Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0640-1 | $65.00 | £42.50

A volume in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series

"A substantial, rich, and original work that takes a typically Jewish topic into the heart of an Islamic cultural context."–Menahem Ben-Sasson, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This Noble House examines the importance of biblical ancestry—especially the claim of descent from King David—for Jews living in the medieval Islamic world.

Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation

Pornographic Archaeology uncovers the determinant role that the sexuality of the Middle Ages played in the construction of nineteenth-century French nation and empire. This cultural history demonstrates how medicine's obsession with the medieval past helped to define European sexuality, race, marriage, and family.

The Language of Human Rights in West Germany

Lora Wildenthal

288 pages | 6 x 9

Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4448-9 | $69.95 | £45.50

Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0729-3 | $69.95 | £45.50

A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

"This is a special book: well-grounded, thoughtful, polished, and responsible. Lora Wildenthal has written an important work that goes far beyond the usual praise and will be greatly appreciated as a landmark study about both postwar German history and about human rights history."–Samuel Moyn, Columbia University

The Language of Human Rights in West Germany traces the four most important purposes for which West Germans invoked human rights after World War II. Lora Wildenthal demonstrates that human rights comprise a political language, best understood in its own domestic and historical context.

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