Search Result List

Jane Colden (1724–1760) was America’s first woman botanist. This richly illustrated account of her life and work examines Colden’s original writing, the correspondence of her father, Dr. Cadwallader Colden, and eighteenth-century botanic sources, and restores her legacy as one of the country’s great botanists.

In Illusions of Progress, Brent Cebul traces the rise of what he terms “supply-side liberalism” back to the 1930s and contends that, by binding national visions of progress to the local interests of capital, liberals often entrenched the very inequalities of power and opportunity they imagined their programs solving.

Undoing Slavery excavates medical and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Facing many challenges to their goal of restoring embodied self-sovereignty to the enslaved, abolitionists learned that legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.

Mass produced of tin-lead alloys and cheap to purchase, medieval badges were brooch-like objects displaying familiar images. Sumptuously illustrated, Medieval Badges considers all badges, whether they originated in religious or secular contexts, and highlights the ways in which badges could confer meaning and identity on their wearers.

Liberty’s Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment, quickly became a holding tank for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation’s promise of liberty. Reissued with a new preface that connects these early penitentiaries to our present debates over mass incarceration.

Featuring a new preface that discusses the complicated legacy of the nation’s founding at its 250th anniversary for the Indigenous peoples of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of Lenape Indian encounters with European settlers in the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.