Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

To studies of Brazilian slavery this book adds a new dimension by showing how it developed in a region where mining was the chief commercial activity and how important a role gender played in this frontier setting in creating opportunities for slaves to achieve some measure of autonomy, compared with slaves who worked in sugar-cane and coffee-growing areas.The interactions among masters, slaves, and royal officials were profoundly shaped by the accessibility and widespread dispersal of gold deposits, the emergence of small urban centers in which commercial activities thrived, the sexual division of labor among slaves working in mining and commerce, and the changing sex ratio within the population of free white colonists settling in the region.Focusing attention on the changing status, autonomy, and influence of nonwhite women, the author argues, is one of the most effective ways of understanding the economic, demographic, and cultural evolution of the slave society as a whole.Kathleen J. Higgins is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Iowa.

Henry W Shoemaker authored hundreds of pamphlets and books on nature, history, and folklore. He was the publisher of several influential newspapers in Pennsylvania, including the "Altoona Tribune" and the "Reading Eagle". This title includes some of the early writings of folklorist Henry W Shoemaker.

Henry W Shoemaker authored hundreds of pamphlets and books on nature, history, and folklore. He was the publisher of several influential newspapers in Pennsylvania, including the "Altoona Tribune" and the "Reading Eagle". This title includes some of the early writings of folklorist Henry W Shoemaker.

In this book, Robert Fallon examines the influence of John Milton's political experience on his great poems, "Paradise Lost", "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes". It is a sequel to his previous book, "Milton in Government".

This work explores the necessities of freedom, the set of conditions without which freedom would not exist. It surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about knowledge, humanity and nature rooted in modern Western thought.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) was arguably this country''s greatest theologian and its finest philosopher before the nineteenth century. His school if disciples (the "New Divinity") exerted enormous influence on the religious and political cultures of late colonial and early republican America. Hence any study of religion and politics in early America must take account of this theologian and his legacy.Yet historians still regard Edward''s social theory as either nonexistent or underdeveloped. Gerald McDermott demonstrates, to the contrary, that Edwards was very interested in the social and political affairs of his day, and commented upon them at length in his unpublished sermons and private notebooks. McDermott shows that Edwards thought deeply about New England''s status under God, America''s role in the millennium, the nature and usefulness of patriotism, the duties of a good magistrate, and what it means to be a good citizen. In fact, his sociopolitical theory was at least as fully developed as that of his better-known contemporaries and more progressive in its attitude toward citizens'' rights.Using unpublished manuscripts that have previously been largely ignored, McDermott also convincingly challenges generations of scholarly opinion about Edwards. The Edwards who emerges from this nook is both less provincial and more this-worldly than the persona he is commonly given.Gerald R. McDermott is Assistant Professor of Religion at Roanoke College.

Based on readings of representative poems by eight Peninsular writers, this book demonstrates that the lyric was a crucial site for the negotiation of masculine identity as Spain's noblemen were alternately cajoled and coerced into abandoning their identifications with images of the medieval hero and assuming instead the posture of subjects.

Presents the letters of the British General who led the campaign against Fort Duquesne, a pivotal episode in the French and Indian War.

Provides a firsthand account of William Penn's 1677 travels in Holland and Germany visiting Quaker congregations and preaching his message of religious toleration. This book helps understand Penn's early years, before he obtained the charter for Pennsylvania in 1681, as well as the reasons for later German-speaking migration to the New World.

Presents information on the buying, selling, and publishing of books in Philadelphia. This book provides insight into the early antiquarian book trade in America.

This work offers an explanation of the way corporate power has achieved its dominant position in contemporary American society. It does so through an examination of history, law, ideology and economics spanning two centuries. It shows that judge-made and statutory laws have had a strong influence.

"Rather than write another of the countless studies in the Weberian tradition, Lutz Kaelber has attempted nothing less than to be Max Weber''s ghost writer and to produce one of the great studies he did not live to undertake-The Christianity of the Occident. The result is a fascinating and engrossing work that adds immensely to our understanding of both then and now." -Rodney Stark, University of WashingtonMax Weber argued that medieval religious movements were an important source for the distinctive rationality of Western civilization. He intended to study precisely this theme but died before he could do so. In Schools of Asceticism, Lutz Kaelber builds on Weber''s ideas by presenting a fresh historical and theoretical analysis of orthodox and heretical religious groups in the Middle Ages. He explores how doctrine and social organization shaped ascetic conduct in these groups from the twelfth century on. Kaelber first examines monastic and mendicant groups, correcting common misperceptions about the nature of their ascetic practices and their significance for the emergence of a Protestant work ethic. Then he turns to two of the largest and most widespread heretical groups in the Middle Ages, the Waldensians and the Cathars. For the most part, Waldensians and Cathars practiced a form of "other-worldly asceticism" resembling that of monks and nuns. For the Austrian Waldensians, however, Kaelber documents a type of "inner-worldly asceticism" that resembled what Weber described for early modern Protestant groups. Both types of asceticism originated in distinctive heretical establishments: Waldensian schools and Cathar "houses of heretics." As these establishments disappeared, the boundaries separating Waldensianism and Catharism from Catholicism collapsed. Kaelber is therefore able to link organizational aspects of heretical communities to the tenacity of heresy in the Middle Ages.Based on exhaustive research into both primary and secondary sources, Schools of Asceticism is a bold and original book that bridges the disciplines of comparative historical and theoretical sociology, medieval history, and religious studies.Lutz Kaelber is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lyndon State College in Vermont.

An explanation of the ideas of leading socialist and anarchist theorists about nationalism and the challenges it presented to the labour movement from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.

This text tells the story of a major episode of intelligence intervention in politics in the mid-1970s that led to the derailing of detente between the Soviet Union and the United States and to the resurgence of the Cold War in the following decade.