Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

Explores the myriad ways that people in the nineteenth century grappled with questions of learning, belonging, civic participation, and deliberation. Focuses on the dynamics of gender, race, region, and religion, and how individuals and groups often excluded from established institutions developed knowledge useful for public life.

An interdisciplinary exploration of white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s.

Examines the book of Ecclesiastes, arguing that it may have served as a provocative voice for, or as a catalyst to, the emergence of apocalyptic eschatology and later sectarian conflicts within Judaism in the mid-Second Temple period.

Explores women's conceptions of citizenship as articulated in their speeches at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Illustrates how, in addition to working for their own enfranchisement, women also modeled practices of democratic citizenship beyond the ballot.

Explores several classic works of social and political thought, examining how the history of their publication materially affected their meaning and reception over time. Case studies include works by Durkheim, Mead, Marx, Du Bois, and Weber.

Explores a narrative pattern in which storytellers revisit instances of genocide and extinction not simply to reveal historical erasures of whole populations but also to rearticulate lifeways premised on cross-species interdependence. Focuses on recovering a sense of affective bonds shared across species lines.

Explores the practices of ecological art, a genre addressing the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues. Examines connections and divergences between contemporary eco art, land art of the 1960s and '70s, and the historical genre of landscape painting.

A reassessment of the regency of Queen Mariana of Austria (1634-1696) during the minority of her son, King Carlos II of Spain, offering a new perspective on the Spanish monarchy in the later seventeenth century.

In this book, Jeffrey Merrick brings together a rich array of primary-source documents—many of which are published or translated here for the first time—that depict in detail the policing of same-sex populations in eighteenth-century France and the ways in which Parisians regarded what they called sodomy or pederasty and tribadism. Taken together, these documents suggest that male and female same-sex relations played a more visible public role in Enlightenment-era society than was previously believed.The translated and annotated sources included here show how robust the same-sex subculture was in eighteenth-century Paris, as well as how widespread the policing of sodomy was at the time. Part 1 includes archival police records from the 1720s to the 1780s that show how the police attempted to manage sodomitical activity through surveillance and repression; part 2 includes excerpts from treatises and encyclopedias, published nouvelles (collections of news) and libelles (libelous writings), fictive portrayals, and Enlightenment treatments of the topic that include calls for legal reform. Together these sources show how contemporaries understood same-sex relations in multiple contexts and cultures, including their own. The resulting volume is an unprecedented look at the role of same-sex relations in the culture and society of the era.The product of years of archival research curated, translated, and annotated by a premier expert in the field, Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France provides a foundational primary text for the study and teaching of the history of sexuality.

Explores how, in the Americas, people of African birth or descent found spiritual and social empowerment in the orbit of the Church. Draws connections between Afro-Catholic festivals and their precedents in the early modern Christian kingdom of Kongo.

A comprehensive overview of the writings of Francis Daniel Pastorius, founder of Germantown, lawyer, educator, and early modern polymath. Includes many of Pastorius's unpublished manuscripts as well as new translations of German-language tracts printed in his lifetime.