Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Kenneth Shropshire describes the franchise warfare that pits city against city in the bidding competition to capture a major league team, using interviews with major players to present an insider's perspective on the business side of professional sports.

"Imperial Medicine ... effectively situates Manson in two very different professional and political locations-China and London-and makes informative connections between the filarial and malarial stages of his career."-Victorian Studies

Migrant Citizenship examines the Farm Security Administration's Migratory Labor Camp Program and its impact on diverse farmworker families across the United States. Veronica Martinez-Matsuda reveals how these camps operated beyond their economic function, helping migrants secure their full political and social participation as citizens.

In Politics of Temporalization, Nadia R. Altschul examines why, by whom, and to what ends certain populations, objects, and practices in nineteenth-century Ibero-America were named as living residues of the premodern Moorish past-and argues against this colonial temporalizing of "the now" as belonging to a constructed and othered "past."

From Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking to the community cookbook created by the First Baptist Church of Midland, Tennessee, Cookbook Politics explores the sensual and political implications of cookbooks, demonstrating how they create nations, establish ideologies, shape international relations, and form communities.

In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R. Greenberg shows how Americans accumulated and wielded monetary information in order to navigate the early republic's chaotic bank note system. He demonstrates that the shift to federally authorized paper money in the Civil War era eliminated the public's need for detailed financial knowledge.

James Bernard Murphy challenges widely shared assumptions about personhood and its development through discrete stages, arguing they undermine our ability to see our lives as a whole. Drawing on classic and contemporary thinkers, Murphy argues that we live our whole lives as children, adolescents, and adults all at the same time.

Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay develop the concept of the aporetic state to describe an entity that acts like a state even as nonrecognition renders it unrealizable. They argue that only by rethinking the de facto state as a realm of practice will we be able to understand the longevity of such states and what it means to live in them.

Street commerce is deeply intertwined with myriad contemporary urban visions and planning goals and has become an increasingly prominent issue in urban areas. In Street Commerce, Andres Sevtsuk offers a comprehensive analysis of the issues involved in implementing successful street commerce and suggests innovative solutions.

In dozens of slave conspiracy scares in North American and the Caribbean, colonists terrorized and killed slaves whom they accused of planning to take over the colony. Jason T. Sharples explains the deep origins and historical triggers of these incidents and argues that conspiracy scares bound society together through shared fear.

In Speaking Infinities, Ariel Evan Mayse explores the life and work of the Hasidic figure Rabbi Dov Ber Friedman of Mezritsh (1704-1772) to elucidate his theory of language in which all human tongues, even in their mundane forms, have the potential to become sacred when returned to their divine source.

Michael Chibnik was editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist for four years. Scholarship, Money, and Prose provides detailed ethnographic and historical descriptions of the operations of the journal as well as engaging anecdotes of his experiences. The book offers a window onto the past, present, and future of scholarly publishing.

Focusing on four influential, yet typically overlooked, French thinkers-Regis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist-The Anthropological Turn shows how key issues of religion, identity, citizenship, and the state have been conceptualized and debated across a wide spectrum of political opinion in contemporary France.

David B. Ruderman examines a chapter in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in nineteenth-century Europe, focusing on evangelical missionary Alexander McCaul and his associates, both allies and foes, who were engaged in conversation about the nature of Christianity, Judaism, and their intertwined destinies in the past and present.

Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society explores the political and social history of the Dutch colony of Suriname-a place where Jews, most of Iberian origin, established the largest Jewish agricultural community in the world and enjoyed various liberties, including the right to convert their slaves to Judaism.

Drawing on American political development's rich theoretical tradition and historical perspective in order to better understand how long-term institutional and ideational developments have shaped the Trump presidency, this volume offers broad reflections on the future of American institutions in a time of considerable social change.

Featuring essays from thought leaders in public administration, Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-First Century offers insights into the governance challenges facing the nation-from diminished capacity to the failure to meet expectations for reform-and recommendations for how civic institutions and leaders might respond.

In this densely contextualized biography, K. Steven Vincent describes how Elie Halevy (1870-1937), one of the most respected and influential intellectuals of the French Third Republic, confronted the Dreyfus Affair, World War I, and the rise of interwar totalitarianism while defending a distinctively French version of liberalism.

Reading texts by Goldsmith, Malthus, Milton, Scott, Mary Shelley, Swift, and others, in the context of debates about scientific innovation, emigration, cultural memory, and colonial settlement, Charlotte Sussman traces a shift in thinking about population and mobility in Britain over the course of the long eighteenth century.

In Early Modern Aristotle, Eva Del Soldato examines treatises, legends, proverbs, fictions, and rhetorical tropes to trace how recourse to the authority of Aristotle shaped intellectual discourse even during a period that challenged and overturned much of his teaching.

From the Antebellum Era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. Art Wars examines three protracted battles that linked art institutions and disputes about taste to major social and political struggles of the nineteenth century.

Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change shows how the resilience of iconic planned communities, from New Lanark to Seaside, depends upon diverse approaches to sustaining their visionary spirit and features while adapting them to the needs of later generations.

The Settlers' Empire examines the peculiar status of the young United States as a postcolonial republic with its own domestic empire by looking at where these dual political responsibilities inevitably collided-in the federal project of early state formation and its joint colonial rules over Euroamericans and diverse Indian nations.

Includes the first readable English translation of the Laws of Edward the Confessor and a much-needed critical edition of its Latin text.

This third volume in the series is devoted to presenting and interpreting the metallurgical evidence from Ban Chiang, northeast Thailand, in the broader regional context. Because the production of metal artifacts must engage numerous communities in order to acquire and process the raw materials and then create and distribute products, understanding metals in past societies requires a regional perspective. This is the first book to compile, summarize, and synthesize the English-language copper production and exchange evidence available so far from Thailand and Laos in a thorough and systematic manner.Chapters by Vincent C. Pigott and Thomas O. Pryce examine in detail the mining and smelting of copper in several sites, and the lead-isotope evidence for the sourcing of artifacts found in two of the consumption sites included in the study. Another chapter compiles the metal consumption evidence, including results of technical studies on prehistoric metals recovered from more than 35 sites excavated in central and northeast Thailand. This compilation demonstrates important regional variation in chaînes opératoires, allowing explication and synthesis of the technological traditions found in this region during prehistory. The review and compilation sheds new light on the social and economic context for the adoption and development of metallurgy in this part of the world. One key insight is that Thailand presents a case for a "community-driven bronze age," where the choices of peaceful local communities, not elites or centralized political entities, shaped how metal technological systems were implemented in this region.This fresh perspective on the role of metallurgy in ancient societies contributes to an expanded global understanding of how humans have engaged metal technologies, contributing to debunking the conventional paradigm that emphasized a top-down view and a standardized metallurgical sequence, a paradigm that has dominated archeometallurgical studies for the last century or more.Thai Archaeology Monograph Series, 2CUniversity Museum Monograph, 153

In American Justice 2019, Mark Joseph Stern examines the term's most controversial opinions and highlights the consequences of Chief Justice John Roberts stepping into a new role as the court's swing vote.

Drawing on the perspectives of modern and medieval narratology, medieval multilingualism, and cultural memory, History and the Written Word argues that members of an administrative elite demonstrated their mastery of the rules of literate political behavior by producing and consuming history-writing and its documents.