Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

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.

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.

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.

In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Marten Soederblom Saarela shows how-through observation, inference, and reference to ideas on language and writing-intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Choson Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and the uses to which it was put: recording sounds and arranging words.

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.

Viewing Jewish history from the perspective of conversion across a broad chronological and conceptual frame, Bastards and Believers highlights how the concepts of the convert and of conversion have histories of their own and speaks to the possibility, or impossibility, of changing one's life.

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.

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

Paradigm Lost argues that negotiations for a two-state solution between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River are doomed and counterproductive. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs can enjoy the democracy they deserve but only after decades of struggle amid the unintended but powerful consequences of today's one-state reality.

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.