Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Covering decades that included the last major crusades, the birth of the Inquisition, and the unexpected invasion of the Mongols, The Two Powers shows how Popes Gregory and Innocent's battles with Emperor Frederick shaped the political circumstances of the thirteenth-century papacy and its role in the public life of medieval Christendom.

To secure the general welfare in a new century, the future of American unity lies not in monolithic nationalism. Rather, Samuel Goldman suggests we move in the opposite direction: go small, embrace difference as the driving characteristic of American society, and support political projects grounded in local communities.

Focusing on advertising and public relations guru Moss Kendrix, Ebony publisher John H. Johnson, and Life photographer Gordon Parks, Brenna Wynn Greer chronicles how black capitalists made the market work for racial progress on their way to making money.

Free and Natural is a cultural history of nudity offering an in-depth account of how the naked body came to be closely tied to modern ideas about nature and authenticity. Sarah Schrank explores how the "free and natural" lifestyle emerged from the history of the nudist movement, sexual and environmental politics, and consumer capitalism.

Dennis Patrick Halpin argues that Baltimore is key to understanding the trajectory of civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A Brotherhood of Liberty traces the civil rights victories scored by black Baltimoreans that inspired activists throughout the nation and subsequent generations.

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots delineates the differences between the British and Portuguese empires as they struggled with revolutionary tumult, revealing how merchants, smugglers, rogue officials, slave traders, and pirates influenced contentious paths of independence in the United States and Brazil.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Japan, Making Meaningful Lives provides an intimate anthropological account of the existential concerns of elderly Japanese women and men.

Fighting for Dignity explores the impact of a mass deportation campaign on African and Asian migrant workers in Tel Aviv and their Israeli-born children. In this vivid ethnography, Sarah Willen shows how undocumented migrants struggle to craft meaningful, flourishing lives despite the exclusion and vulnerability they endure.

In Paper Monsters, Samuel Fallon charts the striking rise in the 1590's of a new species of textual being: the serial, semifictional persona. He argues that their status as collective fictions, passed among writers, publishers, and readers, positioned personae as the animating figures of what we have come to call "print culture."

Richard M. Freeland reviews how Northeastern University in Boston, historically an access-oriented, private urban university serving commuter students from modest backgrounds and characterized by limited academic ambitions and local reach, transformed itself into a selective, national, and residential research university.

In Force and Freedom, Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, abolitionist leaders created the conditions that necessitated the Civil War.

Andrew Heath shows how Philadelphians looked to consolidate their city across internal social and sectional divisions as the republic fell apart in the Civil War era. Rallying to the cry "In Union There Is Strength," their battles over what a modern metropolis ought to be reveals how a city of mobs became a city of neighborhoods.

In its comparative analysis of postcolonial South Africa and Algeria and its examination of narratives of ex-combatants, Making Peace with Your Enemy demonstrates how former adversaries face a similar challenge: how to extricate oneself from colonial domination and the violence of war in order to build relationships based on trust.

In The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament, Shaul Magid presents the first-ever English translation of Rabbi Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik's Qol Qore, a rabbinic commentary on the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.