Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Lavishly illustrated and impressively interdisciplinary, Inventing Exoticism narrates a vital chapter in the history of European exoticism and Europe's perception of its place in the world. It traces the production and consumption of early modern exotic imagery to elucidate processes of cultural mediation in an earlier age of empire.

Appealing to historians working in the fields of business history, political history, and the history of capitalism, Capital Gains highlights the causes, character, and consequences of business activism and underscores the centrality of business to any full understanding of the politics of the twentieth century-and today.

Culture and PTSD examines the applicability of PTSD to cultural contexts beyond Europe and North America and details local responses to trauma and how they vary from PTSD as defined by the American Psychiatric Association.

Dick Allen is considered by some to be the best baseball player not in the Hall of Fame and by others to be the game's most destructive and divisive force-ever. God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen unveils the strange and maddening career of a man who fulfilled and frustrated expectations all at once.

In 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act outlawed workplace sex discrimination, but its practical meaning was uncertain. Equality on Trial examines how a generation of workers and feminists fought to infuse the law with broad notions of sex equality, reshaping workplaces, activist channels, state agencies, and courts along the way.

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? Christian Slavery shows how debates about slavery transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world.

The Alchemy of Slavery foregrounds diverse and adaptable slaving practices that masters deployed to build a slave economy in Illinois, innovating in response to antislavery pressures.

Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously successful eighteenth-century slave societies and imperial colonies. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus trace how the plantation machine developed between 1748 and 1788 and was perfected against a backdrop of almost constant external war and imperial competition.

In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity complicates the role of animals in early Christian thought by showing how ancient texts and images celebrated a continuum of human and animal life.

Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills-swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing-to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

The Medical Imagination traces the practice of using imagination and literature to craft, test, and implement theories of health in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. This history of imaginative experimentation provides a usable past for conversations about the role of the humanities in health research and practice today.

Entangled Empires emphasizes the connections between the English and Iberian imperial projects. The colonial history of the United States ought to be considered part of the history of colonial Latino-America just as Latin American history should be understood as fundamental to the constitution of the United States.