Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

This lavishly illustrated book places glass in its social setting within the Roman household. The volume was written to accompany the traveling exhibition Roman Glass: Reflections on Cultural Change. Through a series of vignettes, the author tells the story of the development of the glass industry in the Roman Empire and the role of glass in the daily routines of the ancient Romans.During the reign of Rome's first emperor, Augustus (27 B.C.-A.D. 14), as several well-established industries such as pottery- and textile-making were being expanded, the craft of glassmaking was adopted from the East, turned into an industry, and adapted to Roman taste. By the mid-first century A.D. glass rivaled pottery in the domestic marketplace. It was used for tableware and storage containers to hold everything from preserved fish to fine perfumes. Glass featured strongly in the Roman daily routine, from the early morning, when maids would apply perfumed lotions to their mistress in preparation for her social rounds, to the late afternoon, when slaves would bring platters of food, bowls of fruit, and jugs of wine—all of glass—to the supper table. And there was a place for glass even in Roman funerary ritual, because it was custom to include all manner of domestic items among the grave furnishings, to add comfort to the afterlife.

Up South documents the efforts of Philadelphia's Black Power activists to construct a vital and effective social movement combining analyses of racism with a program of grassroots community organizing in the context of the failure of civil rights liberalism to deliver on its promise of racial equality.

"Subjects Unto the Same King offers a comprehensive survey of the structure and functionality of authority within and between cultures in seventeenth-century New England."-William and Mary Quarterly

"The late Lasch, college history professor and the author of The Culture of Narcissism (1979), among other seminal works, so despaired of his graduate students' writing that he began to compile a list of common compositional errors. This list soon evolved into a full-fledged writing guide. . . . Lasch's wry, distinctive voice is evident throughout."-Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist

The moving story of Thomas Mann's relationship with his spirited German short-haired pointer. "The life of a dog is a simple and strangely marvelous thing; and that finally may be what sets Bashan and I apart: it is true to the life of a dog."-Gary Amdahl, Ruminator Review

Examines Ralegh's plan to create an English empire in the New World but also the attempts of native peoples to make sense of the newcomers who threatened to transform their world in frightening ways.

A History Book Club selection

The most famous and influential collection of legal materials in world history, now available in a four-volume English-language paperback edition.

Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs.

Chronicling the birth of the biotechnology industry, Biotech shows how a cultural and political revolution in the 1960s resulted in a new scientific order-the practical application of biological knowledge supported by private investors expecting profitable returns eclipsed basic research supported by government agencies.