Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

From the staged debates over religious enthusiasm to the earnest offerings of ordinary men and women to speak to and for God, Doomsayers shows that the contest between prophets and their critics for the allegiance of the reading public was part of a broader recalibration of the norms and values of civic discourse in the age of revolution.

Spanning the first fifty years of the nation's history, Revolutionary Backlash uncovers women's forgotten role in early American politics and explores an alternative explanation for the emergence of the first women's rights movement.

"The Taste of Blood brilliantly explores both Condomble and the representations of ethnographic research."-Folklore Forum

This classic volume, by a well-known linguist, constitutes a systematic introduction to sociolinguistics, unmatched in the clarity and forcefulness of its approach, and to the study of language in its social setting.

Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as simple economic transactions: rather, according to Herman L. Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics.

Colonial Revivals examines the rise of American antiquarianism and historical reprinting in antebellum America. Not merely vehicles for preserving the past, reprinted colonial books testified to the inveterate regional, racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical landscape.

Highlighting meaningful overlap in the production and reception of books and games, Slantwise Moves identifies what they have in common as material texts and as critical models of the mundane pleasures and intimacies that defined agency and social belonging in the nineteenth century.

Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.

Featuring a fine-grained history of Chicago's working class, Postwar investigates what the aftermath of World War II meant to a broad swath of Americans and finds a working-class war liberalism-a conviction that the wartime state had taken things from people and that the postwar era was about reclaiming those things with the state's help.

Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales explores the idea of law as a form of political fiction: a body of literature that blurs the lines generally drawn between the legal and literary genres.

Based on two years of fieldwork with the transnational network of antiwar activists who constituted the World Tribunal on Iraq, For the Love of Humanity addresses the contemporary challenges and ambiguities of forging global solidarity through an anti-imperialist politics of human rights and international law.

People Must Live by Work traces the rise and fall of direct job creation policy-how it was put into practice, how it came within a hairbreadth of becoming a permanent feature of American economic and social administration, and why it has been largely forgotten or discounted today.

In The Commerce of Vision, Peter John Brownlee integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century.