Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

In The Man Who Had Been King, Patricia Tyson Stroud provides a rich account of the life of Napoleon's brother Joseph Bonaparte in the United States, detailing how his palatial estate, gardens, and art collection made him a key figure in the importation of European taste to America.

The Roots of Educational Inequality chronicles the transformation of one American high school over the course of the twentieth century to explore the larger political, economic, and social factors that have contributed to the escalation of educational inequality in modern America.

Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how increased consumption in the aftermath of the Black Death reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.

In Wit's Treasury, Stephen Orgel, one of our foremost interpreters of Renaissance literature and culture, charts how the conflict between Christian principles and classical manners and morals yielded the rich creative tension out of which emerged an unprecedented flowering of English drama, lyric, and the arts.

Presenting a new and accessible history of the Jews of what is now the Czech Republic, Prague and Beyond revises conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present and fully captures the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.

Illusions of Empire is the first study to treat antebellum U.S. foreign policy, Civil War campaigning, the French Intervention in Mexico, Southwestern Indian Wars, South Texas Bandit Wars, and U.S. Reconstruction in a single volume, balancing U.S. and Mexican sources to depict a borderlands conflict with lasting ramifications.

The essays in this collection, by one of the most recognized figures in the field of intellectual history, touch on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the heroism of modern life to the ability of photographs to lie, and explore the fraught connection between the truth of history and the truthfulness of historians.

A New Working Class traces efforts by Black public-sector workers and their unions to fight for racial and economic justice in Baltimore. Federal policy shifts imperiled their efforts. Officials justified weakening the welfare state and strengthening the carceral state by criminalizing Black residents-including government workers.

Mastering Emotions examines the interactions between slaveholders and enslaved people, and between White people and free Black people, to expose how emotions such as love, terror, happiness, and trust functioned as social and economic capital for slaveholders and enslaved people alike.

In Bitstreams, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum distills twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives to argue that bits-the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing- always depend on the material world that surrounds them to form the bulwark for preserving the future of literary heritage.

In Japanese American Incarceration, Stephanie D. Hinnershitz connects the forced removal, incarceration, and exploitation of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II to the history of prison labor in the United States.

Far-Right Vanguard chronicles the history of the ultraconservative movement, its national network, its influence on Republican Party politics, and its centrality to America's rightward turn during the second half of the twentieth century.

Focusing on nineteenth-century poetry written by working-class and African American women, Jennifer Putzi demonstrates how an emphasis on relationships between and among people and texts shaped the poems that women wrote, the avenues they took to gain access to print, and the way their poems functioned within a variety of print cultures.