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.

Neither the Time nor the Place considers how the space-time dyad has both troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades. Organized around considerations of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and bodies, the book presents some of the most provocative new work being done in American literary studies today.

What does it mean to claim, two decades into the twenty-first century, that citizenship is on the edge? The essays in this volume argue that citizenship cannot be conceptualized as a transcendent good but must instead always be contextualized within specific places and times, and in relation to dynamic struggle.

Death of the Desert offers a fresh examination of Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria's banishment of the so-called Tall Brothers, four Origenist monks who led monastic communities in the western Egyptian desert, and brings into dialogue narrative strands that have largely been separated in the scholarly tradition.

The Return of the Absent Father offers a new reading of stories from tractate Ketubot in the Babylonian Talmud in which sages abandon their homes and families to study. Haim Weiss and Shira Stav focus on the relations between fathers and children to reveal a complex tension between mundane domesticity and the sphere of spiritual learning.

Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship offers a collection of essays examining how Wissenschaft des Judentums, a nineteenth-century movement to promote a scholarly approach to the study of Judaism and Jewish culture, extended beyond its original German intellectual contexts and was transformed into a diverse, global field.

Between 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Poisoned Wells explains the origin of these allegations, how they gained popularity before and during the Black Death, and why they declined in the fifteenth century.

This volume offers theoretical, historical, and legal perspectives on religious freedom, as an experience, value, and right. Drawing on examples from around the world, its essays show how the terrain of religious freedom has never been smooth and how in recent years the landscape of religious freedom has shifted.

Past state injustice has enduring consequences and the harm needs to be addressed as a matter of justice and equity. Time for Reparations offers detailed case studies of state injustices-from slavery to forced sterilization to widespread atrocities-and interdisciplinary perspectives on the potential impact of reparative strategies.

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.

Asylum Ways of Seeing uncovers a patient culture within twentieth-century American psychiatric hospitals that did not just imbibe ideas from the outside world, but generated ones of their own. In illuminating seemingly resigned patients in these settings, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.

Johannes Morsink is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Drew University. He is author of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent and Inherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration, both of which are available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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 The Democratic Soul, Aaron L. Herold argues that democracy's current crisis arises from dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment's emphasis on rights over duties. Using the work of Spinoza and Tocqueville, he articulates a revision of liberalism that recovers ideals of justice and political moderation for the contemporary moment.

Infinite Variety offers a brilliantly learned analysis of a seventeenth-century aesthetic framed not by the rise of secularism, but by its opposite, and embraced by English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe.

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.

We celebrate innovation and experimentation, but Claudia Stokes reminds us that nineteenth-century American writers instead valued familiarity and traditionalism, which provided reliable markers of literary quality. Old Style examines the varied uses and expressions of unoriginality, which helped credential marginalized writers.

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.

Medieval felons could take sanctuary from prosecution in any church, but far from static refuge, sanctuary staged dynamic action, even violence. While sanctuary has usually been analyzed as part of legal history, in Uncertain Refuge Elizabeth Allen explores the symbolic consequences of sanctuary seeking in English literary works.

In Extinction and the Human Timothy Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them, focusing especially on the force of human impact on megafauna-mammoths, whales, and the North American bison.

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.

Reverberations aims to generate new concepts and methodologies for the study of political violence and its aftermath. Essays attend to the distribution, extension, and endurance of violence across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and political imaginations.

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.

In helping deeply divided societies come to terms with a troubled past, transitional justice often fails to produce the intended results. Thin Sympathy argues that the acquisition of a basic understanding of what has taken place in the past will enable the development of a more durable transitional justice process.