Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

This Noble House examines the importance of biblical ancestry-especially the claim of descent from King David-for Jews living in the medieval Islamic world.

Examining Byzantine architecture, Ousterhout identifies the problems commonly encountered in the process of design and construction.

Knowing Books examines a variety of eighteenth-century sources that deploy language to emphasize their status as physical objects and their circulation as commodities. In Lupton's account, these texts use this device to enhance their appeal as entertaining objects, making them part of an ongoing tradition of self-conscious media.

Thinking about animals and living with them are vital aspects of medieval experience. Animal Encounters explores saints' lives, hunting treatises, bestiaries, and other genres to discover how various species take part in culture making, revealing that cross-species relationships transform both their animal and their human participants.

Pan American Women examines U.S. women activists' attempts to advance inter-American cooperation among women and further hemispheric peace between the World Wars. Threlkeld argues that diplomatic tensions in Mexico and the ongoing Revolution complicated these efforts, as Mexican women embraced a more nationalist political identity.

The People's Network reconstructs the story of U.S. and Canadian independent telephone companies which challenged the Bell System's market domination in the twentieth century, linking the fight to control telecommunications to dueling political philosophies: regional versus national identity, local versus centralized power.

Reconfiguring the Silk Road offers new research on the earliest cultural interactions along the trade and migration routes across Eurasia, mapping the spread and influence of Silk Road economies and social structures over time.

Homeless explores the efforts of private and public institutions to solve the problem of homelessness by tracing the rise and fall of skid rows in America through the lens of New York's Bowery. Crowded onto skid rows, the homeless lived apart from the middle classes, who saw them as an aberrant population.

Eileen Reeves examines the ways in which a long-standing association of reportage with covert surveillance and astrological prediction was altered by the near simultaneous emergence of weekly newsheets, the invention of the Dutch telescope, and the appearance of Galileo Galilei's astronomical treatise, The Starry Messenger.