Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Recent reports on Pentecostalism in the global South give the impression of an inexorable trajectory of massive growth, but Faith in Flux examines the religion's ambivalent reception in northern Mozambique, locating vital insight in the overlooked places where this religion has failed to take root.

Race and the Making of American Political Science shows that racial thought was central to the academic study of politics in the United States at its origins, shaping the discipline's core categories and questions in fundamental and lasting ways.

In a work based on a meticulous analysis of sources, many of them previously unexplored, Catherine M. Mooney upends the received account of Clare of Assisi's founding of the Order of San Damiano, or Poor Clares.

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.

In Invisible Enlighteners, Federica Francesconi writes the history of the Jewish merchants who prospered in the northern Italian city of Modena during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their sociocultural transformation and legal and political integration evolved through a dialogue between their Italian and Jewish identities.

Philadelphia Stories chronicles the rich lives of twelve of its citizens-men and women, Black and white Americans, immigrants and native born-to explore the city's people and places from the colonial era to the years before the Civil War.

Richly illustrated with 216 halftones and sixteen color plates of mostly small-scale objects, Religion in the Art of Archaic and Classical Greece examines what objects and images can tell us about the experiences and impressions of ancient Greek religion.

From boycotting Nestle in the 1970s to lobbying against NAFTA to the "Battle of Seattle" protests against the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, No Globalization Without Representation is the story of how consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics at the twentieth century's close.

Launched in 1609 as the greatest English merchant vessel of its era, the Trades Increase and nearly all who sailed it perished three years later on the far side of the world. This is the engrossing account of the ship's tragic expedition and global capitalism at its hour of emergence.

In Fighting for the Higher Law, Peter Wirzbicki explores how important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy that fired the radical struggle against American slavery.

In Survival, Adam Stern asks what texts and traditions have made survival a recognizable element of our current political vocabulary. Examining works by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud, Stern shows that survival belongs to a history of debates about the sovereignty and subjection of Christ's body.

In Making the Miscellany Megan Heffernan charts the development of printed poetry in early modern England, showing how material practices of organization were dynamic responses to poetic form and content. Her book argues for a literary history that is sensitive to the conditions of making and using early printed books.

Why did Rousseau fail-often so ridiculously or grotesquely-to live up to his own principles? In Hypocrisy and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau, Matthew D. Mendham is the first to systematically analyze Rousseau's normative philosophy and self-portrayals in view of the yawning gap between them.

In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh and their efforts to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend.

In Democracy's Think Tank, Brian S. Mueller tells the story of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and its crusade to resurrect democracy at home and abroad. Borrowing from populist, progressive, and New Left traditions, IPS challenged elite expertise and sought to restore power to "the people."

No Wood, No Kingdom explores the conflicting attempts to understand the problem of wood scarcity in early modern England and demonstrates how these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of England's earliest colonies.

In Star Territory Gordon Fraser charts how the project of rationalizing the cosmos enabled the nineteenth-century expansion of U.S. territory and explores the alternative and resistant cosmologies of free and enslaved Blacks and indigenous peoples.

Blue-Collar Conservatism examines the blue-collar, white supporters of Frank Rizzo-Philadelphia's police commissioner turned mayor-and shows how the intersection of law enforcement and urban politics created one of the least understood but most consequential political developments in recent American history.

A combination of religious, political, cultural, and military history, War Is All Hell peers into the world of devils, demons, Satan, and hell during the era of the American Civil War and illuminates why, after the war, one of its leading generals described it as "all hell."

Do the nation's highest officers, including the President, have a right to lie protected by the First Amendment? If not, what can be done to protect the nation under this threat? This book explores the various options.

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"-the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction.

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost theorists of the twentieth century to wrestle with the role of violence in public life. In Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, Caroline Ashcroft argues that what Arendt opposes in political violence is the use of force to determine politics, an idea central to modern sovereignty.

The Apache Diaspora brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated. Paul Conrad charts Apaches' efforts to survive or return home from places as far-flung as Cuba and Pennsylvania, Mexico City and Montreal.

The first study of the poetics of vocational crisis in Langland, Hoccleve, and Audelay, and many unattributed works, The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry discusses class, meritocracy, the gig economy, precarity, and the breaking of intellectual elites, speaking to both past and present employment urgencies.

Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the economy, and the state collapsed. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming charts this collapse, and its foundational role in making the world we characterize as early medieval.

The Strangers Book explores how a constellation of nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger.