Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

This sophisticated history of Compton shows how increasing poverty, violence, and public education controversies made an inner-ring suburb resemble a troubled urban center over the course of the twentieth century and into the present.

Let Us Die as Free Men explores the African American fight for the desegregation of the American military between the Second World War and the Korean War. The book credits black soldiers and civilian efforts, more than Truman's executive order, for achieving integration in the context of the Cold War.

Analyzing "heritage events"-from Roma wedding music to Trinidadian wining, Moroccan verbal art, and neopagan rituals-Cultural Heritage in Transit tracks the effects of the heritage industry, focusing on cultural rights and human rights writ large.

Based on intensive archival research and the unique visual data of more than a thousand extraordinary watercolors, The Bishop's Utopia seamlessly weaves cultural history, natural history, art, and imperial politics into a cinematic retelling of the life of Spanish Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martinez Companon and northern Peru in the 1780s.

Written by one of the nation's foremost urban development experts, Convention Center Follies exposes the inner workings of America's convention center boom through case studies of Chicago, Atlanta, and St. Louis.

Utilizing an innovative framework as an international, interdisciplinary dialogue, the volume provides an inventory of contemporary thought about the American city across a wide range of topics, including the design of transportation systems, workplaces, and housing to public art, urban ruins, and futurist visions.

Empire of Vines traces the development of wine culture as grape growing expanded from New York to the Midwest before gaining ascendancy in California-a progression that illustrates viticulture's centrality to the nineteenth-century American projects of national expansion and the formation of a national culture.