Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Joseph A. Dane examines the field of material book history by questioning its most basic assumptions and definitions: How is print defined? What are the limits of printing history? What constitutes evidence?

The Employee examines how American businesses dominated and influenced labor law as they pushed for an ever-narrower definition of "employee" and maneuvered to exclude workers from the right to organize.

Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates the culture of book collecting and compiling in early modern England, examining how the pervasive practice of mixing texts, authors, and genres into single bindings defined Renaissance ways of thinking and writing.

By reconstructing the aural culture of sermons in Puritan New England, Neuman shifts our attention from the pulpit to the pew, demonstrating how sermon auditors helped to shape this dominant genre of Puritan New England.

Scheherazade's Feasts presents over a hundred recipes for the beverages, meals, and sweets of the medieval Islamic world. Part cookbook and part culinary history, this book contextualizes Arab cuisine in a rich tapestry of trade and conquests, royal tables, and poetic praise of fine food.

Frontier Cities recovers the history of borderland cities in a range of periods and locations-from eighteenth-century Detroit and nineteenth-century Seattle to twentieth-century Los Angeles. Frontier cities embody the earliest mode of American urban experience and testify to the intersections of colonial, urban, western, and global history.

Baroque Sovereignty examines the emergence of a creole archive of artifacts, history, and traditions of colonial Mexico, primarily curated by the polymath Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora. Anna More posits the centrality of this archive for understanding how a local political imaginary emerged from the ruins of Spanish imperialism.