Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Between North and South chronicles the three-decades-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism and white reaction, that despite concerted white opposition to reforms produced one of the most progressive desegregation remedies in the nation.

This ground-breaking book examines how judicial interpretations of dignity redefine what it means to be human in the modern world. It features a new preface by the author, in which she articulates how, over the past decade, dignity rights cases have evolved to incorporate the convergence of human rights and environmental rights.

Political Gastronomy examines the many meanings of food as a symbol of power in the daily life and the political culture of early America. Struggling to establish status and precedence, English settlers and American Indians alike conveyed authority through shared meals and other significant exchanges of food.

This book examines why states make formal commitments to rights provisions and to judicial independence and what effect these commitments have on actual state behavior, especially political repression.

Kafka's Jewish Languages shows how Yiddish and modern Hebrew were crucial to Kafka's development as a writer. David Suchoff's examination also demonstrates the intimate relationship between Kafka's Jewish voice and his larger literary significance.

Drawing on a rich archive of magazine fiction, verse satires, comic almanacs, false slave narratives, minstrel song-sheets, and early literary criticism, this book uncovers the controversies over literary fraudulence that plagued the antebellum period and shows how they at once made and unmade American literature.

At the beginning of the 1920s, no political observer would have predicted that universal suffrage would inspire the growth of a conservative women's movement to counter the power of women reformers. This book describes the birth of that movement, analyzing its enduring legacy for twentieth-century female political activists.

Following a long trajectory from late antiquity to the high Middle Ages, Dyan Elliott offers a provocative analysis of the changing religious, emotional, and sexual meanings of the metaphor of the sponsa Christi and of the increasing anxiety surrounding the somatization of female spirituality.

Anna M. Lawrence combines family, gender, and religious history to chronicle the rise of Methodism in England and America during the Revolutionary period. Focusing on the transatlantic Methodist notion of family, this book speaks to historical debates over what family means and how the nuclear family model developed over the eighteenth century.