Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Divorce, American Style contests the frequent claim that marriage has become a more flexible legal status over time. Enduring ideas about marriage and the family continue to have a powerful effect on the structure of a wide range of social programs in the United States.

Between 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, millions of nude photographs of the female form were produced in France. Drawing upon government records, legal decisions, newspaper accounts, and contemporary literature, Raisa Adah Rexer recounts the history of these images and elucidates their immense cultural and artistic reach.

In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer reads nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left behind in their books and defends the value of the physical, circulating collections of nineteenth-century volumes in academic libraries.

In this first biography of Elihu Palmer, Kirsten Fischer depicts a once notorious freethinker who countered Christianity with the idea of an interconnected universe infused with a divine life force. Denounced as "heretical," Palmer's speeches and writings shaped the contest over freedom of religion and of speech in the new United States.

New Towns for the Twenty-First Century considers the ideals behind new-town development, the practice of building them, and their outcomes. Case studies provide histories of new towns in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe and impart lessons learned from practitioners.

A history of village life told through the experiences of Cecilia Penifader, a peasant woman who lived in the early fourteenth century, the second edition of A Medieval Life features an entirely revamped illustration program and sidebars that reveal how medieval historians are able to reconstruct the past from scattered evidence.