Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

A wide-ranging collection of essays on plants as market forces.

Evan Haefeli demonstrates how convoluted and uncertain were the beginnings of religious tolerance in America, by giving them an international context.

Shakespeare's habits of imitation revisit the practices of humanist pedagogy only to reveal significant contradictions at the heart of sixteenth-century masculinity.

This book challenges traditional accounts of the Third World's contribution to international human rights. It demonstrates that diplomats from Third World countries helped both to radicalize the UN human rights agenda in the heyday of decolonization and to undermine that agenda by advancing cultural relativism as an excuse for abuses in the 1970s.

In Looking West, John D. Dorst examines a largely neglected pattern of seeing that stands in contrast to the universally familiar iconography.

Seasons of Misery offers a boldly original account of early English settlement in American by placing catastrophe and crisis at the center of the story. Donegan argues that the constant state of suffering and uncertainty decisively formed the colonial identity and produced the first distinctly colonial literature.

Since the days of V. Gordon Childe, the study of the emergence of complex societies has been a central question in anthropological archaeology. However, archaeologists working in the Americanist tradition have drawn most of their models for the emergence of social complexity from research in the Middle East and Latin America. Bernard Wailes was a strong advocate for the importance of later prehistoric and early medieval Europe as an alternative model of sociopolitical evolution and trained generations of American archaeologists now active in European research from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. Two centuries of excavation and research in Europe have produced one of the richest bodies of archaeological data anywhere in the world. The abundant data show that technological innovations such as metallurgy appeared very early, but urbanism and state formation are comparatively late developments. Key transformative process such as the spread of agriculture did not happen uniformly but rather at different rates in different regions.The essays in this volume celebrate the legacy of Bernard Wailes by highlighting the contribution of the European archaeological record to our understanding of the emergence of social complexity. They provide case studies in how ancient Europe can inform anthropological archaeology. Not only do they illuminate key research topics, they also invite archaeologists working in other parts of the world to consider comparisons to ancient Europe as they construct models for cultural development for their regions. Although there is a substantial corpus of literature on European prehistoric and medieval archaeology, we do not know of a comparable volume that explicitly focuses on the contribution that the study of ancient Europe can make to anthropological archaeology.

The quartzite architectural block E16230 has been on display in the Penn Museum for 115 years. E16230 is one of the few large architectural pieces in the world surviving from the much-debated reign of the "heretic" king Akhenaten. This block is one of the most historically significant objects on display in the Egyptian galleries, yet it has never been analyzed or published. This volume addresses that glaring gap and provides for the first time a translation and discussion of the important texts on the object, along with analysis of the architectural evidence it provides.The block is part of the once intensely ornamented façade of a solar chapel ("sunshade") dedicated to princess Meritaten, the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The large (1100 kg) block originates in a chapel that was part of a royal ceremonial palace of Akhenaten named Per-Waenre ("the house of the Unique-one-of-Re"). Later, after demolition of the building, the block was reused in the city of Heliopolis as the base for a sphinx of king Merenptah (Dynasty 19). Subsequently the block underwent a final stage of reuse in Cairo in the Islamic Period where it was found ca. 1898 in the Mousky district of central Cairo. Because the block is such a major architectural element it provides considerable detail in the reconstruction of the essential appearance, decoration, and other aspects of the Meritaten sunshade.The volume addresses the significance of the piece and the Meritaten sunshade in the context of Akhenaten''s monumental program. Major implications emerge from the analysis of E16230 providing further evidence on the royal women during Akhenaten''s reign. The book examines two possibilities for the original location of the Per-Waenre in which the Meritaten sunshade stood. It may be part of a large Amarna Period cult precinct at Heliopolis, which may, like the capital city at Tell el-Amarna, have born the wider name Akhet-Aten, "Horizon of the Aten." Alternatively it could derive from Tell el-Amarna itself, possibly belonging to a hitherto unidentified palatial complex at that site. The book is a contribution to the study of one of the most debated eras of ancient Egyptian history focused on this long-ignored treasure of the Penn Museum''s Egyptian collection.University Museum Monograph, 144

Death, Beauty, Struggle contains an original vision of gendered lives, poetry, devotion, and social hierarchy in Tamil Nadu.

Borderlands of Slavery explores how the existence of two involuntary labor systems-Mexican peonage and Indian captivity-in the nineteenth-century Southwest impacted the transformation of America's judicial and political institutions during the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras.