Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer examines how Barry Goldwater and elite Phoenix businessmen used policy and federal funds to fashion a postwar "business climate," setting off an interstate competition for investment that transformed American politics.

Early African American Print Culture presents seventeen original essays that demonstrate how the study of African American print culture might enrich the study of print culture, while at the same time expanding the terrain of African American literature beyond authorship to editing, illustration, printing, circulation, and reading.

In the Crossfire brings a much-needed historical perspective to contemporary debates about educational inequality by tracing the life and work of Marcus Foster, an African American educator who struggled to reform urban schools in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Historian Tracy Neal Leavelle examines religious conversions in the upper Great Lakes and Illinois country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries among the Illinois, Ottawas, and other Algonquian-speaking peoples and the rapidly evolving and always contested colonial context in which they occurred.

From the history of Porta Palazzo, Western Europe's largest open-air market, to its current growing pains, this book turns an ethnographic eye on a meeting place for trade, cultural identity, and cuisine.

Leading religious historians connect changes in law and rhetoric to daily cooperation and conflict in early America. These essays examine such topics as Native American spiritual life, the biblical sources of tolerance and intolerance, contemporary philosophies of religious liberty, and the resilience of African American faiths.

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians offers a distinctive and original reading of racialization in early America. Focusing on cultural cross-dressing from a wide range of sources, Sophie White shows that material culture-especially dress-was central to discourses about race, as colonization was built on encounters mediated by appearance.

Historians of British theater have often noted that the eighteenth century was an age not of the author but of the actor. In Rival Queens, Felicity Nussbaum argues that the period might more accurately be seen as the age of women in the theater, and more particularly as the age of the actress.

This volume examines patterns of growth, government organization, and cultural representation that created a new region across the nation's southern rim following World War II. Essays explain how ideology and political economy restructured space within the Sunbelt, making the landscape and lives of its inhabitants more uniformly metropolitan.

Analyzing economic policy from the New Deal through the Reagan Revolution, Tax and Spend takes a new look at the so-called tax-and-spend liberals of the past. This important study examines why many Americans have come to hate the government but continue to demand the security it provides.

Urban historian Michael B. Katz traces the collision of urban transformation with the rightward-moving social politics of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America.