Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

The Ties That Buy traces the lives of black and white women in early America to reveal how they used residence, work, credit, and money to shape consumer culture precisely at a time when the politics of the marketplace gained national significance.

Focusing on the fate of the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, this comprehensive history of the thirty year war over welfare shows how stubborn allegiance to the male-headed household undermined the struggle for economic justice.

David Powers claims that the need for Muhammad to be the "seal of all prophets," combined with the fact that Muhammad apparently had an adopted son, Zayd, created a situation that drove early transmitters of the Qur'an to introduce a group of interrelated deletions, additions, and emendations into certain passages of the text.

Centering on the streets of this metropolis, Simone Roux peers into the secret lives of people within their homes and the public world of affairs and entertainments, populating the book with laborers, shop keepers, magistrates, thieves, and strollers.

Why are certain global problems recognized as human rights issues while others are not? This book highlights campaigns to persuade the human rights movement to move beyond traditional concerns and embrace pressing new ones. Its analytic framework and case studies reveal critical strategies and conflicts involved in the struggle for new rights.

Based on extensive fieldwork, Women of Fes shows how Moroccan women create their own forms of identity through work, family, and society. The book also examines how women's lives are positioned vis-a-vis globalization, human rights, and the construction of national identity.

Although differing in their approaches, the contributors to this collection all agree that class remains indispensable to our understanding of the transition from an early modern to modern era in North America and the Atlantic world.

Rossinow revisits the period between the 1880s and the 1940s, when reformers and radicals worked together along a middle path between the revolutionary left and establishment liberalism. He takes the story up to the present, showing how the progressive connection was lost and explaining the consequences that followed.

Mapping Decline, illustrated with more than 75 full-color maps, traces the ways private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, federal housing policies, and urban renewal encouraged "white flight" and urban decline in St. Louis, Missouri.

W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet is the first religious biography of this leading civil rights activist and intellectual. Though Du Bois is often labeled an atheist, historian Edward J. Blum argues that his religious and spiritual insights are central to understanding his political and intellectual work.

This history of New York culture and commerce in the first two thirds of the eighteenth century tells how the volatile forces of imperial politics and commerce created a fluid society in which establishing one's own status or verifying another's was a challenge.

Roger Chartier examines how authors transformed the material realities of writing or of publication into an aesthetic resource exploited for poetic, dramatic, or narrative ends.