Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Stephen J. Shoemaker investigates contradictory traditions about the end of Muhammad's life in the Islamic and non-Islamic sources of the seventh and eighth centuries.

The Empire Reformed describes how, in the era of the Glorious Revolution, imperial leaders and colonial subjects created new political bonds based on their common desire to save English America from the designs of French "papists" and their "savage" Indian allies.

Ranging from the birth of town meetings in England to the whipping posts of early Boston to the creation of the Scituate shipbuilding common, Town Born reveals how New England town political economies created the foundation for a relatively egalitarian American society.

Building on the eighteenth-century commonplace that the theater could be a school for public virtue, this book illustrates the connections between the popularity of theatrical performances in eighteenth-century British North America and the British and American national identities that colonial and Revolutionary Americans espoused.

"The Pilgrim and the Bee makes a broad claim about a reading-centered history, reclaiming for this purpose a distinctive body of texts. Brown's analysis marks an important step toward a better history of reading."-David D. Hall, Harvard University

The Battle for Welfare Rights tells, for the first time, the complete story of a movement that profoundly affected the meaning of citizenship and the social contract in the United States.