Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Covering progressivism in the early twentieth century, the New Deal, civil rights activism, the Reagan Revolution, and the environmental and Tea Party movements, In Defense of Populism argues that grassroots activism is essential to transforming both Democratic and Republican parties into instruments of reform.

In Rogue Revolutionaries, Vanessa Mongey revives a lost and fleeting world of cosmopolitan radicalism through the stories of "foreigners of desperate fortune" who sought to ignite revolutions and create their own independent states. Their quest for recognition clashed with the growing power of nation-states and a new international order.

In Occupied America, Donald F. Johnson chronicles the everyday lives of ordinary people living under British military occupation during the American Revolution. Focusing on port cities, Johnson recovers how Americans navigated dire hardships, balanced competing attempts to secure their loyalty, and in the end rejected restored royal rule.

Reading early medieval Spanish documents that are little known to many Anglophone scholars, including records of church councils, sermons, and letters, Santiago Castellanos charts the formation of the Visigothic kingdom in Iberia and how it was later reinvented from the episcopal point of view.

Focusing on the creation of the African Colonization Society (ACS) in the nineteenth century, The World Colonization Made chronicles the rise and fall of the colonization movement-an ideology that enabled Americans to envision a world of self-governing republics that harmonized with the racialized political institutions at home.

Subscription Theater asks why turn-of-the-century British and Irish citizens spent so much time, money, and effort joining subscription lists. Matthew Franks argues that subscribers have been responsible for how we value audience and repertoire today, offering a new account of the relationship between ephemera, drama, and democracy.

A World at Sea sharpens and expands our understanding of how the maritime world contributed to global transformations in the early modern world, from inventing knowledge-making practices to pioneering new ways of organizing labor to legal experiments that spanned land and sea.

Bootlegged Aliens explores the history of illegal immigration, migrant labor, and the early formation of U.S. immigration policy along the country's northern border, demonstrating how this often-overlooked region influenced the practices and experiences surrounding illegal immigration in early twentieth-century industrial America.

Unearthing personal stories from the archive, Wicked Flesh shows how black women, from Senegambia in West Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans, used intimacy and kinship to redefine freedom in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Their practices laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century.

Featuring more than sixty illustrations, In the Manner of the Franks traces the long history of early medieval hunting from the fourth through the tenth centuries. Eric J. Goldberg focuses chiefly on elite men and the changing role that hunting played in articulating kingship, status, and manhood in the post-Roman world.

Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political history to consider not whether African Americans participated in the politics of the long nineteenth century but how, when, and with what lasting effects.

Featuring more than 80 illustrations and easy access to related music files, this magisterial work argues that a ballad cannot be read as a fixed artifact, independent of its illustrations, tune, and movement across time and space.

In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how early Americans debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. She argues that early advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.

Can the Letters of Two Lovers be the previously lost love letters of Abelard and Heloise? Making Love in the Twelfth Century presents a new literary translation of the collection, along with a full commentary and two extended essays that parse its literary and intellectual contexts and chart the course of the doomed affair.