Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Throughout his life, Niccolo Machiavelli's overriding central concerns were the present and future strength and independence of Florence. Presenting a wide sample of the many genres in which he wrote, this volume highlights and explores this underappreciated aspect of Machiavelli's intellectual preoccupations.

Presenting nineteen primary source documents, including lesser known texts by Machiavelli and Guicciardini, several of which are here translated into English for the first time, this useful compendium shows how the Renaissance political imagination can be productively applied to pressing civic questions.

Financial crises happen time and again in post-industrial economies—and they are extraordinarily damaging. Building on insights gleaned from many years of work in the banking industry and drawing on a vast trove of data, Richard Vague argues that such crises follow a pattern that makes them both predictable and avoidable.A Brief History of Doom examines a series of major crises over the past 200 years in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and China—including the Great Depression and the economic meltdown of 2008. Vague demonstrates that the over-accumulation of private debt does a better job than any other variable of explaining and predicting financial crises. In a series of clear and gripping chapters, he shows that in each case the rapid growth of loans produced widespread overcapacity, which then led to the spread of bad loans and bank failures. This cycle, according to Vague, is the essence of financial crises and the script they invariably follow.The story of financial crisis is fundamentally the story of private debt and runaway lending. Convinced that we have it within our power to break the cycle, Vague provides the tools to enable politicians, bankers, and private citizens to recognize and respond to the danger signs before it begins again.

Through participant observation and in-depth interviews, Sustaining Life explores how the South African AIDS movement transformed public health institutions, changed policy norms, and enabled near-universal access to treatment to sustain the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS.

The Practice of Citizenship traces the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship. Considering a variety of texts by both canonical and lesser-known authors, Derrick R. Spires demonstrates how black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship.

Suffering Scholars focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that developed around intellectuals during the French Enlightenment. Anne C. Vila shows how the "suffering scholar" syndrome deeply influenced debates about the consequences of book-learning on both the individual body and the body politic.

Can the Pakistan's agricultural sector and rural economy once again play a significant role in growth and development? Agriculture and the Rural Economy in Pakistan: Issues, Outlooks, and Policy Priorities identifies several measures that can promote agricultural productivity growth as well as wider economic and social development.

In his narrative history of black Republicans in the twentieth century, Joshua Farrington reevaluates the relationship between black politicians, activists, and voters and the Republican Party, challenging the assumption that African Americans abandoned the "Party of Lincoln" after 1936.

Represents all the major areas of current work on the Romance of the Rose, both in America and in Europe.

World War II brought together a group of psychiatrists and clinical and social psychologists in the British Army who developed a number of radical, action-oriented organizational innovations in social psychiatry. They became known as the "Tavistock Group," since the core members had been at the pre-war Tavistock Clinic. At the post-war Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, they developed a pioneering mode of relating theory and practice, called in these volumes "The Social Engagement of Social Science." Previous volumes presented two of three interdependent perspectives: the socio-psychological (Volume I, 1990) and the socio-technical (Volume II, 1993). The latest volume, on the socio-ecological perspective, completes the set.The socio-ecological perspective is concerned with the coevolution of systems and their environments. It considers the broader environment which shapes not only the task environments of socio-technical organizations but the institutional and cultural environment that confronts the individual.Volume III focuses on nonhierarchical forms of organization facilitating inter-organizational relations in complex and rapidly changing environments. This perspective provides a guide to institution building for the future.

Benedictin was prescribed to more than thirty-five million American women from its introduction in 1956 until 1983, when it was withdrawn from the market. The drug''s manufacturer, Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, a major U.S. pharmaceutical firm, joined a list of other companies whose product liabilities would result in precedent-setting litigation. Before it was over, the Benedictin litigation would involve 2,000 claimants over a fifteen-year period. Michael D. Green offers a comprehensive overview of the Benedictin case and highlights many of the key issues in mass toxic substances litigation, comparing individual and collective forms of litigation, and illustrating the misunderstandings between scientists and lawyers about the role of science in providing evidence for the legal system.

A guide to the conflicting opinions regarding "postanalytic" philosophy.

Designing Peace examines how institutional innovation impacts peace building in divided societies. Drawing on examples from Bosnia, South Africa, and Northern Ireland, the book demonstrates how institutional lessons from elsewhere could be applied to future negotiations in Cyprus and its broader region.

Thomas M. Kavanagh argues that Enlightenment culture and its tensions, contradictions, and achievements flow from a subversive attention to the present as present, freed from the weight of past and future.

The pursuit of profit by business motivates the capitalist economic system. Understanding profits, therefore, especially the source of profits, is essential to an understanding of capitalism. Mark Obrinsky claims that there has never been an adequate profit theory in mainstream economics. To find the source of profits, he argues, one needs to look beyond ownership of the productive factors of land, labor, and capital.Profit Theory and Capitalism makes a sharply reasoned and accessible contribution to critical theory, the history of economic thought, and post-Keynesian theory. Its insights will be of value to all students and theorists working in the area of income distribution.

In Our Living Manhood, Rolland Murray examines how James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, John Oliver Killens, and other writers challenged the Black Power movement's political commitment to masculinity in the 1960s.

Olster explores Byzantine Christian reactions to the catastrophic Persian and Arab invasions, challenging long-held assumptions that divided "religious" from "secular" literature and exempted religion from contemporary social, political, and intellectual discourse.

A collection of 20 essays, by a distinguished panel of specialists in British and American history, that explores the complex political, economic, intellectual, religious, and social environment in which William Penn lived and worked.

At its height in the thirteenth century, an estimated one fourth of the land area of England came under the special jurisdiction of forest law. This book is the first general history of the royal forest system in medieval England.

Traces the life of the American explorer and documentary filmmaker, and describes the difficulties he faced in creating each of his films.

"Yachnin's implicit claim here is that Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton in effect created the basic institutions of the commercial theater along with the social habitus of the cultural consumer. An important and badly needed contribution to the field of early modern studies."-Michael Bristol, McGill University

"An important book that clarifies both the continued Spanish preoccupation with the legitimacy of conquest and colonization of the Americas and the persistent strength of medieval intellectual thought dating back, in large part, to the thirteenth century."-Sixteenth-Century Journal

"Taylor contributes new insights to material philology and makes a brilliant demonstration of its concerns."-Stephen Nichols, The Johns Hopkins University

In Dark Speech, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the fascinating interaction between performance and law in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries.

Examines the historical creation and meaning of a range of scientific textual forms in the 17th-19th centuries. Contributors consider examples from the fields of medicine, physics, zoology, physiology and mathematics, searching for an approach to the scientific heritage which is rooted in history.