University Of Pennsylvania Press imprint: 776 books
The Socratic Turn
Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science
Language: English
Release Date: October 21, 2015
The Socratic Turn addresses the question of whether we can acquire genuine knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong. Reputedly, Socrates was the first philosopher to make the attempt. But Socrates was a materialistic natural scientist in his youth, and it was only much later in life—after he...
by Shmuel Feiner
Language: English
Release Date: August 17, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: August 17, 2011
At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their...
by Israel Bartal
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2011
In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories...
Robert Love's Warnings
Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston
Language: English
Release Date: February 18, 2014
In colonial America, the system of "warning out" was distinctive to New England, a way for a community to regulate those to whom it would extend welfare. Robert Love's Warnings animates this nearly forgotten aspect of colonial life, richly detailing the moral and legal basis of the practice...
Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life
The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages
Language: English
Release Date: October 9, 2013
The Devotio Moderna, or Modern Devout, puzzled their contemporaries. Beginning in the 1380s in market towns along the Ijssel River of the east-central Netherlands and in the county of Holland, they formed households organized as communes and forged lives centered on private devotion. They lived on...
Our Emily Dickinsons
American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2016
For Vivian R. Pollak, Emily Dickinson's work is an extended meditation on the risks of social, psychological, and aesthetic difference that would be taken up by the generations of women poets who followed her. She situates Dickinson's originality in relation to her nineteenth-century audiences, including...
Fallible Authors
Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath
Language: English
Release Date: February 12, 2013
Can an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to segregate individual failing from official function? Chaucer addressed these perennial...
by Karen A. Winstead
Language: English
Release Date: April 23, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: April 23, 2013
Britain of the fifteenth century was rife with social change, religious dissent, and political upheaval. Amid this ferment lived John Capgrave—Austin friar, doctor of theology, leading figure in East Anglian society, and noted author. Nowhere are the tensions and anxieties of this critical period,...
Archives of American Time
Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
Language: English
Release Date: July 7, 2011
American historians have typically argued that a shared experience of time worked to bind the antebellum nation together. Trains, technology, and expanding market forces catapulted the United States into the future on a straight line of progressive time. The nation's exceedingly diverse population...
by
Language: English
Release Date: June 29, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: June 29, 2012
Global Downtowns reconsiders one of the defining features of urban life—the energy and exuberance that characterize downtown areas—within a framework of contemporary globalization and change. It analyzes the iconic centers of global cities through individual case studies from Europe, Asia, Africa,...
Warner Mifflin
Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist
Language: English
Release Date: July 28, 2017
Warner Mifflin—energetic, uncompromising, and reviled—was the key figure connecting the abolitionist movements before and after the American Revolution. A descendant of one of the pioneering families of William Penn's "Holy Experiment," Mifflin upheld the Quaker pacifist doctrine, carrying...
by Anne Gédéon Lafitte, Marquis de Pelleport
Language: English
Release Date: July 7, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: July 7, 2011
While the marquis de Sade was drafting The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, another libertine marquis in a nearby cell was also writing a novel—one equally outrageous, full of sex and slander, and more revealing for what it had to say about the conditions of writers and writing itself. Yet Sade's...
by Karl Jaspers
Language: English
Release Date: November 24, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: November 24, 2010
Philosophy of Existence was first presented to the public as a series of lectures invited by The German Academy of Frankfurt. In preparing these lectures Jaspers, whom the Nazis had already dismissed from his professorship at Heidelberg, knew that he was speaking in Germany for the last time. Jaspers...
History Matters
Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism
Language: English
Release Date: November 24, 2010
Written for everyone interested in women's and gender history, History Matters reaffirms the importance to feminist theory and activism of long-term historical perspectives. Judith M. Bennett, who has been commenting on developments in women's and gender history since the 1980s, argues that the achievement...