University Of Pennsylvania Press imprint: 776 books
A Predictable Tragedy
Robert Mugabe and the Collapse of Zimbabwe
Language: English
Release Date: June 6, 2011
When the southern African country of Rhodesia was reborn as Zimbabwe in 1980, democracy advocates celebrated the defeat of a white supremacist regime and the end of colonial rule. Zimbabwean crowds cheered their new prime minister, freedom fighter Robert Mugabe, with little idea of the misery he would...
The Medieval Craft of Memory
An Anthology of Texts and Pictures
Language: English
Release Date: January 22, 2016
In antiquity and the Middle Ages, memory was a craft, and certain actions and tools were thought to be necessary for its creation and recollection. Until now, however, many of the most important visual and textual sources on the topic have remained untranslated or otherwise difficult to consult. Mary...
Fallen Bodies
Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages
Language: English
Release Date: August 3, 2010
Medieval clerics believed that original sin had rendered their "fallen bodies" vulnerable to corrupting impulses—particularly those of a sexual nature. They feared that their corporeal frailty left them susceptible to demonic forces bent on penetrating and polluting their bodies and souls.
Drawing...
Last Things
Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2012
When the medievals spoke of "last things" they were sometimes referring to events, such as the millennium or the appearance of the Antichrist, that would come to all of humanity or at the end of time. But they also meant the last things that would come to each individual separately—not...
Thinking in Public
Strauss, Levinas, Arendt
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2015
Long before we began to speak of "public intellectuals," the ideas of "the public" and "the intellectual" raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. Thinking in Public examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation...
Inexpressible Privacy
The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature
Language: English
Release Date: April 9, 2013
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
Few concepts are more widely discussed or more passionately invoked in American public culture than that of privacy. What these discussions have lacked, however, is a historically informed sense of privacy's genealogy in U.S. culture....
Holy Warriors
The Religious Ideology of Chivalry
Language: English
Release Date: June 4, 2012
The medieval code of chivalry demanded that warrior elites demonstrate fierce courage in battle, display prowess with weaponry, and avenge any strike against their honor. They were also required to be devout Christians. How, then, could knights pledge fealty to the Prince of Peace, who enjoined the...
Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book
Gender and the Making of Textual Authority
Language: English
Release Date: March 26, 2013
Sometime around 1230, a young woman left her family and traveled to the German city of Magdeburg to devote herself to worship and religious contemplation. Rather than living in a community of holy women, she chose isolation, claiming that this life would bring her closer to God. Even in her lifetime,...
Socrates and Alcibiades
Plato's Drama of Political Ambition and Philosophy
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2017
In the classical world, political ambition posed an intractable problem. Ancient Greek democracies fostered in their most promising youths a tension-ridden combination of the desire for personal glory and deep-seated public-spiritedness in hopes of producing brilliant and capable statesmen. But as...
An Empire Divided
The American Revolution and the British Caribbean
Language: English
Release Date: December 14, 2015
There were 26—not 13—British colonies in America in 1776. Of these, the six colonies in the Caribbean—Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, Grenada and Tobago, St. Vincent; and Dominica—were among the wealthiest. These island colonies were closely related to the mainland by social ties and...
by Thomas Jefferson
Language: English
Release Date: June 29, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: June 29, 2011
In 1821, at the age of seventy-seven, Thomas Jefferson decided to "state some recollections of dates and facts concerning myself." His ancestors, Jefferson writes, came to America from Wales in the early seventeenth century and settled in the Virginia colony. Jefferson's father, although...
The Benevolent Deity
Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of Rational Religion in New England, 1696-1787
Language: English
Release Date: September 3, 2015
The years following the Great Awakening in New England saw a great theological struggle between proponents of Calvinism and the champions of Christian liberty, setting the stage for American Unitarianism. The adherents of Christian liberty, who were branded Arminians by their opponents, were contending...
Liberty on the Waterfront
American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2012
Through careful research and colorful accounts, historian Paul A. Gilje discovers what liberty meant to an important group of common men in American society, those who lived and worked on the waterfront and aboard ships. In the process he reveals that the idealized vision of liberty associated with...
The Phenomenon of Torture
Readings and Commentary
Language: English
Release Date: July 17, 2013
Torture is the most widespread human rights crime in the modern world, practiced in more than one hundred countries, including the United States. How could something so brutal, almost unthinkable, be so prevalent? The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary is designed to answer that question...