University Of Pennsylvania Press imprint: 776 books
Dante's Philosophical Life
Politics and Human Wisdom in "Purgatorio"
Language: English
Release Date: March 19, 2018
When political theorists teach the history of political philosophy, they typically skip from the ancient Greeks and Cicero to Augustine in the fifth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, and then on to the origins of modernity with Machiavelli and beyond. Paul Stern aims to change this settled...
Death of a Suburban Dream
Race and Schools in Compton, California
Language: English
Release Date: March 10, 2014
Compton, California, is often associated in the public mind with urban America's toughest problems, including economic disinvestment, gang violence, and failing public schools. Before it became synonymous with inner-city decay, however, Compton's affordability, proximity to manufacturing jobs, and...
Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child
Political Philosophy in "Frankenstein"
Language: English
Release Date: October 9, 2017
From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against...
Locked In, Locked Out
Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City
Language: English
Release Date: April 22, 2013
In November 1993, the largest public housing project in the Puerto Rican city of Ponce—the second largest public housing authority in the U.S. federal system—became a gated community. Once the exclusive privilege of the city's affluent residents, gates now not only locked "undesirables"...
by
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2016
Hope is an integral part of social life. Yet, hope has not been studied systematically in the social sciences. Editors Hirokazu Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg have collected essays that investigate hope in a broad range of socioeconomic situations and phenomena across time and space and from a variety...
by Daniel Donoghue
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2018
The scribes of early medieval England wrote out their vernacular poems using a format that looks primitive to our eyes because it lacks the familiar visual cues of verse lineation, marks of punctuation, and capital letters. The paradox is that scribes had those tools at their disposal, which they...
Medieval Boundaries
Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2013
In Medieval Boundaries, Sharon Kinoshita examines the role of cross-cultural contact in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century French literature. Starting from the observation that many of the earliest and best-known works of the French literary tradition are set on or beyond the borders of the French-speaking...
Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing
The American Example
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2017
During the thirty years following ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the first American novelists carried on an argument with their British counterparts that pitted direct democracy against representative liberalism. Such writers as Hannah Foster, Isaac Mitchell, Royall Tyler, Leonore Sansay,...
The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell
Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2011
The early Christian writer Tertullian first applied the epithet "bride of Christ" to the uppity virgins of Carthage as a means of enforcing female obedience. Henceforth, the virgin as Christ's spouse was expected to manifest matronly modesty and due submission, hobbling virginity's ancient...
Between Christian and Jew
Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2012
In 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy...
Evening News
Optics, Astronomy, and Journalism in Early Modern Europe
Language: English
Release Date: March 11, 2014
Eileen Reeves examines a web of connections between journalism, optics, and astronomy in early modern Europe, devoting particular attention to the ways in which a long-standing association of reportage with covert surveillance and astrological prediction was altered by the near simultaneous emergence...
by Lisa Lampert
Language: English
Release Date: April 9, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: April 9, 2013
Although representations of medieval Christians and Christianity are rarely subject to the same scholarly scrutiny as those of Jews and Judaism, "the Christian" is as constructed a term, category, and identity as "the Jew." Medieval Christian authors created complex notions of...
Morality's Muddy Waters
Ethical Quandaries in Modern America
Language: English
Release Date: June 6, 2011
In the face of an uncertain and dangerous world, Americans yearn for a firm moral compass, a clear set of ethical guidelines. But as history shows, by reducing complex situations to simple cases of right or wrong we often go astray.
In Morality's Muddy Waters, historian George Cotkin offers...
Improvised Continent
Pan-Americanism and Cultural Exchange
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2017
How does a country in the process of becoming a world power prepare its citizens for the responsibilities of global leadership? In Improvised Continent, Richard Cándida Smith answers this question by illuminating the forgotten story of how, over the course of the twentieth century, cultural exchange...