Penn State University Press: 456 books
Trade in Strangers
The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America
Language: English
Release Date: May 13, 1999
American historians have long been fascinated by the "peopling" of North America in the seventeenth century. Who were the immigrants, and how and why did they make their way across the ocean? Most of the attention, however, has been devoted to British immigrants who came as free people or...
by Karol K. Weaver
Language: English
Release Date: August 29, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: August 29, 2011
While much has been written about immigrant traditions, music, food culture, folklore, and other aspects of ethnic identity, little attention has been given to the study of medical culture, until now. In Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880–2000, Karol Weaver...
Knowing Otherwise
Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding
Language: English
Release Date: February 8, 2011
Prejudice is often not a conscious attitude: because of ingrained habits in relating to the world, one may act in prejudiced ways toward others without explicitly understanding the meaning of one’s actions. Similarly, one may know how to do certain things, like ride a bicycle, without being able...
Blacks and the Quest for Economic Equality
The Political Economy of Employment in Southern Communities in the United States
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2009
The civil rights movement of the 1960s improved the political and legal status of African Americans, but the quest for equality in employment and economic well-being has lagged behind. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to be employed in lower-paying service jobs or to be unemployed, are...
by Liesl Haas
Language: English
Release Date: November 11, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: November 11, 2010
The election of Michelle Bachelet as president of Chile in 2006 gave new impetus to the struggle in that country for legislation to improve women’s rights and highlighted a process that had already been under way for some time. In Feminist Policymaking in Chile, Liesl Haas investigates the efforts...
Social and Economic Networks in Early Massachusetts
Atlantic Connections
Language: English
Release Date: September 17, 2009
The seventeenth century saw an influx of immigrants to the heavily Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. This book redefines the role that non-Puritans and non-English immigrants played in the social and economic development of Massachusetts. Marsha Hamilton shows how non-Puritan English, Scots, and Irish...
by Patrick J. O'Banion
Language: English
Release Date: November 16, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: November 16, 2012
The Sacrament of Penance and Religious Life in Golden Age Spain explores the practice of sacramental confession in Spain between roughly 1500 and 1700. One of the most significant points of contact between the laity and ecclesiastical hierarchy, confession lay at the heart of attempts to bring religious...
by James Perrin Warren
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 1990
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 1990
Combining intellectual history with literary analysis, this study of Whitman's language experiment from 1855 to 1892 offers a refreshing new look at his theory of language especially the English language in America—as an expression of a "national spirit" and relates that theory to the...
Gorgeous Beasts
Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2012
Gorgeous Beasts takes a fresh look at the place of animals in history and art. Refusing the traditional subordination of animals to humans, the essays gathered here examine a rich variety of ways animals contribute to culture: as living things, as scientific specimens, as food, weapons, tropes, and...
The Improbable Conquest
Sixteenth-Century Letters from the Río de la Plata
Language: English
Release Date: January 12, 2015
The Improbable Conquest offers translations of a series of little-known letters from the chaotic Spanish conquest of the Río de la Plata region, uncovering a rich and understudied historical resource. These letters were written by a wide variety of individuals, including clergy, military officers,...
The History of the New World
Benzoni's Historia del Mondo Nuovo
Language: English
Release Date: January 24, 2017
The History of the New World is an abridged, unique English translation of sixteenth-century Italian merchant Girolamo Benzoni’s popular account of his adventures in the Americas and the Spanish colonies.
First published in Venice in 1565, Benzoni’s book was an immediate best seller and...
by Barbara Cantalupo
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 2014
Although Edgar Allan Poe is most often identified with stories of horror and fear, there is an unrecognized and even forgotten side to the writer. He was a self-declared lover of beauty who “from childhood’s hour . . . [had] not seen / As others saw.” Poe and the Visual Arts is the first comprehensive...
The Challenge of Coleridge
Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy
Language: English
Release Date: November 28, 2000
Interweaving past and present texts, The Challenge of Coleridge engages the British Romantic poet, critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a "conversation" (in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s sense) with philosophical thinkers today who share his interest in the relationship of interpretation...
Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé
The Passage from Art to Ritual
Language: English
Release Date: March 22, 1993
Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé offers a new theory of performance in the poetic and critical texts of Stephane Mallarmé, a theory challenging the prevailing interpretation of his work as epitomizing literary purism and art for art's sake.
Following an analytical presentation of the...