University Of Pennsylvania Press Inc : 784 books
by Catherine M. Paden
Language: English
Release Date: February 17, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: February 17, 2011
Representation of the poor has never been the top priority for civil rights organizations, which exist to eradicate racially prejudiced and discriminatory practices and policy. Scholars have argued that the activities and ideologies of civil rights groups have functioned with a distinct middle-class...
Undercurrents of Power
Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora
Language: English
Release Date: February 9, 2018
Long before the rise of New World slavery, West Africans were adept swimmers, divers, canoe makers, and canoeists. They lived along riverbanks, near lakes, or close to the ocean. In those waterways, they became proficient in diverse maritime skills, while incorporating water and aquatics into spiritual...
by
Language: English
Release Date: March 26, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: March 26, 2013
Medical systems function in specific cultural contexts. It is common to speak of the medicine of China, Japan, India, and other nation-states. Yet almost all formalized medical systems claim universal applicability and, thus, are ready to cross the cultural boundaries that contain them. There is a...
From Paris to Pompeii
French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology
Language: English
Release Date: September 4, 2013
In the early nineteenth century, as amateur archaeologists excavated Pompeii, Egypt, Assyria, and the first prehistoric sites, a myth arose of archaeology as a magical science capable of unearthing and reconstructing worlds thought to be irretrievably lost. This timely myth provided an urgent antidote...
Compassion's Edge
Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France
Language: English
Release Date: October 24, 2017
Compassion's Edge examines the language of fellow-feeling—pity, compassion, and charitable care—that flourished in France in the period from the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which established some degree of religious toleration, to the official breakdown of that toleration with the Revocation of the...
The Killers
A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia
Language: English
Release Date: July 17, 2014
PHILADELPHIA, the 1840s: a corrupt banker disowns his dissolute son, who then reappears as a hardened smuggler in the contraband slave trade. Another son, hidden from his father since birth and condemned as a former felon, falls in with a ferocious street gang led by his elder brother and his revenge-hungry...
Poetics of the Incarnation
Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love
Language: English
Release Date: February 11, 2013
The Gospel of John describes the Incarnation of Christ as "the Word made flesh"—an intriguing phrase that uses the logic of metaphor but is not traditionally understood as merely symbolic. Thus the conceptual puzzle of the Incarnation also draws attention to language and form: what is...
Ethnography After Antiquity
Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature
Language: English
Release Date: August 12, 2013
Although Greek and Roman authors wrote ethnographic texts describing foreign cultures, ethnography seems to disappear from Byzantine literature after the seventh century C.E.—a perplexing exception for a culture so strongly self-identified with the Roman empire. Yet the Byzantines, geographically...
The Fantasy Factory
An Insider's View of the Phone Sex Industry
Language: English
Release Date: August 3, 2010
The Fantasy Factory explores the world of women on the other end of the phone sex lines advertised in magazines like Playboy and Hustler. The author's interviews with these women, as well as her own first-hand experiences as an operator, reveal the complex ways operators and callers negotiate the...
Unraveling Somalia
Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery
Language: English
Release Date: January 27, 2014
In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation-state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine caused the deaths of a half a million people and the flight of a million refugees.
During the...
The Heart of the Mission
Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco
Language: English
Release Date: May 4, 2017
In The Heart of the Mission, Cary Cordova combines urban, political, and art history to examine how the Mission District, a longtime bohemian enclave in San Francisco, has served as an important place for an influential and largely ignored Latino arts movement from the 1960s to the present. Well before...
Homo Cinematicus
Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany
Language: English
Release Date: May 12, 2017
In the early decades of the twentieth century, two intertwined changes began to shape the direction of German society. The baptism of the German film industry took place amid post-World War I conditions of political and social breakdown, and the cultural vacuum left by collapsing institutions was...
"The Farce of the Fart" and Other Ribaldries
Twelve Medieval French Plays in Modern English
Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2011
Was there more to medieval and Renaissance comedy than Chaucer and Shakespeare? Bien sûr. For a real taste of saucy early European humor, one must cross the Channel to France. There, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the sophisticated met the scatological in popular performances presented...
by Rene Lemarchand
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2011
Endowed with natural resources, majestic bodies of fresh water, and a relatively mild climate, the Great Lakes region of Central Africa has also been the site of some of the world's bloodiest atrocities. In Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo-Kinshasa, decades of colonial subjugation—most infamously...