University Of Pennsylvania Press imprint: 776 books
A Road to Nowhere
The Idea of Progress and Its Critics
Language: English
Release Date: October 9, 2017
Since the Enlightenment, the idea of progress has spanned right- and left-wing politics, secular and spiritual philosophy, and most every school of art or culture. The belief that humans are capable of making lasting improvements—intellectual, scientific, material, moral, and cultural—continues...
Conversion and Narrative
Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic
Language: English
Release Date: October 29, 2012
In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a "great man" who urged him to awaken from his slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking...
The Conversion of Herman the Jew
Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century
Language: English
Release Date: April 22, 2013
Sometime toward the middle of the twelfth century, it is supposed, an otherwise obscure figure, born a Jew in Cologne and later ordained as a priest in Cappenberg in Westphalia, wrote a Latin account of his conversion to Christianity. Known as the Opusculum, this book purportedly by "Herman,...
Esperanto and Its Rivals
The Struggle for an International Language
Language: English
Release Date: April 22, 2015
The problems of international communication and linguistic rights are recurring debates in the present-day age of globalization. But the debate truly began over a hundred years ago, when the increasingly interconnected world of the nineteenth century fostered a desire for the development of a global...
Everyday Occupations
Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East
Language: English
Release Date: March 16, 2013
In the twenty-first century, political conflict and militarization have come to constitute a global social condition rather than a political exception. Military occupation increasingly informs the politics of both democracies and dictatorships, capitalist and formerly socialist regimes, raising questions...
by Glenn Mitoma
Language: English
Release Date: April 9, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: April 9, 2013
The American attitude toward human rights is deemed inconsistent, even hypocritical: while the United States is characterized (or self-characterized) as a global leader in promoting human rights, the nation has consistently restrained broader interpretations of human rights and held international...
The Long Gilded Age
American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order
Language: English
Release Date: December 10, 2014
From the end of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, the United States experienced unprecedented structural change. Advances in communication and manufacturing technology brought about a revolution for major industries such as railroads, coal, and steel. The still-growing...
The Saving Lie
Truth and Method in the Social Sciences
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2013
This book explores the distinction between selflessness and self-interestedness, between acting for one's own advantage and acting, even when disadvantageous, for reasons of duty or conscience. This apparently straightforward contrast (exemplified in the difference between rational-choice models in...
Shays's Rebellion
The American Revolution's Final Battle
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2014
During the bitter winter of 1786-87, Daniel Shays, a modest farmer and Revolutionary War veteran, and his compatriot Luke Day led an unsuccessful armed rebellion against the state of Massachusetts. Their desperate struggle was fueled by the injustice of a regressive tax system and a conservative state...
Unveiling Eve
Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature
Language: English
Release Date: April 23, 2013
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
Unveiling Eve is the first feminist inquiry into the Hebrew poetry and prose forms cultivated in Muslim and Christian Spain, Italy, and Provence in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. In the Jewish Middle Ages, writing was...
Piety and Public Funding
Evangelicals and the State in Modern America
Language: English
Release Date: June 28, 2012
How is it that some conservative groups are viscerally antigovernment even while enjoying the benefits of government funding? In Piety and Public Funding historian Axel R. Schäfer offers a compelling answer to this question by chronicling how, in the first half century since World War II, conservative...
1812
War and the Passions of Patriotism
Language: English
Release Date: June 28, 2012
As military campaigns go, the War of 1812 was a disaster. By the time it ended in 1815, Washington, D.C., had been burned to the ground, the national debt had nearly tripled, and territorial gains were negligible. Yet the war gained so much popular support that it ushered in what is known as the "era...
by
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2014
Since 2000, more than twenty countries around the world have held elections in which parties that espouse a political agenda based on an Islamic worldview have competed for legislative seats. Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World examines the impact these parties have had...
by Brian Sutton-Smith
Language: English
Release Date: October 8, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: October 8, 2012
What prompts children to tell stories? What does the word "story" mean to a child at two or five years of age? The Folkstories of Children, first published in 1981, features nearly five hundred stories that were volunteered by fifty children between the ages of two and ten and transcribed...