University Of Pennsylvania Press imprint: 776 books
Peasant Scenes and Landscapes
The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market
Language: English
Release Date: January 31, 2012
Modern viewers take for granted the pictorial conventions present in easel paintings and engraved prints of such subjects as landscapes or peasants. These generic subjects and their representational conventions, however, have their own origins and early histories. In sixteenth-century Antwerp, painting...
The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm
The Reader as Metaphor
Language: English
Release Date: May 28, 2013
As far as one can tell, human beings are the only species for which the world seems made up of stories, Alberto Manguel writes. We read the book of the world in many guises: we may be travelers, advancing through its pages like pilgrims heading toward enlightenment. We may be recluses, withdrawing...
Becoming the People of the Talmud
Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures
Language: English
Release Date: January 31, 2012
In Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmud's preeminence in Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally taken for granted, Fishman contends...
by Richard W. Unger
Language: English
Release Date: May 22, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: May 22, 2013
The beer of today—brewed from malted grain and hops, manufactured by large and often multinational corporations, frequently associated with young adults, sports, and drunkenness—is largely the result of scientific and industrial developments of the nineteenth century. Modern beer, however, has...
Tax and Spend
The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism
Language: English
Release Date: December 30, 2011
Taxes dominate contemporary American politics. Yet while many rail against big government, few Americans are prepared to give up the benefits they receive from the state. In Tax and Spend, historian Molly C. Michelmore examines an unexpected source of this contradiction and shows why many Americans...
Civitas by Design
Building Better Communities, from the Garden City to the New Urbanism
Language: English
Release Date: June 6, 2011
Since the end of the nineteenth century, city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but also to strengthen civic ties through better design of built environments. From Ebenezer Howard and his vision for garden cities to today's New Urbanists, these...
Design After Decline
How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities
Language: English
Release Date: May 22, 2012
Almost fifty years ago, America's industrial cities—Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, and others—began shedding people and jobs. Today they are littered with tens of thousands of abandoned houses, shuttered factories, and vacant lots. With population and housing losses continuing in...
Mayor
The Best Job in Politics
Language: English
Release Date: November 16, 2017
In 2007, after serving almost fifteen years on the Philadelphia City Council, Michael A. Nutter became the ninety-eighth mayor of his hometown of Philadelphia. From the time he was sworn in until he left office in 2016, there were triumphs and challenges, from the mundane to the unexpected, from snow...
This Is Our Music
Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture
Language: English
Release Date: May 26, 2012
This Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation...
Group Harmony
The Black Urban Roots of Rhythm and Blues
Language: English
Release Date: July 17, 2013
In 1948, the Orioles, a Baltimore-based vocal group, recorded "It's Too Soon to Know." Combining the sound of Tin Pan Alley with gospel and blues sensibilities, the Orioles saw their first hit reach #13 on the pop charts, thus introducing the nation to vocal rhythm & blues and paving...
Suffering Scholars
Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2018
As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX, intellectual superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. But it was not until...
The Late Byzantine Army
Arms and Society, 1204-1453
Language: English
Release Date: December 22, 2015
The late Byzantine period was a time characterized by both civil strife and foreign invasion, framed by two cataclysmic events: the fall of Constantinople to the western Europeans in 1204 and again to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Mark C. Bartusis here opens an extraordinary window on the Byzantine Empire...
Revolutionary Backlash
Women and Politics in the Early American Republic
Language: English
Release Date: June 3, 2011
The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. According to Rosemarie Zagarri, the debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution...
China Hand
An Autobiography
Language: English
Release Date: January 31, 2012
At the height of the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s, John Paton Davies, Jr., was summoned to the State Department one morning and fired. His offense? The career diplomat had counseled the U.S. government during World War II that the Communist forces in China were poised to take over the country—which...