Penn Press Log

Liberia: The Violence of Democracy--Now in Paperback

Liberia: The Violence of Democracy
Mary H. Moran
200 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus.
Cloth 2005 | ISBN 978-0-8122-3907-2 | $49.95 | £32.50
Paper 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2028-5 | $22.50 | £15.00
A volume in the Ethnography of Political Violence series

Moran argues that democracy is not a foreign import into Africa, but that essential aspects of what we in the West consider democratic values are part of the indigenous traditions of legitimacy and political process. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Reparations to Africa -- Now Available

Reparations to Africa
Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann. With Anthony P. Lombardo
264 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4101-3 | $49.95 | £32.50
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

Given the long history of European and American mistreatment of Africa, what is the just measure of Western obligations to the peoples of this continent? The author analyzes the arguments for reparations from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and suggests alternative means to restorative justice. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact ellenpt@upenn.edu.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here

Human Rights in the Arab World--Now in Paperback

Human Rights in the Arab World: Independent Voices
Edited by Anthony Chase and Amr Hamzawy
336 pages | 6 x 9
Paper 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2032-2 | $24.95 | £16.50
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

This is the first book in English that draws together the work of intellectuals at the forefront of research on the Arab region's key human rights issues. Its empirical and theoretical focus is on the historical and contemporary place of human rights in Arab politics and the obstacles to advancing rights in the region.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Jackson's Book Part of new MLK "Scholarly Synthesis"

As schools and other cultural institutions prepare to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with service, ceremony, and perhaps a little sleeping in, "The Prophet Reconsidered," a book review in the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, describes a rising trend in scholarship on the life and work of the slain civil rights leader--one that contradicts his current status as a widely accepted national icon. Reviewer Christopher Phelps writes:

. . . a new scholarly synthesis seems emergent four decades after the death of King, one that draws upon decidedly bottom-up conceptions of the civil-rights movement to reconsider King's life and thought. Far from a comforting, "normative" figure, King emerges in these studies, as Thomas F. Jackson puts it in his very fine intellectual portrait From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, as "much more radical, earlier and more consistently, than he is credited for being."

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa--Now Available

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver?
Edited by Audrey R. Chapman and Hugo van der Merwe
360 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus.
Cloth Dec 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4059-7 | $69.95 | £45.50
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa provides a comprehensive evaluation of the TRC process and its impact on South African society. Based on a six-year study, the volume draws on an analysis of the victim hearings, amnesty hearings, institutional hearings, public opinion survey data, and extensive interviews.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

American Ethnologist Review of Female Circumcision

American Ethnologist calls Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives, edited by Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, "a provocative book, clearly written for both general and scholarly audiences" and "a respectful dialog that yet presses determinedly for change."

The complete review is available at the American Ethnologist site.

Atlantic Virginia--Now in Paperback

Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century
April Lee Hatfield
320 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 9 maps
Paper 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-1997-5 | $22.50 | £15.00

"A solid, thought-provoking study of a far more complex world than historians of seventeenth-century Virginia have yet offered."--Journal of Southern History

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here

Marking the Birthday of W.E.B. Du Bois

February 23 is a special day in American, African American, and world history. It is the birthday of W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps the nation’s greatest intellectual and activist. And in a time of uncertain war, of religious and racial strife, and of national division, his legacy and contributions should be remembered. Born in 1868 in Massachusetts, he died in Ghana on the eve of the March on Washington in 1963. In his almost one hundred years, Du Bois helped transform the nation and inspired millions across the world.

On February 23, 1968, the centennial of Du Bois’s birth and five years after his death, Martin Luther King, Jr., marked the occasion before a packed crowd in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, only weeks before being cut down by an assassin. 

Child Soldiers in Africa--Now in Paperback

Child Soldiers in Africa
Alcinda Honwana
216 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus.
Cloth 2005 | ISBN 978-0-8122-3911-9 | $45.00 | £29.50
Paper 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-1987-6 | $22.50 | £15.00
A volume in the Ethnography of Political Violence series

"Child Soldiers is groundbreaking."--PsycCRITIQUES

In Child Soldiers in Africa Alcinda Honwana brings her firsthand experience with child soldiers in Angola and Mozambique to shed light on how children are recruited, what they encounter, and how they come to terms with what they have done.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.

Female Circumcision--Now in Paperback

Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives
Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Editor
296 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus.
Paper 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-1941-8 | $19.95 | £13.00
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

Female Circumcision brings together African activists to examine the issue within its various cultural and historical contexts, the debates on circumcision regarding African refugee and immigrant populations in the U.S. and the human rights efforts to eradicate the practice.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg at ellenpt@pobox.upenn.edu.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.