Penn Press Log

An Earth Day Excerpt from Making Seafood Sustainable

If you plan to celebrate Earth Day this Sunday, April 22, don't forget the water. Earth wouldn't be home without water, the habitat for the fish that nourish many omnivores among us. These fish provide livelihoods for coastal communities around the world. To give water its Earth Day due, we’re sharing an excerpt from Making Seafood Sustainable: American Experiences in Global Perspective, a new book by Seattle native and historian Mansel G. Blackford. In Blackford’s preface, you’ll see that history and water--along with politics and economics--do mix when it comes to understanding how to maintain our planet's natural resources.

Preface

Born in 1944, I remember clearly the excitement and relief that ran through members of my family on a cold, winter evening in 1952. Then a young boy growing up in a pre-Starbucks Seattle, I was delighted that my father, who pioneered in the development of Alaska’s king-crab fishery as the captain of the Deep Sea, a combined catcher-processing vessel, was home for several weeks. That night he received a telephone call from a friend, who was the master of another fishing boat that had also just returned to Seattle from Alaskan seas. He told my father that water had entered one of his ship’s cold-storage holds, partially flooding it and encasing the halibut there in ice. My father could have one of the fish, if he would come down to the vessel and chip it out. Times were tough, and my father was happy to do so. In the early morning, helped by a friend, he brought home a frozen 150-pound halibut. Fortunately, my family had a horizontal freezer large enough to receive the fish. For weeks, along with other family members, I ate halibut prepared in every conceivable manner—boiled, baked, fried, poached, broiled, and creamed. We also ate king crabs, for which a market was just being developed, from my father’s vessel, until we could hardly face another dish of them. Meat was a rare treat, indeed, in those years. However, members of my family were unusual in their dining habits.

Making Seafood Sustainable--Now Available

Making Seafood Sustainable: American Experiences in Global Perspective
Mansel G. Blackford
296 pages | 6 x 9 | 20 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4393-2 | $45.00 | £29.50
A volume in the American Business, Politics, and Society series


"Intelligent, provocative, and well researched, with delightful writing throughout. Blackford has a grasp on the ways in which global developments manifest themselves in American fisheries on a number of different levels: economic, environmental, cultural, and political. Indeed, Blackford demonstrates that all of these local manifestations of globalization are connected to each other."--Arthur F. McEvoy, Southwestern Law School

Making Seafood Sustainable shows how and why sustainable fishing and seafood management can work by looking at past success stories in dealing with the global overfishing crisis, especially in American waters.

Read more . . .

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

A Glorious Enterprise--Now Available

A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science
Robert McCracken Peck and Patricia Tyson Stroud. Photographs by Rosamond Purcell
464 pages | 9 1/2 x 12 | 269 color illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4380-2 | $75.00 | £49.00

"A book to remember. . . . To wander through A Glorious Enterprise is to absorb the 19th century's passion for botany and zoology; the 20th century's mania for exploration of distant, difficult or desolate places; and present-day preoccupations. . . . All of these tales are fascinating, but the book's true fascination comes in its color photographs and illustrations, scores of them."
—Cornelia Dean, New York Times

This first complete history of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia narrates signal moments, achievements, and the colorful characters associated with an institution that shaped the study of natural history in America. Stunning original photographs by Rosamond Purcell cast extraordinary specimens from Academy collections in a new light.

Watch Peck and Stroud discuss A Glorious Enterprise behind the scences at the Academy.

Read more . . .

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

Rainforest Warriors--Now in Paperback

Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial
Richard Price
280 pages | 6 x 9 | 41 illus.
Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4300-0 | $55.00 | £36.00
Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2137-4 | $27.50 | £18.00
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

Rainforest Warriors is a historical, ethnographic, and documentary account of a people, their threatened rainforest, and their successful attempt to harness international human rights law in their fight to protect their way of life—part of a larger story of tribal and indigenous peoples that is unfolding all over the globe. Read more . . .

 

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.

Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Penny, the Press Robin

Many of us at Penn Press recently noticed that a family of robins has built a home in the front doorway of our building. Business & Economics Editor Erin Graham chose the name Penny for the copper-chested bird who appears to be doing most of the nest guard duty.

 

While we can't easily tell whether a Penny or a Benny is watching the nest at any given time, we can be certain that the nest was built by the female member of the household--and not because the outer layer of the nest contains a tangle of pastel ribbons. According to Wildlife of the Mid-Atlantic: A Complete Reference Manual, by John H. Rappole, the female robin is responsible for the architecture and construction of the nest. Penny is also in charge of incubating her clutch of eggs. Wildlife of the Mid-Atlantic also says that robin nests are located "on a horizontal branch or a clump of trees." But Penny is a West Philly robin who knows how to adapt to our particular real estate market. If no decent branches are around, bricks will have to do. Perhaps she picked up some insights from Neighborhood and Life Chances: How Place Matters in Modern America, edited by Harriet B. Newburger, Eugenie L. Birch, and Susan M. Wachter.

Whatever the reason, we're glad Penny chose to make 3905 Spruce Street her address. Good luck to Penny, her mate, and their forthcoming brood.

A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic--Now Available

A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic
Andrew J. Lewis
216 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus.
Cloth 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4308-6 | $39.95 | £26.00
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Using case studies from ornithology, botany, antiquities, theology, and geology, A Democracy of Facts tells the fascinating story of naturalists coming of age and creating a profession in the early American republic.

Read more . . .

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

.

Reproductive Health and Human Rights--Now in Paperback

Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward
Edited by Laura Reichenbach and Mindy Jane Roseman
304 pages | 6 x 9 | 9 illus.
Cloth 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4152-5 | $69.95 | £45.50
Paper 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2160-2 | $29.95 | £19.50
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

Reproductive Health and Human Rights assesses the past fifteen years of international efforts aimed at improving health, alleviating poverty, diminishing gender inequality, and promoting human rights. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Penn Press Marketing at pressmkt@upenn.edu.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

A New Penn Press Podcast--Three Researchers from the Penn Museum on Sustainable Lifeways

In the October Penn Press podcast, Naomi F. Miller, Katherine M. Moore, and Kathleen Ryan from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology discuss human strategies for coping with environmental change over time. The conversations ranges from the power of dung in ancient Anatolia to the career choices of today's young Maasai in east Africa. The three are coeditors of the forthcoming book Sustainable Lifeways: Cultural Persistence in an Ever-changing Environment.

To listen the Sustainable Lifeways interview, visit the Penn Press podcast site.

 

Eugenic Design--Now in Paperback

Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s
Christina Cogdell
352 pages | 6 x 9 | 83 illus.
Cloth 2004 | ISBN 978-0-8122-3824-2 | $55.00 | £36.00
Paper 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2122-0 | $24.95 | £16.50

Winner of the Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology

In Eugenic Design, Christina Cogdell charts new territory in the history of industrial design, popular science, and American culture in the 1930s by uncovering the links between streamline design and eugenics, the pseudoscientific belief that the best human traits could—and should—be cultivated through selective breeding. Read more . . .

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

Spring Overstock Sale--Save 70%

It's a beautiful day (at least in Philadelphia) and the perfect time for the Penn Press Spring Overstock Sale to begin. Hundreds of titles have been marked down by 70 percent. Visit the overstock sale web page for a complete list of discounted books. There's an array of books to chose from, but quantities are limited so check out these bargains now before they're gone.