Penn Press Log

This Week's New Books: The Jet Sex, Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture, Stuyvesant Bound, and Owning William Shakespeare

Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture Edited by Gary Hatfield and Holly Pittman 496 pages | 6 x 9 | 27 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-1-934536-49-0 | $69.95 | £45.50 A volume in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology series Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture draws together studies in archaeology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, genetics, neuroscience, and environmental science to investigate the evolution of the human mind, the brain, and the human capacity for culture. Read more...

Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time Donna Merwick 232 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus. Cloth Apr 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4503-5 | $59.95 | £39.00 A volume in the Early American Studies series Stuyvesant Bound is an innovative, compelling reassessment of the last Director-General of New Netherland. Donna Merwick employs a multidisciplinary approach to examine the layers of culture within which Peter Stuyvesant forged his career and performed his identity. Read more...

The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon Victoria Vantoch 304 pages | 6 x 9 | 30 illus. Cloth Apr 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4481-6 | $34.95 | £23.00 Victoria Vantoch takes us on a fascinating journey into the golden era of air travel. The Jet Sex explores the much-mythologized stewardess within the context of the Cold War, globalization, and the emerging culture of glamour to reveal how beauty and sexuality were critical to national identity and international politics. Read more...

Now in Paperback Owning William Shakespeare: The King's Men and Their Intellectual Property James J. Marino 216 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus. Cloth 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4296-6 | $49.95 | £32.50 Paper 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2254-8 | $22.50 | £15.00 A volume in the Material Texts series This book explores actors' systems of intellectual property in early modern England. Focusing on Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, and other plays, James Marino demonstrates how Shakespeare's company asserted ownership of its plays through intense ongoing revision and through insistent attribution to Shakespeare. Read more...

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

Awards and Acclaim

Here's a look back at recent awards, reviews, and other Penn Press news items from January, 2013.

Michael Witgen’s An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America and Jeffrey Friedman and Wladimir Kraus’s Engineering the Financial Crisis were among Choice magazine’s top 25 Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012.

Foreign Affairs magazine included China and Africa: A Century of Engagement by David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman and on their Best Books of 2012 on Africa list.

The Weekly Standard reviewed China Hand: An Autobiography by John Paton Davies, Jr.

Foreign Affairs also reviewed Lincoln Mitchell’s recent book, The Color Revolutions.  

Montreal Review published an editoral by Laurence Cockcroft, author of Global Corruption: Money, Power, and Ethics in the Modern World.

Natural History magazine praised A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science, wirtten by Robert McCracken Peck and Patricia Tyson Stroud with Photographs by Rosamond Purcell.

New York Times Home & Garden writer Elaine Louis reviewed Gail Caskey Winkler's Capricious Fancy: Draping and Curtaining the Historic Interior, 1800-1930.

Fall 2012 Preview

For a preview of our Fall 2012 books, take a look at the latest catalog in glorious PDF. Our forthcoming books cover an array of subjects, from medieval letters to Miami politics. Here's a sampling of the Press's forthcoming titles.

Lost Letters of Medieval Life: English Society, 1200-1250, edited by Martha Carlin and David Crouch, reveals everyday life in thirteenth-century England through a collection of correspondence from all levels of society. In Miami Transformed, former mayor Manny Diaz recounts his efforts to renew one of America's most fascinating cities. Preparing Today's Students for Tomorrow's Jobs in Metropolitan America, edited by Penn professor Laura W. Perna, and In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform, by John P. Spencer bring much-needed perspectives to today's urban education policy debates. Christopher McMahon's Public Capitalism: The Political Authority of Corporate Executives explores the philosophical and ethical boundaries of business leadership, while Albert J. Churella's The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume 1: Building an Empire, 1846-1917 tells the story of one of the largest enterprises in history. The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island, edited by Jonathan Conlin, explores the history of public gardens in the West, and Ron Henderson guides readers through classical Chinese landscapes in The Gardens of Suzhou. The Fall 2012 list also includes three new books in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology series.

For a complete listing of Penn Press books, ebooks, and journals, visit www.pennpress.org.

Penn Press First Incorporated 122 Years Ago Today

On March 26, 1890, the University of Pennsylvania Press was incorporated with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.Within a decade, the University of Pennsylvania Press imprint began to appear on scholarly publications. One of the Press's first books was the landmark The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, by African American reformer, scholar, and social critic W.E.B. Du Bois. That book remains on the Penn Press list to this day.

Announcing the Inaugural Mellon Distinguished Lecture Series

Penn Press is pleased to announce the Inaugural Mellon Distinguished Lecture Series, sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania Press. The series runs from March 26 to March 30 at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, located at 3355 Woodland Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104. All lectures in the series are free and open to the public.

This year Peter C. Mancall, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at the University of Southern California and coeditor of Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, will give three lectures on Nature and Culture in the Early Modern World. This lecture series will explore aspects of the relationship between people and nature in the early modern Atlantic. Each of the lectures will begin with paintings: a series of images in a fourteenth-century cloister in the south of France; a hand-painted atlas created in 1547; and a 1585 water color of a Carolina Algonquian town by the English artist John White.

Lecture One: “Fréjus: The Borders of Nature”
Monday, March 26, 5:00 PM
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
University of Pennsylvania
3355 Woodland Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Lecture Two: “Vallard: The New Ecology of the Atlantic Basin”
Wednesday, March 28, 5:00 PM
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
University of Pennsylvania
3355 Woodland Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Lecture Three: “Secota: The Landscape at the End of History”
Friday, March 30, 3:00 PM
(Please note the change in time for the last lecture)
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
University of Pennsylvania
3355 Woodland Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Please visit the Mellon Distinguished Lecture Series page for detailed descriptions of each lecture.

 

Good News Comes in Threes from Foundation for Landscape Studies

Hot on the heels of the Foundation for Landscape Studies announcement that a forthcoming Penn Press book will receive a David Coffin Publication Grant, we learned today two of our books won the Foundation's John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize.

Karen M'Closkey received the Coffin Publication Grant for her work-in-progress Unearthed: The Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates. The Press plans to publish Unearthed  in 2013.

Both A Life Spent Changing Places by the late Lawrence Halprin with a foreword by Laurie Olin and Flora's Empire: British Gardens in India by Eugenia W. Herbert received the 2012 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, which rewards "contributors to the intellectual vitality of garden history and landscape studies."

Congratulations to M'Closkey, Olin, and Herbert for earning these honors in landscape studies. Naturally, we are proud to publish their work.

Penn Press Authors Receive National Humanities Medals

Congratulations to Robert Darnton and Teofilo F. Ruiz, Penn Press authors and 2011 National Humanities Medalists. The National Endowment for the Humanities created the National Humanities Medal to honor "individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities." President Barack Obama presented the awards to Darnton, Ruiz, and other honorees at a White House ceremony yesterday.

Darnton, author of The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon, received a medal for his commitment to making knowledge accessible to everyone. "An eminent cultural historian and librarian, Dr. Darnton has illuminated the world of Enlightenment and Revolutionary France, and has pursued his vision for a national library of digitized books," said the president. 

Teofilo F. Ruiz, author of Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile, received a medal for his outstanding scholarship in history. The president praised Ruiz for "deepening our knowledge of medieval Spain and Europe, and exploring the role terror has played in society for centuries."

After the ceremony, the medalists attended a reception with President Obama and Michelle Obama.

The UPCC and Project MUSE eBook Collection for Libraries

Project MUSE in partnership with the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC) has launched an ebook collection for libraries. This collection contains thousands of peer-reviewed digital books from more than 65 major scholarly publishers and university presses, including the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"The addition of ebook collections to the MUSE platform means that, going forward, scholars and students will find a one-stop shopping experience for new university press publications," says Penn Press Director Eric Halpern. Librarians, researchers, and students can discover and search UPCC ebooks along with content from journals on MUSE.

As one of the founding UPCC presses, Penn Press has made more than 400 ebooks available through Project MUSE, and the list of available Press titles is growing. Patrons of participating libraries will be able to read these ebooks on any computer or mobile device with a web browser. Readers can download enhanced web-ready PDFs of the book's chapters and sections—including table of contents, bibliography, notes, and index—from the Project MUSE website. Providing small, chapter-length files discourages piracy while allowing readers access to texts without cumbersome digital rights management (DRM) software. It also improves access to libraries located in areas with low bandwidth. An unlimited number of library patrons can access UPCC ebooks simultaneously.

"'Do for e-books what MUSE does for journals'– became our rallying cry," said Project MUSE Director Dean Smith in his blog Director's Musings. Smith and other Project MUSE representatives have been out in force since last October, spreading the word about the ebook program to librarians and scholars. So far 62 institutions have signed up for the program.

For more information about the UPCC ebook collection and how your library can participate, visit the Project MUSE website. Librarians may request pricing information here.

An American History Publishing Opportunity--the SHEAR Manuscript Prize for 2012

The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the University of Pennsylvania Press invite submissions for the SHEAR Manuscript Prize for 2012. The Prize will be awarded to an exceptional book-length scholarly manuscript pertaining to the history of North America from 1776 to 1861. Within that period, the manuscript may treat virtually any aspect of history, including cultural, political, economic, or social history. Competition is open to any author who has not previously published a scholarly book. Ineligible for consideration are collections of essays, editions of primary sources, or new editions of previously published books.

The author of the winning manuscript will receive a publishing contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press that includes a cash advance, royalties, and an illustrations budget. The book will be published as a volume in the series Early American Studies, sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

To submit a manuscript for consideration, please first send a letter of inquiry accompanied by a brief prospectus, sample chapter, and current CV to:

Robert Lockhart
History Editor
University of Pennsylvania Press
3905 Spruce Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

The deadline for submission of preliminary materials is March 1, 2012.

Shortly thereafter, the prize committee will invite finalists to send complete manuscripts for consideration, and the winner will be announced at SHEAR's annual conference.

If you would like more information, please email Robert Lockhart.

The September Newsletter

Newsletter lovers, the September Penn Press newsletter is online now. The newsletter includes upcoming book events, a summary of our editors' and authors' activities in the world, and a link to a podcast interview with two of the coeditors of Women's Health and the World's Cities, Afaf Ibrahim Meleis and Susan M. Wachter. Bombshell: Women and Terrorism, by Mia Bloom, is the featured forthcoming book for September.

Click here to read an overview of the latest Penn Press happenings.