Penn Press Log

Parkin Wins Emily Toth Award

The Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association has awarded Katherine J. Parkin's Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America, the Emily Toth Award for the best book in Feminist Popular Culture for 2006.

On Thursday, March 15 at 7:00 p.m. Parkin will be at the University of Pennsylvania Bookstore to discuss her work.

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. 

More than Talking Heads

Two Penn Press authors and a series editor recently lent their expertize to news and documentary productions on a wide range of subjects.

This Thursday, Eric Stover, author of The Witnesses and Director of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center, was interviewed for a PBS NewsHour story about DNA technology reconnecting families after the devestation of war. View the video at The Online NewsHour.

Penn Press series editor Thomas Sugrue provides context for a documentary on the history of discrimination against African Americans in Pennsylvania. Viewers of WQED TV can see Jim Crow Pennsylvania on  Sunday, February 25 at 5 p.m. EST.

Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, brings her observations on the prejudice against the genre to Who’s Afraid of Happy Endings?, a BRAVO! Canada documentary on the cultural phenomenon and billion-dollar industry of romance fiction. The program will premiere on March 8 at  8:30 p.m. EST.

Reading Beyond Beloved

According Gene Andrew Jarrett "not all kinds of African American culture are celebrated in February during Black History Month. Consider literature, for example." In his article Misreading authors by their skin: Blacks don't always write about blacks Jarrett asks readers to take a broader view. Here's an excerpt:

Unfortunately, literature written by black people but not about black people tends to go unread, undersold, or out of print. This has done a disservice to learning about how prolific and sophisticated our most famous African American authors actually were. It has also prevented us from deepening our knowledge of the most famous examples of African American literature.

Art in a Season of Revolution--Now in Paperback

Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America
Margaretta M. Lovell
360 pages | 7 x 10 | 10 color, 104 b/w illus.
Paper 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-1991-3 | $29.95 | £19.50
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Winner of the Charles C. Eldredge Prize of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the 2007 Historians of British Art Book Prize for best single-authored book on a pre-1800 subject.

"Lovell delights, astonishes, and challenges us with her insightful new readings of early American paintings and material culture objects."--Journal of the Early Republic

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.

Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine--Now Available

Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine
Kevin Uhalde
248 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-3987-4 | $55.00 | £36.00

Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine examines the complex and varying roles Christian bishops played during late antiquity and how their experiences fundamentally affected Christian ideals of divine justice.

Read more . . .

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

Dark Speech--Now Available

Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland
Robin Chapman Stacey
368 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-3989-8 | $59.95 | £39.00
A volume in the Middle Ages Series

In Dark Speech, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the fascinating interaction between performance and law in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries.

Read more . . .

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

Peoples of the River Valleys--Now Available

Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians
Amy C. Schutt
264 pages | 6 x 9 | 14 illus.
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-3993-5 | $45.00 | £29.50
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the Delaware, or Lenape, Indians in the context of events in the mid-Atlantic region and the Ohio Valley.

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 Chosen for Liberty Legacy Award

From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice by Thomas F. Jackson has been selected as winner of the 2007 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians (OAH).

The award will be presented to Jackson at the 2007 annual meeting of the OAH in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 31st.

Click here to download the press release.

The Evolution of the Origin

As schools, universities, museums and (yes) churches around the world prepare to celebrate Darwin Day, it's a great time to study the evolution of the book that started it all by picking up the Penn Press paperback release of The Origin of the Species: A Variorum Text.

This volume marks the first scholarly attempt to compile a complete variorum edition covering all of the extensive variants in the six texts of The Origin of Species published between 1859 and 1872. Charles Darwin's changes were extensive. His book grew by a third as he rewrote many passages four or five times, and in this edition Morse Peckham has recorded every one of those changes.