Penn Press Log

"I suppose you will want to know something about the war." Letters from WWI

". . . I suppose you will want to know something about the war. As you will see by the papers we are living in stirring and moving times."

The quote above is from a letter written by Sergeant James Duncan, M.M. R.G.G. and dated September 5, 1918. Sergeant Duncan was killed in action on September 23, 1918. Less than one month after his death, on November 11, the armistice was signed ending World War I. His letter appears in War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, edited by Laurence Housman.  Here are some other quotes from the volume.

USAToday.com Live Chat with Michael Chertoff Today at Noon

Today at noon E.S.T., former secretary of the department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff will participate in a live moderated chat at USAToday.com. The online publication invites you to send in questions to Chertoff at their Talk Today website.

Chertoff is the author of Homeland Security: Assessing the First Five Years.

W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet--Now in Paperback

W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet
Edward J. Blum
288 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4010-8 | $39.95 | £26.00
Paper 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2086-5 | $22.50 | £15.00
A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series

"This book is a marvelous probing into the unknown and unexplored dimension of the great W. E. B. Du Bois's life and work: his self-styled religious and spiritual temperament. Edward Blum is to be congratulated for this grand contribution!"--Cornel West, Princeton University

"Blum's work powerfully evokes both the spirit and substance of Du Bois's moral vision in ways that will greatly benefit students and scholars of American religious and intellectual history for years to come."--Journal of American History

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

The Literary Market--Now Available

The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime
Geoffrey Turnovsky
280 pages | 6 x 9 | none
Cloth Nov 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4195-2 | $59.95 | £39.00
A volume in the Material Texts series

This study offers a new reading of the development of modern authorship in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, through a detailed reexamination of one of the central mythologies of this evolution: the author's passage from dependence on patronage to the autonomy of the market.

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

Traitors--Now Available

Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building
Edited by Sharika Thiranagama and Tobias Kelly
280 pages | 6 x 9 | 8 illus.
Cloth Nov 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4213-3 | $45.00 | £29.50

This volume examines political, ethnic, and personal trust and betrayals in modern times from Mozambique to the Taiwan Straits, from the former Eastern Bloc to the West Bank, revealing that treachery is a constant and essential part of the processes through which social and political order is reproduced.

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

Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction--Now Available

Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Edited by David Suisman and Susan Strasser
336 pages | 6 x 9 | 13 illus.
Cloth  2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4199-0 | $49.95 | £32.50
A volume in the Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture series

Scholars investigate sound as part of the social construction of historical experience and as an element of the sensory relationship people have to the world, showing how hearing and listening can inform people's feelings, ideas, decisions, and actions.

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

Everyday Nationalism--Now Available

Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India
Kalyani Devaki Menon
272 pages | 6 x 9 | 4 illus.
Cloth Nov 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4196-9 | $49.95 | £32.50
A volume in the Ethnography of Political Violence series

This ethnography analyzes the popularity of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India through examining the everyday acts of women activists, finding that women's ability to recruit individuals from a variety of backgrounds and the movement's willingness to accommodate a multiplicity of positions are central to understanding its expansionary power.

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