Founded in 1956, Penn State University Press publishes rigorously reviewed, high-quality works of scholarship and books of regional and contemporary interest, with a focus on the humanities and social sciences. The publishing arm of the Pennsylvania State University and a division of the Penn State University Libraries, the Press promotes the advance of scholarship by disseminating knowledge—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—widely in books, journals, and digital publications.
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Since its beginnings, art history has turned on the power of artists' names. Exhibitions, galleries, and books revolve around them, and artists' personas continue to captivate audiences. Medieval art, however, has long been cast as an exception-a world thought to lack known makers, where piety eclipsed personality and anonymous craftspeople served ......
This volume presents the official report of the 2008 excavation season at Tall al-?Umayri, a key settlement for understanding the Bronze and Iron Ages in western Jordan. Part of the long-running Madaba Plains Project, it documents the discoveries, methods, and personnel of that summer's fieldwork while situating them within the project's broader ......
Few artists were as determined to shape their own legacy as James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Fiercely protective of his reputation, he denounced would-be biographers, published The Gentle Art of Making Enemies as his own autobiography, and destroyed works he thought unworthy of his genius, declaring more than once that "to destroy is to survive." ......
Encounters with the Angel of Death in Islamicate Thought and Culture
The archangel Azrael enforces the divine command that all living things must return to God in death. The very word islam implies submission to God's will, and yet Muslim saints, prophets, and sorcerers used charisma, magic squares, and their bare hands to defy Azrael and extend their lives on earth. Their efforts reveal tension between the ......
All his life, Chad Anderson was told he was broken. He believed with all his heart that being a good Mormon would make him straight, because that is what was promised. Chad followed the prescribed road map: mission, marriage, and children. But it didn't make him happy, and it didn't make him straight. For Chad, coming out meant losing everything ......
Urban Design and Environmental Change in Tenochtitlan-Mexico City
For centuries, both the Aztec and the Spanish sought to control catastrophic flooding in Tenochtitlan and later Mexico City, but their responses were about more than just engineering. What might seem like straightforward hydraulic projects emerge, under rigorous examination, as complex intersections of visual cultures and philosophical worldviews ......
Accused of treason four times by three governments, William Rotch led a harrowing life. A Quaker merchant in the Age of Revolution, he refused to fight for either independence or empire. To governments and neighbors, his pacifism looked like treachery. As he fled from Nantucket to France to Britain and back again, Rotch suffered looting, ......
Accused of treason four times by three governments, William Rotch led a harrowing life. A Quaker merchant in the Age of Revolution, he refused to fight for either independence or empire. To governments and neighbors, his pacifism looked like treachery. As he fled from Nantucket to France to Britain and back again, Rotch suffered looting, ......
The Conquest That Never Was uncovers one of the most ambitious but disastrous campaigns of the early colonial period. Pedro de Alvarado-best known as Cortes's lieutenant in Mexico and later as the conqueror of Guatemala-sought to extend his fame and fortune by seizing Quito in the northern Inca Empire. Instead, his massive fleet and army met ruin ......
