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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Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror
In the early 1990s, false reports of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait allowing premature infants to die by removing them from their incubators helped to justify the Persian Gulf War, just as spurious reports of weapons of mass destruction later undergirded support for the Iraq War in 2003. In The Discourse of Propaganda, ......
This study analyzes the impact of color-making technologies on the visual culture of nineteenth-century France, from the early commercialization of synthetic dyes to the Lumière brothers' perfection of the autochrome color photography process. Focusing on Impressionist art, Laura Anne Kalba examines the importance of dyes produced in the ......
How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It)
Examines how journalists have portrayed electoral participation in the United States. The authors analyze depictions of voters in print news coverage over the course of eighteen presidential elections (1948–2016), describe people's reactions to those depictions, and share insights from their interviews with more than fifty elite ......
A photographic essay and narrative documenting the value, ecology, and importance of hemlock and beech trees in eastern North America. Describes the pests and pathogens that are killing them, and addresses solutions that are being sought by scientists and resource stewards.
Examines commonplace conflicting beliefs that technology will either annihilate humanity or preserve humanity from annihilation. Argues that the paradoxical capacities of weapons influence how humanity understands violent ......
Examines the rhetorical function of Isaiah 28–35, a series of six woe oracles, in relation to reading the book of Isaiah as a whole. Explores the use of the language of agrarian wisdom to transport the reader from prior reflections on historical destruction into a vision of ultimate hope.
The Royal Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III (744–727 BC) and Shalmaneser V (726–722 BC), Kings of Assyria (Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period 1) carries on where the Assyrian Periods sub-series of the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) Project ended. The volume provides reliable, up-to-date editions of ......
We all live our daily lives surrounded by the products of technology that make what we do simpler, faster, and more efficient. These are benefits we often just take for granted. But at the same time, as these products disburden us of unwanted tasks that consumed much time and effort in earlier eras, many of them also leave us more disengaged ......
Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship
In this study of the relationship between men and their horses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Monica Mattfeld explores the experience of horsemanship and how it defined one's gendered and political positions within society.
Men of the period used horses to transform themselves, via the image of the centaur, into ......
