Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our December pick:

The urban renewal policies stemming from the 1954 Housing Act and 1956 Highway Act destroyed the economic centers of many Black neighborhoods in the United States. Struggle for the City recovers the agency and solidarity of African American residents confronting this diagnosis of “blight” in northern cities in the 1950s and 1960s.

Examining Black newspapers, archival documents from Black organizations, and oral histories of community advocates, Derek G. Handley shows how African American residents in three communities—the Hill district of Pittsburgh, the Bronzeville neighborhood of Milwaukee, and the Rondo district of St. Paul—enacted a new form of citizenship to fight for their neighborhoods. Dubbing this the “Black Rhetorical Citizenship,” a nod to the integral role of language and other symbolic means in the Black Freedom Movement, Handley situates citizenship as both a site of resistance and a mode of public engagement that cannot be divorced from race and the effects of racism. Through this framework, Struggle for the City demonstrates how local organizers, leaders, and residents used rhetorics of placemaking, community organizing, and critical memory to resist the bulldozing visions of urban renewal.

By showing how African American residents built political community at the local level and by centering the residents in their own narratives of displacement, Handley recovers strategies of resistance that continue to influence the actions of the Black Freedom Movement, including Black Lives Matter.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09775-6.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our September pick:

Ellen Sapega’s study documents artistic responses to images of the Portuguese nation promoted by Portugal’s Office of State Propaganda under António de Oliveira Salazar. Combining archival research with current theories informing the areas of memory studies, visual culture, women’s autobiography, and postcolonial studies, the author follows the trajectory of three well-known cultural figures working in Portugal and its colonies during the 1930s and 1940s.

The book begins with an analysis of official Salazarist culture as manifested in two state-sponsored commemorative events: the 1938 contest to discover the “Most Portuguese Village in Portugal” and the 1940 Exposition of the Portuguese-Speaking World. While these events fulfilled their role as state propaganda, presenting a patriotic and unambiguous view of Portugal’s past and present, other cultural projects of the day pointed to contradictions inherent in the nation’s social fabric. In their responses to the challenging conditions faced by writers and artists during this period and the government’s relentless promotion of an increasingly conservative and traditionalist image of Portugal, José de Almada Negreiros, Irene Lisboa, and Baltasar Lopes subtly proposed revisions and alternatives to official views of Portuguese experience.

These authors questioned and rewrote the metaphors of collective Portuguese and Lusophone identity employed by the ideologues of Salazar’s Estado Novo regime to ensure and administer the consent of the national populace. It is evident, today, that their efforts resulted in the creation of vital, enduring texts and cultural artifacts.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03410-2.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

Unlocked Book of the Month: Falckner's Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our August pick:

Originally circulated in Germany, Daniel Falckner’s Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania was one in a wave of pamphlets about the American colonies disseminated in Europe during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It stood alongside influential works by Penn and Pastorius that were circulated among Pietists and other groups to raise awareness in Europe about the practical and spiritual climates in Pennsylvania. Falckner’s pamphlet, in particular, was used in a promotional manner and utilizes a question-and-answer format, addressing everything from how to plan for a voyage to America to common professions for Europeans in the New World, dealings with the native population, seasonal climate, and hundreds of other issues.

This translation of Curieuse Nachricht, first published by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1905, includes introductory chapters and annotations by Julius Sachse. The English translation and original German text appear on facing pages, and annotations examine the differences between an original manuscript and the version widely distributed by the Frankfort Company, a group of Pennsylvania land investors, in 1702.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-05384-4.html

See the list of full Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

The author of The Declaration in Script and Print discusses Independence Day, the Declaration of Independence as an iconic document, and more.

Why do we celebrate independence on July 4th even though Congress voted for independence on July 2nd?

The date we have chosen for Independence Day depends on a document. By all rights we should be celebrating the day when the United States became an independent nation—July 2, 1776—when the Continental Congress adopted Richard Henry Lee’s resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” John Adams predicted that July 2nd would be the national anniversary, a day marked with parades, bonfires, bell ringing, gun salutes, and “illuminations” of houses with candles in the windows. Adams was wrong, however, because he did not foresee the emotional impact of the official announcement, a broadside printed two days later with the title In Congress, July 4, 1776. A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled. The date in the title is one reason why July 4th prevailed over July 2nd. But above all Americans cherished the text, an eloquent expression of fundamental rights based on principles of liberty, justice, and equality. Historians have traced its origins, its changing reputation, and its influence at home and abroad. I too have noted how it has been variously interpreted, but mainly I wish to show how it has been visualized, how it appeared in engravings, lithographs, and letterpress broadsides during the nineteenth century. I identify about two hundred prints and broadsides in The Declaration in Script and Print, expensive engravings suitable for framing as well as cheap stereotype keepsakes aimed at the bottom of the market. Starting with an innovative advertising campaign in 1816, I describe the merchandising tactics of artists, printers, and publishers who played on a surge of patriotic sentiment to promote their wares. In the same spirit, Penn State University Press has selected July 4th to be the release date for my book.

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Unlocked Book of the Month: Territories of History

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our July pick:

Sarah H. Beckjord’s Territories of History explores the vigorous but largely unacknowledged spirit of reflection, debate, and experimentation present in foundational Spanish American writing. In historical works by writers such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Beckjord argues, the authors were not only informed by the spirit of inquiry present in the humanist tradition but also drew heavily from their encounters with New World peoples. More specifically, their attempts to distinguish superstition and magic from science and religion in the New World significantly influenced the aforementioned chroniclers, who increasingly directed their insights away from the description of native peoples and toward a reflection on the nature of truth, rhetoric, and fiction in writing history.

Due to a convergence of often contradictory information from a variety of sources—eyewitness accounts, historiography, imaginative literature, as well as broader philosophical and theological influences—categorizing historical texts from this period poses no easy task, but Beckjord sifts through the information in an effective, logical manner. At the heart of Beckjord’s study, though, is a fundamental philosophical problem: the slippery nature of truth—especially when dictated by stories. Territories of History engages both a body of emerging scholarship on early modern epistemology and empiricism and recent developments in narrative theory to illuminate the importance of these colonial authors’ critical insights. In highlighting the parallels between the sixteenth-century debates and poststructuralist approaches to the study of history, Beckjord uncovers an important legacy of the Hispanic intellectual tradition and updates the study of colonial historiography in view of recent discussions of narrative theory.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03278-8.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

A Black Philadelphia Reader: An exerpt

The common date given for the settlement of Philadelphia is 1682, when William Penn established a Quaker colony, providing it with a name that means “one who loves his brother.” Penn intended an idyllic “greene country towne,” one that was well ordered, with large open spaces within its twelve hundred acres. It “was the first major American town to be planned.” Penn envisioned his “towne” as a place of freedom, particularly in terms of religion. As with a certain amount of history, much of this is myth. The land, of course, had been settled by the Lenape Indians long before the Europeans arrived. Additionally, Penn’s “greene country towne” soon became a highly congested city, plagued by disease, crime, and fires. Its vaunted freedom was largely limited to White Protestants, and its “brotherly love” certainly did not extend to most immigrants, to non-Christians, or, in particular, to its Black residents.

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Thomas J. Baldino and Paula A. Duda Holoviak, the authors of Pennsylvania Government and Politics, discuss the divided Pennsylvania government, counting votes, and more.

As we were completing our book, Pennsylvania’s and the nation’s political systems experienced two events that individually would have presented a significant challenge to their governments’ stability but occurring simultaneously shook the very foundations of both. We refer to the COVID pandemic and 2020 presidential election. It seemed only fitting that we ask what effects, if any, these events had on the Keystone State’s government.

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Unlocked Book of the Month: Pennsylvania Lion or Panther & Felis Catus in Pennsylvania?

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our June pick:

This Metalmark volume combines two of Henry W. Shoemaker’s pamphlets, both published by Shoemaker’s Times Tribune Co., which also published his newspaper, the Altoona Tribune. Pennsylvania Lion or Panther, published in 1914, provides a narrative look into the history and romance of Pennsylvania’s mountain lion. Hunting lore and legends mix with local and natural history and Shoemaker’s musings on the disappearance of this once prevalent animal. The pages are dedicated to J. T. Rothrock, whose description of the mountain lion’s haunting cry graces the pages of this text. The second pamphlet, Felis Catus in Pennsylvania?, gathers reports of the 1922 capture of a wildcat in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which many speculated was a European wildcat.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-02267-3.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

The Four Shakespeare Folios, 1623–2023: An excerpt

The word folio appears only once in Shakespeare’s plays. In the final lines of the first act of Love’s Labour’s Lost, a comedy, Don Adriano de Armado invokes the instruments of his literary art: “Devise wit, write pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio.” The reference is not a flattering one. Armado is a braggart, enamored of his own stilted way of speaking, and his oath to fill folios with the strained devising of his wit is not one we hope he keeps. The irony is that a play concerned with literary fame—that elusive object that can “make us heirs of all eternity,” according to the King (1.1.7)—puts folio, the word perhaps most closely tied to Shakespeare’s own literary legacy, in the mouth of one of Shakespeare’s most mercilessly rendered fools.

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Where the Grass Still Sings: An excerpt

As a child, I thought of all living creatures as part of my extended family. Several years after my father left my mother, and a month after her artist’s residency in Colorado had come to an end, my mother took her two daughters—my little sister, Anna, six, and me, eleven—and her dog back to the Midwest, where she had lived when she was still married. Life in cooperative art centers had been rich in many ways but did not produce much money, so when some friends offered to let us live in a barn on one of their unused properties, she took it. At the time, I did not realize that we were living in poverty. Poverty was never something I really thought about as a child. Owing largely to my mother’s ingenuity, my life seemed rich in many nonmonetary ways. The reality I lived in was the only one I knew, and so it never struck me as unusual, and certainly not sad, though when I tell stories to my daughter now, she often uses those words. But my mother has a shining, relentlessly optimistic spirit, and to her, living in a barn seemed like a rare opportunity to experience something unique and adventurous—and its being free made it especially attractive. So we moved into the barn.

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