Unlocked Book of the Month: History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States

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 February pick:

First published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1818, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations provides an account of the Lenni Lenape and other tribes in the mid-Atlantic region, looking at their history and relations with other tribes and settlers, as well as their spiritual beliefs, government and politics, education, language, social institutions, dress, food, and other customs. The text, written by the Reverend John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary based in Ohio and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, includes the author’s observations, anecdotes, and advice, preserving not only his knowledge about the Indian nations in the eighteenth century but also his perspective, as a missionary and settler, on Native Americans and the often-fraught relationships between the tribes and European settlers. This version of the text, published in 1876, contains an introduction and notes by the Reverend William C. Reichel as well as a glossary of Lenape words and phrases and letters between the author and the then-president of the American Philosophical Society concerning the study of the Indian nations and their languages.

Read more & access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-06701-8.html

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

A Delicate Matter: An excerpt

What is the relationship between the exquisite delicacy of art and the debased flimsiness of disposable commodities? Few people today would deny that a distinction exists between these two forms of perishability. The Louvre may sit atop an enormous mall, but no one would confuse the art in the galleries with the fashionable goods in the basement shops. A world of difference separates, for example, the delicate brushstrokes of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s paintings from the latest season of trinkets and fragrances on display downstairs in the Fragonard perfumery. A painting by Fragonard such as The Warrior’s Dream of Love may, like perfume, conjure evanescent pleasure, but the museum ensures that we regard the fragility of the painting itself as much more than an expression of commercial ephemerality. When the museum’s informational brochure cautions us that “works of art are unique and fragile” and that “touching, even lightly” can cause irreparable harm, the warning makes no reference to market worth. The significance of art’s fragile materiality goes unspecified, but we are told that whatever unnamed essence it contains “must be preserved for future generations.” If the perishability of a commercial product reflects the fleetingness of fashion, then the fragility of art here stands for the opposite, representing something whose value transcends time.

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The author of Saint George Between Empires: Image and Encounter in the Medieval East discusses images of Saint George in the Medieval East, why this perspective is important, and more.

Why investigate images of Saint George during this period?

Saint George is one of the most revered saints in the Christian tradition, with devotees across the globe. For audiences in America and Europe, he is best known as the patron saint of England, a dragon slayer, and a paradigm of medieval chivalric ideas. Yet long before Saint George became a model of Christian knighthood in Europe, he was venerated as a warrior saint in the Eastern Mediterranean. By studying images of Saint George from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, I draw attention to the period in which he rose to global prominence. Not coincidentally, this period corresponds with the emergence of an integrated world system, which connected peoples across Afro-Eurasia via extensive trade networks. These routes enabled representations of Saint George to travel far and wide.

This is also the period in which Saint George acquired his most famous miracles, including his defeat of a dragon, rescue of a Christian captive, and intervention at the Battle of Antioch in 1098. Image makers developed new ways to represent Saint George that displayed his saintly talents, continuously redefining his significance in relation to their political, military, and devotional needs. Much of the imagery developed during this period is still in use today—including depictions of miracles that remain popular among East Christian communities but never gained a major audience in Western Europe and the Americas.

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The author of Show Me Where It Hurts: Manifesting Illness and Impairment in Graphic Pathography discusses the growing field of graphic pathography, its benefits, and more.

Why is graphic pathography such a fast-growing field, and how does it “work” for the drawing subject?

Graphic pathography allows subjects who have fallen ill or experienced a medical or clinical challenge to have their say—or rather, to draw their own representations. If the internal workings of the body disappear from consciousness when we are in good health, according to Drew Leder, their appearance as aches and pains during illness, I argue, invites artists to reenvision or revise Leder’s “recessed body.” Graphic pathography illustrates the experiences of illness, sometimes to critique a subject’s care and caregivers, other times to offer fresh perspectives on the effects of receiving chemotherapy, living with clinical depression, or struggling against anorexia, among many other experiences. Because the artists are freed from confining clinical representations to express themselves through the graphic line—one with infinite possibilities of showing what sometimes telling cannot achieve—graphic pathography invites aesthetic and personal responses by which others can learn and empathize. That medical schools increasingly are incorporating courses in graphic medicine, in addition to existing courses in narrative medicine (writing about one’s experiences of illness or impairment), teachers, students, and medical practitioners alike find that art can assist in healing.

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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:

Black Forest Souvenirs was inspired by Henry Shoemaker’s early experience in the Black Forest of Germany and the mystical draw of its vast expanse of hemlocks, spruces, and pines interspersed with lumbermen and roaming wildlife. On trips to Clinton, Potter, McKean, and Lycoming Counties in Pennsylvania between 1899 and 1902, Shoemaker discovered forests still intact, evoking the romantic ideal of the German Schwarzwald. However, upon returning to the mountains five years later, he found these forests desolated by the logging industry, practically a ruin—a vision far from the romanticized wilderness he had encountered early in life. This destruction inspired Shoemaker to attempt to preserve the region’s folklore, recording stories and tales told by elderly residents of the area. Traversing the line between fact and fiction, Black Forest Souvenirs reveals a pristine landscape preserved in the minds of its people.

This collection of legends from the northern regions of the state was originally printed by the Bright-Faust Printing Company in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1914 and includes photographs by William T. Clarke.

Read more & access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-05644-9.html

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

The author of New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century discusses how women have used humor as social critique, the relationship of women of wit to feminism, and more.

How has humor been used by women and other marginalized groups as an indirect form of social critique?

Humor offers women and other marginalized groups an effective way to mask their criticism through the socially acceptable form of laughter. Satire, in particular, is often used by outsiders to voice protest against dominant racial, class, and gender norms and social stereotypes. The female satirist is in a unique position as somewhat of an outsider operating within mainstream society; this dual perspective shapes the often ironic, double-voiced, or dialogical nature of much of women’s humor. The aggressive posture of the satirist, however, is often seen as being “unfeminine” and is one reason why women’s humor has been overlooked and even resisted. For many of these women writers, the double-voiced irony of humor as well as the female self-fashioning of their appearances offers a necessary masking of their subversive messages in order to have their voices heard.

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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 November pick:

The Occitan literary tradition of the later Middle Ages is a marginal and hybrid phenomenon, caught between the preeminence of French courtly romance and the emergence of Catalan literary prose. In this book, Catherine Léglu brings together, for the first time in English, prose and verse texts that are composed in Occitan, French, and Catalan-sometimes in a mixture of two of these languages. This book challenges the centrality of “canonical” texts and draws attention to the marginal, the complex, and the hybrid. It explores the varied ways in which literary works in the vernacular composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries narrate multilingualism and its apparent opponent, the mother tongue. Léglu argues that the mother tongue remains a fantasy, condemned to alienation from linguistic practices that were, by definition, multilingual. As most of the texts studied in this book are works of courtly literature, these linguistic encounters are often narrated indirectly, through literary motifs of love, rape, incest, disguise, and travel.

Read more & access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03672-4.html

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

Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland, editors of Aromas of Asia, discuss anosmia as it relates to the COVID-19 pandemic, the tricky nature of olfaction, and where the phenomenon of smell as transnational exchange began.

Of the many serious, and still emerging, impacts of infection with COVID-19, anosmia, or a loss of the sense of smell, is less often discussed. Yet the condition is said to affect almost half of all diagnosed patients, and although most people regain olfaction within a month, for some, anosmia lingers, transforming how they eat, drink, and interact with the world. People may also experience a condition of paranosmia, or phantom, and often unpleasant, smells. 

In the introduction to our new interdisciplinary edited collection, Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats, we discuss how this phenomenon speaks to the tricky nature of olfaction: its profound impact in shaping one’s everyday experience of the world and the popular dismissal of its significance. For, perhaps it is only in losing a sense that we are troubled and thus realise its significance. Anosmia is a condition that demonstrates how smell (or its lack) moves between bodies and traverses scales, as an intimate, personal experience of the world created by the transnational movement of pathogens within a global pandemic.

Smell is thus a particularly generative phenomenon to draw upon when theorizing the dynamics of transnational exchange. And this particular transnational exchange of the pandemic, of course, began in Asia.

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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 October pick:

Originally published in 1906 within the Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society, this volume contains the names, gravesite locations, and available personal details for 1,219 people interred at the Moravian graveyard in Lititz, Pennsylvania, between 1758 and 1905. Also included are 181 names of those interred at Saint James Graveyard in Lititz between the years 1744 and 1812. A map of the primary graveyard and a comprehensive name index add to the volume’s accessibility as a guide for visits and research.

Read more & access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-06037-8.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:

In Pennsylvania Railroad, William Sipes provides a detailed history of the railroad, its construction, its management, and its various lines and their stations, starting with the first experimental track laid down in 1809 in Delaware County and continuing with the railroad’s westward expansion across the state. Sipes discusses the attractions and history of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s destinations, including landmarks in Philadelphia, Lancaster, Altoona, Pittsburgh, New York, and New Jersey. Published in 1875, this book explores the world of transportation in the nineteenth century and takes its readers on an informative journey through the state of Pennsylvania, following the trajectory of its railroad’s development.

Read more & access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-06541-0.html

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