The University of Chicago Press is pleased to announce the launch of Chicago Scholarship Online. This collaborative effort between the University of Chicago Press and Oxford University Press will deliver Chicago titles to scholars and researchers around the world through the University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO) platform.

“Because the reading and library landscape has changed so dramatically in the past decade, Chicago is always looking for new ways to have our books available in the places and platforms where scholars want to use them,” says Garrett Kiely, director of the University of Chicago Press. “We are confident that our collaborative effort will support our core mission to make the work of Chicago authors as visible and widely available as possible.”

Chicago monographs in a range of disciplines from biology, sociology, and economics to literature and education, are newly available to libraries through the UPSO platform, and more disciplines will be added over time. Developed in response to increased demand for digital scholarly content, UPSO streamlines research by making monographs easily accessible, highly discoverable, and fully cross-searchable via one powerful online platform. Library Journal named UPSO “A must-have database for every academic library and many public and special libraries as well.”

Chicago . . .

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For much of the twentieth century, Americans had a love/hate relationship with France. While many admired its beauty, culture, refinement, and famed joie de vivre, others thought of it as a dilapidated country populated by foul-smelling, mean-spirited anti-Americans driven by a keen desire to part tourists from their money. We’ll Always Have Paris explores how both images came to flourish in the United States, often in the minds of the same people—and for the month of August only, you can download it free from the University of Chicago Press website.

Read an excerpt.

Check back each month for more free e-books from the University of Chicago Press or for all our currently available e-books, see our complete list of e-books by subject.

E-books from the University of Chicago Press are offered in Adobe Digital Editions format for Mac, PC, and a number of mobile devices such as the Sony Reader, IREX, BeBook, and more. Check out these links to find out more about Adobe Digital Editions or more about e-books from the University of Chicago Press.

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Joseph Leo Koerner, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and the author of The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art and The Reformation of the Image, has been awarded one of three Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Awards for 2009. The awards, which include a hefty cash prize of up to $1.5 million each, “honor scholars who have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry and enable them to teach and do research under especially favorable conditions while enlarging opportunities for scholarship and teaching at the academic institutions with which they are affiliated.”

You can find the official press release at the Andrew W. Mellon website.

More about Koerner’s books:

The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art

In this groundbreaking and elegantly written study, Joseph Koerner establishes the character of Renaissance art in Germany. Opening up new modes of inquiry for historians of art and early modern Europe, Koerner examines how artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien reflected in their masterworks the changing status of the self in sixteenth-century Germany.

The Reformation of the Image

Martin Luther preached the radical notion that we are saved . . .

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If you missed our one-day-only free download of Mark Monmonier’s newest book, No Dig, No Fly, No Go, not to worry. Starting today and for the rest of the month you have another chance to sample the fascinating work of this prolific author/geographer with a Monmonier classic, Cartographies of Danger: Mapping Hazards in America—May’s free e-book of the month.

About the book:

No place is perfectly safe, but some places are more dangerous than others. Whether we live on a floodplain or in “Tornado Alley,” near a nuclear facility or in a neighborhood poorly lit at night, we all co-exist uneasily with natural and man-made hazards. As Mark Monmonier shows in this entertaining and immensely informative book, maps can tell us a lot about where we can anticipate certain hazards, but they can also be dangerously misleading.

“No one should buy a home, rent an apartment, or even drink the local water without having read this fascinating cartographic alert on the dangers that lurk in our everyday lives.… Who has not asked where it is safe to live? Cartographies of Danger provides the answer.”—H. J. de Blij, NBC News

Also read Monmonier’s list of ten risky places.

E-books from . . .

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