NBN Book of the Day

With rigorous scrutiny and deep care, Robin Hansen's Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadow (U Regina Press, 2024) offers crucial insight into the intersections of ongoing colonial harms facing Indigenous mothers in Canada. Building from an unplanned call to Hansen from a pregnant, incarcerated Indigenous woman in 2016, Prison Born highlights how custodial prison sentence...

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium an...

Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of perpetual peace in the global order decisively influenced both intellectual history and twentieth-century politics, shaping everything from the German Constitution to the United Nations Charter. Renowned philosopher Marcus Willaschek explains why,...

Is traditional American religion doomed? Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of Americans identifying as "not religious" has increased remarkably. Religious affiliation, service attendance, and belief in God have declined. More and more people claim to be "spiritual but not religious." Religious organizations have been reeling from reve...

Today we are joined by David Fleming, Peabody-nominated correspondent for Meadowlark Media, longtime ESPN senior writer, and author of A Big Mess in Texas: The Miraculous, Disastrous 1952 Dallas Texans and The Craziest Untold Story in NFL History (St. Martin’s Press, 2025). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of the infamous (but also surprisingly un-famous) Dallas Texans, the club’s dis...

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild's contention that French is a "modern-day Copernicus." The title--referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies...

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Japan sent its first diplomatic delegations to visit the popes and dignitaries of Europe. European artists portrayed these historic ambassadors—the Tenshō embassy (1582–90) and the Keichō embassy (1613–20)—in numerous oil paintings, frescoes, drawings, and prints. Envisioning Diplomacy: Japanese Ambassadors in Early Modern Europe (Pennsylvania...

Welfare Work Without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) argues that women activists, wage workers, and homemakers in the Romanian capital Bucharest became de facto social workers in the interwar period through their "austerity welfare work". Revealing links and tensions between the performers of different types of underpaid or unpaid austerity welfar...

The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by upper-class patrons broke down entirely. In its place, Maddalena Alvi argues, can be found the origins of a recognizably modern market of nationalized spheres driven by capitalist inv...

Black women comedians are more visible than ever, performing around the world in physical venues like comedy clubs and festivals, along with appearing in films, streaming specials, and online videos. Across these mediums, humor—and particularly sass—functions as a tool for Black women to articulate and redress cultural, social, and political marginalization. In Sass: Black Women's Humor and Human...

Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet (Cornell University Press, 2025) concerns the Tibetan Buddhist revival in China, illustrating the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns and exploring the political effects that arise from their nonpolitical daily engagements in the remote, mega-sized Tibetan Buddhist encampment of Yachen Gar. Yasmin Cho's book chal...

In Appropriated Tales: Race and the Disney Fairy-Tale Mode (Wayne State UP, 2025), scholar Michelle Anya Anjirbag examines Disney's method of fairy-tale storytelling to determine how the corporation has shaped public understanding of what fairy tales are and who belongs within them. Covering a span of years "from mermaid to mermaid"—from the 1989 animated The Little Mermaid to the 2023 live-actio...

“A lot of things become possible when [the nation state] is not the only framework,” Melissa Byrnes reminds us in this deeply intimate local history of North African migrants in France. In this conversation about her new book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon (U Nebraska Press, 2024) we learn about how questions Byrnes had about how we...

Medieval Europe was preoccupied with magic. From the Carolingian Empire to Renaissance Italy and Tudor England, great rulers, religious figures, and scholars sought to harness supernatural power. They tried to summon spirits, predict the future, and even prolong life. Alongside science and religion, magic lay at the very heart of culture. In this beautifully illustrated account The Magic Books: A...

Beginning in the 1970s, a series of government agencies established to carry out the federal “war on crime” offered financial and ideological support to the fledgling feminist movement against sexual violence. These entities promoted the carceral tactics of policing, prosecution, and punishment as the only viable means of controlling rape, and they expected anti-rape organizers to embrace them. Ye...

Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of Hollywood's role in the shaping of the Rust Belt in the United States. During the 1970s and 1980s, filmic representations of shuttered auto plants, furloughed millworkers, and decaying downtowns in the industrial heartland contributed to pervasive narratives of American malaise and decline--informing the...

A spectacular graphic novel about the life and times of the legendary Fela Kuti—the Pan-African frontman, multi-instrumentalist, sociopolitical powerhouse, and father of Afrobeat. In Fela: Music Is the Weapon (Amistad, 2025), artist Jibola Fagbamiye and writer Conor McCreery team up to tell the remarkable origin story of one of Nigeria’s most famous sons, the King of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, who rose...

Exploring 500 years of protest and resistance in US history—and how its force is foundational and can empower us to navigate our chaotic world In this timely new book in Beacon’s successful ReVisioning History series, professor Gloria Browne-Marshall delves into the history of protest movements and rebellion in the United States. Beginning with Indigenous peoples’ resistance to European colonizati...

Analyzing dress, costume, and fashion in Puerto Rico, Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico: Taínos to Beauty Queens (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. José Blanco F. & Raúl J. Vázquez-López utilizes case studies that explore national identity and nation formation as well as past and current practices in Puerto Rican visual culture. As the last Spanish-speaking colony with an ever-growing di...

When they gazed at the moon, medieval people around the globe saw an object that was at once powerful and fragile, distant and intimate—and sometimes all this at once. The moon could convey love, beauty, and gentleness; but it could also be about pain, hatred, and violence. In its circularity the moon was associated with fullness and fertility. Yet in its crescent and other shifting forms, the moo...

The way we govern the past to ensure peaceful futures keeps conflict anxieties alive. In pursuit of its own survival, permanence and legitimacy, the project of transitional justice, designed to put the 'Never Again' promise into practice, makes communities that ought to benefit from it anxious about potential repetition of conflict. Governing the Past: 'Never Again' and the Transitional Justice Pr...

By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato—indigenous to the Americas—had become Egypt's top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuisine. The tomato brought together domestic consumers, cookbook readers, and home cooks through a shared culinary culture that sometimes transcended differences of class, region, gender, and ethnicity—and sometimes reinforced them. In Nile Nightshade: An E...

Rebind combines reading with AI-chat to deepen learning and simulate the experience of conversing with some of the greatest scholars and thinkers. With Rebind, you can read A Tale of Two Cities with Margaret Atwood, Huck Finn with Marlon James, and Candide with Salman Rushdie. John and his team have recently launched the Rebind Study Bible, an interactive way to read, listen, and interpret the Bib...

King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father (Harvard UP, 2023) is a rollicking portrait of the paradoxical patriot, whose measured pragmatism helped make American independence a reality. Americans are surprisingly more familiar with his famous signature than with the man himself. In this spirited account of John Hancock's life, Brooke Barbier depicts a patriot of fascinating...

In September 2025 the Dutch government announced that it would return to Indonesia the fossilized remains of the famous ‘Java Man’, the first known example of an early species of human, homo erectus. The remains had been uncovered by a Dutch archaeologist in 1891-2 during the colonial period and taken to the Netherlands. In fact, Southeast Asia has a special place in the history of human evolution...