Author: Marshall Poe

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NBN Book of the Day - Andrew Fialka, “Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War” (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Fialka illustrates two exceptional incidents of occupational and guerrilla violence in Missouri during the American Civil War. The first is a Union spy's two-week-long murder spree targeting civilians, and the second is a pro-Confederate guerrillas' mutilation of almost 150 U.S. troops.
The men leading the atrocities (Jacob Terman, alias Harry Truman, and “Bloody" Bill Anderson) weren't so different. Both the Union spy and the infamous Confederate guerrilla claimed to be avenging the deaths of their families, operated under orders from military officials, and were hard drinkers. Their acts outline the terror inflicted on both sides of the struggle.
This book's use of sequential art, illustrated by Anderson Carman, displays these grisly realities to mute the war's glorification and to help prompt a modern, meaningful reconciliation with the war. The moral ambiguities contained within this story call into question our understanding of the laws of war and the ways in which wars end.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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NBN Book of the Day - Elizabeth White, “A Modern History of Russian Childhood: From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union” (Bloomsbury, 2020)

A Modern History of Russian Childhood: From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Bloomsbury, 2020) examines the changes and continuities in ideas about Russian childhood from the 18th to the 21st century. It looks at how children were thought about and treated in Russian and Soviet culture, as well as how the radical social, political and economic changes across the period affected children. It explains how and why childhood became a key concept both in Late Imperial Russia and in the Soviet Union and looks at similarities and differences to models of childhood elsewhere.
Focusing mainly on children in families, telling us much about Russian and Soviet family life in the process, Elizabeth White combines theoretical ideas about childhood with examples of real, lived experiences of children to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject. The book also offers a comprehensive synthesis of a wide range of secondary sources in English and Russian whilst utilizing various textual primary sources as part of the discussion.
This book is key reading for anyone wanting to understand the social and cultural history of Russia as well as the history of childhood in the modern world.

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NBN Book of the Day - Tracy Slater, “Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp” (Chicago Review Press, 2025)

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced Executive Order 9066, which authorized the confinement of tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the Western U.S., sending them to cramped, hastily-constructed camps like Manzanar and Amache. 

One such Japanese-American was Karl Yoneda, a well-known labor activist–and the husband of Elaine Yoneda, a Jewish-American woman. Elaine soon followed her husband to the Manzanar camp, after authorities threatened to send her three-year-old mixed-race son, Thomas, to the camp alone. 

The Yonedas time in the camp is the subject of Tracy Slater’s book, Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp (Chicago Review Press, 2025)

Tracy is a Jewish American writer from Boston, based in her husband’s country of Japan. Her previous book was the mixed-marriage memoir The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2015). She has also published work in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time’s Made by History, and more.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Together in Manzanar. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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NBN Book of the Day - George Musser, “Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe” (Picador, 2024)

A revelatory exploration of how a “theory of everything” depends upon our understanding of the human mind.
The whole goal of physics is to explain what we observe. For centuries, physicists believed that observations yielded faithful representations of what is out there. But when they began to study the subatomic realm, they found that observation often interferes with what is being observed—that the act of seeing changes what we see. The same is true of cosmology: our view of the universe is inevitably distorted by observation bias. And so whether they’re studying subatomic particles or galaxies, physicists must first explain consciousness—and for that they must turn to neuroscientists and philosophers of mind.
Neuroscientists have painstakingly built up an understanding of the structure of the brain. Could this help physicists understand the levels of self-organization they observe in other systems? These same physicists, meanwhile, are trying to explain how particles organize themselves into the objects around us. Could their discoveries help explain how neurons produce our conscious experience?
Exploring these questions and more in Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe (Picador, 2024), George Musser tackles the extraordinary interconnections between quantum mechanics, cosmology, human consciousness, and artificial intelligence. Combining vivid descriptive writing with portraits of scientists working on the cutting edge, Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation shows how theories of everything depend on theories of mind—and how they might be one and the same.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Armand Lione, “Native American History of Washington, DC” (History Press, 2023)

Native American History of Washington, DC (History Press, 2023) by Dr. Armand Lione is a comprehensive recounting at the overlooked history of the Indigenous people who lived in the area for many years before the arrival of colonists. The book, dedicated to increasing public awareness of this history, aims to fill the historical gap that has long been ignored in the nation's capital. Lione, a toxicologist and historian, began his research after being inspired by the public acknowledgment of Indigenous people in Melbourne, Australia.

The book's central argument is that the history of Native Americans in Washington, DC, has been essentially "overlooked" or "erased from public view". Lione's research debunks the common "myth of a swamp," which suggests the land was empty before the capital was founded. Instead, he presents extensive evidence of a rich Native presence, focusing on the Anacostan people of the Piscataway tribe.

The author meticulously documents numerous archaeological sites and artifacts found throughout the city. These findings prove that the land was inhabited for centuries. Highlights include:

  • The Native Village Near the Capitol: The book details the findings of archaeologist Samuel Vincent Proudfit, who in the 1880s identified a Native village site just five blocks from the U.S. Capitol, on land that became Garfield Park and the Daniel Carroll estate.
  • The White House Grounds: In the 1970s, construction for a new swimming pool on the White House grounds uncovered seventeen Native American artifacts, including quartzite points and pottery fragments.
  • A High-Status Burial in Foggy Bottom: Archaeological digs for a new highway ramp in 1997 revealed three significant Native sites, including a burial pit with the cremated remains and grave goods of a high-status woman from about 1,200 years ago. This is described as "The most significant prehistoric discovery in the city of Washington".
  • Anacostia-Bolling Military Base: Lione pinpoints the Anacostan chief's village and a Native burial ground to the area that is now the Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. In 1936, two ossuaries (common burial sites) containing the remains of about 130 individuals were found during airfield expansion.
  • Native Quarries in Northwest DC: The book details two major Native quarries in northwest DC: the Piney Branch Quartzite Quarry and the Rose Hill Soapstone Quarry, where Native Americans worked stone for tools and pots for thousands of years.

Lione also explores the historical record of the Anacostans, explaining how their name was derived from a linguistic mistake by English settlers and how the tribe was a hub of traders. The book introduces Henry Fleete, a young English settler who lived with the Anacostans for five years in the 1620s and returned with fluency in their language, later becoming a successful trader.

In the epilogue, Lione asks why this rich history has been overlooked. He suggests that a mix of indifference, an underlying shame about colonial history, and a lack of public markers are to blame. The author advocates for actionable steps, such as using Native land acknowledgments, teaching this history in schools, and supporting local Piscataway tribes through donations and land trusts. He created the DC Native History Project to bring this history to public attention and has seen small victories, such as a land acknowledgment at the DC Public Library and the Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling updating its history to include the Anacostan presence. Lione concludes with a call to action for readers to help ensure this history is no longer forgotten.

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NBN Book of the Day - Elaine Weiss, “Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement” (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, follows that magisterial work with a work of equal scholarly significance and narrative excellence, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement (Simon and Schuster, 2025), "the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement."
"In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.
Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.”

Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. In addition to Spell Freedom, she is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army of the Great War; and The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more at her website.

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NBN Book of the Day - Peter K. Andersson, “The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour” (Oxford UP, 2025)

A history of the dandy from below, from Beau Brummell and Baudelaire to Bowie and Bolan... and beyond. The historical figure of the dandy has commonly been described as an upper-class gentleman, often exemplified by well-known men such as Beau Brummell, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Max Beerbohm. But there is a broader history to be told about the dandy - one that incorporates unknown men from the lower strata of society. The Dandy: A People's History of Sartorial Splendour (Oxford UP, 2025) constitutes the first ever history of those dandies who emanated from the less privileged layers of the populace - the lowly clerks, shop assistants, domestic servants, and labourers who increasingly during the modern age have emerged as style-conscious men about town. Peter Andersson shows that dandyism is far from just an elite phenomenon represented by famous poets and artists. He shows how dandyism as a popular youth subculture grew into an influential cultural movement, from the days of Beau Brummell in the early 19th century to the age of mods in the 1960s. A series of fascinating in-depth studies of the wide variety of dandy subcultures that have surfaced around the world in the last two centuries tell the story of how the shaping of fashions and the image of men became increasingly democratized, with the arbiters of taste increasingly coming from the other end of the social spectrum. Along the way, we encounter such long-forgotten groups as the mashers, the knuts, the Paris gandins and the Berlin transgender dandies, alongside more well-known but unexplored figures like the zoot suiter, the teddy boy, and the New Romantic. Above all, this is a story of how fundamental aspects of modern culture such as fashion, style, and conduct have been shaped from below just as much as from above. It is a story that shows how the problematic business of young men trying to find an identity is an enduring phenomenon - and one sadly often accompanied by innocent victims along the way.

Peter K. Andersson is a historian and writer, with a PhD in History from Lund University in Sweden. He has been a visiting scholar at the universities of London, Oxford, and Bologna, and has written extensively on Victorian cultural history, urban history, and popular culture.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Angela C. Tozer, “The Debt of a Nation: Land and the Financing of the Canadian Settler State, 1820-73” (U of British Columbia Press, 2025)

You’ve got to speculate to accumulate. We apply that notion to individuals in pursuit of wealth, but what about countries? The Debt of a Nation: Land and the Financing of the Canadian Settler State, 1820–73 (U of British Columbia Press, 2025) is the first comprehensive history of Canada’s nineteenth-century public debt. Beginning in the 1820s, loans gave British North American settler governments access to unprecedented amounts of capital at low interest rates. The credit for such loans derived from colonial appropriation of Indigenous territories, and this process essentially created a market value for stolen land.

Dr. Angela Tozer explores the role of public debt financing in the consolidation of the Canadian settler state: Upper Canada’s first public debt, issued as securities on the London Stock Exchange; the unique government land tenure of Prince Edward Island and attendant impact on Mi’kmaw homelands; and the purchase of Rupert’s Land via a loan. She analyzes how an economic system centred on credit and debt relied on two factors: settlers had to become the risk bearers – though not necessarily the beneficiaries – of loans, and colonial governments had to have the power to appropriate Indigenous territories in order to appear creditworthy.

This history of the intimate relationship between public debt and colonization underscores the importance of the appropriation of Indigenous lands to global markets.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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NBN Book of the Day - Gary Rivlin, “AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence” (Harper Collins, 2025)

A veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist shadows the top thinkers in the field of Artificial Intelligence, introducing the breakthroughs and developments that will change the way we live and work.

Artificial Intelligence has been “just around the corner” for decades, continually disappointing those who long believed in its potential. But now, with the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a rapidly multiplying number of other AI tools, many are wondering: Has AI’s moment finally arrived?

In AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence (Harper Collins, 2025), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rivlin brings us deep into the world of AI development in Silicon Valley. Over the course of more than a year, Rivlin closely follows founders and venture capitalists trying to capitalize on this AI moment. That includes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the legendary investor whom the Wall Street Journal once called, “the most connected person in Silicon Valley.”

Through Hoffman, Rivlin is granted access to a number of companies on the cutting-edge of AI research, such as Inflection AI, the company Hoffman cofounded in 2022, and OpenAI, the San Francisco-based startup that sparked it all with its release at the end of that year of ChatGPT. In addition to Hoffman, Rivlin introduces us to other AI experts, including OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman and Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, an early AI startup that Google bought for $650 million in 2014. Rivlin also brings readers inside Microsoft, Meta, Google and other tech giants scrambling to keep pace.

On this vast frontier, no one knows which of these companies will hit it big–or which will flame out spectacularly. In this riveting narrative marbled with familiar names such as Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates, Rivlin chronicles breakthroughs as they happen, giving us a deep understanding of what’s around the corner in AI development. An adventure story full of drama and unforgettable personalities, AI Valley promises to be the definitive story for anyone seeking to understand the latest phase of world-changing discoveries and the minds behind them.

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NBN Book of the Day - Gary Rivlin, “AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence” (Harper Collins, 2025)

A veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist shadows the top thinkers in the field of Artificial Intelligence, introducing the breakthroughs and developments that will change the way we live and work.

Artificial Intelligence has been “just around the corner” for decades, continually disappointing those who long believed in its potential. But now, with the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a rapidly multiplying number of other AI tools, many are wondering: Has AI’s moment finally arrived?

In AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence (Harper Collins, 2025), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rivlin brings us deep into the world of AI development in Silicon Valley. Over the course of more than a year, Rivlin closely follows founders and venture capitalists trying to capitalize on this AI moment. That includes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the legendary investor whom the Wall Street Journal once called, “the most connected person in Silicon Valley.”

Through Hoffman, Rivlin is granted access to a number of companies on the cutting-edge of AI research, such as Inflection AI, the company Hoffman cofounded in 2022, and OpenAI, the San Francisco-based startup that sparked it all with its release at the end of that year of ChatGPT. In addition to Hoffman, Rivlin introduces us to other AI experts, including OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman and Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, an early AI startup that Google bought for $650 million in 2014. Rivlin also brings readers inside Microsoft, Meta, Google and other tech giants scrambling to keep pace.

On this vast frontier, no one knows which of these companies will hit it big–or which will flame out spectacularly. In this riveting narrative marbled with familiar names such as Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates, Rivlin chronicles breakthroughs as they happen, giving us a deep understanding of what’s around the corner in AI development. An adventure story full of drama and unforgettable personalities, AI Valley promises to be the definitive story for anyone seeking to understand the latest phase of world-changing discoveries and the minds behind them.

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