NBN Book of the Day

About NBN Book of the Day

The "NBN Book of the Day" features the most timely and interesting author interviews from the New Books Network delivered to you every weekday. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Publisher

Marshall Poe

Category

arts

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

20 Jul 2020

Latest episode

20 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 1,964 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   20 Oct 2026

   Disability: A History of Resistance with David Turner (Random House, 2026)

   Despite there being more than 16 million disabled people in the UK today, disability rarely features in mainstream accounts of our past. That absence is not down to a lack of evidence: it is a forgotten, suppressed history – the result of deliberate choices about whose histories matter. This remarkable book rectifies this. Disability: A History of Resistance (Random House, 2026) is a story of resistance and ingenuity, full of people who refused to be silenced or pitied. We meet the labourer who fights accusations in court that he’s faking his disability, and wins; the painter who signs her royalty miniatures ‘without hands’; and the one-armed textile worker who turned his injury into reform. We see how disabled people have rallied together to demand equality – fighting for their right to lead ordinary lives like everybody else. This is a story not of progress led by doctors or philanthropists, but an extraordinary ground-up history of ordinary people demanding dignity and justice. By putting disabled people back into our national story, David Turner reveals a fuller and richer history of modern Britain than ever before.

2. 

   19 Oct 2026

   Spanish Louisiana: Contest for Borderlands, 1763–1803 with Frances Kolb Turnbell (LSU Press, 2024)

   Sandwiched between the long period of French colonization, and the brief return to the French empire before the Americans enter the scene, the Spanish period of Louisiana's history is often ignored by historians. Yet, according to University of North Alabama historian Frances Kolb Turnbell, scholars of Vast Early America and the American West ignore this three decade period at their own peril. In Spanish Louisiana: Contest for Borderlands, 1763-1803 (LSU Press, 2024), Turnbell argues that the Spanish period of Louisiana's history is a prime example of historical contingency. The people - Black, white, Indigenous, and the many who straddled such categories - assumed the colony would stay in Spanish hands indefinitely, and made choices based on that assumption. The actions of Native people or American traders only make sense through this specific and contextual lens. And although this Spanish period did come to a close, its legacy endured well into the American period of the region's history. An excellent example of borderlands history, Turnbell's book urges scholars to reevaluate the history of the American West during the revolutionary period to uncover what else may have been missed beneath the Mississippi's murky waters and lush bayous.

3. 

   18 Oct 2026

   Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work with Annie McClanahan (Princeton UP, 2026)

   Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Princeton UP, 2026) retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated Today, 80 percent of U.S. workers do service work, from delivering takeout to mopping floors to teaching. Each time we are handed a bag of groceries or a cup of coffee, call for a cab or have our homework graded, we confront both the enormity and the intimacy of the contemporary service sector. Do these jobs have anything in common? Who is doing this work? And what kind of labor politics does it generate? If service work has often been treated as a footnote to modern capitalism, Beneath the Wage reveals it as crucial to understanding how exploitation functions today. Uncovering a history that runs from eighteenth-century servants to present-day gig workers, Annie McClanahan retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated. Assembling a diverse set of sources for understanding and reimagining service work—from reality television and conceptual poetry to novels and workers’ own descriptions of what they do—McClanahan explores three paradigmatic types of contemporary service labor: superexploited tipwork, deskilled clerical microwork, and informalized gigwork. She shows how work done “beneath the wage” depends on racialized and gendered forms of economic domination, is often excluded from labor organizing and regulation, and yet has begun to generate a new politics of social reproduction and solidarity. Annie McClanahan is Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine. Her first book, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture explores how U.S. culture responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. She has published on topics like the rise of microeconomics and methodological individualism, the cultural history of economic stagnation, so-called “neoliberalism” and the history of the university, and the politics and theory of sexwork.

Inside a recent episode

Scott Cunningham, "Causal Inference: The Mixtape" (Yale UP, 2021)

Published 19 Nov 2021 · Transcript excerpt

[…] Well, That's great, and that's always true. But the problem is that in a lot of the social sciences, political science, economics in particular, epidemiology, and even in some of the physical sciences, astronomy, you can't really run a lot of physically randomized experiments. We don't randomly assign people into college itself. We don't randomly assign countries to into different kinds of political regimes. They tend to be happening, but they happen, but we're not randomly doing it. And yet they're very, very important. They're extremely, extremely important questions to know what is the effect of college on earnings and what is the effect of some sort of political regime or some sort of public policy. […]

Who has been a guest on NBN Book of the Day

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Henry Thierault
• Megan Reid
• John Bardes
• Didi Kuo
• Zev Handel

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

243

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.7 / 5

12 ratings

Spotify

4.4 / 5

5 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 78 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

90

Social presence

0

YouTube

72

Engagement

92

Contact NBN Book of the Day

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Shows with a similar audience

• 

  In Our Time

• 

  Philosophy For Our Times

• 

  History Extra podcast

• 

  Dan Snow's History Hit

• 

  Vibe Check

• 

  Fresh Air

Questions about NBN Book of the Day