NBN Book of the Day

The Bund's grand facades and the leafy streets of the former French Concession are usually read as monuments to Western enterprise in China. But those buildings were raised by Chinese labor, and the concessions that defined old Shanghai could not have run without the Chinese who served, traded, and lived inside them. In Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City (Yale University Press: 2026), Michael Dillon sets out to tell the city's story from the Chinese side.
Michael's new book follows the city from a small fishing town on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, through the Opium War and the treaty ports, the foreign concessions, the Japanese occupation, and the Communist takeover, to its place today as the most representative city of China's forward-looking, economy-driven modernization. Drawing on Chinese-language sources, Michael argues that Shanghai's history has been told for too long through Western eyes.
Michael joins the show today to talk about Shanghai's long rivalry with Beijing, the 1927 Shanghai Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and Deng Xiaoping's later admission that leaving Shanghai out of the first special economic zones was a mistake.
Michael Dillon is professor of history and an affiliate of King’s College London’s Lau China Institute. An expert on modern Chinese history, politics, and society, he is the author of numerous books, including We Need to Talk About Xi, a history of modern China, and biographies of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shanghai. 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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In this episode of In Conversation, Lilyanna D'Amato speaks with Paul Kelton about his new book, Hidden Terrors: The Scourge of Cholera in Jackson's America (Oxford UP, 2026), which traces the arrival of the first cholera pandemic in the United States, in the 1830s. Drawing on various historical documents, including family papers, letters, and newspaper accounts from the time, Kelton examines how ordinary Americans reacted to the strange disease and how the country’s ideologies and inequalities resulted in loss of life on a mass scale.

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For three years in the early 1900s, a serial killer zigzagged across the rice belt region of the United States, using an everyday ax to slaughter Black families living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route. The similarities among the murders were uncanny, yet lawmen in early twentieth-century America had neither the technology nor the vocabulary to identify the serial killer in their midst. Instead, regional authorities worked the cases as individual homicides.

This approach led to seemingly contradictory realities: the unknown killer was dubbed “the axman,” and a young Black woman named Clementine Barnabet was arrested as a suspect. She offered questionable confessions and swiftly gained international recognition, as the press reimagined Clementine as a cult-leading, ax-wielding, sacrifice-driven serial killer. But there was a problem: Clementine was already in jail by the time more than half of the murders occurred.

In Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South with Lauren Nicole Henley (LSU Press, 2026), Lauren Nicole Henley examines this conundrum as she describes how axman madness consumed an entire region for years. She unpacks these crimes and their aftermaths to show how Black communities responded to incomprehensible violence, how the state criminalized Blackness, and how a young Black woman ultimately came to be understood as a serial killer. Drawing on more than three thousand newspaper articles, hundreds of pages of court records, prison ledgers, death certificates, censuses, city directories, and more, Henley tells a historical narrative that is as intriguing as any true crime novel, challenging our assumptions about who has the ability to get away with murder.
Dr. Lauren Henley is an assistant professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on violent crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She investigates how age, race, gender, and religion contribute to perceptions of criminality in the South and West, and her articles have appeared in the Journal of African American History and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. You can find her at the University of Richmond website.
Following this conversation, Lauren and Sullivan went over to the Additions to the Archive Substack to continue their conversation about writing historical figures who, like Clementine Barnabet, don’t neatly fit the respectable boxes we would like for them.
Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Why would a government bother to go after groups that carry no weapons and hold no power? Suparna Chaudhry argues that the answer says a lot about where politics is heading. In Civil Societies and Civil States: Government Repression of NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2026), she shows that states are targeting advocacy organizations less often with violence and more often with laws. These laws cap foreign funding, restrict advocacy, and bury groups in paperwork, to name just a few examples. Because the measures look like routine regulation, they rarely make headlines. Democracies have become as skilled at using them as dictatorships.
We discuss how the fading liberal international order has given governments more freedom to act. We also talk about why urgent threats draw violence while long-term ones draw bureaucracy, and how lawmakers copy each other's anti-NGO laws word for word. We then look at why China tolerates Greenpeace, how one Ethiopian law closed nearly 90 percent of the country's human rights groups, and what shrinking aid budgets mean for the sector.
Our guest is Suparna Chaudhry, an Associate Professor in the Department of International Affairs at Lewis & Clark College.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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In An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge UP, 2026), Elisa Prosperetti argues that while racialized, colonial notions of development saw African bodies as the primary sites of economic value, anticolonial development imagined the minds of Africans as the key to economic productivity. Thus, the broadening of access to Europhone education (that is, using European languages) was a central component of anticolonial and antiracist visions of an emancipated African future. But this educationally-driven vision of the future had deep roots, calling back to other experiences of freedom, however partial, in the Black Atlantic world. Thus, the book further argues that the forms that decolonization took in coastal West Africa are best explained by framing decolonization as a Black Atlantic emancipation, akin to 19th-century slavery abolitions. Although decolonization in West Africa shared parallels with what happened across other parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East after World War II, a Black Atlantic frame accounts for certain regional specificities that the general process/category of decolonization does not. Combining more than sixty interviews with former students, teachers, and school administrators with research in state and institutional archives in West Africa, Europe, and the United States, An Anticolonial Development analyzes the rise and fall of public education as the principal project of anticolonial development in West Africa.
Elisa Prosperetti is a historian at the National Institute of Education (part of the Nanyang Technological University) in Singapore. Her research focuses on modern African and global history, particularly histories of diaspora, education, race, development, economic and intellectual history, and decolonization. Her first book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa, was published in 2026 by Cambridge University Press. She received her MA (2015) and PhD (2019) degrees in History from Princeton University and her BSc in International History and International Relations from the London School of Economics (2008). Prior to graduate school, she worked for several years as a classroom teacher.
You can learn more about Dr. Prosperetti’s work here
Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana.

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