NBN Book of the Day

Mark Twain’s Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self‑aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn Black fathers in American fiction. Haunted by the family he has left behind, Jim acts as father figure to Huck, the white boy who is his companion as they raft the Mississippi toward freedom. Jim is also a highly polarizing figure: he is viewed as an emblem both of Twain’s alleged racism and of his opposition to racism; a diminished character inflected by minstrelsy and a powerful challenge to minstrel stereotypes; a reason for banning Huckleberry Finn and a reason for teaching it; an embarrassment and a source of pride for Black readers.In Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade (Yale UP, 2025) eminent Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin probes these controversies, exploring who Jim was, how Twain portrayed him, and how the world has responded to him. Fishkin also follows Jim’s many afterlives: in film, from Hollywood to the Soviet Union; in translation around the world; and in American high school classrooms today. The result is Jim as we have never seen him before—a fresh and compelling portrait of one of the most memorable Black characters in American fiction.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and professor (by courtesy) of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author or editor of many books, including Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee and Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices, and editor of the twenty-nine-volume Oxford Mark Twain. She lives in Stanford, CA.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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In 1975, Kuwaiti workers orchestrated arguably the most powerful
citizen-led movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Persian
Gulf. Their efforts built on decades of wide-ranging struggle over the
meanings and outlines of citizenship. During the twentieth century,
anticolonial nationalists, pro-democracy reformers, feminists, and labor
organizers joined forces to fight for a more equitable citizenship
regime. In so doing, they won a remarkable series of victories:
political independence, constitutional rights, and oil nationalization,
reshaping not just Kuwait, but the global petroleum order. This book reframes the history of labor activism, citizenship, and
decolonization in Persian Gulf by centering the history of social
movements—especially organized labor. In ⁠Comrades Estranged: ⁠⁠Labor and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Persian Gulf⁠ (Stanford University Press, 2026), Alex
Boodrookas traces how workers and their allies shaped the
world-historic transformations witnessed across the region: the
consolidation of British sovereignty, formation of autocratic states,
inrush of hydrocarbon wealth, onset of decolonization, and rise of both
mass migration and mass politics. But unions failed to incorporate
noncitizens into their movement, and as Boodrookas argues, this fatally
undermined the movements' strength. The contradictions of nationalist
and internationalist visions proved insurmountable. Comrades Estranged thus sheds light on both the power, and the limits, of citizenship and the nation-state as the framework for political action.

Dr. ⁠Alex Boodrookas⁠ is Assistant Professor of History at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Dr. ⁠Ahmed AlMaazmi⁠ is Assistant Professor of History at the United Arab Emirates University.
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Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) is
the first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other
Emancipation Day celebrations, told through photographs, art, and an
engrossing narrative.

For more than 150 years, Black communities
have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for
true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider
recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated
across the United States.

These observances were spaces of joy,
remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was
unfinished. This volume brings together stirring essays and striking
images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how
Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a
testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling,
demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully
recognized.

Blair LM Kelley is an award-winning author,
historian, and scholar of  the African American experience. She is also
the president and director of the National Humanities Center, the only
independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively
to the humanities.

Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of
Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing
appears in the edited collection From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.
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The story of the Moy family—U.S.-born Chinese-American siblings who grow up in the first half of the 20th century—is one that spans the Pacific, covering New York, Chicago, and cosmopolitan Shanghai. It’s a story that spans the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, and the early Cold War—and stars one sibling who was an early participant in the Kuomintang…and another who records propaganda for Germany and Japan during the Second World War.

In her new book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution (University of California Press, 2026), historian Charlotte Brooks follows the Moys as they confront discrimination in the United States, search for opportunity in cosmopolitan Shanghai, and wrestle with questions of loyalty, identity, and belonging that still resonate today.

Charlotte is a historian and author who has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American and Chinese diaspora history. Originally from California, she graduated from Yale and worked in mainland China and Hong Kong before earning a PhD from Northwestern University. She is a professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

In this conversation, we talk about Charlotte’s research, the lives of the Moy siblings, and what their experiences tell us about being Chinese American in a turbulent century.
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There is no shortage of books on music and politics, but Anna Harwell Celenza explores an interesting premise in her book On the Record: Music that Changed America (Norton, 2026). Each of the twelve chapters discusses a different instance when music, as Celenza writes, “sparked debates in the halls of Congress.” Arranged basically chronologically, Celenza tackles some of the most powerful and contentious issues in twentieth and twenty-first century American politics. From censorship to copyright law; from the Civil Rights Movement, to foreign policy during Apartheid, Celenza traces the extraordinary moments when music moved Congress, challenged power, and united people around shared ideals. The stories Celenza tells are just as much about music including the intertwined histories of “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing” or the making of Paul Simon’s album Graceland, as they are about US legislation or American politics. She offers readers a history of America heard through the songs and compositions that changed its course.
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