NBN Book of the Day

Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. R. Joseph Parrott
explores how anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and
Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from
the 1960s through the 1970s and influenced American foreign policy as
the Vietnam War drew to a close. These Portuguese African liberation
movements, led by nationalists like Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral,
built global solidarity networks to support their military and social
challenges to empire while defending against Western intervention. US
activists disillusioned with the Cold War came to see African
self-determination as central to global campaigns for racial and
economic justice. A broad coalition ranging from Black Power radicals to
religious liberals mobilized against the North Atlantic alliance with
Portugal. In the process, this grassroots movement helped define a New
Left Internationalism that championed decentralized, multiracial
organizing and a collaborative vision of US foreign policy to redress
historic inequalities between Global North and South.

Drawing
on more than fifty oral histories and research in government and
activist archives on three continents in English, Portuguese, French,
and Afrikaans, Dr. Parrott reconstructs the transnational anti-imperial
network that injected Global South priorities into US political debates.
Popular protests and informational campaigns led to collaborations with
legislators eager to constrain the powerful executive branch. In 1976,
this grassroots-legislative alliance halted Gerald Ford’s anti-communist
intervention against the Soviet-backed government of newly independent
Angola. This victory of New Left Internationalist ideas anticipated
future anti-apartheid and Latin American peace movements while also
fueling
a conservative revival of Cold War containment. By exploring US
engagement with the contested process of African decolonization, Dream the Size of Freedom
highlights the origins of two contrasting visions of American foreign
policy that defined debates over the country’s proper role in the Global
South into the 1990s.

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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Sentient Seas: Archaeologies of Seascapes and Maritime Rituals (UP Florida, 2026), published by University Press of Florida (2026), offers a global perspective on maritime cultures, examining how societies across time and space have understood and interacted with the sea. Synthesizing archaeological evidence, historical documents, and ethnographic accounts, Ian McNiven explores maritime traditions from ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mediterranean to medieval Europe and Scandinavia to contemporary Indigenous communities in the South Pacific.

McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions.

Ian J. McNiven is Research Professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator with the Australian research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea.
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An unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US—and why even affluent Black women are imperiled by substandard care.From a leading expert on race, class, maternal health, and reproductive rights.Racism in maternal healthcare is not reserved for the poor. An unsparing picture of inequities in prenatal care and childbirth in the United States, Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans (MIT Press, 2026) reveals that not only are black people three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause, but racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels. That is, wealthier black people are much more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period than their white counterparts. Focusing on a San Francisco obstetrics clinic that caters to the affluent, Khiara Bridges looks at the choices around prenatal care and childbirth that class-privileged, pregnant black people are making in order to survive what has been called the “black maternal health crisis.”Bridges, whose previous work exposed how race and racism are embedded in maternal healthcare for the poor, draws on two years of participant-observation to show how wealthier black people try to leverage their class privilege to avoid some of the negative effects of their blackness—only to discover that in a country that has never reckoned with its horrific racial past, there is no escaping racism’s reach. Throughout the book, engaging, heartbreaking, infuriating stories of women’s experiences with pregnancy and prenatal care illustrate how race and racism matter regardless of wealth or status.
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We use avatars to play video games. We use pseudonyms on social
media. We use VPNs to mask our identities and activities. In the digital
realm, anonymity is everywhere, a persistent option for those who wish
to hide, experiment, and deceive. But we are anonymous in more contexts
than the digital. In urban settings, we routinely experience the
anonymity of the crowd, and routinely use anonymity to participate in
political life and social protests. Anonymity matters. This book is a
wager that we can learn much about society, humanity, and power by
analyzing the structural tensions and possibilities of anonymity, and by
analyzing how the economy of anonymity is changing in a modernity
defined by computation.

While many have explored the connections between surveillance,
datafication, and privacy, relatively little has been done to theorize
anonymity and its critical role in our lives. The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification (Stanford University Press, 2026) rebalances
our intellectual investments by expanding our understandings of
anonymity. Putting the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Bernhard Siegert into
conversation, Hector Amaya examines the contours of anonymity in
different social domains—in relationship to individuals, institutions,
and contexts; to epistemology and ontology; and to history and society.
As the book shows, anonymity entails paradoxical possibilities—sometimes
anonymity is experienced as freedom and other times as powerlessness,
or subjugation.
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Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line (Oxford UP, 2026) reveals the rise and fall of the mavericks running Britain's Cold War forgery empire. Their secret mission was audacious: to disrupt and discredit adversaries across the world using phantom groups, fake sources, and counterfeit documents.

The leader was a remarkable character, wrestling with personal and professional dilemmas: Hans Welser. An Austrian refugee and one-time MI5 suspect interned behind barbed wire, Welser was a great survivor who rose to become special operations adviser to the Foreign Office, working hand in glove with MI6. His second in command was an eccentric, hard drinking, and high-flying journalist-turned-propagandist called John Rayner. Brought out of semi-retirement, for one final posting. Their team of bowler-hatted refugees, voluble ex-journalists, trailblazing women, and licentious literary sorts navigated loyalty and betrayal — both professionally and romantically — from the diplomats' attic, in the most sensitive part of the Foreign Office's secret propaganda department.

The newly declassified files expose an array of plots, some comically absurd and others dangerously controversial. The forgery empire impersonated everything from hippies and ghosts to Islamists and ballet composers in their campaign to smear hostile politicians, stir tensions among adversaries, and even stymie the career of a contentious British historian. All took place against a high stakes backdrop — both overseas as states competed beneath the looming threat of nuclear war and in the corridors of power at home where grey-suited bureaucrats circled, keen to shut down the team for good.

With timely insight into how propaganda works and how to respond to disinformation, Fakers is a thrilling journey into a secret world where nothing was as it seemed.

Rory Cormac is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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