W. W. Norton & Company inaugurates a new century of visionary independent publishing with Norton Shorts. Written by leading-edge scholars, these eye-opening books deliver bold thinking and fresh perspectives in under two hundred pages.  

A perfect fit for college courses, each Norton Shorts title features resources to help instructors enrich their course material. Browse by discipline and request your digital examination copy below. 

Wild Girls

How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation

by Tiya Miles

An award-winning historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America.

Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in nineteenth-century New England. The Indigenous women’s basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, regained a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 World’s Fair. For the girls at the center of this book, woods, prairies, rivers, ball courts, and streets provided not just escape from degrees of servitude, but also space to envision new spheres of action. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, this book evokes rich landscapes and the rebellious spirit of the girls who roamed them—a perfect fit for courses in U.S. women’s or environmental history. 

KEY TOPICS ● gender and the domestic sphere; Indigenous knowledge; history of childhood and adolescence; history of sport; human/nature relationships 

Against Technoableism

Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

by Ashley Shew

A bioethicist explodes what we think we know about disability and argues that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability. 

When bioethicist Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,” there was no returning to “normal.” Suddenly, well-meaning people called her an “inspiration” while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Why do abled people frame disability as an individual problem that calls for technological solutions, rather than a social one? In a warm, spirited voice and vibrant prose, Shew argues that disabilities should be viewed not as liabilities but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world. This short, stirring book is ideal for courses in disability studies, philosophy of technology, bioethics, and philosophy or sociology of disability.

KEY TOPICS ● identity-first vs. person-first language; disability tropes; eugenics; medical vs. social models of disability; neurodivergence

Explorers

A New History

by Matthew Lockwood

The impulse to seek out new worlds is universal to humanity.

In a truly inclusive account of exploration, historian Matthew Lockwood interweaves stories of famous figures—including Sacagawea, Pocahontas, and Dr. David Livingstone—with tales of individuals who are usually denied the title “explorer.” Lockwood’s new cast of adventurers features figures often excluded from Western focused narratives on the early rise of globalization. Lockwood delves into the histories of Rabban Bar Ṣawma, a Uighur monk who traversed the Middle East and Europe; Yasuke, an East African traveler to Japan during the sixteenth century; and David Dorr, a man born in slavery whose travelogues reshaped Americans’ understanding of the African continent. As an assistant professor of history at The University of Alabama, where Lockwood teaches on the Age of Exploration and Conquest, he brings critical context readers need to reevaluate their understanding of how our modern world was shaped by early explorations. This intrepid re-imagining of our global past is vital for courses in histories of Western civilization or world history; exploration and empire; and more. 

KEY TOPICS ● exploration; travel and travelogues; indigenous knowledge of the environment; histories of natural science and geography; world history 

Offshore

Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism

by Brooke Harrington

This eye-opening account of offshore finance reveals how a shadowy global system is fueling economic crises while also corroding democracy, capitalism, and the environment.

Sociologist Brooke Harrington trained as an offshore wealth manager then spent years immersed in tax havens around the world as part of an ethnographic study, observing and interviewing the experts who keep the secrets and protect the fortunes of the global ultra-rich. She highlights what offshore finance costs us all and how it has enabled the world’s billionaires to colonize the world. As politicians struggle to address the deepening economic and political inequality destabilizing the world, Harrington’s exposé of the offshore system helps students understand the most pressing crises of our time. This engrossing deep dive into the hidden realm of offshore finance is perfect for courses on economic sociology, globalization, and social inequality.

KEY TOPICS ● immersion ethnography; economic sociology; power elite; colonialism; tax havens; financial crimes; wealth inequality

Literary Theory for Robots

How Computers Learned to Write

by Dennis Yi Tenen

In the industrial age, automation came for the shoemaker and the seamstress. Today, it has come for the writer, professor, physician, programmer, and attorney. 

Chatbots are already impacting the way we read, write, and think. For better or worse, they are being used to find information, influence public opinion, diagnose illnesses, and shape political discussion online. How did we get to this point and what can we do to prepare? Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. Former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for the rapidly changing AI landscape and invites readers to consider how humans and smart technology might coexist in the future. This provocative reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science is essential for courses in literary theory, comparative literature, the philosophy of language, and the history of rhetoric. 

KEY TOPICS ● human intelligence vs. artificial intelligence; history of machine learning; rhetorical traditions; automation; knowledge work 

Imagination

A Manifesto

by Ruha Benjamin

Imagination isn’t a luxury; it’s a vital resource and a powerful tool for our collective liberation.

A world without prisons? Schools that foster the genius of every child? A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin believes in the liberating power of the imagination. Deadly systems shaped by mass incarceration, ableism, digital surveillance, and eugenics emerged from the human imagination, but they have real-world impacts. To fight these systems and create a world that works for all of us, we will have to imagine things differently. As Benjamin shows, educators, artists, technologists, and others are experimenting with new ways of thinking and tackling seemingly intractable problems. Visionary and practical, Imagination: A Manifesto is an inspired selection for courses in inequality, race, technology, and sociology of education.

KEY TOPICS ● schooling and IQ; whiteness of the curriculum; play and childhood; eugenics; technology; inclusive worldbuilding