Garrett Peck's "The Bright Edges of the World"

Garrett Peck is an author, historian, and tour guide in Santa Fe, specializing in adventure travel and historic and cultural interpretation. He leads the Willa Cather’s Santa Fe tour, teaches stargazing, and leads many other tours.

The author of nine books about American history, Peck’s latest is The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop. The book explores Cather’s travels to the Southwest that inspired her to write her “best book” (her words), Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Peck applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Bright Edges of the World and shared the following:

Page 99 of my Willa Cather book is a half-page of text, while the other half is a 1926 image of the Santa Fe Plaza with the St. Francis Cathedral in the background. It has a large number of black Ford Model Ts along the street, a reminder how the automobile became so widespread and affordable in the 1920s. On this page I wrote about the character of Santa Fe and the prevalence of Catholicism:

Santa Fe is a deeply Catholic city. It wasn’t uncommon in the early twentieth century to see nuns and priests walking about. The Catholic Church had a significant presence downtown. St. Francis Cathedral stands a block east of the Plaza, and just to the south were two Catholic parochial schools: Our Lady of Light Academy, the girls school known to most as the Loretto Academy, and St. Michael’s College for boys.

This is a pretty good measure of my book. Although Cather wasn’t Catholic, she wrote about two Catholic priests on the American frontier in the Southwest in Death Comes for the Archbishop, and so I wanted to create a sense of the Catholic presence in Santa Fe in my book. Cather was inundated with Catholic fan mail after the book came out in September 1927 (they are collected in a thick folder at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln Libraries archive). She couldn’t respond to all these letters, so she penned an open letter to Commonweal magazine addressing their many questions about a book that she later called her “best book.” Her letter is a fabulous primary source that explained so much of what went into her novel.

My book, The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, is a history of Cather’s “best book.” As I’m a tour guide in Santa Fe, I focused on Cather’s travels to the Southwest and how much that inspired her fiction. I wrote the book conversationally to appeal to a wide range of readers, including those who want to go “a-journeying in New Mexico on the trail of the Archbishop,” as Cather wrote.

Visit Garrett Peck's website.

Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition.

Writers Read: Garrett Peck (January 2010).

The Page 99 Test: The Prohibition Hangover.

The Page 99 Test: Capital Beer.

The Page 99 Test: A Decade of Disruption.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas's "When the Good Life Goes Bad"

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University and has served as the executive director of both the Society of Christian Ethics, the Black Religious Scholars Group and is co-founder of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion. She has published ten books including Religion, Race, and COVID-19: Confronting White Supremacy in the Pandemic and The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture.

Floyd-Thomas applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, When the Good Life Goes Bad: The US and Its Seven Deadly Sins, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Understanding pride as the doctrinal dimension of the American good life is essential for distinguishing between the projections and shadows that myths cast. The American discipline of education and schooling produces knowledge that shapes what Americans consider to be good. In short, American education has long indoctrinated Americans to accept social and cultural norms (aka assumptions and lies) about themselves and others as fact. Pride or “knowledge without character” is the process by which Americans presume and impose the supremacy of their worldview to the exclusion of all others. Through an analysis of knowledge production and dissemination, this chapter explores the ways in which the privileged perspectives of some become the normalizing process by which the general public comes to believe in these death- dealing ideologies as they order our world.

In Christocentric terms, pride is the pinnacle of human hubris, whereby we focus on our own ability, an ability often rooted in delusions of grandeur. Where Hebrews 11:1 articulates that Christian faith is trusting in the divine, pride substitutes our own self-aggrandizing feats and self- serving facts as the source of the “assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.” Philosopher David Hume assesses pride as a pleasant sensation and humility as a painful one. Many wise people have deemed pride to be the greatest of sins. Specifically, American pride emanates from American nationalism and the alleged magnanimity of the United States as a first world power. Many in the world regard the United States as a country proud in the extreme and profoundly lacking in national self-awareness. Take, for example, “Make America Great Again” as a political motto whose adherents exhibit their reluctance or inability to learn moral lessons from past great empires and to gauge its historical significance relative to them. American pride is founded upon Gandhi’s blunder of “knowledge without character.”

Rather than doing the hard work of gaining an enlightened, historically informed understanding of their nation, Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that self-knowledge is more about trusting their feelings of superiority, whether based on nationality, race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability. As a result, the goal of establishing and advancing common ideals such as fellowship, freedom, and flourishing is ignored. In short, America’s system of knowledge production privileges the national functionality of its citizens to the detriment of their national character and moral formation. The rising intolerance in the United States for critical reflection and analysis has coddled the American mind and compromised its ability to search for wisdom and to question untruths.

Page 99 appears in a chapter that frames “pride” as a doctrinal dimension of the American good life.

The core of the text is actually revealed on this page! A browser opening to page 99 would get a good idea of what When the Good Life Goes Bad is doing. The book is a theological and moral critique of the stories that shape American identity, and page 99 shows the engine of that critique: pride as “knowledge without character,” where confidence outruns wisdom and inherited assumptions get treated as fact. It also captures how I read culture as formation. Education and “knowledge production” are not neutral; they can function like catechesis, training citizens into “normal” ways of seeing and then baptizing those perspectives as universal.

I write as a theologian listening to public life. Scripture and moral philosophy sit beside the everyday habits that form us—what we celebrate, what we ignore, what we call “common sense.” If page 99 resonates, it may be because you recognize the feeling it names: certainty that isn’t wisdom, confidence that isn’t character. The page also signals a Christocentric contrast. Hebrews 11:1 describes faith as trust oriented toward God; pride replaces that trust with self-aggrandizing achievements, national myths, and self-serving “facts,” producing a certainty that resists correction. Readers will also see that this pride is not merely personal. It is communal and political—bound up with nationalism, privilege, and the way one group’s worldview becomes the standard by which everyone else is measured.

What page 99 cannot supply, on its own, is the book’s full architecture: how pride interlocks with other “shadows” cast by the American good life, how these ideologies take on everyday force, and how the argument turns toward moral formation and hope. Even so, as a browser’s shortcut, the Page 99 Test works well here.

If page 99 hooks you, the rest of the book shows why that diagnosis matters. I follow the American good life’s promises—fellowship, freedom, flourishing—and then track what those promises can conceal: exclusion, domination, and a growing intolerance for critical reflection that coddles the mind and dulls our capacity for wisdom. Along the way, I ask questions that refuse easy answers: Who benefits when nostalgia becomes moral authority? What happens when superiority feels like self-knowledge? The text helps us realize that we live in a time of gaslighting—public gaslighting. A time when the obvious is denied. When facts are treated as opinions. When propaganda is called patriotism. When cruelty is called “strength.” When greed is called “freedom.” When lies are called “just asking questions.” In such a world, faith must become more than comfort. Faith must become clarity. Or otherwise, faith becomes synonymous for lying.

Alas, this is not a book that settles for scolding or despair. It presses toward an alternative moral imagination: humility in place of hubris, historically informed self-awareness in place of myth, and character formed for the common good rather than national functionality. Page 99 gives you the thesis in sharp relief; the chapters that follow trace its consequences—and invite readers to imagine a good life that does not have to go bad.

Learn more about When the Good Life Goes Bad at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia Seed's "Sails and Shadows"

Patricia Seed is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the award-winning author of To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico; American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches; and Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Sails and Shadows: How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic and Launched the Slave Trade, with the following results:

This page focuses on the Portuguese explorer of Africa’s Atlantic coast, Diogo Cão. Despite being little known outside of Portugal his contemporaries viewed his voyages as a far more important than Barthlomew Dias’s because Cão was the first European to successfully sail south of the Equator, that is, without the help of a pole star. Furthermore, the page illustrates the common Portuguese tactic of ingratiating themselves with leaders of very wealthy African kingdoms, in this example, with the Congo. Their goals were twofold: to convert the leadership to Christianity and to establish an ongoing commercial relationship including cooperation with the slave trade.

Page 99 may surprise readers, who expected that any Portuguese encounter with Africans would result in the latter being deliberately harmed. Yet nothing of the sort happened in Congo. Far from altruism, Diogo Cão’s politeness sought to entice Congo elites into an orbit in which they would exploit or enslave other Africans in return for wealth the Portuguese could supply. Readers might view this information as creation of a web of complicity.

Much of the book explains how the Portuguese finally managed to cross the mid-Atlantic and return, a feat that had eluded sailors for thousands of years. Although Norsemen had briefly island-hopped across the northern rim, knowledge of the Americas remained hidden from Europeans and Africans until the breakthrough Portuguese voyages of the 1400s.

Learn more about Sails and Shadows at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

L. Archer Porter's "Homebodies"

Archer Porter interrogates the social, cultural, and economic life of performance in digital culture. She holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA and Masters from UNC-Greensboro. In her first monograph, Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media, Porter examines the politics of everyday media production by amateur performers, grounded in the study of thousands of home dance videos online. Outputs of her research have been published in Documenta, Performance Research Journal, communication +1, International Journal of Screendance, Bloomsbury Handbook on Dance and Philosophy, and Etúdes. Porter is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Texas at Arlington.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Homebodies and shared the following:

On page 99 of Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media, I describe how Instagram users maintain multiple accounts to brand themselves differently for different audiences, and how dance supports those brand distinctions. This discussion appears midway through the second chapter on “the dancing selfie,” a media form whose aesthetics and semiotics make clear that the dancer is recording themselves. Two dancers whose home dance videos I analyze earlier in the chapter reappear here, and their posts and profiles continue to serve as tools for unpacking the choreographies of intimacy and circulations of authenticity in digital culture. By considering their Instagram accounts as a whole on this page, I suggest how each dancer crafts a personal brand through the dancing body, domestic space, and autobiographical narrative, all organized into a coherent aesthetic.

Page 99 is a representative snapshot of Homebodies, particularly in how it foregrounds the neoliberal co-optation of the dancing body on social media—a central concern of my theory of intimaesthetics. This theory names the aestheticization of intimacy in Web 2.0, especially through self-produced media that stage interior life, private space, and personal narrative. On platforms like Instagram, however, home dance videos play directly into systems that harvest intimate data and refashion the person as a product for the capitalist marketplace. In the book’s introduction, I draw on Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello to critique the “sophisticated ergonomics” of neoliberal capitalism in new media, showing how these systems tap into the most interior dimensions of subjectivity and convert them into marketable forms. Personal branding on social media is a key expression of this process.

The discussion on page 99 demonstrates this dynamic by focusing on the everyday, choreographic manifestations of the “new spirit of capitalism” online. It shows how home dancers produce media that reflect and refine their personal brands, and how platforms actively encourage and reward this crafting of persona. In this sense, the page functions as a concise portrait of intimaesthetics as a whole.

The reference to two dancers who have honed the practice of the dancing selfie also signals a more structural feature of the book. Each chapter centers on just two home dance videos, which I analyze closely to trace their choreographic mechanisms, media genealogies, and platform politics. This deliberate focus counters social media’s overabundance of images and its corresponding lack of critical attention to the aesthetic regimes it creates and promulgates.

What page 99 cannot fully convey, however, is the book’s sustained attention to the body and its framing. Throughout Homebodies, I engage in choreographic analysis to show how intimacy is produced and how it enters different circuits of circulation. A dancer might cultivate closeness by closing his eyes and drifting in and out of frame, as if unaware of the camera—an image that circulates as privacy with a surveillance aesthetic. Or he might dance in the kitchen with a mop, as if pausing from household labor. Whatever the scene, movement, or framing, Homebodies treats choreographic intimacy as the anchor for its social, cultural, and economic life on the platform.

Visit Archer Porter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yonatan Green's "Rogue Justice"

Yonatan Green is an Israeli-American attorney and an author, most recently a Fellow at the Georgetown University Center for the Constitution. He co-founded and was Executive Director of the Israel Law & Liberty Forum.

Green applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Rogue Justice: The Rise of Judicial Supremacy in Israel, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Rogue Justice closes out my theoretical discussion of the dominant form of statutory interpretation in Israel, called “Objective Purposive Interpretation” (or “OPI”). Under this novel method, judges can apply a statute according to what its purpose ought to be, in their own estimation – really. The page includes a quote from renowned Prof. Stanley Fish critiquing OPI (“you have broken free of any and all constraints on what you then declare the law to be”), and summarizes a central flaw of this interpretive method – that it explicitly enables courts to make binding decisions based on “the entirely personal and prejudiced moral ideology of each and every judge.” I finish the section by writing: “The use of OPI renders legislation meaningless, legislators powerless, and the legislative process futile.” The page then continues on to another section, in which I examine a striking and perplexing similarity between Justice Aharon Barak (pioneer of OPI), and Justice Antonin Scalia (paragon of judicial restraint and textualism).

I think the Page 99 Test works for my book – partially. Rogue Justice is an analytical, scholarly, rigorous critique of the Israeli legal system, and especially of the doctrines developed by the Israeli Supreme Court over the past four decades. This page sums up the overall critique against one of the core pillars of Israeli judicial supremacy – a wild and unparalleled form of statutory interpretation, which openly flouts legal, democratic and linguistic norms and which grants judges unrivaled governing power. Much of the book involves a serious principled and theoretical examination of the Court’s doctrines, and this page shows the tail-end of such a discussion. The page refers to a well-known expert, reflecting the book’s spirit because so much of the book endeavors to present the critiques of prominent legal scholars, and not solely my own views. One might fairly say that more than anything else, this book compiles a vast array of arguments advanced by leading legal figures against the Israeli Court’s supremacist jurisprudence.

The last sentence quoted above (in the page description), which closes the section, reflects my effort that the book be accessible, readable and enjoyable – I try and condense core arguments into memorable zingers which pack a punch (and are no less true for it). As I continue to the next section, I raise a point of interest to American readers (Scalia vs. Barak), and this too reflects an overall goal of the book, bridging the gap between a far-off jurisdiction and a foreign non-Israeli audience. Further, I think the section (albeit in the next page) makes a non-intuitive and nuanced argument (namely, that Barak and Scalia reach the same conclusion but for completely opposite and contradictory reasons), something which the book does quite often.

The page is missing two significant elements. First, throughout the book I regularly refer to real-life examples and to judicial decisions. This is missing from the current page, making the book seem more theoretical and less practical than it really is. Second, the page has very few endnote references, which is unusual – the book is supported by a vast array of sources and notes, meticulously researched, which typically adorn (and sometimes crowd) every page. Indeed, a key emphasis of my book is how much the granular details matter. In that sense, the very notion of a single page capturing the book’s “essence” is, by definition, contrary to the book’s essential claim. Nonetheless, I think this page provides a useful and not-misleading glimpse into Rogue Justice, its style, and its substance.

Visit Yonatan Green's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patti M. Marxsen's "Karen Blixen’s Search for Self"

Patti M. Marxsen is an essayist, biographer, independent scholar, and translator (FR>EN) whose writings have been published in the USA, Europe, and the Caribbean. She is the author of three biographical studies, two essay collections, a collection of short fiction, and numerous articles and reviews related to visual art and Haitian literature.

Her books include Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own and Jacques Roumain: A Life of Resistance.

Marxsen applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Karen Blixen's Search for Self: The Making of "Out of Africa" (LSU Press), with the following results:

Page 99 of my book proves the astute observation of Ford Madox Ford to be true in many ways. On that page, I begin with the fact that animals are everywhere in Karen Blixen’s famous memoir of her idealized African world. In that sense, Out of Africa echoes her idyllic early childhood in nineteenth-century Denmark where “dogs, horse, and birds were ever-present.”

This gets complicated, however, when Blixen compares Black African people to animals … as she does, throughout her book, with statements such as, “The old dark clear-eyed Native of Africa, and the old dark clear-eyed Elephant, they are alike.” For this she has been criticized by post-colonial scholars who read her animal metaphors as evidence of racism since racism was, clearly, built into the framework of British Colonialism and she was, in fact, a colonizer by choice. Yet when neither species is deliberately diminished—as in the example of a wise old elephant—another perspective emerges that goes to heart of a current culture debate that dares to question human superiority as the basis of modern “humanism” vs. the wisdom of the animal world as an essential aspect of what many scholars refer to as “post-humanism.” As Danish scholar Peter Mortensen points out, Karen Blixen’s unique vision represents one of the early examples of “post-humanism” because it recognizes a necessary balance of human/animal interaction.

This issue is one of several that emerges in my book as I offer a twenty-first-century reading of a twentieth-century classic, beginning with a “deep dive” into how Karen Blixen thought and lived with issues of colonialism, racism, and feminism in a section titled “Contested Legacy.” I also untangle a kind of “identity theft” in that section with regard the blockbuster film in 1985 that posthumously romanticizes Blixen’s difficult life.

I find it fascinating that one page of a book can serve as a kind of “on ramp” to the many complex issues I explore through the lens of a memoir first published in 1937. That said, I would argue that a true understanding of Karen Blixen’s life and work requires several angles of vision—and many more pages.

Visit Patti M. Marxsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alec Worsnop's "Rebels in the Field"

Alec Worsnop is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park where he direct the Military Perspectives Speaker Series and is a Research Fellow in the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rebels in the Field: Cadres and the Development of Insurgent Military Power, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book walks through the way in which Việt Minh sought to develop a modern military system by selecting a cadre of small unit leaders who could plan effective military operations and train their troops. It comes in a chapter that assesses the performance of various Vietnamese insurgent groups as they countered the French during the First Indochina War (1945-1954). While the victory of the Việt Minh, the predecessor for the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, also known as the Việt Cong), looms large in the 20th century, as the conflict started, the French were less worried about the Việt Minh than many of its competitors.

This page actually touches on one of the core themes in the broader book. Rebels in the Field departs from the existing research into insurgent behavior by explicitly focusing on the military processes involved in deploying force in substate conflicts. To conduct guerrilla warfare, groups have to fight well. While perhaps a weapon of the ‘weak’, guerrilla warfare is not a weapon of the tactically incapable. And the things that help groups to organize in the first place, ideology, religious, social ties, do not necessarily help organizations to fight well, and can actually impair military development.

To fight this way, I argue that insurgents, like any other military actor, need capable small units that can fire and maneuver without suffering extensive losses. To do this, I draw on much research into conventional militaries and hold that a key linchpin in this process is capable small-unit combat leaders. When facing much stronger foes, creative small-unit combat leaders can "punch above their weight." Not only do they lead effective operations, but lay the groundwork for military adaptation and resilience from the bottom-up.

The Việt Minh is an archetypal case of the importance of military development. While their success is often attributed to their Communist ideology, leaders in the organization were painfully aware that ideological commitment did not generate military capacity. As I elaborate on page 99, "General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the commander of the Việt Minh forces, advised that 'it is necessary to carry out regular training systematically and according to plan, proceeding from the rank and file upwards … The army must be trained to master modern techniques, tactical use of arms, coordinated tactics, and modern military service.'"

In this context, the chapter on the Việt Minh helps to explain how the Việt Minh, which looked weak at the onset of the war, developed into one of the most successful insurgent militaries in the 20th century, defeating the French in a set battle at Ðiện Biên Phủ. The chapter ends by quoting a French post-mortem which recognized that the French military had underestimated the immense effort the Việt Minh put into developing a professional military.

The following chapters, covering the US interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, identify similar dynamics. As with the Việt Minh, the groups that fought well did not do so based on their religious, political, and social endowments, but instead developed a cadre of small-unit combat leaders who served as the back bone of their military efforts.

Visit Alec Worsnop's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bianca J. Baldridge's "Laboring in the Shadows"

Bianca J. Baldridge is Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University. She is the author of Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youthwork (2019).

Baldridge applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work, and reported the following:

On page 99, you’ll find the beginning of Chapter Four, titled “Protecting Youth, Protecting Ourselves.” I begin the chapter with two quotes. The first is from the extraordinary feminist scholar, activist, and poet, Audre Lorde. The second is from Chris, a youth worker from the Midwest and an interview participant in my book. Like Lorde, he’s a poet and activist. He’s also dedicated his life to working with youth in community-based educational spaces.

I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference . . . Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
–Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays

We have to take care of ourselves, take care of each other, honor memories, and honor legacies that just don’t exist in the same way for other people.
–Chris, youth worker

I began this chapter with these two quotes because they speak to the struggle to be well and to care for the self amid struggle, pain, and structural harm, while also trying to care for others. The opening paragraph describes an experience Chris had while giving a guest lecture at a local university, where he wanted to protect himself and to honor and respect the memory of a former student he lost to gun violence.

This test works for part of the book but not for the entire book. But it does capture a very important part! That is, how do community-based youth workers—professionals in youth organizations who educate, nurture, and guide young people through many forms of development—take care of themselves in a loosely organized field that can be quite precarious due to low wages, high turnover, housing and food insecurity, etc., while also taking care of young people as they cope with structural harm. I believe that page 99 will give readers a sense of how skilled youth workers are at managing the nuances that arise in their work.

In my book, I argue that because youth workers, particularly in nonprofits, are situated as care and education workers, their work is typically viewed as “noble,” which ultimately furthers their exploitation. For Black youth workers, I make the case that this precarity is exacerbated by racial discrimination and racial microaggressions. Despite the challenges I raise, my book also shares their visions for the future and how joy serves as a tool of resistance and protection for youth workers and the young people they work with. Laboring in the Shadows highlights precarity and invisibility while demonstrating the power and promise of youth work as a sustaining and necessary force in Black educational and social life.

Visit Bianca J. Baldridge's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan Seale-Feldman's "The Work of Disaster"

Aidan Seale-Feldman is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and a research associate at the Centre d’anthropologie culturelle (CANTHEL) at the Université Paris Cité in France.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Work of Disaster tells a story called “Vishal’s Medicine.” Vishal was a man I met in an earthquake-affected village in rural Nepal who received psychosocial counseling and medication after the disaster. He was one of many people who discovered such treatments because of the seismic rupture and the post-earthquake humanitarian psychosocial interventions that followed. Around the time of the earthquakes, Vishal had been suffering from troubling episodes of incoherent wandering in the forest which he described as jangali, wildness. The story on page 99 takes place three years after the post-disaster mental health program phased out, during a follow-up trip I made back to Nepal to explore the afterlives of humanitarian intervention.

I think readers opening the book to page 99 would get a clear idea of some of the core issues I address in the work as a whole. In fact, I used to give talks that would start with a photograph of Vishal’s medicine: three blister packs of pills–red, blue, and green–on a plastic shopping bag laid out on a patch of Himalayan earth [image left]. I felt this image and the story that accompanied it cut to the heart of the key question that I raise in the book: What are the consequences of transient care, in a world of cascading disasters?

Vishal’s story is exemplary for multiple reasons. Like many of the clients treated by the post- disaster psychosocial program, Vishal did not conform to humanitarian assumptions of the “earthquake victim.” Vishal’s suffering began before the earthquakes, and he was prescribed antipsychotic and antidepressant medication by an NGO because he happened to live in the disaster zone. When humanitarians deemed the “crisis” of mental health in Nepal to be over, Vishal was once again left to manage his affliction on his own in a region with minimal access to psychopharmaceuticals. The temporary prescription of psychiatric drugs in the earthquake- affected districts is one of the most troubling aspects of the story of disaster and mental health in Nepal.

At the same time, Vishal’s story confounds our (now well established) anthropological expectations that humanitarian interventions are solely a form of violence, or that global mental health is simply a mode of medical imperialism. Despite the obstacles of access, after the program phased out Vishal chose to continue taking the medication he discovered through the work of disaster, whatever the cost. Vishal continued his treatment because it made him feel better and allowed him to return to health, which he defined as being able to care for his children, his animals, and to work the land. Ultimately Vishal’s challenge was one of chronicity. When I met him years later, he was strong and had just come from planting rice, but he was also ambivalent about the efficacy of his treatment. He worried that he might have to take psychiatric drugs for life. The story of Vishal’s medicine not only raises questions regarding the ethics of brief humanitarian psychosocial interventions but it is also an example of what disaster generates, and the limits and possibilities of transient care.

Visit Aidan Seale-Feldman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan VanGorder's "A Mother’s Work"

Megan VanGorder is assistant professor of history at Illinois State University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Mother's Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War–Era Nurse, and shared the following:

The top half of Page 99 of A Mother’s Work is occupied by an image of a large building, the Illinois Soldier’s Orphan’s Home, which was officially opened to occupants in August 1867 in Normal, Illinois. In front of the building, the reader can discern a row of children. They are dwarfed by the grandeur of the building, but they stand out because they all dressed in white and neatly assembled. These children are presumably the orphans or half-orphans of Illinois Civil War soldiers who occupy the home.

The remaining text on page 99 states:

[Mary Bickerdyke] also inserted herself into traditionally male-dominated aspects of organizational development, influencing fundraising efforts, teacher and matron assignments, and even decisions about the home’s location.

Publicly, the creation of the Illinois Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home was the province of powerful Illinois men eager to publicly demonstrate their dedication to fallen soldiers and their families. Even before the guns fell silent, state leaders began to anticipate the social and financial responsibilities that would accompany peace. As the Civil War was still being waged across the South, the Illinois General Assembly recommended a “tax for destitute families of soldiers, schools for soldier’s [sic] orphans, and a state sanitary bureau” to prepare for the postwar reality in early 1865. Governor Richard Yates entreated the state’s citizens to support the measure and invoked their patriotism and collective obligation to the general welfare of their neighbors: “No State is worthy of its sovereignty, and no government the respect of its people, who will not protect and nurture the children of its soldiers...”

The Page 99 Test hints at the major themes of the book and works reasonably well as a way to understand how Mary Bickerdyke consistently worked to “insert herself into traditionally male-dominated” spaces. However, the page only contains a single example of that lifelong journey. From page 99 alone, a reader might reasonably assume the book is primarily about the founding of the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home or about state-level policy formation. In reality, the institutional story is one strand within a broader exploration of how one woman leveraged Civil War service to reimagine authority, obligation, and maternal citizenship in the nineteenth century.

The image of the Illinois Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home visually signals that this book is not simply a wartime narrative, but a study of how wartime service translated into long-term structures of veteran and dependent care. The accompanying text underscores one of the book’s core arguments that Bickerdyke did not merely operate within accepted feminine spheres of professionalism but took direct action to influence institutions pertaining to soldier or veteran care. The page also situates this example of her work within the broader political culture, showing how male state leaders publicly claimed authority over commemorative and welfare efforts while women like Bickerdyke exerted influence in ways that were less visible but no less consequential.

A Mother’s Work spans four decades of Mary Bickerdyke’s tireless efforts to legitimize herself as a professional caregiver and the ways in which she utilized her reputation as “Mother” to effectively accomplish those goals.

Visit Megan VanGorder's website.

--Marshal Zeringue