Iftekhar Iqbal's "The Range of the River"

Iftekhar Iqbal is Associate Professor of History at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Range of the River is set along the upper and middle Mekong. It follows the Akha community, whose “circulatory” pattern of movement was disrupted when French and Siamese border-making along the Mekong turned a fluid frontier into a taxed and policed line. The page then shifts to the Loutzu in Yunnan, whose “wild independence” rested on their ability to move cotton, salt, and other commodities along the river’s trading corridors, despite repeated attempts by Chinese officials to extract tribute. It closes in the lower Mekong, drawing on David Biggs’s history of hydraulic engineering and insurgency and Philip Taylor’s ethnography of Cham Muslims to show how ecological fluidity and access to fresh water shaped both resistance to state encroachment and Cham Muslim identities in the delta -- echoing Charles Wheeler’s ‘looking at the river, thinking of the sea’

Would a browser opening the book to page 99 get a fair sense of the whole? I think the Page 99 Test works reasonably well for The Range of the River. The page does not spell out the overarching argument, but it does place the reader in the midst of what the book is trying to do: track how imperial border-making, local mobility, and ecological infrastructures became tightly intertwined along Asia’s great river systems.

Throughout the book, “looking at the river, thinking of the sea” works as a prime protocol of reading and writing, and it captures one of the major spirits of the book. Scenes are anchored in specific river stretches, yet they are always oriented toward wider oceanic horizons, spanning both mountains and valleys. I move between the headwaters and deltas of rivers such as the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Red and the Yangzi, tracing how upland communities, traders, boaters, and officials negotiated fluvial networks that linked China, India, and Southeast Asia. Page 99 is typical in the way it juxtaposes different reaches and ethnic groups while keeping the river itself as the connective tissue.

Learn more about The Range of the River at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jon Moen and Mary Tone Rodgers's "Before the Fed"

Jon Moen is a Professor of Economics at the University of Mississippi. He has published papers on US slavery, retirement, and bank panics during the National Banking Era. He is a member of the Economic History Association, the Economic History Society, and the Cliometrics Society. Mary Tone Rodgers is an Adjunct Instructor of Finance and Economics at the State University of New York. She enjoyed a 30-year career at Merrill Lynch before moving to academia where she received the 2022 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Moen and Rodgers applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Before the Fed: J.P. Morgan, America's Lender of Last Resort, and reported the following:

On page 99 we find President Grover Cleveland stymied in two attempts to resolve a rapidly developing financial crisis in the winter of 1895: he must replenish the US gold reserve. The terms on which he can borrow money are too rigid to produce what he needs: a huge infusion of gold to support payments of US debts in gold. Without an immediate gold inflow, the US would resort to paying the interest on its debt in silver, anathema to essential European investors who were securely on the gold standard. Page 99 sets the stage for J. P. Morgan’s entrance to the drama. Up to this moment in the book, Morgan has already stepped in to stop bank runs, calm panicky markets, and supply emergency loans when others failed. But the stakes on page 99 are higher than anything he has ever confronted, putting him at the edge of the riskiest rescue operation of his career. What unfolds over the next twenty pages is not just the largest last-resort loan in American history up to that point, but a rescue that reshapes the financial role Morgan will play until the Federal Reserve forms to take on the job.

The Page 99 Test works because on that page we discuss a core theme of our book: the US had a paucity of official tools at its disposal to address financial crises and therefore relied on the voluntary actions of bankers like Morgan to create lifelines to preserve financial stability. To motivate other bankers to join him in collective action Morgan has to try to make last resort loans profitable to them. On page 99 we do what is distinctive among financial histories: we show how risk, return and prices of last resort loans were estimated by Morgan’s banking network.

However, page 99 does not touch on many of the other related themes we develop in the book. It does not touch on how he adapts his syndication device for arranging routine loans to the railroads to arranging loans to quell crises; how his approach evolves from saving his father’s firm, to saving customers, to eventually saving the US financial system; or how he incurs some massive losses on some last resort loans. And it doesn’t spell out the similarities between how Morgan crafted last resort loans and how the Federal Reserve does them today.

Learn more about Before the Fed at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joanna Dee Das's "Faith, Family, and Flag"

Joanna Dee Das is associate professor of performing arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of the award-winning book Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora.

Das applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America, and shared the following:

The first paragraph on page 99 makes an important point in my book: that live performances in the tourism mecca of Branson, Missouri in the 1960s-1980s gave country music the sense of authenticity needed to counterbalance the genre’s strong commercial roots. As I write, “While sitting at home listening to the Barn Dance Radio Hour or a [country music] LP, one could imagine the social world of rural Americana. By attending a Branson show, one could experience it.” The second paragraph gives an example of a quintessential Branson performer who moved to the town in the 1980s boom era: Boxcar Willie, who was an accomplished country music performer who hadn’t ever quite reached #1 hit status. He maintained success with a heavy touring schedule, but Branson gave him an opportunity to settle down. He became one of the city’s biggest cheerleaders. Page 99 quotes from him: “I don’t think there is a better part of the U.S. that a fellow can open a business or move to such as the Branson area.” He definitely supported the idea of Branson as ideal not only because of its spirit of free entrepreneurship, but also adherence to an ideal of rural America as real America. As I write on 99: “He famously turned down $20,000 a week on Broadway for Branson. He harbored a disdain for urban poverty, which he did not explicitly state in racial terms but was implied by echoing Reagan’s coded language about welfare queens.” Boxcar Willie championed hoboes (that was his persona), but disdained bums, even though one could argue that both terms are names for transient people without stable jobs or homes.

The Page 99 Test works for Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America because it reiterates one of my central claims that live performance in Branson, Missouri weaves together multiple strands of conservative ideology into a coherent whole. It demonstrates how Branson performers have championed the city as a model of both economic conservatism (the free market) and cultural conservatism, the latter which has sometimes dipped into racism (ie, Boxcar Willie’s implication that unemployed white men of the Great Depression, or hoboes, were valiant and moral despite their transience, whereas unemployed Black men on the street corners of New York were lazy.) Sometimes, capitalism and authenticity are in conflict with each other, which means that economic and cultural conservatism can be in tension. Live performers help ease tensions to create coherence. Yes, country music is fully invested in the capitalist marketplace, but through Branson performers like Boxcar Willie, who will chat with you before, during, and after the show, who will sign autographs and pose for pictures, who doesn’t seem too big for his britches despite his commercial success, makes audiences feel like the music is authentic, for lack of a better word. The Boxcar Willie example continues onto page 100, so you don’t quite fully get the whole picture just with page 99, but you get enough.

I think this Page 99 Test should work for any well-written nonfiction book. As a nonfiction author, you have to keep reiterating your main points and tie all specific examples back to those main points. Therefore any given page should be able to serve as a microcosm of the whole.

Visit Joanna Dee Das's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Mosseri's "Trust Fall"

Sarah Mosseri is a sociologist and writer whose insights are shaped by years spent working on both sides of the labor divide—from the service counter to the strategy room.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us, with the following results:

On page 99, I draw out one of the central insights from my ethnographic research into workplace relationships: some managers cultivate trust not through mastery or authority but through what I call “endearing incompetence.” The page focuses on Paul, a restaurant manager whose small mistakes and disheveled style actually worked in his favor. His errors weren’t liabilities; they humanized him. They signaled authenticity and a kind of self-effacing humility that softened the power gap between manager and worker. As I write, “Paul’s fumbling manner set him apart from the typical manager and helped lay the groundwork for personalized relationship building.” Later on the page, I contrast this with a more buttoned-up, by-the-book style of management, one that many workers experienced as rigid, distant, and harder to relate to. Where Paul’s endearing incompetence invited closeness, the more formal approach heightened social distance.

The Page 99 Test works fairly well for this book. It not only represents the narrative, data-grounded style of the book, but it also serves as a microcosm for several of the book’s arguments. The comparison between the two management approaches illustrates how styles of competence aren’t just technical; they are deeply social. Page 99 doesn’t yet dive into the darker side of this dynamic, but it hints at it through lines like, “[his imperfections opened] the door to a humanity bubble where intimate connections could thrive unimpeded by business operations.” That moment foreshadows the broader critique to come: how the very traits that make managers feel approachable and authentic can also be leveraged in ways that obscure power, blur boundaries, and deepen workers’ dependence.

The page also sets the stage to discuss the unequal terrain on which these dynamics unfold. Endearing incompetence is not equally available—or equally persuasive—to everyone. It is most effective for white men whose competence is assumed by default, making their mistakes appear charming rather than disqualifying. For white women and people of color, the same behaviors often fail to generate trust and may even be interpreted as evidence of inadequacy. In this sense, page 99 isn’t just a snapshot of relational style; it’s an early window into the book’s argument about how workplace intimacy and trust rest on, and reproduce, broader social inequities.

Visit Sarah Mosseri's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthony Fletcher and Ruth Larsen's "Mistress"

Anthony Fletcher was formerly professor of history at the Universities of Sheffield, Durham, and Essex, and professor of English social history at the University of London. His works include Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 and Growing up in England. Ruth M. Larsen is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Derby. An expert on gender and the country house, she has contributed to several books on the subject.

Larsen applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Mistress: A History of Women and their Country Houses, and reported the following:

Page 99 of this book looks at three elite women and the extent to which they were able to access and manage family finances. It shows how Frances, ninth Viscountess Irwin of Temple Newsam, Leeds, inherited the house from her husband in 1774, and was able to reshape the property. This case is contrasted with the situation of Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler, who are also known as the Ladies of Llangollen. As ‘women without men’ their income was insecure and they relied heavily on gifts in order to maintain their way of life.

This page would give the reader a very good indication of what the book is like more widely. The variety of female experiences in their ability to be the ‘mistress’ of the country house is the central tenant of the book, and the degree to which they had control over finances is, of course, really important to this. However, it was not the only way they could be mistresses, and in many ways these three women were outliers; most mistresses of the country house did not own the property themselves, but had to work alongside their husbands in fulfilling this role. Some did so as happy partners, while others had to manage this despite their husbands being absent, uninterested, and/or emotionally cruel. The rest of the book explores these wider experiences, looking at motherhood, the role of the mistress beyond the country house, and their influence in designing the buildings, amongst other things. Therefore, page 99 is more of an excellent ‘taste’ of the volume, but – as should be expected – not the whole picture.

Learn more about Mistress: A History of Women and their Country Houses at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Eastman An's "Fear of God"

Daniel Eastman An is Assistant Professor of Church History at Yonsei University in Seoul.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fear of God: Practicing Emotion in Late Antique Monasticism, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Fear of God: Practicing Emotion in Late Antique Monasticism is part of a discussion centering on prayer spaces in Egyptian monasteries in late antiquity. At the top of the page I’ve just introduced the concept of “surface figuration” as a collective designation for the various texts, images, and other markings painted and inscribed on the walls and floors of the (now destroyed) Monastery of Apa Jeremias outside modern Cairo. The page goes on to state the argument of the book’s fourth chapter: by guiding what monks saw and how they moved their bodies while praying, the monastery’s surface figuration “afforded a particular set of relationships (and hence emotions) for its inhabitants, centering on the idea of intercession. While the overarching relational paradigm between the monastery’s inhabitants and their God remained one of future judgment, the surface figuration afforded a host of subsidiary interactions between monastics (both living and dead) and the intercessory figures whose aid they sought.”

While I can’t say that this accurately encapsulates the entire book, it is a fair representation of the book’s penultimate chapter, “Spaces of Judgment and Mercy,” which focuses on the emotional lives of monks at two monasteries in Egypt in the period between the fourth and seventh centuries. The above quotation also hints at the conclusions of the book’s two main preceding chapters. First, “The Psalter as Emotional Lexicon” explores the varying emotional vocabulary of the relationship between humans and God across three ancient translations of the psalms (Greek, Coptic, and Syriac), concluding that monks reciting the psalms in all three languages (but especially Greek) encountered a vocabulary that strongly emphasized human fear over against divine pity or mercy. The other main chapter, “Scenes of Judgment,” shows how monastic writers made sense of these two emotions through the relational paradigm of judgment, leading them to foreground God’s role as eschatological judge in their writings for other monastics. These textual analyses preface the book’s engagement with monastic material culture, which shows rank-and-file monastics reacting to the fear of eschatological judgment by establishing networks of intercessional and penitential prayer on behalf of themselves and one another.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway of the book is the idea that emotions—even supposedly ineffable emotions like those involved in relationships with the divine—are thoroughly shaped by the variables of language, culture, and physical environment. Context matters. Together with this is the idea that emotions in one relational domain tend to influence emotions in other relational domains. While the book begins with the concept of fear of God, it ends with the realization that that fear itself generated profound mutual love among the members of some monastic communities in late antiquity.

Learn more about Fear of God at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ladelle McWhorter's "Unbecoming Persons"

Ladelle McWhorter is the Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Emerita at the University of Richmond. Her books include Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy.

McWhorter applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self, with the following results:

Page 99 of Unbecoming Persons is near the end of Chapter 3, “Imposing Personhood: African Enslavement and Indigenous Resistance.” It describes US government efforts to force the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole peoples to abandon their traditional relationship with the land either by accepting individual (male) landownership or by leaving their native territories and relocating to “Indian Country,” what is now Arkansas and Oklahoma.

In 1819, President Monroe’s Secretary of War John C. Calhoun negotiated a dubious treaty with a small group of Cherokee men in Washington that rewarded those who “had demonstrated an adoption of ‘American life-styles’” (plantation agriculture and slaveholding) with 640 acres each and a path to US citizenship. Meanwhile, the government continued to press for removal of all who refused to abandon tribal relations with land. In 1830, President Jackson signed the controversial Indian Removal Act (which had passed Congress by only five votes) and began a formal process of dispossession and relocation. The Cherokee sought legal recourse for several more years, as did the Creek until 1832. Although thousands eventually made the trek west, some hid in the mountainous backcountry or fled south to join the more militant Seminole resistance.

No single page could possibly capture the central idea of Unbecoming Persons for the simple reason that the book is more a process of discovery and of dismantling assumptions than it is the development of a single thesis. However, page 99 does present a very significant step in that process. Earlier chapters demonstrate that the modern concept of “person”—with its strong Roman legal ancestry and the moral, political, and epistemological meaning it acquired in the work of John Locke—is inextricably bound up with proprietorship. The modern person is the owner of its thoughts, actions, and labor and as such can also own material and intellectual property. This concept of personhood was a tool of British colonization. As Locke insisted, Indigenous people, like European people, are to be judged as individual persons; persons who do not manage and cultivate their resources properly are to be punished with dispossession—precisely because, as individual persons, they are morally responsible for their failure. When Indigenous people refused to treat land as property, they refused Lockean personhood as well.

The first chapters of Unbecoming Persons present a genealogy of the concept of personhood with special attention to Roman law and Christian Trinitarian theology and the ways those lineages come together in social contract theory. It shows how personhood emerged at the turn of the 18th century as a mechanism for enforcing regimes of private property and forcing European peasants into wage labor or workhouses and how it was used to justify colonization and slavery. The final chapters of the book explore a variety of possibilities for resistance to personhood’s most dangerous aspects and for creating and leading good lives beyond the strictures of post-Lockean propriety.

Learn more about Unbecoming Persons at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Blaxland (ed.), "Mobilising the Australian Army"

John Blaxland is Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University and a former military intelligence officer.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new edited book, Mobilising the Australian Army: Contingencies and Compromises Over More than a Century, and reported the following:

My edited book, Mobilising the Australian Army: Contingencies and Compromises over more than a Century, draws on contributions to an Army History Unit conference held in Canberra a couple of years back. Page 99 of the book sees Carol Fort explain commercial sector munitions production for the Australian Army during the Second World War. But the book spans a much wider scope of Australia's martial history ranging from Federation through to the early 2020s. The Second World War features prominently, to be sure, noting that it stands out as the greatest mobilisation of the Army in the nation's history.

Fort's chapter is the fourth and final chapter of 'Part 2, entitled 'Mobilsing Resources for War: Early Twentieth Century'. Part 2 spans work by Meighen McCrae on resource decision making to win in the First World War, Douglas E. Delaney's comparative study of inter-war Canadian and Australian army mobilisation planning, and Andrew T. Ross's chapter on industry, industrial mobilisation and the Australian army in the Second World War. This is a rich part full of useful historical pointers on how to overcome challenges of rapid industrial and force expansion.

Part 3 covers women and force expansion during the Second World War and beyond. It includes a chapter by Clare Birgin discussing the employment of women in signals intelligence in the lead-up to and opening phases of the Second World War, acknowledging their excellent work went largely unheralded because of the secretive nature of the organisations they work for. It also includes a chapter by Karen D. David and Philip McCristall, once again comparing the Canadian and Australian experience, but this time focusing on women in the military, reflecting on the past and shaping the future.

Part 4 'Alliance and Concurrency Pressures', discusses Cold War and post-Cold War challenges in four chapters. In the first one, Amanda Johnston describes some of the constraining effects of concurrency pressures faced by the Australian Army today. Sue Thompson examines alliance security planning in Southeast Asia during the Cold War, reflecting a surprisingly longstanding interest in and engagement with Southeast Asian partners. I have chapter in this part which reviews the Australian Army's growing concurrency pressures in the years from 2003-2010, demonstrating how it was a near run thing. Then Dan Marston reviews the difficulties of resourcing coalition operations with UK and US forces in the war in Iraq. All four chapters present complementary perspectives from different operational settings but with enduring pointers for the contemporary Australian Army.

Part 5 covers force preparation and utilisation of the Reserves. This includes a chapter by James Morrison on the home reserve and the militia in Australia during the Second World War, exploring some of the political and administrative challenges experienced. James Kell's chapter reviewing the post 1945 national service schemes points out the different rationale and purposes for the two schemes introduced successively in the early 1950s and mid 1960s. Part 5 concludes with Renée Kidson's chapter on reserve mobilisation for domestic contingencies, notably Operation Bushfire Assist and Operation Covid Assist. This is rich in fascinating observations on challenges and innovative responses.

Part 6 explores deployment challenges from the 1990s onwards. It starts with an illuminating chapter by Bob Breen on rehearsing mobilisation and force projection during the Kangaroo Exercise Series from 1989 to 1995. Bob has a second chapter auditing the Australian Army's performance in a number of operational deployments from 1987 to 2003 - including off the coast of Fiji, Somalia, Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Timor L'este. The third and final chapter in this part is by Rhys Crawley who examines the case studies drawn from Australia's Afghanistan commitments from 2005-2006, drawing important pointers for future reference. Once again, a range of operational settings provide some fascinating insights into the challenges of raising, deploying and sustaining forces - many of which are of enduring significance.

In the concluding part, I offer some reflections on mobilisation in the past and offer some pointers for the future - including a proposed voluntary but incentivised scheme for national and community service intended to help the nation face a spectrum of security challenges ranging from great power competition, looming environmental catastrophe and a spectrum of governance challenges in the region. This complements the introductory overview of the book provided by Iain Langford, which acts, in effect, as an excellent synopsis of the book. It also caps off the insights offered in the first part of the book, written by Jean Bou, who provides the contemporary and historical environment to the concept of mobilisation and its intellectual history.

All this to say that Carol Fort's observations on page 99 stand on their own, to be sure, but they make more sense in the context of the broader span of issues covered by the other chapters in the book. In the end, Mobilising the Australian Army is a timely and worthwhile reflection on the Australian Army's experience with mobilisation and what it means for today. This applies not only for contemporary military planners, policy makers, and strategists but also for politicians and the informed Australian voter contemplating what it might take to make a significant and rapid expansion of military capability in the event of an existential crisis.

Learn more about Mobilising the Australian Army at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen M. Koeth's "Crabgrass Catholicism"

Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C. is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is an urban, religious, and political historian of twentieth-century America. His research focuses on U.S. Catholic involvement in postwar metropolitan development, including urban renewal projects, public housing, and suburbanization, and the effects of these interactions on Catholic faith and politics.

Koeth applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Crabgrass Catholicism begins by situating the reader in the Diocese of Rockville Centre in suburban Long Island. Established by the Vatican in 1957 to serve the Catholics of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, the diocese was hailed as the first entirely suburban diocese and is therefore the perfect place to fulfill the aim of Crabgrass Catholicism: to examine the effects of postwar suburbanization on American Catholic practice and politics.

The first paragraph of the page focuses on the 1980s and the Diocese’s efforts to encourage fallen-away Catholics to return to the practice of the faith. The phenomenon of religious disaffiliation which became especially prominent in the 1970s and beyond is not the focus of my study. I do, however, conclude Crabgrass Catholicism by arguing that disaffiliation is one long-term effect of the changes that suburbanization ushered into the Church.

Still, the Page 99 Test largely succeeds: the remaining two paragraphs of page 99 serve as a conclusion of Chapter Three and are an apt summary of one of Crabgrass Catholicism’s principal arguments. Namely, that postwar suburbanization “made private spaces, especially the family home,” the “center of prayer and faith formation” undermining the centrality and communality of the parish and heightening the laity’s sense that religious practice was just “another life choice made amid a panoply of social possibilities.”

The urban ethnic parish, established amid late nineteenth century mass immigration, “wove geography, education, culture, family, and faith” into a “highly successful means of providing for immigrants, perpetuating ethnic culture, and passing the faith on to future generations.” But the suburban parish, “formed by rapid population expansion” in the postwar period, lacked not only the physical spaces in which the faithful could gather to “form community, practice charity, and pass on the faith,” but also crucially lacked “the binding forces of ethnic religiosity.” This radically altered not only the Catholic understanding of the parish, and how youth were instructed in the faith, but even how Catholics participated in American political life.

Visit the Crabgrass Catholicism website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tim Seiter's "Wrangling Pelicans"

Tim Seiter is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Tyler, specializing in colonial Texas with an emphasis on Spanish and Native histories.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios, with the following results:

When a reader opens page 99 of Wrangling Pelicans they will find themselves in the book’s fifth chapter entitled "A Most Dangerous and Desirable Profession." For some context, Texas throughout the eighteenth century is firmly controlled by Native peoples, even if the Spanish empire claimed otherwise. Being a Crown soldier in this space, then, was incredibly dangerous. By today’s standards, it would easily rank as the most dangerous job in the United States, if not the world. Why, then, would men be willing to risk their lives in signing up as a soldier? Page 99 of my book answers that question: by enlisting in the presidio, mestizo, mulatto, and Indigenous men of the region could be legally classified as españoles (Spaniards) and gain all the advantages that came with that status.

Race mattered a great deal in the Spanish empire. As I write in the book, "those perceived as having limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) received additional protections under the law, had more opportunities for employment, and experienced little to no social ostracism." For instance, municipal codes from places such as San Antonio reveal that Indigenous offenders could be sentenced to as many as 200 lashes "with a rope about [their] neck," whereas white offenders typically paid a fine and spent a few days in jail.

On colonial Mexico’s northern borderlands, the Spanish Crown faced a fundamental problem—it could not find enough “clean-blooded” españoles to fill its military ranks. Few white Spaniards had any incentive to relocate to the empire’s fringes, where they would find limited opportunity but limitless amounts of danger. With manpower in great need, the Crown solved this problem by turning their mixed race soldiers white on paper, thereby creating a phenomenal recruiting tool. Despite its danger, mixed race men increasingly flocked to the presidios to acquire this social status.

Alas, the Page 99 Test does a great job of summarizing one of the main arguments I make in Wrangling Pelicans. In short, men and women in borderland spaces were willing to be part of the Spanish Crown’s imperial projects if they received tangible benefits for themselves, in this case whiteness. But ultimately, throughout the rest of the book, we learn that when residents of these remote regions perceived no personal advantage, they readily violated Crown laws.

Visit Tim Seiter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue