Matthew Davis's "A Biography of a Mountain"

Matthew Davis is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale, and the first English-language children’s book published in Mongolia, The Magic Horse Fiddle. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among other places. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Davis lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, a diplomat, and their two young kids.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book dives into the politics of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, and begins to explore how his politics impacted his art. A representative sentence from this page is: “Borglum’s own politics were antiestablishment and championed the individual against overarching systems, beliefs he extended towards his art.”

In this sense, page 99 is both representative of the book as a whole while also limiting the book’s aperture. It is representative in that the relationship between politics and art is crucial to the meaning of Mount Rushmore—how Gutzon Borglum’s politics influenced his ideas behind the memorial, and how today’s politics influences its contemporary meaning is an important element of A Biography of a Mountain. But it is limiting in that what I hope to accomplish with this book is expand the story of Mount Rushmore beyond the actual sculpture itself. It is why the work of art is decentralized on the cover in favor a broad picture of the mountain of Rushmore, and why so much time is spent reporting from the present-day Black Hills. The actual sculpture is essential to any book about Rushmore, as is Gutzon Borglum. But what I hope to do in my book is tell a fuller picture of how the memorial came to exist in the Black Hills, how it represents the complicated conversations we are having today about the narratives of American history, and how it reflects the processes by which we memorialize those narratives. In this sense, page 99 limits that perspective.

Visit Matthew Davis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Griswold's "Resurrecting the Past"

Sarah Griswold is Associate Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. She has published articles in the Journal of the Western Society for French History, War & Society, and the Journal of the History of Collections.

Griswold applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate, and reported the following:

From page 99:

...the latter dynasty having displaced the Umayyads, moved the seat of Islamic power to Baghdad, and encouraged a historicization of their predecessors as despotic and decadent. German scholar Julius Wellhausen’s Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902) most influentially chipped away at the old paradigm, his book asserting the bias of Abbasid historiographers. Meanwhile, the Jesuit priest Henri Lammens, a historian of early Islam at the Université. Saint-Joseph in Beirut, became a leading public apologist for reinterpreting the Umayyads, doing so on either side of World War I; his La Syrie (1921)—written at the behest of the French High Commission—repositioned the long-discredited Umayyads as both Syria’s best Islamic legacy and Islam’s apogee, characterizing the religion as in moral, political, and cultural decline ever after.

It was thus amid this broader reformulation of the Umayyads that work at the Great Umayyad Mosque took shape, the site becoming a showpiece of the French regime’s focus on the Islamic past, and for multiple reasons. For one, it remained geographically axial and religiously dynamic in present-day Damascus. Built from 706 to 715, the Great Mosque continued to anchor the old city in the 1920s.

Does the Page 99 Test work in the case of Resurrecting the Past? I think so: oui. Page 99 drops readers into my 300-page book, which focuses broadly on heritage work in the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon, a regime set up after WWI. The page distills a critical shift that the book traces from the Christian preservation projects that anchored France’s initial claims in the Levant to projects about the Islamic past that seemed more politically serviceable by the late 1920s. The page, moreover, is neatly half text, half image--a layout that, if not all that common in the book, is still telling about its methods and arguments.

The text alludes to how French officials in Damascus had started to rethink what heritage should mean in a mandate setting that no longer felt "controlled" or practicable in the long-term. The image—a 1931 aerial photograph taken by France's aviation forces—shows Damascus' Great Umayyad Mosque, whose rediscovered 8th-century mosaics were suddenly being hailed by French heritage specialists as proof of earlier Christian and Islamic coexistence. The glittering tiles, French officials suggested, showed historical cooperation—and, by implication, justified French involvement in Syria and Lebanon.

It's also noteworthy that my page 99 suggests how images work in Resurrecting the Past. The book depends on images because the mandate’s heritage work did also. And this particular photograph illustrates a point that I make throughout the book: that heritage was produced through a dialectic relationship between representation and materiality.

Here we get a classic “view from above" of the Mosque that was shot by French military photographers and appeared in magazines back in France. The image is a reminder that the French wanted to frame how the Mosque was presented to French publics back home. But the Mosque is also, very clearly in its own right, a massive structure anchored in the heart of Damascus, and those properties gave the site qualities that often eluded French attempts at control.

You can see here, all on page 99, how real materiality and representational framing both defined heritage-making.

Learn more about Resurrecting the Past at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna-Luna Post's "Galileo's Fame"

Anna-Luna Post is a historian of knowledge at Leiden University. She is interested in all facets of the world of scholarship and learning in the early modern period. Trained as a cultural historian and Italianist, she is also fascinated by the intersections between early capitalism and environmental history, especially in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Post has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, Cambridge University, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, and the Medici Archive Project and the Netherlands Institute for Art History in Florence. She studied in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Bologna.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Galileo's Fame: Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century, and shared the following:

Readers opening my book on page 99 will be met by a black-and-white portrait of Galileo smiling at them. The portrait, made by Francesco Villamena, appeared in his 1613 work Letters on Sunspots, a polemical work flowing out of a dispute between Galileo and a German Jesuit, Christoph Scheiner, over the nature of dark spots that could be observed on (or near, according to Scheiner) the sun’s surface. Villamena’s portrait captures Galileo, dressed in a fur-lined robe, below two putti holding the instruments of his scholarly fame: his geometrical compass, the telescope, and the books he had published thus far. Most of the page is taken up by the portrait and caption, leaving space for just five lines of text. These lines let readers know that this was the first of Galileo’s works to include an author portrait, and convey the idea that an author’s portrait often served to capture readers’ attention and establish a sense of familiarity. The last line tells readers that the Accademia dei Lincei “paid for the design and worked—”, but then the page cuts off…

Alas, I don’t think the Page 99 Test works too well for my book, as it may give readers the wrongful impression that the book consists of 80% images and 20% text. Still, page 99, which appears in the middle of the third chapter, does showcase my book’s approach and thematic focus.

Galileo’s Fame recounts how a remarkable cast of characters, including artists, poets, philosophers, popes, lower clergymen, cardinals, courtiers, and, yes, the members of the Accademia dei Lincei, shaped Galileo’s fame through a variety of media. The book consequently embraces a wide variety of sources, pays careful attention to the visual culture of the time, and is not afraid to pursue in-depth analysis of poems written in Galileo’s honor: page 99 lies in the middle of a chapter that focuses especially on such poems and the visual artefacts of Galileo’s fame. I use these sources to show how people with different relationships to Galileo could try to latch onto his fame, in order to advance some of their own career goals, and argue that this could be beneficial (the poems meant attention!) but also detrimental (the poems did not always give him full credit) to Galileo.

That said, within the book, chapter 3 (“Admiration and Appropriation”) stands out as it discusses a full cast of characters for whom fame was a good thing. The other four chapters, meanwhile, show that for many seventeenth-century observers fame usually elicited some form of suspicion as well, as they associated it with gossip, the unreliable and unruly opinion of crowds, and with pride. In this way, the book captures the highly ambiguous nature of scholarly fame in this period, showing that fame was at once a highly coveted, and a controversial asset.

Learn more about Galileo's Fame at the University of Pittsburgh Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sanya Carley and David Konisky's "Power Lines"

Sanya Carley is the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. She is the coauthor of Energy-Based Economic Development: How Clean Energy Can Drive Development and Stimulate Economic Growth. David Konisky is the Lynton K. Caldwell Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, where he researches US environmental and energy politics. He has authored or edited six books, including Cheap and Clean: How Americans Think about Energy in the Age of Global Warming.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Power Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition, with the following results:

Page 99 of Power Lines comes toward the end of a chapter that discusses the challenges many Americans have in affording energy for their homes. Among the challenges for low-income populations is accessing energy assistance programs.

The first full paragraph reads:

A final important barrier is that many people distrust the government officials that implement energy assistance programs; that distrust may extend to the companies contracted to install energy efficiency upgrades in people’s homes. This distrust is reflected strongly in figure 4.3, which shows that only 6 percent of all low-income households called their utility company when they were struggling to pay their energy bills, and only 11 percent sought government assistance.

The Page 99 Test works reasonably well for our book, as it highlights a key theme of Power Lines that energy-related disparities – in this case, access to affordable and reliable energy utility services – are not merely a function of income, but also broader factors such as how people feel and interact with public and private actors. Energy assistance programs are poorly funded and only reach a fraction of the people that need them. On page 99, we demonstrate that the limited reach of these programs, in part, results from people not trusting government agencies and utility companies.

The overall argument of Power Lines is that the ongoing clean energy transition, despite its overall benefits, will create challenges for many people, including higher energy prices, job displacement, and burdens from living near new infrastructure. None of these challenges are reasons to reverse the transition. The urgency of the climate crisis means we need to accelerate the transition to cleaner sources of energy (e.g., wind, solar) and new, more efficient energy technologies (e.g., electric vehicles, heat pumps). At the same time, we need to devise public policies and programs to assure that all Americans will benefit from this transition.

Learn more about Power Lines at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Zakaras's "Freedom for All"

Alex Zakaras is professor of political science at the University of Vermont. He is the author of The Roots of American Individualism and Individuality and Mass Democracy and is coeditor of J. S. Mill’s Political Thought.

Zakaras applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Freedom for All: What a Liberal Society Could Be, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book falls near the beginning of a chapter about the exploitation of American workers in today’s economy. On this page, I’m discussing the history of American attitudes about economic freedom. In the early nineteenth century, not long after the country was founded, Americans tended to believe that most people who worked for wages were unfree. At the time, the United States was a nation of farmers, and most white families owned (or were on a path to owning) their own farms. Americans celebrated the independence of landowning small farmers who were their own bosses and who controlled their livelihoods; by contrast, they saw wage- earners as dependent on others for their daily bread, lacking economic security, and subservient to bosses or managers.

The Page 99 Test does not work very well for my book, because this is one of the few sections that looks backward into the (distant) past. If you started reading on this page, you might conclude that this is a book about American history; it’s actually about America today and in the future. Still, the themes I explore on this page are important throughout the book. The question I’m considering here is what a truly free economy would look like. In the eyes of our founders and the generations who lived right after them—including many of the abolitionists who fought to end slavery in this country—free markets were not enough, nor was economic growth or overall prosperity. If people doing essential work are economically stressed, vulnerable to being fired at will, and working in hierarchical workplaces that demand subservience, the country itself is not free—or so these early Americans believed. They also wanted an economy that was fairly equal, without extremes of opulent wealth and grinding poverty, where people could look one another in the eye as social and civic equals. For all these reasons, they would have been deeply unsettled by the American economy today.

Freedom for All argues that deep inequalities in wealth, power, and opportunity have pulled this country apart and left us vulnerable to demagogues and authoritarians. The book also invites us to imagine what our country could be if we really committed ourselves to building a society in which everyone is equally entitled to live freely.

Learn more about Freedom for All at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Georgina Wilson's "Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature"

Georgina Wilson is an early modern literary scholar specialising in material texts. Her work has been published in Criticism, The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England, and Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

Wilson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature, and shared the following:

Opening Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature at page 99 puts us near the beginning of chapter 3 of 4. We’re over half way through the book (excluding endnotes), which suddenly makes it seem shorter than it had felt to write. Taking part in a pattern of short, punchy chapter titles, chapter 3 is entitled ‘Form’; it’s about the history of formalism and the role of paper (as an imaginative and material form) in that history. Two of the three paragraphs are broader brush – the kind of ‘history-of-the-discipline’ stuff that might be useful for readers looking to situate themselves within the longue durée of material texts – while the third paragraph dives into a close reading of the early modern theologian William Pemble.

That swooping between the bigger picture and granular close reading is representative of the book as a whole, and the critics cited on this page (D.F. McKenzie, Peter Stallybrass, Margreta De Grazia, Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry span multiple generations of scholarship in a way which, I hope, also reflects something about the book. At the same time page 99 is broadly about book history rather than paper and so prises open the focus of the argument. The particular affordances of paper and form only start to emerge from William Pemble’s similies about souls and whiteness which are abruptly truncated by the edge of the page.

Having just taught an MSt class in which we discussed the units of pages, leaves, and sheets in relation to early modern books, I couldn’t help wondering what page 99 would mean in some of these different configurations. The real 99th page in this book, accounting for title pages and preliminary material, is numbered page 91, and comes at the end of possibly my favourite chapter on ‘composition’. This chapter is about the gathering together of stray sheets and paper fragments into books as a model for gathering words into sentences, and I enjoyed thinking about my own writing as I put the argument together. If Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature were a quarto – printed from sheets of paper folded twice to make 8 pages per sheet - then page 99 would fall on the 13th sheet, printed at the same time as pages 98, 102, and 103. Imagining this book as an octavo or a duodecimo would place page 99 in relationship to a plethora other pages. So to really do justice to the potential of early modern paper we couldn’t talk about page 99 without talking about all those other pages as well, and eventually we’d have to abandon the idea of the single page and go back to the unit of the book.

Learn more about Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Pearson's "Grievous Entanglement"

Erin Pearson is Associate Professor of English at Elon University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, with the following results:

As the pivot point between the two sections of Grievous Entanglement, the single paragraph on page 99 aptly introduces the book’s major concerns. It reminds readers that consumption-as-connection, the focus of the book, existed because meanings of the word “consume” shifted in the eighteenth century to include the economic sense of buying as well as older, largely negative senses like “eat” and “destroy.” The book as a whole argues that this semantic shift unlocked new ways for people far away from slavery to envision their own connection to (and complicity in) slavery. Consumption-as-connection revealed how everyday purchases drove a system designed to make human beings (economically) consumable. As page 99 notes, the first section of the book explores how this conceptual framework enabled people to understand commodities like sugar and tobacco as direct links to the enslaved laborers who had produced them. The rest of page 99 introduces the book’s second section, which moves from depictions of actual commodities to the metaphors of violent eating that permeated the discourse on slavery. Commentators repeatedly used metaphors of cannibalism or ravenous animals to capture the depredations of chattel slavery as well as its economic logic.

While page 99 offers an overview of the structure and argument of Grievous Entanglement, it does not give a sense of how that argument is developed. Grievous Entanglement investigates a conceptual framework adopted by a wide range of people throughout the Atlantic world. In order to show the pervasiveness of this thought pattern, the book carefully analyzes small details in a variety of texts, including poems, paintings, songs, political cartoons, novels, and antislavery pamphlets. A reader might thus get a better idea of the work by turning to a page that analyzes how Harriet Jacobs deploys animal imagery to denounce enslaver appetites or how Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses cannibalism metaphors to critique consumers’ failure to recognize the source of their luxuries. One chapter considers not only the lyrics of a blackface minstrel song, but the significance of the material form of the book in which it was printed; another traces how narratives by formerly enslaved abolitionists who resisted hungry animals influenced academic painting on both sides of the Atlantic. These cultural close readings illuminate historical conceptions of slavery, and that, ultimately, is the heart of the book.

Learn more about Grievous Entanglement at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Horbinski's "Manga's First Century"

Andrea Horbinski began studying Japanese in college after she started watching anime in high school, and went on to research hypernationalist manga in Kyoto on a Fulbright Fellowship. While pursuing her PhD in history and new media at the University of California, Berkeley, she harnessed her love of manga and pop culture, writing a general history of manga in its historical and global contexts for her dissertation. Along the way, she uncovered the role that fans of manga have played in the medium’s development since its earliest decades, mirroring her own experience in sci-fi and online fandoms since childhood.

Her new book, Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989, is the result of ten years spent researching, reading, and thinking about manga on three continents, including research stints in Belgium and Japan.

Horbinski applied the “Page 99 Test” to Manga’s First Century and reported the following:

Page 99 of Manga’s First Century takes readers to the 1930s, discussing the ideals and leading figures of the Shinmangaha Shūdan (New Manga Faction Group). The group rose to prominence in this decade by expanding manga for adults to new publication venues under the slogan “market acquisition” (shijō no kakutoku), and sought to avoid political content in their manga—a wise move amongst the escalating censorship of wartime Japan. Although they were quite well-paid for professionals at the time, two of the group’s leading figures, Kondō Hidezō and Sugiura Yukio, apparently saw the Shinmangaha and its activities as complementary to their interest in anarchism. The remainder of the page briefly discusses the nature of anarchism in imperial Japan, and how it was easily twisted to serve the wartime state.

In one sense, this page literally lives up to Manga’s First Century’s subtitle of “creators and fans,” as the Shinmangaha members were upstart young creators seeking to expand manga’s ambit beyond what the establishment thought was wise—a recurring phenomenon in my discussion of manga’s history in the 20thC. And insasmuch as I sought to explain how manga became manga, it is representative of that aspect of the book too; although the Shinmangaha and its creators are not well-known outside Japan (and are somewhat forgotten nowadays there too), they played a key role in manga in the 1930s and 1940s, and themselves became the manga establishment in the 1950s. Bringing otherwise obscure creators and developments in manga to light, and explaining how they fit together and led to the manga that people around the world love today, is the book’s project.

At the same time, this isn’t the page I would necessarily pick to sell readers on the book, even if it does reflect significant aspects of the whole. The Shinmangaha’s leading members achieved a kind of soft landing and were co-opted into the so-called New Order by the end of the 1930s; Kondō Hidezō became the central figure at Manga (1940-45), the state-approved manga magazine that was one of the few outlets in which publishing manga was permissible after 1940. Their experience was thus atypical of manga on the whole, which was censored nearly out of existence as many creators were drafted, blacklisted, or simply driven out of the profession in these years. In this straitened era, manga fans kept manga alive by avidly rereading older manga, either from each other’s personal collections or through used and rental bookstores—which laid down consumption patterns that exploded into new modes of manga entirely after the war. As one excerpt from a largely chronological account, page 99 is only a snapshot; there’s far more to manga history in the book than this one page contains, and readers will learn a lot more about many other people and developments in that history by picking up the book.

Visit Andrea Horbinski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan A. Stapley's "Holiness to the Lord"

Jonathan A. Stapley is an award-winning historian and scientist. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University and has been active in the field of Mormon History for two decades.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship, and shared the following:

In a famous line from “I Believe,” one of the catchiest songs from The Book of Mormon musical, Elder Price declares, “that God has a plan for all of us. I believe that plan involves me getting my own planet.” It’s funny. It is also a flawed caricature that largely does not map onto the beliefs of individual members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (more commonly called “Mormons”).

Latter-day Saints are constructing temples throughout the world. They excitedly take the public on tours of these iconic buildings once they are complete. But after the prayers of dedication, the public is excluded and church members make promises not to talk about what happens inside. The result is often awkward. Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship is a detailed explanation of the religious ceremonies that occur within these temples, their history over the last nearly 200 years, and an exploration of their religious meaning in the lives of church members. There is a bit of ritual theory and religious studies, but it is mostly history.

Page 99 notes how “it can be tempting to focus on the exotic beliefs” of nineteenth century Mormons. I write this after describing in vivid detail the religious cosmologies of Brigham Young—the leader of the church from 1844 to 1877—and perhaps his most prominent wife, Eliza Snow. Their beliefs about the afterlife and eternal destination of the human soul are the seeds for Elder Price’s goofy Broadway declaration. Page 99 deals with perhaps the most “exotic” elements of Latter-day Saint history. These beliefs are largely irrelevant to the lived religion and beliefs of the millions of practicing Mormons who worship in temples today. But they are also necessary to understand the trajectory of those beliefs and practices.

Page 99 fails at being representative of Holiness to the Lord as a whole. But it is still key for the book to represent the history of the Latter-day Saint temple as a whole.

Visit Jonathan A. Stapley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek Edyvane's "The Politics of Politeness"

Derek Edyvane is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. He was previously a lecturer and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York where he earned his PhD. He works on incivility, injustice, citizenship, and the ethics of political resistance and is the author of two books: Community and Conflict (2007) and Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil (2012). He was awarded the Political Studies Harrison Prize for his article 'Incivility as Dissent' (2020).

Edyvane applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Politics of Politeness: Citizenship, Civility, and the Democracy of Everyday Life, with the following results:

Politeness is often imagined as a stuffy affair of rigid conformity to social rules and conventions. But when we look more closely at how politeness actually works on the ground of everyday living, a much more interesting picture emerges.

Page 99 of The Politics of Politeness, which falls almost exactly halfway through the book and somewhere in the middle of Chapter 4, explores what happens when the usual norms of politeness are unclear or contested. In moments like these, politeness doesn’t retreat - it gets creative.

Taking the example of a shop-keeper who code-switches his manner depending on the customer, page 99 contends that this isn’t just savvy customer service, but rather a kind of social improvisation. In many everyday settings, politeness actually consists in the wisdom to depart from rigid etiquette and to adapt. It’s about crafting interactions that honour a deeper ‘civilizational’ ideal: the will to live decently alongside other people.

In this way, page 99 informs the reader of one of the book’s central ideas: its sense of the ritual-like nature of politeness and the suppleness of the ritual in the face of urban superdiversity. It also captures the book’s insistence on the embeddedness of the politeness ritual in a larger (and more controversial) civilizational bedrock.

Still, the Page 99 Test is not wholly satisfactory as a browser’s shortcut. It doesn’t quite capture the book’s core claim: that politeness is political. The book argues that the way we navigate politeness in daily life has real consequences for the health and vitality of democracy. And it argues that we can therefore use political theory to help us better understand the dilemmas of everyday civility.

That said, page 99 does offer at least a clue. After all, politics is often the art of negotiating difference and diversity. And what is politeness, if not a quiet, everyday way of doing just that?

Learn more about The Politics of Politeness at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue