Kevin Padraic Donnelly's "The Descent of Artificial Intelligence"

Kevin Padraic Donnelly is an associate professor of history at Alvernia University. His scholarship has appeared in the British Journal for the History of Science, History of Science, PUBLIC Journal, and History of Meteorology, and he has published several chapters in edited volumes on the role of statistics and science in shaping social thought. His previous book is a well-acclaimed history of the pioneering nineteenth-century statistician Adolphe Quetelet.

Donnelly applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Descent of Artificial Intelligence: A Deep History of an Idea 400 Years in the Making, and reported the following:

Page 99 actually starts with the conclusion to chapter 3, which itself is the end of the first section of the book. It summarizes the opinions of a bunch of thinkers who despised the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and who generally go by the title of the “counter-Enlightenment,” a term popularized by Isaiah Berlin. While many historians of ideas have justifiably marginalized them as reactionary thinkers tied to hidebound traditions of the old regime, I argue that their critiques of science, and particularly scientific thinking, have value today. In many ways, I argue that they actually sound like modern humanities professors who want to keep alive a vision of the liberal arts in a world of technical and career education. While a lot of people today – myself included – would certainly not support their belief in the ideas of absolute monarchy, strict adherence to the Catholic church, and traditional social hierarchies, they viewed these institutions as protectors of a kind of connected society that I think many people, including liberals, still value. Here is one quote from the page that kind of sums up what the chapter is about: “As the review of these thinkers makes clear, their fear of a 'descent' from an intelligent nature was based on the idea that the reduction of humanity to generalized laws and mathematical formula had severe consequences.”

I would say the Page 99 Test works great for my book. As the quote above shows, it even has “descent” and “intelligence” from the title of the book! While the book stretches from Descartes to Alan Turing and modern statistics, I think you can get a pretty good insight into what the book is about just based on this page: that artificial intelligence today is in part a product of how we have defined ourselves as scientific subjects. The thinkers in this chapter offer a critique of this process, but sometimes the critics are the best historical guide to what is going on in the history of ideas. While landing on a “Conclusion” subsection is fortuitous, I do think I benefited from academic readers reminding me to always connect the story back to the major themes of the book. Outside of a page from the introduction and conclusion to the book itself, page 99 of the book is about as good a “shortcut” as a reader would be able to find from just one page.

Learn more about The Descent of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pittsburgh Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sheila Curran Bernard's "Bring Judgment Day"

Sheila Curran Bernard is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, author, and educator. The recipient of an NEH Public Scholars award, she is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Bernard applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Bring Judgment Day falls partway through chapter 4, “1918: The State of Texas vs. Walter Boyd.” Boyd is an alias assumed by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as the musician Lead Belly. Page 99 finds him incarcerated near DeKalb, Texas. At the top of the page is a brief excerpt of two work songs, both of which describe men dying in the field under the brutal conditions of the Texas prison farm system, in which prisoners—a disproportionate number of them Black men—labored under the threat of violence from white overseers. In May 1920, this page reports, Ledbetter was transferred to a larger prison, the Imperial State Prison Farm (also known as Sugarland) near Houston. We learn that he and others, shackled together in groups of about thirty, were likely brought there by a longtime transfer agent named Bud Russell, who shows up in some versions of a song for which Lead Belly is famous, “The Midnight Special”:

“Yonder come Bud Russell.”
“How in de worl’ do you know?”
“Tell him by his big hat
An’ his 44.

He walked into de jail-house
Wid a gang o’ chains in his han’s;
I heard him tell de captain,
‘I’m de transfer man.’”

Once a site of enslavement and later of convict leasing, the prison at Sugarland stretched out over more than five thousand acres. Arriving there in 1920, “Walter Boyd” – Lead Belly – had twenty-eight years left in his sentence. He was thirty-one years old.

Page 99 is only partially representative of the book as a whole. It finds Lead Belly caught up in a system designed, in part, to crush Black Americans, particularly those who, like Lead Belly, were independent and ambitious. We see his agency in the defiant lyrics of work songs, but this page doesn’t capture the portrait of him overall that emerges in the book. It also doesn’t give readers a sense of the book’s narrative framework, the six months, from 1934 to 1935, in which Lead Belly traveled and worked with white folklorist John Lomax. It was Lomax who introduced Lead Belly to national audiences, emphasizing his prison record and portraying the musician as inherently violent and untamed. The book refutes this portrait, replacing legend with fact drawn from oral histories, land and census records, prison records and more.

Visit Sheila Curran Bernard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tracy L. Steffes's "Structuring Inequality"

Tracy L. Steffes is professor of education and history at Brown University. She is the author of School, Society, & State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Structuring Inequality: How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education, and reported the following:

Page 99 describes the federal investigation of segregation in Chicago Public Schools in 1966-1967. This investigation was launched after civil rights groups filed a Title VI complaint under the Civil Rights Act with credible (and later validated) evidence of segregation in the district. Federal officials briefly withheld funds under the newly passed Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) but the political backlash from powerful White Democrats, including Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, and their attacks on “federal overreach” and ESEA itself, led federal officials to release the funds and instead launch an investigation. Page 99 uses confidential internal correspondence among federal officials to show how they worried about the politics of the investigation—how to navigate the hostility of local politicians and school officials while also enforcing the law. Their solution was to stall and pull their punches: the substance of the final report documented segregation of students and teachers but sidestepped intent and legal culpability. In the report and their actions afterward, federal officials offered to help CPS officials address segregation and emphasized cooperation over coercion, but school officials read it as absolving them of responsibility, setting the stage for many years of local resistance, evasion, and delay to address segregative policies and practices.

The Page 99 Test does not work very well for my book. This page is deep in the weeds of one policy fight in one place at one time—school desegregation in Chicago in the mid 1960s—and while it gives some sense of the dynamics of that fight, it does not give someone browsing it any sense of the book’s overall scope and arguments. The book explores how public policies, including state government policies around the boundaries and funding of schools and local governments, structured racial and socioeconomic inequality in Chicago and its suburbs from the end of WWII through the early 21st century. It explores how this metropolitan inequality was forged in the decades before the 1960s, fought over in the 1960s and 1970s through policy fights over three major sets of reforms (school desegregation, fair and affordable housing, and school finance and property tax reform), and virtually forgotten as a public policy problem to solve in the 1980s and 1990s amid calls for fiscal discipline and shifts toward neoliberal modes of governance. The book argues that this history helps us to understand our world today, including the way that public policy has structured inequality over time and space, and the ways it might be used or reimagined to dismantle it. Consequently, a person reading just page 99 would find themselves deep in the details of just one moment in one place, and it would not give that reader any sense of the stakes, how that relates to the book's larger arguments and questions, and why it matters for how we understand the past or present.

Learn more about Structuring Inequality at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Menika B. Dirkson's "Hope and Struggle in the Policed City"

Menika B. Dirkson is Assistant Professor of African American History at Morgan State University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Hope and Struggle in the Policed City: Black Criminalization and Resistance in Philadelphia, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“If my boy did this, if he helped kill that man . . . he’ll have to pay the price.”

Based on the interviews Graham, Peters, Porter, and Thomas conducted, the potential causes for the boys’ crime were complex. All the youths appeared to have come from decent homes, and their relatives often characterized them as well-mannered, occupied with school and sports, and willing to work to have money in their pockets. However, there were some internal and external socioeconomic factors that made their personal lives unstable. Harry and Edward McCloud came from a two-parent household they shared with their three younger sisters in a six-bedroom rowhome, but their father was unemployed. James Wright, who lived with hismother and four younger brothers, received a “church upbringing” in his household and had dreams of becoming a professional football player. However, Wright’s parents had separated three years prior, his family was on welfare because his mother was unable to work, and he recently failed several courses at Overbrook High School, which jeopardized his opportunity to graduate and become a professional athlete. Lonnie Collins and Harold Johnson came from broken nuclear families with an absent mother and a deceased father, respectively; regularly sought out employment to meet their financial needs; and were known to hang out with the “wrong crowd of boys” despite their parents and guardians’ advice to stay away from gangs. Although Collins and Johnson’s families explained that the youths had access to money for their “pocket” through employment or a one-time allowance, the Tribune alluded that the boys were financially frustrated because Collins had recently been laid off from his job at a grocery store while Johnson had to wait nearly a week to return to his summer job in Atlantic City. Nevertheless, by detailing these accounts of familial and financial turmoil, the Tribune journalists provided its readers with the sociological factors that possibly influenced the boys to commit the crime. Overall, the Tribune staff writers agreed with the general public that the murder of In-Ho Oh was “brutal” and tragic, but their article sought to humanize the boys amid incessant media reports that focused on the “bestiality” and “viciousness of the crime.”

If anyone were to read page 99 of my book, they would find an excerpt about the 1958 tragic robbery-murder of University of Pennsylvania graduate student In-Ho Oh by eleven black teenagers in West Philadelphia. This excerpt provides a good idea of what the entire book entails because it is one of many cases of poverty-induced crime that occurred in Philadelphia from the 1950s through the 1970s. Criminal cases involving black youth, particularly those who appeared to be gang-affiliated, often provoked a media blitz along with increased municipal funding for tough on crime policing rather than poverty alleviation. Throughout my book, I offer historical and sociological analyses of poverty-induced crimes like this one to argue that the perceived high rate of black crime that some journalists, police, city officials, and everyday citizens frame as a moral panic is not a result of racial inferiority, but generations of social ostracism (like racism and classism) along with a lack of access to decent employment, housing, education, and recreation necessary for a good quality of life. While some people in power promoted the idea of more government spending on police and prisons, there were community activists, social workers, former gang members, teachers, and even a few police officers who resisted this approach and operated anti-gang and anti-poverty organizations that offered black youth and adults the resources they needed to survive, including therapy sessions, mentorship, and job training, to steer them away from delinquency and crime and direct them to a life with a positive future. Ultimately, my book seeks to convince readers that there are non-violent and non-carceral approaches to solving poverty-induced crime and juvenile delinquency. For nearly a century, everyday Philadelphians have established settlement houses, gun violence prevention programs, and everything in between to curb crime when government-funded social welfare has been inadequate. This book highlights a communal struggle to prove that consistent and adequate government spending on schools, housing, and recreation are essential to reducing poverty and crime.

Learn more about Hope and Struggle in the Policed City at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Grundy's "Never By Itself Alone"

David Grundy is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (2019), and co-editor with Lauri Scheyer of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (2023). Formerly a Teaching Associate at the University of Cambridge and a British Academy Fellow at the University of Warwick, he is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin.

Grundy applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Never By Itself Alone: Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and the Bay Area, 1944―Present, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the third page of the book’s third chapter, on the so-called “Occult School” of Boston poets. The page is a profile of the poet Ed Marshall, described there as “poet, street preacher and denizen of the queer underworld”. It introduces Marshall and provides a brief introductory biography. This page of the book is a good example of the archival approach I draw on throughout. It focuses on an object from the archives of the publisher Irving Rosenthal: a small mirror that Marshall affixed to his shoe to assess the sexual prospects within adjacent cubicles while cruising men’s rooms. I suggest that the archival mirror (literally) reveals to the scholar their own face as (metaphorically) the object of Marshall’s own enquiry, cruised out of time. I also draw on the figure of the ‘glory hole’ in Marshall’s work to suggest the contradictions it turns into something furtive and pleasurable: cruising and the necessity to move on versus the impulse to stay, watch, and enjoy anonymised sensual delight, a sociality under pressure, taking place underground and in the cracks of society and of literary history.

For the poets in this book, such questions—sex life, the inhabitation of public space—could not be separated from their poetry, whether it was their poems’ explicit subject or not. But the record is fragmentary. Amassing details around the dozens of poets covered in this story, many of whom have received scant, if any, prior attention, involves telling stories, uncovering archives, working the way through trails of anecdote and evidence, sometimes within poems, sometimes outside them.

The term “Occult School” comes from poet Gerrit Lansing, describing a group of poets—one of many such in the book—who formed provisional, small and temporary communities united by poetry and queer sexuality. Lansing, a student of Aleister Crowley and other esoteric thinkers, uses the term to pun on way such poets are left out—occluded—from conventional literary histories. With no one there to preserve one’s stories, how do they survive? In the shadows, obscurely, in the poetic, political underground. With the explosion of political movements in the ’60s—Civil Rights, Black Power, Women’s and Gay Liberation—the underground came out and above ground. Yet the devastating impact of AIDS created a loss of generational memory, effectively wiping out of prior generations of activists and artists. Today, as a new New Right resurges throughout the USA and worldwide, it’s helpful to remember the way generations of queer poets and activists resisted the forces that would slur, jail, queerbash and electroshock them into silence. Ed Marshall is just one of those voices.

Learn more about Never By Itself Alone at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael D. Hattem's "The Memory of '76"

Michael D. Hattem is a historian of early America and author of Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution. He is the associate director of the Yale–New Haven Teachers Institute.

Hattem applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Memory of '76: The Revolution in American History, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Memory of '76 is part of the introduction to Part III, which explores attempts to nationalize the memory of the Revolution after the Civil War. I don't know if the page reveals "the quality of the whole" book, but it actually does address a critical turning point in the story of the book. On this page, I describe how popular understandings of the Declaration of Independence, particularly the idea of "liberty" that it promised, underwent a dramatic shift in the half century after the Civil War. In part because of the end of slavery and the context of the Gilded Age, the liberty of the Declaration increasingly came to be seen as "individual liberty" rather than liberty as a feature of the society as a whole (as had been more common before the Civil War). Defined in no small part by freedom from government, any attempts to achieve equality came to be seen by some Americans as infringements of the individual liberty guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence.

I also cannot say whether reading page 99 will give readers a good or poor idea of the book. It does cover a crucial thread that runs throughout the book and is important for understanding the origins of the modern conservative memory of the Revolution that came about in the early years of the Cold War. But it also not representative of the book as a whole because much of the rest of it is more narrative-driven than this specific section.

The points made on page 99 setup my reinterpretation of the significance of the Gettysburg Address on the following page. There, I argue against Garry Wills's claim that the Gettysburg Address created a "concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition" that fundamentally changed the nation. Instead, I argue that by highlighting liberty and equality as the two fundamental principles of the Declaration and the Revolution as a whole, Lincoln actually helped lay the foundation for the conflicts over the meaning of the Revolution in the twentieth century. In the years after the Civil War, those two principles, which Lincoln thought were mutually reinforcing, would come to be seen by many Americans as antagonistic and irreconcilable.

Visit Michael D. Hattem's website.

The Page 99 Test: Past and Prologue.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frances Kolb Turnbell's "Spanish Louisiana"

Frances Kolb Turnbell teaches history at the University of North Alabama and is editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Spanish Louisiana: Contest for Borderlands, 1763–1803, and reported the following:

If you open my book to page 99, you will find yourself at the very beginning of Chapter 4: Louisiana in the American Revolution. The Page 99 Test works fairly well with my book. Chapter 4 opens in August of 1779 with acting governor Bernardo de Galvez receiving news of his appointment as governor of Louisiana and news of Spain's declaration of war against Great Britain, which signaled Spain's entry into the larger conflict of the American Revolution. This is actually a pivotal moment in the book because it is the most important moment in which Spain tests the loyalty of Louisiana's inhabitants. The first three chapters lead up to Spain's declaration of war against Britain and offer the looming question of whether Louisiana's colonists and Indian allies will be loyal when it really matters for Spain. The answer is a resounding yes, which is the argument of Chapter 4: "During the American Revolution, the interests of Spain overlapped most closely with those of the borderland population"(99). The fallout of the American Revolution on the Gulf Coast influences Louisiana history for the rest of the Spanish period.

Page 99 also highlights a good deal of what Bernardo de Galvez has done on behalf of Spain in Louisiana to prepare for war, including to build up its diverse militia, which was multilingual, multi-ethnic, and included both white and free black colonists.

Louisiana was a crazy place with all sorts of people moving about in it in the decades following the Seven Years War, a space that saw the arrival of new colonists including Acadians, Canary Islanders, British merchants, among others, as well as a growing number of enslaved people from Africa and the Caribbean especially. Additionally, the smaller Indian nations of the Gulf Coast migrated a good deal in this season and competed with Indians and colonists already in Louisiana for land and resources.​ Spain had a big project to try to navigate the various factions and interest groups operating in the post 1763 Mississippi Valley especially when many individuals and groups found it in their own interests to pursue survival, profit, and personal gain through networks and practices that defied Spanish policy.

Ultimately, the book offers the first stab at a comprehensive history of Spanish Louisiana, 1763 to 1803, an underappreciated time a place. It was both an era of transition and tumult—every chapter of the book includes some sort of revolt or rebellion except for Chapter 2. In such a space, it is no wonder that the inhabitants felt uneasy about the future of their imperial belonging and even tried to effect it from time to time. During the American Revolution, they held on tightly to the Spanish Empire.

Learn more about Spanish Louisiana at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rena Steinzor's "American Apocalypse"

Rena Steinzor is Edward M. Robertson Professor of Law at University of Maryland Carey Law School. She is the author of Why Not Jail? (2014), The People's Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public (2010), and Mother Earth and Uncle Sam. She is a former president of the Center for Progressive Reform.

Steinzor applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, American Apocalypse: The Six Far-Right Groups Waging War on Democracy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book focuses on a disastrous Supreme Court decision, West Virginia v. EPA, that choke-chained the EPA’s ability to combat climate change by requiring fossil fuel-burning industries to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. This approach is known as mitigating the disruption of the climate. We will face dire consequences no matter what we do, but mitigation is essential to avoid catastrophic outcomes. Conservatives tout adaptation as an alternative, meaning taking measures like air conditioning and building sea walls to combat climate disruption. Adaptation will play some role, but no credible scientist thinks it will be nearly enough.

The Court’s conservative supermajority in the West Virginia case said that even though the electric utility industry supported the Obama Administration’s mitigation rule because it gave companies flexible options, the Obama rule was illegal because it cost too much and was not specifically authorized by Congress. The Trump Administration had a rule that was much weaker and it complied with the Court’s opinion, although it never went into effect because President Biden won the 2020 election. Under West Virginia, the EPA’s efforts to require mitigation from the dirtiest sources are very narrow.

I am relieved to say that page 99 of my book passes the “good idea of the whole work” test. How the six far-right groups—big business, the Tea Party, the Federalist Society, Fox News, white evangelicals, and armed militia—have thwarted efforts to mitigate these existential problems are the book’s core.

For example, fossil fuel industries and their corporate customers have spent billions to undermine all efforts to regulate their contributions to climate change, assisted by another Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that gave corporations First Amendment rights to political speech, lifting the lid on campaign contributions. White evangelicals believe that climate change is the End of Days or the Rapture when non-believers will be eliminated and Christ will return to the earth. Armed militia demonstrated on the lawns of top public health officials, frightening them so badly that they resigned. The next pandemic will find us as unprepared as we were for the last one.

While the six groups do not coordinate their attacks and may even diverge on short-term agendas, their priorities land on a surprisingly tight bullseye: the size and authority of expert agencies like the EPA. Over the long-term, as the prevalence of global pandemics and climate crises increase, an incapacitated national government could usher in unimaginable harm.

Learn more about American Apocalypse at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Graham Wilson's "America's Cold Warrior"

James Graham Wilson is a Historian at the US Department of State.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, America's Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book describes Paul Nitze’s takeaway from his work on the 1957 report “Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age” (the Gaither Report), and a meeting with President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in which Nitze failed to persuade them to take drastic action.

Should you read only page 99 of this book, I think you would get a good sense of what mattered to Paul Nitze. He believed in superior U.S. military capabilities to deter foreign attacks, and that nothing was so provocative to the Soviet Union as U.S. weakness. And he did not hesitate to tell anyone that they were wrong.

There is a quote on page 99 that sums up Nitze’s personality and his approach to individuals—however powerful—who did not accept his logic. After he met with Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, Nitze wrote Dulles a letter that concluded: “Finally, assuming that the immediate crisis is surmounted, I should ask you to consider, in the light of events of recent years, whether there is not some other prominent Republican disposed to exercise the responsibility of the office of Secretary of State in seeking a balance between our capabilities and our unavoidable commitments, equipped to form persuasive policies, and able to secure the confidence and understanding of our allies, whether by direct communication or communication through emissaries.” If Dulles ever responded to that, I have yet to find it.

Dulles and Nitze had never liked each other. Yet—up until 1957—Dulles sought Nitze’s counsel. Why was that? More broadly, how did Nitze command the attention of American presidents and their advisors from the start of the Cold War to its end? This is a fundamental question that I wrestle with in the book. And, when it comes to arriving at an answer, page 99 alone will not suffice.

Learn more about America's Cold Warrior at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Lobel's "Van Gogh and the End of Nature"

Michael Lobel is Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He holds a BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University and an MA and PhD in History of Art from Yale University. He is the author of Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art (2002) and James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics and History in the 1960s (2009). His third book, John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration, was awarded the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art.

Lobel applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Van Gogh and the End of Nature, and reported the following:

Much of page 99 of Van Gogh and the End of Nature is taken up by a large-scale reproduction of a single work of art: a painting entitled Gauguin’s Chair, which Vincent van Gogh created in the autumn of 1888. The picture, rendered largely in tones of green, purple, and reddish-brown, depicts an elaborate wooden chair; on its seat are perched a lit candle and a couple of books, perhaps popular novels of the day. The long span of green wall at back is punctuated by a gas wall sconce. The several lines of text on the page read as follows:

And to Theo, whom he was constantly hitting up for funds, [Vincent] argued that the expense would pay for itself, since it would give the two artists that much more time to make paintings: “If Gauguin and I work every evening for a fortnight, won’t we earn it all back again?” This is why classifying this span of months as Van Gogh’s gaslight period makes so much sense. It touches on pictorial, practical, personal, and professional matters, all rolled into one.

As it turns out, someone who opened the text to page 99 would get a good sense of the book, for a number of reasons. For one, the large-scale, full color reproduction of a painting signals to the reader the importance of images, and close visual analysis, to the project as a whole. Additionally, even though the page includes just a few lines of text, that passage highlights one of the main takeaways in this particular chapter: that gaslight was a central preoccupation for Van Gogh, particularly during his time in Arles, in the south of France. And this then dovetails with one of the broader aims of the book, which is to connect Van Gogh and his artistic preoccupations to the industrial era in which he lived and worked (gaslight was powered by coal gas, hence underscoring the artist’s involvement in the burgeoning age of fossil fuels). While Van Gogh’s depictions of the natural world have tended to shape how we think about him, Van Gogh and the End of Nature shows that a closer look reveals how industry and pollution were present in his world, and in his work, in many different and varied ways.

Learn more about Van Gogh and the End of Nature at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue