Jennifer Michael Hecht's "Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It"

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of four history books, including the best-selling Doubt: A History, and three volumes of poetry. Her work has won major awards in intellectual history and in poetry. Hecht teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and The Graduate Writing Program of The New School University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, and reported the following:

I like page 99, it is about a person I enjoyed getting to know in my research, a guy named John Henley. Henley published a book called Cato Condemned in 1730, in which he argued that the famed Roman statesman Cato was wrong to kill himself. My page 99 shows that Henley knew – better than many people today – that though the ancient world sometimes celebrated a particular suicide, mostly the ancients rejected suicide. One line I enjoy a lot says “…for Henley suicide represents not courage but cowardice or desperation, not honor but shame, and not liberty but slavery to one’s passions.” Many people today speak of suicide as the ultimate act of liberty, so I like that Henley reminds his reader that one can also be a slave to one’s own passions. Page 99 doesn’t reveal the whole book, in that the book contains many powerful arguments against suicide, and it reminds us of the good we do for the world simply by staying in it, by rejecting suicide. Then again, for every twenty people who thank me for offering a conceptual barrier against suicide, there are one or two who fiercely defend their right to leave life whenever they want. So Henley is a nice way to represent the book because he had to take some heat for his position. He was writing at a time when the Church was cruelly punishing attempted suicides, and torturing the corpses of completed suicides, and he despised that, but he still wanted to encourage people to live. The progressive thinkers around him often took the opposing side, and called in the ancient philosophers as witnesses for their side, but Henley knew better. In our culture today there is no secular argument against suicide, and like Henley, I’d like to make sure people are aware that such arguments exist. Culture can lend us strength and courage, but only if we know about it.

Learn more about the book and author at Jennifer Michael Hecht's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charlotte Biltekoff's "Eating Right in America"

Charlotte Biltekoff is Assistant Professor of American Studies & Food Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis. Previously, she was a chef at Greens, a well-known vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health, and reported the following:

Eating Right in America definitely passes the page 99 test. The most important thing I want people to learn from this book is that dietary advice is always both empirical and ethical. It provides rules about what to eat that also operate as guidelines for making oneself into a certain kind of person; responsible, moral, a good citizen. Usually dietary advice is based on scientific nutrition. Its quantitative rules obscure the ideas about what it means to be a good person that are inevitably embedded in advice about how to be a good eater. On page 99 (among other things) I sum up my discussion of a reversal of this dynamic that, nonetheless, gets to the heart of the book’s main argument. Rather than providing empirical norms that obscure ethical content, the alternative food movement foregrounds “eating as an ethical act” and obscures empirical norms that are in some ways actually more binding than those of scientific nutrition.

The alternative food movement eschews a narrow focus on nutrients in favor of a more systemic approach to a “good diet,” one that takes into account the relationship between food, the environment, and social well being. Knowledge, responsibility and pleasure are the core principles of eating right, replacing the stringent rules and self-denial of scientific nutrition with a far more sensual and overtly ethical ethos. But just as we need to learn to see the moral precepts that are obscured by the seemingly objective, quantitative language of nutritionally oriented dietary advice, we also need to learn to see the rules that lurk within the overtly ethical language of alternative food discourses of eating right. Not all pleasures are condoned; there are rules that designate some pleasures authentic and responsible and others deluded and dangerous. Furthermore, instead of simply following rules, as eaters are expected to within the realm of scientific nutrition, here eaters must like it too! This is pleasure harnessed rather than repressed, a subtle but significant expansion of the scope of dietary advice and the purview of dietary reform deeper into our very selves.

Learn more about Eating Right in America at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Pratt Guterl's "Seeing Race in Modern America"

Matthew Pratt Guterl is professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University and is the author of American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation among other books.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Seeing Race in Modern America, and reported the following:

I remember writing this page. I was a fellow at the Humanities Research Center, Rice University, living in my apartment in Martel College. It was the winter of 2010. And I wrote this while a SciFi movie marathon played in the background, offering ambient noise for the click-and-clack of my laptop. I remember these details because this was a fun chapter to write - perhaps because in the background of my composition there was a parade of mega-sharks and giant squid and earthquakes and stuff.

The 99th page of this book takes us, in one breath, from the 1970s to the present, or from Dorothy Debolt to Angelina Jolie. More specifically, at the top of the page I conclude my discussion of a scene in the award-winning, early 1970s documentary about the De Bolt family, where Dorothy sits at a piano with two of her daughters - one African American and the other Asian. What, I ask, are we supposed to be looking at here?

This page lies near the end of a chapter about transnational adoption, and more specifically about the way that big, multiracial families are often described as symbolically important. Important, I say here, because they help us to see race, to attend to the difference between skin tones and colors. They are built to be seen.

The chapter, in turn, sits in the middle of a section of the book, a section on mixed racial ensembles, and on the way they encourage us to see diversity and common cause at the same time. The chapter immediately after this one, for instance, is on the multiracial platoon, broadly conceived, from the Village People to the movie Predator.

And this section, finally, sits in the middle of the book, titled Seeing Race, which takes up the question of how and why we come to see what we see. The first section of the book (there are three) dwells on close readings of the racial body, from racial profiling to advertising to silhouetting. The third and last section of the book explores those bodies in which - or on which - it can be a challenge to see race. Hybrid bodies. Ambiguous bodies. Passing bodies.

If you were just to read page 99, though, you'd think the book was just about transnational adopted families, and about how they structure our sightlines.

Learn more about Seeing Race in Modern America at the University of North Carolina Press website, and visit Matthew Pratt Guterl's blog.

The Page 99 Test: American Mediterranean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leslie Morgan Steiner's "The Baby Chase"

Leslie Morgan Steiner lives in Washington, DC with her husband and three young children. Her 2009 memoir about surviving domestic violence, Crazy Love, was a New York Times bestseller, People Pick, Book of the Week for The Week magazine, and subject of the first TED Talk by a domestic violence survivor.

Steiner applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, The Baby Chase: How Surrogacy Is Transforming the American Family, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Baby Chase is filled with pictures of the Wile family! So I have to quote from p. 100 instead. And yes, I think this single page completely captures the book and how much I enjoyed getting to know Rhonda and Gerry Wile and writing the amazing story of how they overcame infertility.

The first issue to address when Gerry and Rhonda started their baby making was Gerry’s…ahem…vasectomy.

Astoundingly, he had not told Rhonda about the operation during their courtship, the early years of marriage, or their many, many conversations about how much Rhonda wanted a family.

"It just never came up," Gerry says now, as if still trying to mask the significance of his omission. But really, what had stopped him from confiding in Rhonda for nearly six years was that he didn’t want to risk losing her. He knew how much she longed for a family. He figured he would fix the vasectomy without the girl of his dreams ever finding out about it.

In 2004, after he and Rhonda had started to talk seriously about starting a family, but while he was still deployed in Iraq, Gerry moved forward with a solution. Fourteen years before, the Canadian military doctors had performed a simple vasectomy, cutting the vas deferens tube, removing a small portion of it, and bending the cut section backwards, as one would fold over the tip of a plastic straw. Gerry consulted a military doctor and made plans to have the surgery reversed. He didn’t tell Rhonda. No confrontation, no tears, no betrayal. There was simply no need to upset her.

His vasectomy could be reversed with a relatively simple operation, the military doctor who’d examined Gerry explained, via a detailed email, sent to their home email address in Florida, read by…

Rhonda Wile.

That’s how Rhonda found out her new husband could not father the children she’d always dreamed of having. In an email, followed by an official letter, both meant for Gerry. Not easy for a woman whose first husband had been a compulsive liar.

Rhonda was stunned. And furious. And flabbergasted. Had she given her heart away, again, to a deceitful man?

With Gerry still in Iraq, Rhonda bit back her instinct to confront him. This was not a conversation to have via satellite phone. Although she was experiencing an emotional war zone, Gerry lived every day in a real war zone. She simmered and wondered what the hell Gerry had been thinking. She tried to smile and chitchat during their daily phone calls. For the next several months.

She felt sick at the thought of not being able to have children. Would she ever be able to forgive him? Did she love Gerry enough to stay with him, if that meant never having the babies she had dreamed of since she was a small girl watching Happy Days, playing dress up, and devouring her Eat-More candy bars?

“I didn’t know if I could,” Rhonda explains today, closing her eyes and shaking her head silently.

What hurt even more than the devastating news about Gerry’s vasectomy was that he had lied to her. Rhonda valued honesty above almost every other quality, in herself and her relationships. The betrayals in her first marriage had left her with an insistence on candor in every nook and cranny of her friendships, professional relationships, and most of all, in love. Without honesty, she couldn’t trust Gerry, or how she felt about anything in their marriage.

The day Gerry came home, she was overjoyed to see him back safe and sound, despite her questions and deferred rage. Rhonda waited as long as she could. She lasted close to four hours.

As they sat next to each other on their bed, she silently handed him the doctor’s note.

Gerry read a few lines. Then his face, filled with joy seconds before, crumpled. He buried his head in his large, calloused hands. He began to cry.

What he said next – the first words out of his mouth – deflated Rhonda’s rage, because she knew it was the truth.

Read more about The Baby Chase at Leslie Morgan Steiner's website and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: The Baby Chase.

Writers Read: Leslie Morgan Steiner.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Mikhail's "The Animal in Ottoman Egypt"

Alan Mikhail is Professor of History at Yale University. He is a historian of the early modern Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt whose research and teaching focus mostly on the nature of early modern imperial rule, peasant histories, environmental resource management, and science and medicine.

Mikhail is the author of Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History and editor of Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds us in Egypt’s dogdom. It relates how changes in the social function of dogs led to changes in human attitudes toward the animal. Dogs in Cairo were historically what pigs were in New York City—sanitation workers. They consumed the city’s waste, thereby forging a productive social and economic niche for themselves among human communities. At the turn of the nineteenth century, more and more people relocated to Cairo, ideas about disease radically changed, garbage was moved outside the city’s walls, and the metropolis underwent a massive campaign of construction and urban transformation. These and other phenomena all dealt a critical blow to dogs. Humans now saw them as interspecies competitors for space, mangy potential disease vectors, useless noisemakers, and threats to ideas of civilization emerging in the period. The end result? Widespread dog eradication campaigns in Cairo (and other Egyptian cities) in the first third of the nineteenth century. For the first time since the founding of Cairo in the seventh century CE, dogs were purposely separated from humans.

This separation of species is one of the overarching processes followed in The Animal in Ottoman Egypt. In its three parts, the book traces how three classes of animals were actively separated from human animals through different historical mechanisms and forces. The three classes of animals are domesticated laboring animals, dogs, and charismatic megafauna. The interspecies separations the book examines all occurred between 1750 and 1850. This was a period in which Egypt, like many other parts of the world, experienced massive social, political, environmental, and economic changes. Egypt became increasingly autonomous as a province of the Ottoman Empire, beginning a move toward independence. Its cities grew in size. Its economy became increasingly enmeshed in global commercial networks and capitalist modes of exchange. The Animal in Ottoman Egypt argues that what happened to Egyptian animals’ relationships to humans was part and parcel of these other transformations.

To be specific—the story of domestic work animals explains fundamental changes in Egypt’s labor regime that saw humans replace animals as the preferred and dominant means of labor in the countryside. Page 99 and its neighbors elucidate how the history of Egypt’s dogs explains wider changes in understandings of urban sanitation, health, and the human and animal body. And the changing social, economic, and political roles of charismatic megafauna track Egypt’s shifting position in the nineteenth century’s global capitalist economy.

Learn more about the book and author at Alan Mikhail's website and the Oxford University Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher M. Davidson's "After the Sheikhs"

Christopher Davidson is reader in Government and International Affairs at Durham University, a former visiting associate professor at Kyoto University, and a former assistant professor at Zayed University in the UAE. He is the author of several books on the politics and international affairs of the Gulf states, including Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond, Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success, and The Persian Gulf and Pacific Asia: From Indifference to Interdependence.

Davidson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies, and reported the following:

Page 99:

…competitive research grants—it is likely that it will hope to get more from the same pot in the future. In these circumstances junior members of staff or postgraduate students tend to feel uncomfortable discussing either the source of the funding or pursuing sensitive topics relating to the donor country. It is almost inconceivable, for example, to imagine an aca­demic with no alternative source of income researching and writing a serious critique of a regime that has either paid for his or her salary, schol­arship, or the building that houses his or her office. In many leading uni­versities this is now no longer a possible scenario, but instead a likely one.

In addition to promoting self-censorship, the donations also tend to encourage the steering of academic debate away from the Gulf monar­chies themselves—and especially studies on their domestic politics or societies—by instead promoting research on ‘safer topics’ in the broader region or on Arabic language or Islamic Studies. Indeed, the latter two fields are particularly palatable as they provide further support for the monarchies’ attempts to build up cultural and religious legitimacy resources. In Saudi Arabia’s case the funding of leading Islamic Studies centres also seems to be part of an effort to make the Saudi state’s highly controversial interpretation of Islam more ‘mainstream’ and acceptable, at least in scholarly and government circles. What all of this will soon lead to (and in some cases already has led to) is an academic discipline that carefully skirts around the key ‘red line’ subjects such as political reform, corruption, human rights, and the prospects of revolution—as these are usually perceived by university fundraisers and executives as likely to anger or antagonise their Gulf patrons. As such, this particu­lar stream of funding is in some ways an even more powerful and sen­sitive soft power strategy for the Gulf monarchies, as it is not primarily aimed at influencing public or even government-level opinion in the West. Rather its more subtle objective is to sway academic opinion in the West, or at the very least foster a ‘chilling atmosphere’ of apologetic behaviour or avoidance when it comes to intellectual discussion of the Gulf monarchies.

The historic links between Britain and the region have meant that the Gulf monarchies have been particularly attracted to funding British uni­versities, and these currently represent the best examples of the strategy. Indeed, it is now difficult to find any leading British institution focusing on the Middle East that has not received all of the varieties of gifts. Exeter University, home to Britain’s only centre for Gulf Studies…

Page 99 of After the Sheikhs is the beginning of a section on how ruling family members and their affiliated foundations have sought to channel huge donations into those departments of leading western universities that have historically taught on or done research on Middle East politics or Islamic studies. The Gulf monarchies’ aim, as part of a broader oil-financed soft power campaign in the opinion-making centres of their Western military protectors, is to encourage self-censorship among potentially critical academics and in general to steer debates away from controversial topics such as domestic Gulf politics, human rights, or civil society, while also normalizing the controversial Saudi interpretation of Islam within elevated intellectual circles.

Visit Christopher M. Davidson's website.

The Page 99 Test: Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond.

Writers Read: Christopher M. Davidson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Suddendorf's "The Gap"

Thomas Suddendorf is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland whose research has attracted honors and awards from such organizations as the American Psychological Association, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and the Association for Psychological Science. His work has been covered by the New York Times, Discover, and Science, among other outlets. Born and raised in Germany, he lives in Brisbane, Australia.

Suddendorf applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, and reported the following:

In The Gap I explore why we are the peculiar creatures that we are. What differentiates us from other animals and enabled us to dominate the planet? About half of the book examines the most common proposals about what sets us fundamentally apart from the rest: language, foresight, mind-reading, intelligence, culture, and morality. I find that various animals, in particular our closest animal relatives the great apes, have sophisticated capacities in even these domains. Nonetheless, in each of these contexts the human ability is special for recurring reasons. In particular, two profound characteristics keep re-emerging as critical: our deep-seated drive to exchange our thoughts, and our ability to imagine alternative scenarios (be they about past, future or entirely fictional events) and embed them into larger narratives.

Page 99 illustrates these two characteristics in the context of our capacity to travel mentally in time. As you well know, we can think about how events unfolded or what the future might hold. By comparing alternative routes to the future and deliberately selecting one plan over another we gain a sense of free will and an edge over creatures with less foresight. However, this also burdens us with the responsibility for getting it right. We are not clairvoyants. Constructing clever scenarios of the future is a complex skill that draws on many components (I compare it to what is involved in putting on a play in a theatre) and on page 99 I highlight how we frequently get it wrong — as well as how our urge to connect our minds was critical in turning this fallible system into a powerful adaptive strategy that harnesses our collective wit.

…spectacular miscalculations can be found among the annual winners of the Darwin Awards. We will never know what exactly a wheelchair-driving 2010 winner was anticipating would happen when, after missing a closing elevator, he decided to impatiently ram the door until it broke down—only to fall into the now-empty shaft. Most of our foresight errors are minor by comparison, leading to inconvenience or embarrassment. You may fail to usefully imagine the future because of shortcomings in any one of the components in the theater metaphor. Stage: you may fail to disengage from the present to imagine the future—perhaps like that wheelchair driver. Actors: you may miscalculate how others will feel or act—as so often happens in pranks. Set: you may misjudge physical relations—say, when you think the boat could surely take a much heavier load. Playwright: you may fail to generate the relevant scenarios—and you later have to admit that you didn’t think of this or that. Director: you may not have practiced for the future sufficiently—leading you to look distinctly underprepared. Producer: you may end up selecting the wrong plan—d’oh! There are countless ways in which our attempted foresight can let us down.

However, we have radically improved our chances of getting it right through a wonderfully effective trick: we share our plans and predictions with others. We can transmit our mental plays and reflections to audiences around us and, in turn, consider their thoughts. In preparing a speech, it can be helpful to rehearse it not only in our mind but also in front of a friend. We can learn from others’ memory and foresight, and listen to comments on ours. Indeed, we have a deep-seated drive to broadcast our minds and to read what is on the minds of others—to foreshadow the next chapter. And we have an extraordinarily effective way of exchanging our mind travels through language—to remind you of the previous chapter. Language is ideally suited for this mental exchange, and much of human conversation is indeed about past events (who did what to whom, and what happened next) and future events (what will happen to whom, and what we are going to do about it). By exchanging our experiences, plans, and advice, we have vastly increased our capacity for accurate prediction. In Stumbling on Happiness the psychologist Dan Gilbert discusses errors and biases in our foresight and argues that the most reliable way to predict a situation is to ask people who have experienced something similar. Indeed, for much of our past the stories of our fellow tribespeople would have been all we had to go by.

Learn more about the book and author at Thomas Suddendorf's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lewis Perry's "Civil Disobedience"

Lewis Perry is John Francis Bannon, S.J., Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Saint Louis University. His previous books have dealt with anarchism, antislavery movements, American intellectual life, and moral problems in history.

Perry applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition, and reported the following:

Page 99 brings us to a meandering passage in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in which Henry David Thoreau reviews his famous brush with the law and night in jail in 1846. He goes on to quote (and translate) Antigone’s defiance of King Creon’s death sentence as illegitimate under divine law. Thoreau learned his Greek at Harvard, but in his allegiance to timeless law he was dissociating himself from a view of ethics he had encountered as a student. He kept his copy of William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy in his library but rejected its preference for expediency and public “conveniency” in ethical decision making. He upheld instead the call of conscience and the eternal claims of justice: “This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war with Mexico, though it costs them their existence as a people.”

It will be no surprise to find discussion of Thoreau in a book devoted to exploring an American tradition of civil disobedience from the colonial period to the present. The surprise may be that it has taken more than ninety pages to get there. That is because I emphasize the role of predecessors – colonial protesters against religious injustice, missionary champions of American Indian nations, fugitives from slavery, benevolent women reformers – in creating a tradition. Thoreau’s greatest significance came in the 20th century, after he had been discovered by Mahatma Gandhi in India and South Africa and cited in defenses of civil disobedience by a succession of American dissenters and activists from the 1930s on. His influence would eventually be deplored by leaders who worried about the instability of democracy, while it was glorified by dissenters from national policy, and adopted in defense of activist law breakers in courtrooms and popular books.

Learn more about Civil Disobedience at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Buchholz's "Alternate Histories of the World"

Matthew Buchholz is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a Bachelor’s Degree in Film & Television Production.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Alternate Histories of the World, and reported the following:

Perhaps it’s appropriate that Page 99 of Alternate Histories of the World is a full-page picture. My book alternates between over 90 full-page images of monsters, robots, and zombies rampaging through human history, and accompanying pages of descriptive text. It’s also a book that started from my online Alternate Histories store (AlternateHistories.com) which is entirely image-based.

Page 99 shows a recruiting poster for the Canadian Mounted Rifles “Monster Corps” (Canada’s Crack Calamity and Colossus Corp) - [Canada’s] First Line of Defence Against Monsters, Zombies, Aliens, and Other Unearthly Creatures.” In the picture an officer is seated on his horse using field glasses to spy on a UFO destroying a small town.

In the book, this Canadian Monster Corps plays a significant part in explaining why we don’t have monsters & zombies running around in modern times. I posit that the Canadians in the 1920s started this Monster Corps program and staffed it with battle-hardened veterans of World War I. These officers, later assisted by Mechanical Man Philip J. Gearsworthy, set up the beginnings of protocols designed to deal with outbreaks of the zombie virus, gigantic monsters smashing tall buildings, and robots rising up to destroy their creators.

In a later page of the book (pp. 104-105), I discuss the United States’ similar but more more extensive efforts after World War II, with the creation of the S.M.A.S.H. (Stop Monsters And Save Humanity) Squads who used these Canadian techniques and combined them with American technology, industry, and that can-do spirit. Eventually they managed to essentially wipe out the scourge of monsters, contain the zombie virus, and hold back alien invading forces.

The rest of my book deals with these monsters & creatures running rampant through our past, and these two pages are a feeble (if hopefully amusing) attempt to explain why you, the reader, were not aware that a robot helped to write the Declaration of Independence. Better to think of the book as a product of another universe, one where supernatural creatures roamed freely. An Alternate History, if you will.

Visit Matthew Buchholz's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Matthew Buchholz and Otis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan D. Carle's "Defining the Struggle"

Susan Carle teaches legal ethics, anti-discrimination law, labor and employment law, and torts at American University Washington College of Law. She writes primarily about the history of social change lawyering, anti-discrimination law, and topics at the intersections between civil rights, employment, and labor law. In the past she has been a community organizer, civil rights lawyer, and union-side labor lawyer.

Carle applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915, and reported the following:

It takes courage to apply the page 99 test to one’s own work with honesty, though honesty may be the most important virtue of a writer. So I will try: Defining the Struggle tells the story of the civil rights leaders of the late nineteenth and earliest years of the twentieth century who started to develop the ideas that would lead to the rich and multifaceted campaign for racial justice in the United States, which eventually grew into the later twentieth century civil rights movement. As a legal historian, I wanted to convince other legal historians of the importance of this largely overlooked “prehistory” of legal civil rights organizing, but I also desperately wanted to write a book that would be accessible and interesting to a more general readership. Did I accomplish this? I believe the page 99 test shows I did, in part. That page begins a discussion of the founding of the longest-lasting national civil rights organization of the turn of the century period: The National Afro American Council, which lasted for a decade before essentially merging with other efforts to become the NAACP. It describes the Afro American Council’s founding in the midst of a celebration of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. Dignitaries in attendance included famous suffragette and good friend of Douglass Susan B. Anthony, thus reflecting the connection some of the more visionary leaders of this period (though not all) saw between the campaigns for racial equality and for women’s rights. Also active in the proceedings was the now-famous anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells. Wells was known for her blunt speaking style, and she shared her ideas about who would be best to lead this new organization; her thoughts were heeded in the appointment of the savvy organization-builder Alexander Walters, the youngest-ever bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, to head this new organizing effort. The “standard story” holds that the African American civil rights leaders of this period were almost all descendants of a free black elite, but this hardly describes the backgrounds of either Wells or Walters, who were both born enslaved and moved into national leadership roles despite very modest economic and educational backgrounds.

Does this snippet whet one’s appetite for more? The answer to that question probably depends on one’s personal taste for historical accounts that seek to revise standard stories and settled judgments of who counts as historical figures of enduring importance. Thus page 99 is a terrific litmus test: This book will appeal if one is interested in the kind of story it tells, but the writer’s talents are such that it might not convert a reader’s interest absent an underlying enthusiasm for stories about history’s forgotten heroes.

Learn more about Defining the Struggle at the Oxford University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Defining the Struggle.

--Marshal Zeringue