Jennifer Van Horn's "The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America"

Jennifer Van Horn is an assistant professor of Art History and History at the University of Delaware. She specializes in the fields of early American art and material culture.

Van Horn applied the “Page 99 Test” to her book, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America, and reported the following:

My new book looks at a variety of types of artifacts produced for and used by elite consumers in early America, including portraits, dressing furniture, city views, gravestones, and even prosthetic devices. I argue that artifacts were key players in forming Anglo-American communities in early America and eventually of forming citizenship. The book explores how consumers in port cities assembled networks of similar objects not simply as markers of status or political identification, but as active agents to bind themselves together and to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans.

Each chapter tackles a different group of objects drawn from an early American port city. The first two chapters focus on Philadelphia and by page 99 we are just beginning the second chapter which concentrates upon a main player in the book: the artist John Wollaston.

From page 99:

In 1752, two years before George Heap and Nicholas Scull’s view of Philadelphia was published, British portrait painter John Wollaston made his first trip to the city. Wollaston was forty-two years old when he left England, where he had established himself as a successful, if not prominent, portraitist in the competitive metropolitan market. Over the next two decades (1749-1767), he journeyed extensively throughout the American colonies, traveling to the urban centers of New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Williamsburg, and Charleston, as well as the plantations of Maryland, Virginia, and the British Leeward Islands. The artist met with tremendous success on his North American sojourn, painting more than three hundred portraits of colonial elites before eventually returning to England.

Being a British artist, John Wollaston might seem a strange character to star in a book about the ways that early Americans used objects. But Wollaston’s portraits actually offer a great mechanism to recover elite colonists’ differing ideas about what paintings should look like and what they could do. Because he completed multiple depictions in different American locales we can draw out the differences between patrons’ desires. For example, if we look at only two of Wollaston’s paintings of early American women completed in New York City and Charleston, South Carolina, we see radically dissimilar portraits (different poses, different costumes, different sized canvases). Both sitters were elite women who wanted to signal their politeness through their portraits so what led them to do so in very different ways? I conclude that the similarities between objects made in specific port cities were visual bonds that allowed colonists to cohere into communities. By assembling networks of similar objects early Americans created civil spaces at the margins of empire. It was through their relationships with artifacts that Americans constructed a nation.

Thus Wollaston’s peripatetic career, the focus of page 99, proved critical for allowing me to trace local meanings for what at first seem to be similar objects.

Learn more about The Power of Objects at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William M. Epstein's "The Masses are the Ruling Classes"

William M. Epstein is a Professor in the School of Social Work at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of scores of books, articles, reviews, and research monographs.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Masses are the Ruling Classes: Policy Romanticism, Democratic Populism, and Social Welfare in America, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses the romantic content in pop psychology – the triumph of emotion over reason, an extreme sense of personal agency, and the notion of chosenness. More broadly, these elements define the American ethos and have for centuries. The nation is open; there is little coercion; conspiracies of power and wealth are unlikely although very popular since political careers are not nourished by confronting Americans with the idea that social problems persist as a reflection of embedded preferences -- policy romanticism at the heart of democratic populism. The book illustrates its argument through characteristic social welfare programs – Year Up, Communities in Schools, Generations of Hope Communities in the private sector and the food stamp program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in the public sector. Each of these popular programs fails to achieve its goals but each incorporates the romantic elements of the American ethos. Indeed, the programs persist as ceremonies of national values rather than as pragmatic responses to social problems.

Quoting from the Conclusion:

There may be some truth in the comment that “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the customary interval of civilization.” Underdeveloped, nostalgic, and often inattentive to the needs of its citizens, the society is stunted in adolescence by policy romanticism – a chosen people’s delusion of Divine entitlement with an exaggerated sense of personal agency. Policy romanticism persists in spite of enormous social and economic inequality, but along with the apparent failure of 100 years of free, compulsory, universal public education, which fancies itself as objective, worldly, informed, practical, and humane.

Without ever mentioning President Trump it goes far to explain his victory, the conservative ascendancy, and the refusal of this wealthy nation to share its bounty.

Learn more about The Masses are the Ruling Classes at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason King's "Faith with Benefits"

Jason King is Professor and Chair of the Theology Department at St. Vincent College. He has published essays in the Journal of Catholic Higher Education, Religious Education, Horizons, the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, American Benedictine Review, and the Journal of Moral Theology.

King applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Faith with Benefits: Hookup Culture on Catholic Campuses, and reported the following:

It is a funny exercise to turn to page 99 of one’s own book to see if it reflects the work’s main thesis. When I did so for Faith with Benefits: Hookup Culture on Catholic Campuses, I found a chart that related mass attendance and hooking up that included intercourse for Mostly Catholic campuses. These three aspects are what support my claim that there is a “benefit” to faith.

First, the page indicates that Catholic campuses have different kinds of religious cultures. While I found three different types – which I typically describe as Very, Mostly, and Somewhat Catholic – it is perhaps better to think of them as three different configurations. For Mostly Catholic campuses, the one referenced on page 99, the religious culture is a communio Catholicism that puts “a clear priority on people and relationships.”

Second, the religious culture of a Catholic campus is primarily constituted by the students themselves. For mostly Catholic campuses, the majority of students are Catholic and go to mass weekly. They understand Catholicism to be fostering kindness and hospitality, rooted in God’s love, and tend to place less importance on the church’s sexual teaching and the authority of church’s leaders.

Finally, it indicates that the religious culture, as constituted by the students, affects hookup culture. This effect is not a simple, linear relationships, where more Catholic means less hooking up. Instead, the different configurations of Catholic culture affect hookup culture differently.

The communio Catholicism of Mostly Catholic campuses, made up by students who go to mass weekly and value the church’s teaching on kindness but not sexuality, transforms hooking up from a “no strings attached” affair to an “entry way into a relationship.” In other words, the religious culture generates a relationship hookup culture.

Page 99 succinctly suggests that different Catholic campuses have different religious cultures and, as a result, different hookup cultures. Students constitute most of the culture, the culture affects expectations around hooking up, and these expectations shape students’ behavior. While there is more to understanding how a culture works and the limits of changing it, these basics indicate that, because the religious culture affects hooking up, there is a “benefit” to faith.

Learn more about Faith with Benefits at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Casey's "The War Beat, Europe"

Steven Casey is Professor in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His books include Cautious Crusade (2001) Selling the Korean War (2008), which won the Harry S. Truman Book Award, and When Soldiers Fall (2014), which won the Neustadt Prize.

Casey applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The War Beat, Europe: The American Media at War Against Nazi Germany, and reported the following:

On Monday, February 1, 1943, a group of correspondents including Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, Walter Cronkite of the United Press, and Bob Post of the New York Times, left London’s Paddington Station for Bovingdon airbase. This group, which would soon become known as the Writing Sixty-Ninth, were part of a bold new experiment in war reporting. The US Eighth Air Force intended to train them in the basics of high-altitude precision bombing, with the goal of sending them on a raid over Germany in the near future.

Page 99 of The War Beat, Europe shows how Bigart and Cronkite reacted to their training week. Cronkite, an airplane enthusiast, reveled in the experience, enthusing that he felt like a real aviator when kitted out in a heavy flying suit and oxygen mask. Bigart, a nervier customer, focused less on the buzz of flying and more on the perils associated with the whole enterprise. After days of listening to lectures, both men passed the course. For the next couple of weeks, they proudly paraded around London wearing the much-valued accouterments that identified them as members of the air force: a star with wings on their sleeves and a saggy hat with its wire stays remove. Then came the time for their one and only bombing mission, whose ultimate destination turned out to be the German submarine pens at Wilhelmshaven.

On their return, Bigart and Cronkite wrote dispatches that would help to establish their reputations, which would grow to legendary proportions in the years to come, as Bigart covered countless Cold War conflicts and Cronkite became America’s leading TV news anchor. In February 1943, however, both men were rookies compared to Bob Post of the New York Times. Before the Wilhelmshaven mission, Post had selflessly volunteered to fly on one of the Liberator bombers, allowing Bigart and Cronkite a space on the more glamorous Flying Fortresses. Tragically, Post was killed when his plane was shot down. Bigart never forgot this moment, and afterwards he would always view war as a hellish affair, run by officers whose wisdom needed to be challenged. Back in New York, America’s top editors were equally appalled, and within days they would send out firm instructions barring their correspondents from taking part in similar missions in the future.

The training week discussed on page 99 of The War Beat, Europe therefore turned out to be an eye-catching exception, rather than the start of something new. For the next two years, war correspondents would largely cover the unfolding air war from the safety of American air bases, counting how many planes had returned, before receiving official figures on how many bombs had been dropped and how much of the intended target had been destroyed. Such reporting was far from glamorous, and the correspondents with sufficiently big reputations soon headed off to cover other aspects of the war, Bigart and Cronkite among them. By the summer of 1943, Bigart was with George Patton’s Seventh Army as it conquered Sicily; he then reported on the grueling battles at San Pietro, Cassino, and Anzio, as Mark Clark’s Fifth Army tried to liberate Rome. In the summer of 1944, Cronkite did manage to report from the skies again, first when he went on a plane to look at the Allies’ Normandy beachhead on D-Day and then when he was allocated a place in a glider to cover the ill-fated Market-Garden operation.

The War Beat, Europe documents all of these events, as well as the equally intrepid exploits of reporters like Ernie Pyle and Don Whitehead, Drew Middleton and Bill Stoneman, Margaret Bourke-White and Helen Kirkpatrick. These men and women were part of American journalism’s golden generation, and this book is the first comprehensive account of both their exciting back stories and their vivid published stories.

Learn more about The War Beat, Europe at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: When Soldiers Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mugambi Jouet's "Exceptional America"

Mugambi Jouet teaches at Stanford Law School. His writing has been featured in Mother Jones, Slate, The New Republic, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Salon, The Hill, Truthout, Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, and academic journals.

Jouet applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Exceptional America: What Divides Americans from the World and from Each Other, and reported the following:

My book Exceptional America: What Divides Americans From the World and From Each Other aims to answer three questions. Why did Donald Trump follow Barack Obama into the White House? Why is America so polarized? And how does American exceptionalism explain these social changes?

Page 99 of the book focuses on how faith in Christianity is generally far more intense in America than in other Western democracies—a dimension of American exceptionalism with distant historical roots that Alexis de Tocqueville had previously remarked upon. I describe on that page how these circumstances have been influenced by social pressure to be religious, especially in conservative regions of America. “[A] strong social norm of religiosity” among a rather devout population has led both Republican and Democratic U.S. politicians to regularly invoke God, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence, and, to a lesser extent, Donald Trump. “In turn, religious rhetoric from the nation’s leaders helps normalize religiosity and dissuade skepticism, irrespective of whether such public displays of faith are heartfelt or contrived.” These circumstances are among the factors having led religion to play a huge political role in America compared to the rest of the West: European nations, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Yet religion is often as great a source of division as of unity in an American society where conservatives and liberals are divided by traditional and modern understandings of faith, as illustrated by clashes over abortion, contraception, gay rights, and the theory of evolution. In sum, this excerpt seems to exemplify the Page 99 Test. A distinctive understanding of religion is a major dimension of American exceptionalism, as well as a significant factor behind the acute polarization of modern America.

Learn more about Exceptional America at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy H. Dixon's "Curbing Catastrophe"

Timothy H. Dixon received a B.Sc. degree in 1974 from the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and Ph.D. degree in 1979 from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. From 1979-1992, he worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. From 1992-2010 he was at the University of Miami. Since January 2011 he has been at the University of South Florida, where he is a Professor in the Department of Geology.

Dixon applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Curbing Catastrophe: Natural Hazards and Risk Reduction in the Modern World, and reported the following:

When I was asked to write an article for “The Page 99 Test,” the first thing I did was look at another entry to see what other writers had done with this challenge. I chose Chip Colwell’s Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits. In hindsight it may not have been the best choice. Page 99 of Colwell’s book includes the following riveting passage:

On the bitter cold morning of November 29, 1864, the U.S. Army attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho settlement at the eastern edge of Colorado, slaughtering upwards of 200 people, mostly women, children, and the elderly. After the killing ended, the soldiers plundered the dead—taking body parts as trophies, including fingers, genitalia, and scalps. When the Army returned to Denver they were greeted as heroes. During a parade that snaked through downtown Denver, the scalps were raised to cheers.

The book goes on to describe the anthropologic consequences of the genocide committed by our European ancestors against the original inhabitants of North America. It’s fascinating reading, and I highly recommend it.

In contrast, page 99 of my book drops the reader into the middle of a rather dry four page description of how scientists discovered that the Pacific coast of Oregon and Washington in the US, and the Canadian province of British Columbia (geologists call this region “Cascadia”) are at great risk from a giant earthquake and devastating tsunami. It's rather dry, but it's important – the Cascadia region is virtually certain to experience an event similar to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, killing approximately 30,000 people and costing that country more than $200 billion (US). It was the world’s costliest natural disaster, and is discussed in Chapter 4 of my book. But unlike Japan, the US and Canada are actually much less prepared, for reasons discussed in Chapter 5 (including page 99). If it happened tomorrow, the consequences would be devastating, far worse than Japan. The main reason for the difference is that scientific understanding of the risk did not come until the 1990’s, long after the area had been settled by Europeans, and long after much of the region’s infrastructure have been built – so it's not earthquake-safe. In contrast, Japan has been settled for more than a thousand years, and that country’s inhabitants have learned to live with earthquakes, and design buildings accordingly. It’s a good example of the importance of time lag, a major theme in the book (in this case, the time difference between settlement and scientific understanding of local risk).

An interesting aside, related to Colwell’s book but not discussed in my book, is that the indigenous inhabitants of Cascadia were actually familiar with the earthquake and tsunami hazard (the last big one was in 1700 AD, and it was recognized in their oral traditions). European settlers (and scientists of the day) paid no heed to the natives, who were viewed as uncivilized.

We can’t predict when “the big one” will hit Cascadia, but we probably have at least a few decades to prepare. Let’s use the time wisely.

Learn more about Curbing Catastrophe at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rebecca Schuman's "Schadenfreude, A Love Story"

Rebecca Schuman is a frequent contributor to Slate, where she writes about higher education, Germany, popular culture and parenting. She holds a PhD in German from the University of California, Irvine.

Schuman  applied the “Page 99 Test” to her first book, Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For, and reported the following:

This is approximately the fiftieth-saddest story I have ever known: In 1995, I was overexcited to be in Europe for the first time in the way only a chronically disaffected 90s young adult can be. That is, I’d made a pilgrimage of sorts, to pay homage to the remains of the most influential person in my life, Franz Kafka—to walk the streets he’d walked, to live in his hundred-year-old shadow for a few days and thus (obviously) osmote (osmosify? osmosificate?) just a fraction of his genius. It didn’t work.

Schadenfreude, A Love Story isn’t actually about Germans (although it is), as much as it’s the Bildungsroman of a doofus (the much less appealing backup title), told as a very digressive and somewhat petulant love letter to Kafka, the German who wasn’t German who started it all. It’s all about Kafka, whose “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”) runs “an endless stream of traffic” in circles around dear Ford Madox Ford when it comes to unreliability—the one trait, rather than genius, I did manage to inherit in that summer of 1995, whose ignominy is immortalized on the book’s ninety-ninth page, where this happens:

After ditching my friends in great dramatic fashion so that I might be able to commune with Kafka’s ghost in proper writerly solitude, I grow immediately restless—so much so that I end up clumsily seducing a random guy I’d met the day before. (Or did I allow myself to be clumsily seduced by him? I’m too unreliable to allow you to be sure.) Before all that, however, comes this line, a line that does not take place in Germany and does not pertain to Germans, and yet does, curiously enough, reveal more or less the whole character of the book (or, at any rate, the version I’d like you to know): “I should have—I knew I should have—stuck to my café glowering and my artisanal travel journal, but my dirtiest secret turned out to be that I could only stand my own company for half a day.”

Visit Rebecca Schuman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Conan Fischer's "A Vision of Europe"

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Conan Fischer is an Honorary Professor in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. He graduated in European Studies from the University of East Anglia in 1972 and received his DPhil from the University of Sussex in 1980 with a thesis on the social history of the Nazi storm troopers. His earlier research and publications concentrated on Nazism and Communism in inter-war Germany, before turning to the history of inter-war Europe and in particular Franco-German relations.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Vision of Europe: Franco-German Relations during the Great Depression, 1929-1932, and reported the following:

A Vision of Europe is the story of French and German efforts to put the sterile legacy of the First World War behind them by building a European Union organized around a Franco-German economic partnership.

Page 99 comes midway through a section that examines the multifaceted contribution of the Catholic Church and of Catholic political and cultural organizations to the cause of inter-war Franco-German reconciliation. It details a major conference held in Berlin in December 1929, which brought ‘together [French and German] forces that shared a similar domestic political agenda.’ These forces included ‘complementary economic interests’ and other ‘powerful elements [working towards] understanding and cooperation,’ which embraced wide-ranging academic collaboration and ‘the establishment of closer relations between the Catholic press and journalists of the two countries.’ The German and French press reported on two ‘dazzling official receptions hosted in turn by the French Ambassador [at Berlin] and the German Foreign and Justice Ministers,’ to the evident pleasure of the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand. And as the German Ambassador at Paris observed: ‘the impression is growing [in France] that the meeting of German and French Catholics in Berlin has been useful and it has undoubtedly encouraged circles previously opposed to a German-French dialogue to reconsider.’

This Catholic dimension was one factor among many that appeared to be paving the way to a peaceful, integrated Europe. Indeed, in September 1931 the French and German governments formally agreed to create a Franco-German customs and economic union as the first step along this road, but a series of major setbacks quickly followed. The Great Depression undermined France’s commitment to free trade just as German politics were convulsed by the rise of the nationalist demagogue, Adolf Hitler. The unauthorized publication of leaked German foreign policy documents in France and Germany added to the furore, as Europe and the wider world slid towards renewed war.

It took the Second World War to teach the international community the hard way of the virtues of collaboration. Collegial diplomacy came slowly to prevail, if only after the challenges of the Cold War had been defused. But now, it seems, we are once again condemned to witness the populist prioritization of national self-interest over multilateralism and collective well-being.

Learn more about A Vision of Europe at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Bryzgel's "Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960"

Amy Bryzgel is Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book says nothing about it, and yet it says everything, because page 99 is a list of endnotes! This page is about a quarter of the way into the book, and consists of the 7th page (of ten) of the endnotes to that chapter. While most may never even read this page, some may simply glance at it, and only the avid researcher will scrutinize it sharply, it is a very important page, as it forms the foundation and basis for the book, and reflects the rigorous research undertaken over the course of several years.

Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 is the first substantial academic study that outlines the history and development of performance art, or live art, including action art and happenings, in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. Because performance art developed as an experimental or unofficial art form in the region, it was not usually recorded or included in official art histories, and therefore still exists, in many instances, as primarily an oral history. Consequently much of my research involved traveling to the region and interviewing artists about their performative art practices. While that forms a substantial part of the research, it also relies quite heavily on primary, secondary and even tertiary published materials. What this page reveals is the extensive research that went into creating this text.

Page 99 may not be an exciting page to read, and it may tell you nothing about the topic of my book, but it is important that it is there, and in its very existence, can tell you everything.

Learn more about Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 at the Manchester University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nina Sankovitch's "The Lowells of Massachusetts"

Nina Sankovitch is the author of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair and Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Celebrating the Joys of Letter Writing. She was born in Evanston, Illinois, and is a graduate of Evanston Township High School, Tufts University, and Harvard Law School.

Sankovitch applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Lowells of Massachusetts: An American Family, and reported the following:

From page 99:

He was simply having too good a time to write home to his parents and siblings back in America. The lack of news made them worry. The initial wave of public approval for the French Revolution was receding. The onset of the Reign of Terror had turned American support into fear: what terrible violence had been unleashed in France? The French Revolution had seemed like a good idea – and a flattering imitation of America’s bid for independence –but now it had become something quite different. Revolution was supposed to lead to an evolution for the greater good but in France, the revolution was dissolving now into anarchy. The aristocracy was being massacred, churches desecrated, clergy decimated. The governmental institutions for law and order were breaking down. When the great French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, was called a traitor by Robespierre and then jailed by Danton, Minister of Justice, Americans cried out in protest. The French were no longer to be trusted.

But Frank never felt himself to be in any danger. He had numerous cousins living in France, safely and happily, and he himself was traveling with a special passport issued by the French Committee of Public Safety. Enjoying his cloak of official protection, he found French life interesting and satisfying more than demoralizing or terrifying. After witnessing mass executions of five hundred men while visiting Paris, the only mention of it he made to his father when he finally wrote a letter was about how very quiet the whole event had been: “One of our training days [at Harvard] made a great deal more noise...”

Little time was spent by Frank considering the moral or political implications of the French Revolution; instead, what fascinated him were the opportunities he saw everywhere he went…

This excerpt from page 99 of my biography of the Lowell family over three hundred years does a good job of placing one member of that family, Francis Cabot Lowell, well within the context of his times, while offering a perhaps surprising view of those times. Throughout my book, I offer not only portraits of individual members of the Lowell family but also of the important historical events of their eras. The story of the Lowells is interesting on its own merits, with its heroes and even a few villains, and its plot twists and resolutions and revolutions, but the book also brings to vivid life the history of the United States from the 1600s through the 1900s.

We tend to think of the French Revolution as all terror, all the time – and the paragraphs from page 99 invoke those horrors – but for a young American, fresh out of Harvard and trying to make his way in the world, France during the Revolution was a fascinating place offering so many opportunities. The Lowell family motto was Occasionem Cognosce (recognize opportunity, seize opportunity), and Frank took advantage of his time in France, learning not only the language and the customs but also the material needs of the French. The French were cut off from British goods and Frank realized that American suppliers could fill the void. He returned to Boston and began an import/export company, leading first Boston and then the nation to becoming world leaders in trade and manufacturing.

Every generation of Lowells, from the 68-year old patriarch who came to the New World in 1639 to start a new life, through to Francis Cabot Lowell and his siblings, and on through the Lowells of the twentieth century, had an uncanny ability to change course, to recognize new opportunities and seize upon them. This facility at reinvention, along with their ingrained ideal of working hard on behalf of the larger community, led them to be movers and shakers in all the eras in which they lived.

Visit Nina Sankovitch's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Lowells of Massachusetts.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer M. Randles's "Proposing Prosperity?"

Jennifer M. Randles, author of Proposing Prosperity?: Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America, is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Fresno. Her research explores how inequalities affect American family life and how policies address family formation trends.

Randles applied the “Page 99 Test” to Proposing Prosperity? and reported the following:

From page 99:

Chelsea made it clear she was not giving Simon an ultimatum that he needed to have a high-paying job before she would marry him. She just wanted him to be employable. Though Chelsea was willing to pay off his $5,000 [in traffic fines] if and when she had the money, Simon seemed like too much of a risk to marry until those traffic fines were paid off.

In 1996, Congress overhauled welfare policy to promote work, marriage, and responsible fatherhood for American families living in poverty. This led to the creation of the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative—often referred to as marriage promotion policy—which has spent almost $1 billion since 2002 to fund hundreds of relationship and marriage education programs across the country. I observed over 500 hours of healthy marriage classes, analyzed 20 government-approved marriage education curricula, and interviewed low-income parents—including Chelsea and Simon—who took classes.

Though healthy marriage policy is premised on the idea that developing relationship skills creates better marriages, which in turn lead to financial prosperity, the low-income couples I interviewed believed that marriage represents the culmination of prosperity, not a means to attain it. As Chelsea elaborated, “I didn’t dream about getting married, but now that I’m getting older and having babies, now I feel like [my son’s] mom and dad should be married, but I want Simon to have his license first….That’s one of the biggest problems in our relationship.” Chelsea knew marriage would not solve their financial or relationship problems, and she, like almost all of the other parents I interviewed, told me they could neither afford nor prioritize marriage until they were more financially stable. I detail their relationship stories to illustrate how financial challenges lead to curtailed commitments, especially when marriage between two economically unstable partners seems like a bad financial risk.

Though parents frequently challenged instructors’ claims that marriage could help them, they did find the classes useful. Participants experienced the classes as a rare opportunity to communicate free of the material constraints that shaped their lives and relationships. Hearing other low-income couples talk about their challenges with love and money normalized parents’ intimate struggles and allowed them to better understand how relationship conflict and unfulfilled hopes for marriage are shaped by poverty. Low-income parents’ experiences with marriage classes point to how relationship policies would likely be more useful if they focused more on how economic stressors take an emotional toll on romantic relationships and less on promoting the dubious message that marriage directly benefits poor families.

Learn more about Proposing Prosperity? at the Columbia University Press website.

Writers Read: Jennifer Randles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seva Gunitsky's "Aftershocks"

Seva Gunitsky is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

Page 99 takes us right into the conclusion of the first case study chapter – the intense but failed wave of democratization that followed World War I. For a brief moment, it appeared that democracy was the only viable alternative. Almost all the new states created (or resurrected, in Poland’s case) by the war adopted democratic institutions like parliaments, universal suffrage, and proportional representation:

Such widespread consensus on the attraction of democracy would not resurface until the Soviet collapse seven decades later. Democracy seemed to offer a path toward both domestic and international legitimacy, and for those rulers who saw little value in such trifles, it was a way to modernize, strengthen, and stabilize their own fragile new states and societies.

As I argue in the book, sweeping waves of democratization are closely linked to abrupt shifts in the structure of global power. Domestic theories of democratization cannot say much about these recurring and wide-ranging cascades of reform. Instead, the hegemonic shock that followed WWI proved to be the decisive factor, for both material and ideological reasons:

The alternatives appeared either moribund (in the case of monarchical absolutism) or volatile (in the case of communism). A fledgling communist regime had appeared in Russia after the country’s brief flirtation with liberal democracy, but it was the product of a war-born, minority-forged coup facing a bitter civil war and foreign invasions...

As with other abrupt hegemonic shocks of the twentieth century, the aftermath of the Great War produced powerful but ultimately short-lasting pressures for reforms. The initial systemic pressures that pushed for democratization soon faded away:

The flowering of democratic regimes on the European continent was a period of hope born from tragedy, a moment of crisis transformed into opportunity. This cascade of postwar reforms was intense, widespread, ambitious—and ultimately unsuccessful.

One of my basic arguments is that failure is actually “baked” into democratic waves from the start, since the same hegemonic forces that create institutional cascades also sow the seeds of their demise. Hegemonic shocks produce waves, but they also produce periods of ‘democratic overstretch’:

...Yet the fundamental premise of the Versailles treaty—the idea of democracy as the answer to the problems of modernity—was not solidified by the postwar settlement. It was, in retrospect, an ill-fated victory. ...The Soviet Union after 1923 and Germany after 1933— two states excluded from the negotiations at Versailles—would in time offer their own visions of the modern state.

So begins a century of shocks and waves – a struggle between competing superpowers and the institutional alternatives that they embodied. Hegemonic shocks became the culminations of that struggle, the critical junctures that catalyzed immense waves of domestic reforms.

And that’s the basic contention – the history of modern regime evolution, and especially democratization, cannot be understood fully without taking into account the consequences of these dramatic systemic transformations.

Learn more about Aftershocks at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Or Rosenboim's "The Emergence of Globalism"

Or Rosenboim is a Research Fellow in Politics and History of Political Thought at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, and a teaching associate at the Center for Gender Studies, and co-convene the Political Thought and Intellectual History Seminar. She holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Cambridge, M.St in Imperial History from the University of Oxford, UK, and BA (summa cum laude) in Modern History from the University of Bologna, Italy.

Rosenboim applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The idea of the ‘global’ emerged in a dialogue with specific geopolitical sites like the frontier which informed normative assumptions about power relations in the world.

Page 99 reflects on the geopolitical visions of two American thinkers, Owen Lattimore and Nicholas Spykman, who constructed a global order based on regional blocks. In the book, I discuss the emergence of the idea of ‘globalism’ in the 1940s through a series of transnational conversations between public intellectuals and political commentators in the United States and Britain. One of these conversations revolved around the theme of geopolitics, showing how for the geopoliticians Lattimore and Spykman globalism did not mean universalism, but an interconnected system based on large regional blocks. Their global visions were grounded in concrete geopolitical conditions, such as frontiers, sea power and territorial control. Their tripolar systems, led by the United States, Russia and Britain or China, were intended to offer a stable yet pluralist structure to the post-war world. On page 99, I assess the reasons for the relative decline of their visions in the post-war years, despite their prominence during the war.

Yet page 99 also highlights an important theme of the book: the plurality of political spaces included in the discourse of globalism, and the complex relations between these spaces. For mid-century thinkers, ‘globalism’ did not necessarily entail universality and unity. Rather, the globalist debate that mid-century public intellectuals embarked on sought to balance the tensions between a growing recognition of pluralism on the one hand and an appreciation of the unity of humankind on the other.
The book explores the intellectual history of global thought during and after the Second World War, when public intellectuals grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty, and the decline of the imperial system. Without using the term "globalization," they identified a shift toward technological, economic, cultural, and political interconnectedness and developed a ‘globalist’ ideology to reflect this new post-war reality. The world’s globality led mid-century thinkers to challenge conventional political categories, and the ‘global’ became the new yardstick to measure political order in the state, the region, the federation and the whole world. Although the discussion of the marginalisation of the geopolitical visions of tripolar regional blocks in page 99 may seem specific at first glance, it does represent central aspects of the wider debate on the desirable and possible shape of the new ‘global’ order of the post-war era.

Visit Or Rosenboim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samantha Evans's "Darwin and Women"

Samantha Evans is an associate editor of the Darwin Correspondence Project at the University of Cambridge.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Darwin and Women: A Selection of Letters, and reported the following:

My page 99, I'm relieved to find, is representative in one way: it features a letter from Dora Roberts, who seems otherwise completely unknown to history. This shows that you can use the archives of great figures from history to throw light of the lives of unknown people, as well. She wrote to Darwin after the publication of his book, Expression of the emotions in man and animals. This was one of his most popular publications, and many people wrote to him with anecdotes about the behaviour of people and animals that they knew. The animal stories in particular show how closely many people lived with the natural world. Dora tells the story of a hen ('very indignant because not provided with eggs to sit upon for some time past') that kept stealing kittens from a mother cat and on one occasion carried them somehow to a high shelf where the cat couldn't reach them. The cat went for help to a cook ('A cat came to the cook mewing piteously and expressing both grief & excitement'). Dora thought this was odd as the cook disliked cats and had never treated this one kindly: 'it seemed her sense of justice to which the creature appealed'. The kittens were rescued, with the help of a ladder.

Learn more about Darwin and Women at the Cambridge University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Darwin and Women.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Kiernan's "Việt Nam"

Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Professor of International and Area Studies at Yale University, where he founded the Cambodian Genocide Program and the Genocide Studies Program. He is the author of numerous books including The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 and Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.

Kiernan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Việt Nam addresses two key issues in the book. First, it describes Vietnamese relations with imperial China to the north and with neighboring realms to the south, in what is now Southeast Asia. Second, it highlights the environmental differences that enlivened those relations, encouraging lucrative trade and aggressive conquests. The mid-first millennium saw imperial weakness in China, and tense relations between its then frontier provinces – Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen – that now constitute north Việt Nam, and their southern neighbors: Linyi – now central Việt Nam, and Funan – later part of Cambodia, now Việt Nam’s Mekong delta.

These early interactions with realms to the north and south did not necessarily produce a sense of Vietnamese distinctiveness. Even when they rebelled against China (three revolts are mentioned on p. 99), or when divisions within it led to greater autonomy, and for longer periods, many elite Vietnamese still identified with Chinese culture, especially Confucianism, or shared a common religion, Buddhism. Yet even as they repelled incursions from Linyi, people of Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen did not necessarily see it as ethnically alien, a “barbarian” kingdom, but as a political rival. Trade persisted, sometimes during warfare.

In 487 a Chinese historian described “a chain of great and small ships” plying the Vietnamese coast between China and tropical Southeast Asia. Jiaozhi and Jiuzhen, Linyi and Funan all flourished, sending north goods China valued: ivory, rhinoceros horn, sandalwood, gharu woods, and tortoiseshell.

Only later in Vietnamese history (99 pages later in the book) did ethnic distinctions polarize, partly under the influence of Neo-Confucian thought, which drew a sharp ideological line between “civilized” realms and “barbarians.” Decades of slow penetration of Neo-Confucianism among classically-educated officials of the independent kingdom of Đại Việt (Great Việt) peaked in the Lê dynasty, which emerged after defeating the Ming occupation of 1407-1428. A Đại Việt writer rejoiced (p. 198): “The soil is again the soil of the Southern kingdom. The people are again the people of the Việt race. Coats and skirts and customs are in agreement with those of the past. The moral and political order is re-established as of old.” The scholar Nguyễn Trãi wrote in his Dư địa chí (Geography) in 1435: “The people of our land should not adopt the languages or the clothing of the lands of the Wu [Ming], Champa, the Lao, Siam, or Chenla [Cambodia], since doing so will bring chaos to the customs of our land.” This conception of “race” (or “people”) was of course not a biological racism but a view of indigenous ethnicity based on place, history, and custom. A literate Vietnamese sense of identity was coming into being.

Learn more about Việt Nam at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 69 Test: Blood and Soil.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina Snyder's "Great Crossings"

Christina Snyder is Thomas and Kathryn Miller Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. She is the author of the award-winning Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America.

Snyder applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson, and reported the following:

My new book retells the story of Jacksonian America. Often the history of this era focuses on whites who turned west to conquer a continent. This story, instead, begins in the interior of the continent and looks outward to reorient our perspective and broaden our gaze. It includes Indians who faced east and met Americans in the middle and African Americans who challenged the empire of liberty to live up to its rhetoric. These diverse people converged in an experimental community in Kentucky called Great Crossings, which was home to a famous interracial family and the first federally-controlled Indian school. Here, America’s diverse peoples articulated new visions of the continent’s future. However, these visions were often at odds, as page 99 reveals.

“The trouble began, as it often did, in the dining hall.” There, the Native students of the federal school, Choctaw Academy, were served by enslaved African Americans owned by the school’s proprietor, Richard Mentor Johnson. Johnson, a prominent politician who later became vice president, believed that Choctaw Academy would enhance his career, but he also used the school to covertly educate Adaline and Imogene, the daughters he shared with his long-term African American concubine Julia Chinn. Unlike most white fathers of enslaved children, Johnson eventually emancipated his daughters as well as a few of their relatives. Meanwhile, Chinn instilled in her daughters and nieces middle-class American values, hoping this would enhance their status after emancipation. Chinn, who oversaw Johnson’s estate while he served in Congress, assigned her relatives work that kept them away from the harsher—and less stereotypically feminine—labor of the fields and mills. Several served as waitstaff in the dining hall, where they “wore neat country dresses.” Indeed, some local whites complained that the waitstaff “dressed too fine,” but Chinn tailored their uniforms to mirror the look of “other respectable women in rural Kentucky.”

To the waitstaff, “students complained bitterly and often of the inferior coffee,” which one upperclassman characterized as “mixed with rye” and “badly prepared.” The students of Choctaw Academy came from distinguished families in Indian country, and they read meaning into food. Several complained that “inferior coffee,” “fatty bacon,” and “tough mutton” were not just unappealing—they were inappropriate for young gentlemen. They should have blamed Richard Johnson, ever the penny-pincher, but the students took their frustrations out the waitstaff. Verbal attacks became physical as the students rioted, “dashing coffee” and “throwing stones” at the dining hall staff.

The coffee riot, which happened in early 1830, reveals much about how the Jacksonian era transformed North America. As biological notions of race hardened, Jackson’s Indian removal policy sought to expel Indians from their homelands to make way for the rising US empire. The enslavement of African Americans expanded, and free people of color lost many of the gains of the Revolutionary generation. In this context, the Indian gentlemen and black ladies of Great Crossings turned to class and its trappings (in this case, food, clothing, and labor roles) as a strategy to preserve or enhance status in a changing world. Sometimes this led to collaboration—students and slaves ran away together, for example—but, as page 99 suggests, the problems posed by early US imperialism often led the people of Great Crossings to take divergent paths.

Learn more about Great Crossings at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Slavery in Indian Country.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chin Jou's "Supersizing Urban America"

Chin Jou is a Lecturer in American History at The University of Sydney.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food with Government Help, and reported the following:

Page 99:

But while the fast food industry wooed prospective African-American franchisees—one survey by the International Franchise Association in 1992 found that 74 out of 180 franchise companies (not just fast food) claimed to have minority recruitment programs—they seldom reached into their own pockets to assist minority entrepreneurs. The financial assistance they provided was generally limited to modifying asset and down payment requirements for minorities. When Burger King signed a covenant with the civil rights organization Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) in 1984, for example, it agreed to raise the number of African-American franchises from less than 100 (out of 3,800) to 540 by 1987. To achieve this goal, the company pledged that it would reduce the down payment for African-American franchisees from $125,000 to $25,000. But that was where the burger chain’s “assistance” ended. As the company’s spokesperson John Weir told Black Enterprise, “The rest of the financing is arranged by the owner himself.” The same had been true of many other restaurant franchisors in earlier years. In 1971, the Senate’s Select Committee on Small Business found that only 38 of 180 franchisors surveyed made financing help available. This assistance, moreover, frequently meant that the franchisor participated in minority recruitment programs sponsored by the SBA or the Commerce Department. So when franchisors vaguely touted “minority financing program available,” as the Subway chain did in an ad appearing in Black Enterprise in 1996, they meant that they could refer prospective franchisees to sources of government funding like the SBA.
◆◆◆
African-American franchisees came on the radar of fast food companies when the industry looked to expand to predominantly minority inner-city locations starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the 1980s, black franchise owners were sought after to draw and retain the African-American consumers who were becoming indispensable to the fast food industry’s bottom line. In 1985, African-American customers accounted for 15 percent of all fast food sales, despite...

As the subtitle of Supersizing Urban America reads, this book is about “how inner cities got fast food with government help.” One of the ways the U.S. federal government contributed to the expansion of fast food chains into urban African-American communities since the late-1960s was by partnering with fast food companies in encouraging the growth of black-owned franchises through minority entrepreneurship programs in the U.S. Department of Commerce and loan guarantees from the Small Business Administration. The top paragraph on page 99 shows a way in which the federal government bore a disproportionately high cost in these “partnerships” by providing the actual financing assistance to would-be fast food franchisees. Meanwhile, often times fast food companies simply signed pledges to recruit minority franchisees, and met with little or no repercussions if they not did meet the goals set in these pledges.

As the chapter on which page 99 appears notes, participation in government-sponsored minority entrepreneurship programs could be a win-win for fast food companies because it allowed them to publicize their support for diversity initiatives and minority entrepreneurship without actually having to contribute much to these efforts. Moreover, when fast food companies nudged prospective African-American franchisees toward federal financing programs, it enabled them to expand into inner-city communities that they had been eyeing for expansion since the 1960s with little risk and expenditure on their part.

An unintended consequence of the federal government’s assistance to fast food chains’ urban expansion efforts is, as the lurid cover and main title of this book scream, that the U.S. federal government contributed to an obesity epidemic in the communities where it helped underwrite fast food restaurants. Page 99 of this book, then, turns out to be a key part of the larger story.

Learn more about Supersizing Urban America at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Pinkerton's "Blasphemous Modernism"

Steve Pinkerton is a Lecturer in English at Case Western Reserve University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book arrives about two-thirds of the way into chapter 3, “Blasphemy and the New Negro.” Keen-eyed readers will here discern, hovering behind my workaday prose, the faint contours of an image that bleeds through from the reverse (page 100): a drawing by Harlem Renaissance artist Richard Bruce Nugent [inset below left; click to enlarge]. In stark black-and-white, this 1928 picture depicts a lynched black body hanging from two intersecting tree limbs that together form a conspicuously cruciform shape. The victim, we infer, is a modern Christ, his lynching a modern-day Crucifixion. Nugent’s illustration thus speaks to a key concern of this third chapter, which explores how he and other black artists sought to combat the sanitized racial politics of Alain Locke’s landmark anthology The New Negro (1925)—a book that has often, and suggestively, been called “the Bible of the Harlem Renaissance.” Locke had contrived, for instance, to exclude any mention of lynching from that volume’s 450 pages. In response, Nugent and company weaponized the black-Christ trope as one of several blasphemous strategies for voicing their opposition to Locke’s “Bible” and, more generally, to the Harlem Renaissance orthodoxy of racial uplift.

Hence my discussion, on page 99, of three “black Christ” poems by Countee Cullen, and of the Nugent illustration that’s reproduced overleaf. The page then terminates with a discussion of Nugent’s friend Langston Hughes and of his harrowing poem “Christ in Alabama” (1931):

Unlike Cullen’s more diffuse Crucifixion poetry, Hughes’s poem aims for a blunt economy of diction and of the poetic line, driving its conceit home with alliterative associations (“Mary”/“Mammy”/“Master”) and using twice the controversial word “nigger.” Here is no idealized black Christ but rather a [“Nigger Christ / On the cross of the South”].

For the most part, Blasphemous Modernism attends to the often ingeniously sportive blasphemies of modernist writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, and Djuna Barnes. (Not to mention the unintended comedy of D. H. Lawrence, who at one point has a sexually aroused Christ announce, in deadly earnest, “I am risen!”) But chapter 3 testifies to the more sober and often riskier forms that blasphemy could take in the hands of a politically radical writer like Hughes. Much as Nugent’s illustration looms spectrally behind the words of page 99, then, Hughes’s bluntly uncompromising irreverence haunts the more playful varieties of blasphemy that both inspired and shaped so many modernist works.

Learn more about Blasphemous Modernism at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carmel Finley's "All the Boats on the Ocean"

Carmel Finley is a newspaper reporter turned historian of science who teaches in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University. She is coeditor of Two Paths toward Sustainable Forests: Public Values in Canada and the United States and author of All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustained Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management.

Finley applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, All the Boats on the Ocean: How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing, and reported the following:

I was skeptical that a page could sum up a book. And at first I was dismayed at what seemed like one of my duller pages, heavy on detail. But as I thought about it, the page very much does sum up the book; it mentions Iceland, Japan, the United States, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama and Peru, and they are all arguing over fish and who is going to catch them. After World War II, fish wound up at the center of several treaties and trade agreements. The Americans sought to reintegrate Japan back into global trade and to tilt Iceland towards the West. While Japanese canned tuna edged Southern California tuna off supermarket shelves, Canadian and Icelandic cod was displacing New England fish in the booming American market for fish stocks. Enormous fleets of boats with vast nets were appearing in the waters off many nations. The Soviet fleet showed up off the Oregon coast in 1966 and in the space of three years, they decimated a rockfish species, Sebastes alutus, that has yet to recover. I wrote the book because I wanted to understand how the Soviets wound up fishing off Oregon, and what happened to the rockfish. While post-war fisheries expanded quickly, developing an understanding of the complex world of deep-water fish came much more slowly. It has taken decades, but scientists now believe they know how enough about ocean ecosystems to restore fish populations. I hope looking at how overfishing was created opens a space for more attention being paid to government subsidies to build fishing boats.

Visit Carmel Finley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Temin's "The Vanishing Middle Class"

Peter Temin is Professor of Economics Emeritus at MIT. His books include The Roman Market Economy.

Temin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Vanishing Middle Class introduces the third part of the book where the economics and politics explained in the first two parts are shown to affect various parts of life in the current United States.

The first part of the book explains a dual economy and how the United States divided in two over the last forty years. The growing gap between total earnings and wage incomes was captured by well-educated rich people, with the greatest gains going to the very richest. What I call the FTE sector, focusing on finance, technology and electronics that form the core of this sector, separated further and further from what I call the low-wage sector. The middle class that was the pride of the United States earlier in the 20th century is vanishing.

The second part explains how the dual economy affects politics. The FTE sector employs racism and sexism to inflict its will on the low-wage sector. The FTE sector justifies cutting off government programs that helped low-wage workers to advance into the middle class by claiming that blacks and women are using those programs to displace white male workers. The FTE sector has little contact with the low-wage sector and is not interested in helping working men and women of all colors get ahead.

The third part describes our dual justice system; the FTE sector pays fines for illegal activities while the low-wage sector goes to prison. The War on Drugs filled our prisons and caused us to build more as we became a world leader in mass incarceration. The War on Drugs focuses on blacks, and our mass incarceration became a new Jim Crow oppression.

We also have a dual education system; the FTE sector has adequate public schools in suburbs while public schools in cities are denied needed funds and fail low-wage children—particularly black children with incarcerated parents. And we have a dual infrastructure; interstate highways and airports for the FTE sector, and decaying urban streets, bridges, and public transport for low-wage folks.

We increasingly resemble a third world country.

Learn more about The Vanishing Middle Class at the MIT Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Roman Market Economy.

--Marshal Zeringue