Saturday, November 30, 2019

Christopher S. Wood's "A History of Art History"

Christopher S. Wood is a professor at New York University. He is the author of Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art and Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, the coauthor of Anachronic Renaissance, and the editor of The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s.

Wood applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A History of Art History, and reported the following:
On page 99 I quote Giovanni Andrea Gilio, a sixteenth-century Italian cleric who disapproved of the sensuous, stylish Christian art of his time, what we now call Mannerist art. Gilio contrasted the modern pictures to the simple, austere art of early Christian times. I then suggest that in this historical period, generally, worries about the religious content of images tended to interfere with the appreciation of those images’ artistic qualities. So for example when European travelers came into contact with cult images in South Asia they were unable to see those images also as artworks, so confident were they that the Hindu gods were false gods, or demons.

This page is a window opening onto one of the main topics of my book: relativism, or the willingness to cast a sympathetic gaze on unfamiliar artistic styles. Gilio was able to appreciate the sincere but clumsy early Christian paintings, so preparing the ground for an affirmative history of medieval art. But he could do this because he still felt connected, by continuity of religious doctrine, to those primitive Christians. His contemporaries had no such sympathy for Hinduism, and so had no sympathy for Hindu art.

My book is about art history as an intellectual project. The books asks: where, when, and why have people thought about art historically, or tried to write its history? In the Renaissance, the author of an art history was likely to be an artist, like the Italian painter Giorgio Vasari. In modern times, art history evolved into an academic discipline. Art history is written by cultures which cherish and protect art’s autonomy, its freedom from external pressures: mainly in China, and in Europe and beyond since the Renaissance.

Already Vasari had a strong sense of art’s independence, and of the primacy of form over content. The focus on form rather than content became the key to overcoming the European prejudices that clouded the vision of non-European art. By the nineteenth century art historians were ready to forgive the Hindus their doctrinal errors and so write inclusive, global art histories. Relativism—or the attempt to understand every culture and every artwork on its own terms—became the creed of the modern historiography of art.
Learn more about A History of Art History at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 29, 2019

Pradip Ninan Thomas's "Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India"

Pradip Ninan Thomas is at the School of Communications and Arts, University of Queensland. He has written extensively on the media in India, the political economy of communications, communications and social change and the media and religion. He was the Vice President of the International Association for Media & Communication Research (2012-2016).

Thomas applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India: A History, and reported the following:
Page 99 does highlight some key issues discussed in this volume. The expansion of the imperial chain of wired and wireless stations – the all Red Line was a project that was a stated ambition and that was dear to the heart of His Majesty’s Government (HMG). Relying on lines that routed through foreign territory was a bit of a gamble as both the forces of Nature and unfriendly foreign powers frequently destroyed these lines thus delaying the flow of imperial communications from London to India and vice versa. However, the issue of who was to pay for the establishment of these lines was a point of contention between HMG and the Government of India (GOI). Marconi’s monopoly over wireless had always been a sticking point for the HMG and the GOI had its own reasons for keeping Marconi at a distance.

This volume is a historical account of the establishment of the Victorian Internet – the telegraph, cable and wireless that was key to imperial communications. From the very beginning of this enterprise, private capital played an important role. John Pender was the first telecommunications czar who monopolised every aspect of the cable industry and for the most part his projects, while making money for his shareholders, also acted as conduits for imperial communications. For the most part, such synergies were mutually beneficial although the desire to nationalise imperial telecommunications was a policy objective of the HMG. The desire to have complete control over communications flows between London and the colonies and within the British Empire became a paramount concern after the take-over of the governance of India by HMG from the East India Company. It is telling that the Indian Telegraph Act of 1887 remains in force even today in post-independent India. This volume also explores the continuities between Empire and post-Empire telecommunications and makes a case for history to be acknowledged in any interpretation of the present. Even the landing stations for oceanic cables in India today, are for the most part, colonial in origin.

Based primarily on telecommunications archives located in the British Library, it tells a story of the growth and development of a key Victorian infrastructure – telecommunications in India. It also includes a substantive chapter on the challenges faced by the post-independent government of India to democratise access to what until then was an elite project.
Learn more about Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Douglas R. Egerton's "Heirs of an Honored Name"

Douglas R. Egerton is a professor of history at Le Moyne College. The award-winning author's books include Thunder at the Gates and The Wars of Reconstruction.

Egerton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America, and reported the following:
By page 99, Charles Francis Adams Sr., the son and grandson of presidents, is deeply into antislavery politics. The year on this page is 1852, and four years earlier, Adams had run as the vice presidential nominee for the Free Soil Party, a new party dedicated to keeping slavery out of the lands in the Southwest taken from Mexico. Although himself not a candidate for office that year, the former state assemblyman campaigned for the party around his home state of Massachusetts, and he was gratified to see that the Free Soilers captured 22 percent of the vote in his state and came in just behind Whig candidate Winfield Scott. As much as he mourned the triumph of Democratic nominee Franklin Pierce, whom he derided as "an ultra pro-slavery" candidate, Adams took heart in the fact that his new party was "no longer the third party of the nation." In the coming years, Adams was to play a key role in the founding of the Republican Party.

For Heirs of an Honored Name, the page 99 tests works splendidly. Readers just glancing at the page will see Charles Francis Adams Sr. at the dawn of his illustrious career. Behind him were five years in the Massachusetts assembly, and by this page Adams was deeply involved in antislavery politics as one of the most famous free soil advocates in the nation. But one also sees his deep ambivalence--a longstanding family trait he would pass along to the fourth generation of Adamses--toward national greatness. Of all the early presidents, only John Adams and Martin Van Buren sired sons who lived to adulthood, making the Adams family the nation's first political dynasty. Charles Francis Sr. coveted fame and dedicated his life to the service of his country, but as an Adams, greatness had to come to him. He could not seek it out. One sees on this page that his friends hoped to nominate him for the House of Representatives, and Adams admitted to his diary that the nomination "would be agreeable" provided it was "spontaneous." He wished to his friends to understand, however, that he never "solicited a nomination." It was that refusal to seek out fame that would ultimately cost him the chance to become the third President Adams.

Heirs opens where most books on the Adams family end, with the 1848 death of Congressman John Quincy Adams, who was the first man ever to die in the Capitol building. Because they helped to found the American republic and held the nation's highest office, John and John Quincy have received the most attention from historians. Each year, it seems, sees the publication of a new biography or presidential study of the early Adamses. Yet the third and fourth generation of Adamses, if largely forgotten today, were nearly as important to American history. Charles Francis Sr. served five years in the Massachusetts legislature, where he succeeded in passing some of the most progressive legislation the state had ever seen. (At a time when new states, for example, banned interracial marriages, Adams drafted legislation that repealed his state's 1786 ban on interracial relationships.) He helped to create the 1848 Free Soil party, ran as its first vice presidential nominee, and then played a critical role in building the Republican Party. As a congressman, he served on the Committee of Thirty-three, which attempted to forge a compromise to halt southern secession, and after Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president, Adams was tapped to become the third member of his family to serve as minister to Great Britain. During his seven years in London, Adams worked to keep Britain from siding with the Confederacy, and his skill at doing so marked him as one of the greatest diplomatists in his country's history. At the same time, however, Adams and his children reflected the troubled mood of the post-war nation. They mirrored the decay of the Republican Party's ideals as the party deteriorated from a progressive, free soil movement that spoke to the aspirations of the northern middle class, into a party of wealthy barons and railroad magnates.
Learn more about Heirs of an Honored Name at the Basic Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Ann Durkin Keating's "The World of Juliette Kinzie"

Ann Durkin Keating is Dr. C. Frederick Toenniges Professor of History at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The World of Juliette Kinzie: Chicago before the Fire, and reported the following
Opening to page 99 of The World of Juliette Kinzie, the reader is dropped not only into the middle of Juliette Magill Kinzie’s life, but also into the middle of her 1856 history of Chicago, Wau-Bun: The ‘Early Day’ in the Northwest. It is representative of the book in this way: At every turn, I wove together what Juliette was writing with her broader life experiences. So the page toggles back between early Chicago and 1856. In 1856, Juliette was 50 years old; it was thirty-five years after she had married and traveled west from Connecticut to Wisconsin and then to Chicago. Juliette still lived in the large brick house she and her husband John had built in 1835 on the north side of the Chicago River not far from what is today the Michigan Avenue Bridge. By 1856, the couple had helped to build Chicago from a small outpost in Indian Country to a growing industrial entrepot anchored by almost a dozen rail lines. Juliette Kinzie wrote her history of Chicago to solidify the place of the Kinzie family in that saga. We remember her because of her work as a historian; Wau-Bun remains in print down to the present.

On page 99, the reader learns that Juliette sought to shape the history of the city she called home. I suggest that:
Juliette set out to define a foundation story for Chicago that properly acknowledged the role of her family. Her history of Chicago began in 1804 with the arrival of John and Eleanor Kinzie, the same year the US government completed Fort Dearborn. Whatever happened before was simply a prequel. This allowed Juliette to acknowledge and then quickly diminish the earlier presence of others like Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, now widely understood to have been Chicago’s first settler. She shrewdly interjected race into her dismissal of his claim to primacy by repeating what she had heard from area Indians: “the first white man who settled here was a negro.” She assumed that her largely white readership would then simply discount his importance.

Juliette also skillfully downplayed the handful of métis families at the small trading outpost that emerged during the 1790s. Their houses, gardens, and outbuildings already dotted the riverbanks when Fort Dearborn was founded. In Wau-Bun, Juliette ignored them when she enumerated the residents of Chicago she encountered in her 1831 visit. By narrowing her field to “white inhabitants,” Juliette overlooked even the Kinzies’ longtime neighbors Antoine and Archange Ouilmette, who had lived alongside Point de Sable during his years at Chicago.
This selection also raises another issue that threads through my book. Juliette Kinzie believed in the supremacy of white New England society and tried to transplant it in Chicago. Alongside her sense of superiority, Juliette betrayed deep prejudices against Native Americans, African-Americans and European immigrants. While Juliette showed a deep interest in understanding the Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi who lived around her in the early 1830s, it was guided by her certainty that their world was disappearing in the face of the western expansion of American society. Metis people were simply written out of her story of “white inhabitants.” And African-Americans, enslaved or free, were relegated to subservient places in her deeply hierarchical and patriarchal world. Individual rights had very little meaning to her; household responsibilities were at the center of a worldview that she shared with many privileged white women. But changes were afoot. Even by 1856, challenges from abolitionists and women’s rights activists, as well as the rise of industrial capitalism, were challenging Kinzie’s world view. Not found on page 99 is the story of how Juliette Kinzie responded to these changes before her death in 1870. But it is part of The World of Juliette Kinzie!
Learn more about The World of Juliette Kinzie at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 25, 2019

Matthew Gutmann's "Are Men Animals?"

Matthew Gutmann is a professor of anthropology at Brown University who has spent thirty years exploring notions of masculinity across the United States, Latin America, and China. He also has been a visiting professor at El Colegio de México and Nanjing University.

Guttman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Are Men Animals?: How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Are Men Animals? is in a chapter called “The Male Libido.” It has part of a narrative on how men in Mexico (and elsewhere) were usually “planned out of family planning” global campaigns for modern forms of contraception and women’s health launched in the 1960s and 1970s. To quote directly from page 99:
In government, foundation, and family planning agency documents of the time, men were rarely mentioned as relevant to new population programs. Perhaps they were overlooked by accident. Perhaps this was an inadvertent consequence of women reasonably being made the highest priority. Or perhaps there were underlying assumptions about men, their biologies, and their essential interests and inclinations when it came to sex and babies that precluded making them central to campaigns around contraception, birth spacing, the optimal number of children, and sexual health.
Men’s sexuality is one of the key examples discussed in the book, and family planning in Mexico is a good case study on sexuality that highlights widespread and harmful assumptions about men and boys that exaggerate biological factors in explaining male behavior.

Are Men Animals? is a book about maleness and asks why, in common and scientific discourse, language about masculinity so often resorts to biological stereotypes about what makes men tick. As a cultural anthropologist I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, the United States, and China. I have documented and tried to understand everyday ways that men express themselves when it comes to sexuality and aggression, for example, noticing both tremendous variation from one locale to another, as well as significant changes over time—from one generation to another—in what it means to be a man. All these ideas about maleness and experiences with men are the stuff of daily life, for women as well as men.

And these ideas and experiences with men have everyday practical implications not only for families but for public policies as well. In Mexico City, women can ride in separate subway cars at rush hour. In the United States, only 18 year old men register for a possible future draft. Men in UN Peacekeeping forces, some say, cannot go longer than six months before they “need” sex. In China, the government preaches that men can marry whenever they like, but women who are not married 27 years old are to be officially labeled “leftover women.” In each of these cases, erroneous assumptions about men’s (and women’s) natures are at least influential in the policies.

To the extent these beliefs about men and maleness go unquestioned we can inadvertently let men off the hook. After all, boys will be boys, right? For anyone who supports gender equality, such thinking and language needs to be challenged. We live in an age of gender confusion with the possibility of serious renegotiation of what it means to be a man. That process will be infinitely easier once we understand that men’s fate does not reside in their biology.
Learn more about Are Men Animals? at the Basic Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Miriam Kingsberg Kadia's "Into the Field"

Miriam Kingsberg Kadia is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Moral Nation, which won the Eugene M. Kayden Book Award in 2015.

Kadia applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan, and reported the following:
Page 99 falls almost at the midpoint of Into the Field, at the beginning of the fourth of eight chapters. This chapter examines the institutions that generated a new, post-imperial understanding of concepts such as “race” and “culture” in early postwar Japan. The first of these was UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization), founded in 1945 to deploy knowledge as a means of preventing another world war. As I argue on page 99, despite—or because—of their recent contributions to militarism and fascism, Japanese scholars were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the organization in the world. In the words of one observer, they became “kamikaze for UNESCO” (this is one of my favorite quotes in the book!). UNESCO also exemplifies the importance of global influences, engagement, and above all funding to human science in early postwar Japan. In the 1950s it sponsored the nation’s first field expedition to Brazil (the subject of Chapter 6).

Page 99 is one of a minority of pages in Into the Field that does not mention the transwar Japanese ethnologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist Izumi Seiichi (1915-1970), around whose career the book is structured. In researching this project, I adopted an ethnographic approach, visiting Izumi’s former field sites from the Andes to the Amazon and from Manchuria to West Papua. But because page 99 deals with a background development at home, it is based on more conventional sources for historians: library and archival materials. It lacks some of the intimate personal detail and drama that appear in the rest of the book.

Yet in fact, Into the Field is not intended as an intellectual biography of one extraordinary individual, but rather as a collective biography (prosopography) of his cohort. Izumi belonged to a generation of human scientists who created knowledge to serve the Japanese empire before 1945, and who subsequently revised that knowledge to suit an aspiring democratic, capitalist, peaceful postwar state. In writing this book, I struggled to strike a balance between following Izumi’s incredible professional life on the one hand, and showing him as representative of larger trends and ideas on the other. Page 99 is an example of how I periodically pause my narration of Izumi’s career to zoom in on the wider context of domestic and global developments.
Learn more about Into the Field at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 23, 2019

Julia Maskivker's "The Duty to Vote"

Julia Maskivker is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Her research focuses on ethical and political philosophy, in particular, on theories of justice and equality. Much of her research concerns the political theory of the welfare state and issues of distributive justice. Other more recent work focuses on democracy and citizen participation, including the ethics of voting and civic obligation.

Maskivker applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Duty to Vote, and reported the following:
The page 99 test does not work for my book. It is in the middle of the most "technical" chapter that deals with an objection that is not central to my argument and not illustrative of the book's claims in general. Anyone using the page 99 test would get the wrong idea about the book.

The classical approach to voting in the literature is that it is irrational to do it. Anthony Downs, in his groundbreaking book, An Economic Theory of Democracy, famously argued that individuals, if rational, will not bother to vote because one single vote will get lost in a proverbial ocean of votes and will have no impact on the election. But this understanding of human rationality is shortsighted.

We can see voting as a collectively rational act. When many people vote with a modicum of information, we can expect that elections will result in the establishment of fair minded governments—or the ousting of inept and immoral ones. Why not think that we have a duty to help our fellow citizens, and society, by contributing to justice in this way? If voting will not get in the way of important personal goals and plans of life we may have-- we do not need to be a Homos Politicus as Aristotle would have wanted us to-- why not view it as a duty of “common pursuit”—that is, a duty that requires that we act in concert with others in order to be effective?

In the book, I argue that we can see voting as a contribution to a larger collective endeavor, and an act of justice in the light of a Samaritan duty of aid towards society. We have a duty of conscience to vote with care, i.e., with information and a sense of the common good, in order to help our fellow-citizens prevent injustice and ensure decently good governance. The latter can be achieved, partly but importantly, if voters manage to elect acceptably fair-minded governments and vote out corrupt or inept ones. On this view, the benefit that comes about for everybody that cooperates out weights the personal cost of doing our share of the cooperation. There is nothing irrational in partaking of a collective activity from which many others, including ourselves, may benefit. Free-riding, on this logic, is not attractive because we commit to the goodness of the result we seek to further with others. Individuals do this all the time in other realms of social life such as when they give to charity or when they take pains to minimize their carbon footprint. Why should voting be any different?
Visit Julia Maskivker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 22, 2019

Jessica Whyte's "The Morals of the Market"

Jessica Whyte is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben.

Whyte applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, and reported the following:
In 1966, the Austrian neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek described the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an incoherent attempt to fuse a Western liberal tradition with the Marxist ideals of the Russian Revolution. Hayek singled out the Universal Declaration’s social and economic rights, arguing that they were a threat to the competitive market order and to ‘civilisation’ itself.

Page 99 of The Morals of the Market takes us to the centre of the book’s argument for why the social and economic rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration ultimately proved to be far less threatening to the market order than Hayek and his neoliberal collaborators assumed. It returns us to the late 1940s, when United Nations delegates argued over the best means to achieve these rights. While some argued that states should be legally required to provide their citizens with food, clothing, housing and medical care, the United States promoted a minimalist and privatized conception of social and economic rights, best realized through private consumption.

This gives us a good sense of my book’s broader argument that the seeds of what I call ‘neoliberal human rights’ were planted in the 1940s, even if they only flourished decades later. In the case of social and economic rights, I show that early neoliberal thinkers were also consumed with the question of how to respond to poverty in ways compatible with a competitive market order. They insisted that the provision of a vital minimum must not interfere with familial and individual responsibility and the will to work for a living. Poverty relief, the neoliberals believed, must not interfere with the inequalities of civil society.

Throughout the book, I show that while neoliberal thinkers looked with despair at attempts to enshrine new rights to social welfare, racial equality and self-determination, they also developed their own account of human rights as moral and legal supports for a liberal market order. The role of neoliberal human rights was less to protect the individual than to protect the market order and inherited status hierarchies in the face of political challenge. The neoliberals saw human rights as necessary to protect ‘civil society’ – understood as a realm of freedom, voluntary interaction, and distributed, private power – from the violence, conflict and coercion they insisted was endemic to politics.

This conception of human rights, I show, has been much more influential than most contemporary human rights defenders would like to admit—and not only on the political right or in the halls of power. Without coming to terms with that influence, social movements and struggles that wield the language of human rights to contest neoliberalism may find themselves strengthening its hold.
Learn more about The Morals of the Market at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Joanna K. Love's "Soda Goes Pop"

Joanna K. Love is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Richmond.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Soda Goes Pop: Pepsi-Cola Advertising and Popular Music, and reported the following:
Page 99 falls about midway through chapter three and summarizes my analysis of a set of three 1985 “The Choice of a New Generation” Pepsi commercials featuring Lionel Richie. This page connects my overarching theory of redaction—the practice marketers have used to select, censor, and restructure musical texts to fit commercial contexts in ways that revise their aesthetic meanings and serve corporate aims—with the main point of the chapter: that redactive practices were applied to the music and visuals in mid-1980s commercials featuring popular musicians in ways that supported emerging ideologies of neoliberalism in the U.S. The middle paragraph on this page (cited below) summarizes the analysis done in previous pages:
After three minutes of spectacle, sentimentality, and Pepsi pop slogans, it is obvious that the brand offers its drink as the only ‘choice’ for those who wish to be included in the new generation. The first number, ‘You’re Looking Pepsi Style’ foregrounds the product by featuring Richie’s specially composed jingle set in a generic adult contemporary musical style. Images of young professionals demonstrate how the ideal neoliberal consumer should look and act. The second scene transitions to one of Richie’s recognizable older hits, ‘You Mean More to Me.’ Not only are its lyrics modified to fit the commercial’s family-friendly, sentimental story line, but Pepsi gives viewers a momentary break from the hard sell. This allows Richie to embody the ideal citizen and demonstrate that despite his success he maintains the moral values important to neoconservative audiences. The campaign’s final vignette, ‘Pepsi Feels So Right’ is set to the tune of Richie’s recent hit ‘Running with the Night.’ This commercial brings viewers into advertising’s (and more specifically into Pepsi’s) most recent trend: the performance of new(er) hit songs injected with lyrics that showcase the brand and offer guidance to those who seek fulfillment in the commodity.
The bottom of the page then begins to explain how these commercials imitated the brand’s groundbreaking 1984 commercials with Michael Jackson (analyzed in the previous chapter), leading to a discussion about why Richie’s spots were not received with similar acclaim.

The Page 99 test offers a useful snapshot of the types of arguments and analyses employed in my book. Someone perusing this page might be intrigued enough to either turn back to the beginning of the chapter to see how I arrived at this conclusion, or to keep reading to find out how my methods apply to the other commercials discussed in this chapter. Ideally, this page would encourage readers to go back to the beginning of the book and read the whole thing!

This test applied surprising well to my book, demonstrating my aim to show the many ways that popular music in commercials proves integral to communicating specific values, norms, and ideas. There is so much excellent writing on advertising and music, but much of it ignores or glosses over the fact that the sounds themselves are coded with historically significant tropes that create important connotative and denotative possibilities. My aim is for this book to foreground discussions about the music and to show how and why popular music has been, and continues to be, a powerful force in American advertising.
Learn more about Soda Goes Pop at the University of Michigan Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Erik R. Seeman's "Speaking with the Dead in Early America"

Erik R. Seeman is Professor of History at the University at Buffalo. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Speaking with the Dead in Early America, and reported the following:
Page 99 features several examples of what I call “talking gravestones”: markers that represent the dead as speaking or being spoken to.

The first marker on Page 99 is that of Barbary Weekes, a Massachusetts woman who died at age fifty-one in 1798. The stone’s epitaph has her address her fellow denizens of the burial ground: “O my friends I beg a place in your cold bed / That I may rest my limbs and akeing head.”

The second stone on Page 99 memorializes Phebe Gorham, who died on Cape Cod in 1775. Her marker quotes four lines from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, the ten-thousand-line poem from the early 1740s that was one of the best-loved exemplars of the Graveyard School of English poetry and prose. The epitaph quotes from the poem in a way that encourages passersby to imagine Gorham speaking the words:
Henceforth my Soul in sweetest Union join

The two supports of human Happiness,

Which some erroneous think can never meet:

True Taste of Life, and constant thought of Death.
Markers like those for Weekes and Gorham appealed to mourners because they allowed loved ones to imagine a continuing relationship with the deceased. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, the bereaved increasingly visited cemeteries, where they prayed, meditated, and interacted with talking gravestones in a way that helped them maintain a connection with the dead. Such burial ground communion would become a central practice in what I refer to as the antebellum cult of the dead.

Page 99 thus exemplifies several important themes in the book. Methodologically, it demonstrates my use of material culture and literary sources. In addition to gravestones, the book examines embroidery, mourning portraiture, postmortem photography, and much more. And in addition to the Graveyard School, I analyze Gothic fiction, sentimental poetry, and other forms of imaginative literature.

Analytically, Page 99 is one step in the book’s journey of tracing the origins of the antebellum cult of the dead. Speaking with the Dead boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role. This counters a long scholarly tradition that sees the Reformation as having successfully ended Catholic practices of maintaining relationships with the dead. My narrative begins with the English Reformation and demonstrates increasing interest in postmortem relationships, culminating in the nineteenth-century cult of the dead.

What Page 99 does not include is one of the book’s many examples of when people believed they were actually communicating with the dead: hearing the words of a ghost, or talking to a guardian angel, or experiencing a vision of heaven. But other than that, this page nicely represents the book’s main concerns.
Learn more about Speaking with the Dead in Early America at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Roger Crowley's "The Accursed Tower"

Roger Crowley is a best-selling narrative historian with deep interests in the Mediterranean world and its surrounding area. At Emmanuel College, Cambridge he read English but has gone on to build a reputation for writing page-turning history based on original sources and careful scholarship.

Crowley is the author of a loose trilogy of books on the Mediterranean: Constantinople: The Last Great Siege/1453 (2005), Empires of the Sea (2008) – a Sunday Times (UK) History Book of the Year in 2009 and a New York Times bestseller – and City of Fortune on Venice (2011), as well as Conquerors (2015), a rare break out into the Atlantic with the Portuguese. His latest book, The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades, explores the end of the Holy Land crusades.

Crowley applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Accursed Tower and reported the following:
Page 99 contains the grand words of a treaty sworn by a Muslim sultan: ‘By Allah by Allah by Allah…I bind myself to uphold this blessed truce agreed between myself and the Commune of Acre and the grand masters who live there.’ It goes on to describe the discussions between the sultan and his emirs as to whether the Christians had broken this truce. The Accursed Tower is a history of the collapse of the crusades in the Holy Land, featuring the final siege and destruction of Acre in 1291. Treaties are quite important to the narrative, but the book is really about the dramatic siege itself. The treaties are a detail – not a main element.

Page 99 is interesting however because it’s a hinge moment. It leads to the crucial decision to destroy Acre. It allows us to hear Muslim voices speaking directly to us – the book aims to tell the story from both sides, using Arabic as well as Christian sources – and what follows from this debate will be the launching of the largest Muslim army ever assembled during the crusades. Possibly a hundred thousand men are mobilised, giant catapults are hauled to the city walls, miners are brought in to undermine its foundations. What follows is the Alamo of the crusades – a resistance to the last man by the hopelessly outnumbered crusaders. Six weeks of bloody fighting, detailed in vivid eyewitness accounts, and the key to the defence is the so-called Accursed Tower, situated at a critical point on the city walls.
Visit Roger Crowley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 18, 2019

Roland De Wolk's "American Disruptor"

Roland De Wolk is a U.C. Berkeley educated historian who left academia for a career in journalism, then returned to teach at a San Francisco Bay Area university as an adjunct while retaining his prize-winning investigative reporting work.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford, and reported the following:
Page 99 of American Disruptor is a lucid, cogent explanation of the federal government’s ridiculously generous terms on loaning Stanford’s private company what today would be billions of dollars to build the transcontinental railroad – Stanford living a life on those dollars more opulent than maharajas – soon afterwards said he shouldn’t have to pay back.

There is a section break and then a brief narrative on the beginnings of the construction from Sacramento and into the Sierra Nevada.

Since there are some 300 pages total to American Disruptor, having read one page, be it page 99 or any other, you would mostly likely get .3 percent of the work’s content.

Stylistically, one might get a bit more. Let’s be generous and suggest 5 percent.

Page 99 is, as are (hopefully) all the pages, important as it propels the story forward in both important and interesting information and in clean, even elegant, prose. The extraordinarily lavish government seed money for the private enterprise is very much part of the story, as are the terms for Congress’ munificent disposal of hard-earned taxpayer money. This is vital to the deeply documented story of exploitation and abuse of that generosity.
Visit Roland De Wolk's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 16, 2019

Cedric de Leon's "Crisis!: When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule"

Cedric de Leon is Director of the Labor Center and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His areas of expertise are labor, race, political sociology, and comparative historical sociology. He is the author and editor of five books, including most recently, Crisis! When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule.

De Leon applied the “Page 99 Test” to Crisis! When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule and reported the following:
Crisis! When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule looks back at the U.S. Civil War to identify the political conditions that give rise to crises of public confidence. I use the lessons of the Civil War to make sense of the Great Depression and the election of Donald Trump.

At the center of each moment is the success or failure of the political establishment to absorb an existential challenge to its power. When the establishment fails to absorb such a challenge, the people withdraw their consent to be ruled and the party system fractures. When the establishment succeeds, the people allow their frustrations to be channeled into party politics and the party system is stabilized.

Page 99 of Crisis! is in the middle of the chapter on the Great Depression. In addition to being the worst economic downturn in American history, the Depression was also a politically tumultuous time. Industrial workers struck in the hundreds of thousands, farmers’ unions fought pitched battles with police in the streets, and communism was popular not just in Chicago, Detroit, and New York, but also in the South. Even to the casual observer, it seemed as if the republic were teetering on the edge of revolution.

But the Democratic Party did something then that few expected: they remade themselves into the party of the forgotten man and inaugurated what we know today as the New Deal. As part of the New Deal, Democrats and progressive Republicans passed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which recognized the right of workers to bargain collectively with their bosses.

In doing so, the Democrats absorbed the challenge posed by striking workers and revolutionaries. Page 99 chronicles an especially poignant moment in that process, when labor leaders organized their members to withdraw their support for third parties and back the Democrats instead. Sidney Hillman, for example, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, persuaded his executive board to abandon the idea of an independent labor party in 1936. Hillman warned that under a Republican administration,
“It would be silly to discuss organization in steel and the automobile industry. There would be no room for the CIO [the Congress of Industrial Organizations] … You talk labor party. But can you have a labor party without an economic labor movement? … I say to you that the defeat of Roosevelt and the introduction of a real Fascist administration such as we will have is going to make the work of building a labor movement impossible.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party thus used the New Deal to coopt a once vibrant and politically independent labor movement and thereby stopped the crisis of public confidence from escalating into an all-out revolution.

None of this is to suggest that it is better to contain a crisis than it is to succumb to one. As director of the UMass Amherst Labor Center I can hardly celebrate the cooptation of the labor movement. Nor do I revel in the crisis of public confidence that has gripped the United States in the Trump era. Instead my goal is to understand when and why the political establishment loses the consent to rule.

Crisis! does have important political implications, though, and those I do not shy away from. The fact that our current crisis bears some resemblance to the Civil War and the Great Depression makes a strong historical analysis a matter of utmost urgency. Like the triumph of ethnic nationalism today, the crises over slavery and mass unemployment during the Depression were the result of partisan maneuvers and grassroots movements that divided civil society and made possible the unthinkable. What politicians and social movements do now can mean the difference between fascism and democracy.
Learn more about Crisis!: When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago by Cedric de Leon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Brandon R. Byrd's "The Black Republic"

Brandon R. Byrd is an intellectual historian of the 19th and 20th century United States with specializations in African American History and the African Diaspora. Currently, he teaches at Vanderbilt University, where he an assistant professor in the Department of History and an affiliate of the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies.

Byrd applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti, and reported the following:
The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti re-considers the history of black internationalism and black political thought in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries by focusing on how and why black intellectuals in the United States engaged with the political realities, people, and ideas of Haiti. Page 99 reads as follows:
In 1889, a debate unfolded in St. Louis, Missouri. Under the St. Louis School Board’s initial plan for renaming the city’s colored schools, Wendell Phillips, the late abolitionist known for his antebellum lecture on Toussaint Louverture, would become the namesake of Colored School No. 5 while a host of other white abolitionists, politicians, and Union officers would receive similar honors. The proposal failed; to the chagrin of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the names of those “saviors of the colored race” never graced the segregated black schoolhouses in the city. The newspaper, owned and operated by the conservative white Democrat Joseph Pulitzer, complained that the St. Louis School Board revised its recommendation after African Americans protested the renaming of Colored School No. 6 in honor of Winfield Scott Hancock, a deceased Union general, Democratic politician, and avowed segregationist. Bowing to that pressure, the Post-Dispatch grumbled, the St. Louis School Board scrapped its first proposal and requested that black principals offer names for their institutions in recognition of black heroes and heroines.

Divided opinions within black St. Louis soon emerged. In a letter to the St. Louis School Board, the principal of Colored School No. 1 argued that “the imputation already rests upon [African Americans] that we are slow to appreciate our real benefactors and friends” and predicted that those “imputations would certainly rest upon stronger grounds” if his school “failed to honor the memory of Wendell Phillips ... the scholar, the orator, the fearless anti-slavery advocate.” Other black principals in St. Louis welcomed the chance to express their race pride even if it meant drawing the ire of their white counterparts. Indeed, some wanted school names that commemorated the most radical expression of black independence in the world.
This page, which opens Chapter 3 of The Black Republic, recounts a controversy over the re-naming of black schools in St. Louis, which ended in Colored School No. 2 becoming the Dessalines School and Colored School No. 4 re-emerging as the Toussaint L’Ouverture School. It is part of a vignette that leads to the ensuing chapter’s main arguments. The decision of Arthur Dessalines Langston, the principal of Colored School No. 2, and other black St. Louisans to name their schools after Toussaint Louverture, one of the foremost leaders of the Haitian Revolution, and Jean Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s first head-of-state, suggests the deeper meaning of Haiti to African Americans during the post-Reconstruction era. “Haiti,” I go on to write, “came to epitomize virile black manhood and militant resistance to racial oppression” in a moment of dimming prospects for global black freedom. “It was an inspiring albeit embattled stronghold of black self-determination in the Age of Imperialism and Jim Crow.”

A reader who opened The Black Republic to page 99 would get a better idea of the main ideas of Chapter 3 than of the central arguments of the whole book. The Black Republic tracks African American thinking about Haiti, a singular black nation-state born in slave insurrection, across the shifting political, cultural, and social landscape of a “long postemancipation era” stretching from the U.S. Civil War through the period between World War I and World War II. It finds consistent interest among a diverse group of U.S. black intellectuals in Haiti’s perceived exceptionalism but inconsistent, complex, and sometimes conflicting interpretations of Haiti’s meaning to African Americans, the United States, and the world. Put simply, page 99 introduces readers to one iteration of a multifaceted aspect of black internationalist and political thought.

Still, it is worth mentioning that a reader applying the “Page 99 Test” to The Black Republic would get a strong sense of my methodologies even though they would not get a holistic understanding of the entire book. Like numerous other contemporary intellectual historians, particularly those writing about black intellectual history, my work is influenced by social and cultural history. The Black Republic thus mines a diverse archive composed of written, oral, material, and visual sources produced by self-defined intellectuals and organic thinkers alike. It finds ideas wherever they emerge, including the naming of colored schools.
Visit Brandon R. Byrd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Pekka Hämäläinen's "Lakota America"

Pekka Hämäläinen is the Rhodes Professor of American History and Fellow of St. Catherine’s College at Oxford University. He has served as the principal investigator of a five-year project on nomadic empires in world history, funded by the European Research Council. His book, The Comanche Empire, won the Bancroft Prize in 2009.

Hämäläinen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, and reported the following:
The test better than works—if I could have chosen any page, 99 would have been a strong contender. It finds the Lakotas in the Missouri Valley in the early 1790s in the middle of talks with the Mandan and Omaha Indians, trying to forge an accommodation. Having shifted westward from the Minnesota Valley homelands in search of horses and bison, the Lakotas had reached the Missouri—Mníšoše to them—three decades earlier and had almost instantly clashed with a number of villagers who saw them as invaders. The result was a long and violent struggle between the Lakotas and Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras over the mastery of a river that was about to emerge as one of North America’s key commercial arteries. The peace process failed. The Missouri was home and sacred for the villagers, a place where all their history had happened, and they were determined to keep the Lakotas out. Soon after the Lakotas attacked a Mandan village of fifty-eight lodges and killed everyone in it.

That was one the one of the most significant turning points in Lakota history. Demoralized, the Mandans retreated upriver, pushing north until they reached the Hidatsa villages at the mouth of the Knife River. A few years later the Arikaras, too, abandoned their remaining villages near the Lakotas and sought refuge in the west and north. Nearly a two-hundred-mile expanse of the Missouri now lay vacant ahead of the Lakotas. They pushed in, gaining a massive reservoir of water, grass, game, timber, and shelter. They had become the masters of the Missouri Valley who gave Lewis and Clark a pause, a premonition of the carnage in the Little Bighorn Valley three generations later.

We tend to see the Lakotas as quintessential horse people who dominated the vast grasslands of the Northern Great Plains, but that was a later development. Here the Lakotas reinvent themselves as river people who made Mníšoše the center of their world. It was there that they assumed their sacred form as the seven oyátes, or “people,” splitting up and linking up along the life-giving river. It was there that they learned how to contain colonial powers and it was there that they began to develop the strategies that would allow them to build an Indigenous empire in the northern plains in the late nineteenth century—and frustrate the United States’ westward expansion for decades.
Learn more about Lakota America at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Nathan Spannaus's "Preserving Islamic Tradition"

Nathan Spannaus is a specialist in Islamic intellectual history and religious thought. He is a graduate of McGill University's Institute of Islamic Studies and Harvard's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and he has held positions at Princeton and Oxford. His work has appeared in Islamic Law and Society, Muslim World, Arabica, and Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, and he has contributed to the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology, the Encyclopedia of Islam and the two-volume Modern Islamic Authority and Social Change. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Islamic philosophy at University of Jyvaskyla, Finland.

Spannaus applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Preserving Islamic Tradition: Abu Nasr Qursawi and the Beginnings of Modern Reformism, and reported the following:
From page 99:
precedents were utilized in novel ways and engaged in continuing Islamic scholarly discourse.

Jackson (noted in the Introduction) characterizes taqlīd as “scaffolding,” a conception of authority in which the work of earlier scholars was accepted by later scholars to facilitate their own scholarship. There was little need or incentive for the latter to revisit larger, more structural issues, he argues, and taqlīd allowed them to instead devote their energies to addressing more minute but also more advanced questions, leading to more sophisticated scholarship. Taqlīd thus served as a paradigm for scholarship, in which the positions of earlier scholars were utilized as premises for the formulation of new positions within the same discourse.

A significant benefit of the taqlīd framework was that it limited the potential for the formulation of deviant or anomalous views. Coherence was a major goal of taqlīd, and, as scholars were generally obliged to conform to the established positions of their school or faction, they were restrained in their interpretive activity and the possible scope for any new position was narrowed. Scaffolding was therefore understood to safeguard (though not necessarily ensure) the correctness of scholars’ formulations, which could depart only so much from the views of their predecessors. A direct connection with scripture was thus seen as unnecessary, as any new stance would have to align with positions that had been previously legitimated as correct. Indeed, the interpretation of scripture without the limits imparted by the taqlīd framework was considered more likely to breed erroneous, unpredictable, and/or incoherent views.

Although much of the attention devoted to taqlīd in secondary literature is focused on its role in the area of law, its place in kalām was not
This passage offers an interesting window into the book. The discussion on page 99 is part of a longer section addressing taqlid, a key element in the history of the Islamic scholarly tradition that mediates how new ideas relate to existing ones and represents the link between Islamic knowledge and religious authority. Its ‘scaffolding’ was of central importance for the development of Islamic scholarship, for which taqlid served as the predominant framework for nearly a millenium. The focus of the book is not on taqlid per se, but rather it’s about a critique of this framework, and then how it was transformed in the early modern period. Taqlid, however, is not very well understood, especially for later periods (roughly 15th-18th centuries), which are among the least studied in Islamic history, and the book devotes significant attention to how it operated, both in theory and in practice.

Abu Nasr Qursawi (1776-1812), the subject of the book, took aim at taqlid, specifically that it excluded erroneous positions. He believed this was not necessarily the case, but moreover that it actually hid errors in received wisdom by giving it a patina of validity. Accordingly, he called for greater skepticism toward established views and investigation into them to determine their correctness.

He identified two major points where he argued that invalid positions had been perpetuated by taqlid: on the timing of the night prayer and on the question of God’s attributes. For both cases, he criticized the assumption that the predominant views must be correct because they are so widespread, and he argued on logical and scriptural grounds that they in fact cannot be correct and must be rejected. (Each of these issues is fairly intricate, but they’re addressed in detail in the book.)

In the background of Qursawi’s criticism of his fellow scholars was the subordination of Islamic institutions by the Russian government. State control bureaucratized scholars, disrupting the link between knowledge and religious authority. In response, Qursawi put forward a radical rethinking of laypeople’s role in articulating Islamic morality, arguing that any educated Muslim should determine correct action for themselves, without scholarly guidance. Nevertheless, in this context the framework of taqlid was seriously undermined. Its mediation between new and existing views gradually came to be rejected, and the entire edifice of the Islamic scholarly tradition called into question. Preserving Islamic Tradition uses Qursawi’s reformism and its implications as a lens for exploring these historical and religious transformations.
Learn more about Preserving Islamic Tradition at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 11, 2019

David J. Silverman's "This Land Is Their Land"

David J. Silverman is a professor at George Washington University, where he specializes in Native American, Colonial American, and American racial history. He is the author of Thundersticks, Red Brethren, Ninigret, and Faith and Boundaries. His essays have won major awards from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the New York Academy of History.

Silverman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, and reported the following:
Page 99 of This Land is Their Land appears early in chapter 3, which explores how the Wampanoag Indians’ decimation by an unidentified epidemic between 1616 and 1619 was the essential context to their outreach to Plymouth colony in 1621. Contrary to the Thanksgiving myth, the Wampanoags did not engage the English because they were inherently friendly. Rather, the Wampanoags needed allies and fast because the Narragansett tribe, which had escaped the disease, was subjugating them in their weakness to the status of tributaries. Page 99 is part of a larger discussion of what Wampanoag country was like just before the epidemic. It traces how the density of the Wampanoag population and the Wampanoags’ long-distance social and political networks enabled the disease to spread from human to human between the Saco River of Maine on the north and the east side of Narragansett Bay on the south. This discussion also explores the intertribal enmities that prevented the sickness from reaching the Narragansett tribe on the west side of the bay. Page 99 quotes the writings of European explorers who preceded the Mayflower in southern New England that Wampanoag country was full of people and “an excellent place both for health and fertility.” It also uses those sources, and the Indian testimony on which they drew, to sketch the close relationship between the Wampanoags of what is now southeastern Massachusetts and the Massachusett Indians of Massachusetts Bay, where Boston is now located. The Wampanoags depended on the Massachusett Indians as allies against the Narragansett tribe to the south, whereas the Massachusett Indians depended on the Wampanoags as trade partners and military allies in relations with the Wabanakis of Maine to the north. The Wabanakis were in steady contact with European fishermen from several different nations, to whom they traded furs in exchange for metal tools in high demand among Native people. To facilitate this trade, the Wabanakis began dedicating more time to hunting beaver for pelts and less to producing food, but they made up for that shift by trading bits of metal and worn out tools to the Massachusett Indians in exchange for their corn. The Massachusett Indians probably exchanged a portion of this metal to the Wampanoags for additional corn. When the corn-producing Massachusett people refused to bargain on Wabanaki terms, the Wabanakis launched amphibious raids against them in “their newly acquired sailing vessels” from Europeans. The epidemic of 1616-19 would feast on such human connections to the devastation of the aforementioned tribes.

The “page 99 test” would work once the reader has finished my book and absorbed its overarching themes, but probably not otherwise. This Land is Their Land emphasizes that the sanitized Thanksgiving myth is lousy history for a host of reasons. Those reasons include depicting America as a New World or wilderness instead of reckoning with Native people’s ancient history and civilizations; sidestepping the century of bloody contact between the Wampanoags and Europeans before the arrival of the Mayflower as Europeans repeatedly raided the coast for captives and plunder; ignoring that the Wampanoags’ “friendly” outreach to Plymouth colony stemmed from their need for military and trade allies to offset the threat of the Narragansett tribe after the epidemic of 1616-19; and using a shared meal as a symbol of bloodless colonialism and Indian consent to their own displacement instead of acknowledging the Wampanaogs’ resentment of aggressive English expansion, culminating in the bloody King Philip’s War of 1675-76. The Thanksgiving myth also elides the three centuries of Wampanoag struggles with colonialism after King Philip’s War, including the processes by which whites reduced them to near landlessness and servitude, denied their Indian identities and rights, and assigned them to romantic bit parts in the nation’s founding myth. Finally, I emphasize that the Wampanoags’ National Day of Mourning, held in Plymouth annually since 1970, reflect a centuries’-long Wampanoag critique of colonialism as a betrayal of their people’s historic alliance with Plymouth. Telling this history in its full complexity involves addressing not only the troubled history of Wampaoag-English relations, but the intra- and intertribal politics of the Wampanoags, which often drove their policies toward the New England colonies. In this respect, the page 99 test proves true.
Learn more about This Land Is Their Land at the Bloomsbury website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 9, 2019

Jon Lawrence's "Me, Me, Me?"

Jon Lawrence works on modern British social, cultural, and political history, and is now based at the University of Exeter. He has previously taught at University College, London, the University of Liverpool, Harvard University, and the University of Cambridge. Lawrence has published extensively on British social and political history including Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867-1914 (1998) and Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (2009).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Me, Me, Me?: The Search for Community in Post-war England, and reported the following:
From page 69:
[She] clearly took pride in having been a trail blazer for domestic refrigeration, but there is little sense here of competitive one-upmanship. For [Beryl] Watts, private consumption was something to be shared with friends who, like her, strongly identified with the pleasures of making their first home. Peter Willmott’s 1963 study of the massive Dagenham estate on London’s eastern fringe drew similar conclusions, arguing that ‘the process by which one family followed another’s example was the result of friendly endorsement rather than rivalry’, and concluding that ‘in the main people on the estate seem to see their fellows not as adversaries but as allies in a general advance.’

Others challenged the implications of the question more directly. Linda Jones, a hairdresser in her late forties, replied ‘Not really. Most of us have these things but I don’t see where competition comes in’ (note the use of ‘us’ here; in many ways it was a bigger challenge to the researchers’ assumptions than her denial that people were competitive). Mrs Pearce, an Irishwoman in her early thirties, took a different, more personal, tack by replying, ‘For me there’s not. I go out to work. We have them all.’ But arguably her narrower, more individualist, outlook said more about her pride in contributing to the family’s well-being, than about her love of things. Certainly, her explanation of why she voted Labour suggested strong identification with her neighbours: ‘Labour stands for me, and for next door, and for all the people in the street’. Mrs Tufnell, a bricklayer’s wife from Shoreditch tried a different approach, arguing ‘people don’t compete, but they have room now, and they like nice things’, while others simply pointed to practicalities: that young couples moving from furnished rooms to a new three-bed, unfurnished house were bound to need to focus on home-making. Mr and Mrs Bridge were in exactly this situation, having moved to Stevenage as newly-weds in 1956. They tried to explain that paying to furnish their new home was the one down-side of the move: ‘We do get very short at the end of the week. If we didn’t have everything to buy we’d be quite well off really.’ Sadly, the interviewer, almost certainly Samuel, wasn’t listening – having noted that all their furniture was new (was there even much choice about this in late-1950s Stevenage?), he commented: ‘pattern of mass media imposed misery’. It was the New Left’s ‘false wants’ thesis about the corrosive effects of ‘affluence’ reduced to a soundbite. It seems unlikely that the Bridges would have concurred.

Many people resented the suggestion that they (or their neighbours) only wanted things because others had them. Margaret Richardson, a housewife in her late twenties, insisted that ‘everyone wants them regardless of the neighbours’, and Kevin Burnaby, a maintenance fitter originally from Cornwall, replied ‘If they can afford it they get it. [They] used to be a luxury but now they’re necessities’.
In many ways this page does get to the heart of the book’s central theme in that it showcases the rich insights to be gained from re-reading historic social-science testimony ‘against the grain’. Me, Me, Me? explores how people made sense of rapid social and cultural change in England in the decades after the Second World War; how they acted as sociologists of their own lives, and how these vernacular understandings of change often challenged the preconceptions of expert observers. In short, it analyses how people sought to reconcile the competing claims of self and society across seven decades marked by rapid technological, economic and cultural change.

In this extract, the focus is on the culture wars over mass consumption in late-fifties Britain. The page discusses how residents of Stevenage New Town responded to being asked a decidedly leading question about their consumption habits: ‘Do you think there is much competition between neighbours over washing-machines, T.V. sets, refrigerators and so on here?’. This survey was conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Conservative Party’s landslide victory at the 1959 election. Prosperous southern English towns like Stevenage had swung heavily towards the Conservatives, and many on the Left became convinced that the rising prosperity associated with the ‘affluent society’, represented a fundamental challenge to the nation’s post-45 social democratic settlement. The field-work in Stevenage was conducted by the young historian and New Left intellectual Raph Samuel on behalf of the Institute of Community Studies. In an article published in the first issue of New Left Review, Samuel ended up using the survey’s findings to argue against narrowly economic explanations for the Conservatives’ 1959 victory, but, as we see here, this did not mean that he found it easy to understand working-class respondents’ practical responses to the emerging consumer society. Both the survey’s original question, and the parenthesised comment about ‘mass media imposed misery’ signal an inability to imagine the practical challenges facing young couples suddenly transported from cramped furnished rooms to a spacious new family home deep in the Hertfordshire countryside (and hence far from friends and family). More broadly, it was absurd to equate wanting a refrigerator with anything other than wanting a) to store food safely, and b) not to have to make a trip to the shops every day when there was no longer a shop on every street corner. Researchers assumed that suburban living meant atomisation, status anxiety and competitive consumption, but Beryl Watts saw things differently. On the previous page readers hear her telling Samuel’s researcher: ‘When I got my fridge the whole street came to look at it, and now they’ve all got one’. In 1959, self and society remained indivisible in vernacular accounts of the new consumerism.
Learn more about Me, Me, Me? at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Helen Fry's "The Walls Have Ears"

Helen Fry is the author of The London Cage and over twenty books focusing on intelligence and POWs in World War II. She consulted on the docudrama Spying on Hitler’s Army and appeared in BBC’s Home Front Heroes.

Fry applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, The Walls Have Ears: The Greatest Intelligence Operation of World War II, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Walls Have Ears lands at the very heart of the book’s narrative and a good example of the book’s content. This page begins the extraordinary saga of the German generals and their life in captivity in a stately house, Trent Park at Cockfosters on the outskirts of London. Page 99 narrates the arrival of the first German generals, Generals Cruwell and von Thoma, after capture in North Africa in May and November 1942. They were swiftly followed by 12 other senior commanders and generals after the surrender in North Africa in May 1943. At Trent Park they were treated according to their status as ‘military gentlemen’, but little did they realise that nothing in their surroundings was as it seemed. They were actually being held at the behest of British and American intelligence. Deep in the walls, hidden in plant pots and the billiards table were embedded microphones. The devices were wired back to a special listening room in the basement, known as the ‘M Room’, where teams of secret listeners were working in 12 hour shifts.

This was all part of an already elaborate and carefully orchestrated bugging operation of German prisoners that had begun in the Tower of London in September 1939. The prisoners were often given a ‘phoney’ interrogation, and believed the British were unbelievably stupid and incompetent. When they returned to their cellmate, they boasted about what they had not told the interrogating officer – all within earshot of the hidden microphones. The operation grew so rapidly that it moved to Trent Park at the end of 1939, and within 2 years had extra sites at Latimer House and Wilton Park, both outside London in Buckinghamshire. The clever deception, headed by MI6 spymaster Thomas Joseph Kendrick, became a massive intelligence-gathering factory that provided vital information for every campaign of the war. The volume of intelligence is staggering: from intelligence ahead of the Battle of Britain in 1940 and new enemy technology to night fighter strategy, new aircraft and fighting capability, U-boat operations and construction, detailed information on coastal defences ahead of D-Day, as well as the mass atrocities and concentration camps.

It was from the German Generals, tasked with keeping the Third Reich’s most closely guarded secrets, that the biggest intelligence coup came. They inadvertently gave away the existence and location of Hitler’s deadly V-weapons (V-1 and V-2) at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. It led directly to the bombing of Peenemünde in August 1943 in Operation Crossbow on the orders of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. But British and American intelligence knew that to get this intelligence from them, the Generals had to be totally off guard if they were to speak freely within range of the microphones. What emerged is a seemingly outrageous scenario where they were wined and dined, looked after by a fake aristocrat ‘Lord Aberfeldy’, taken on trips to the posh restaurant of Simpsons in the Strand and given copious supplies of gin at the Ritz. It worked and they were were totally hood-winked. The frivolity and outlandish treatment of the Generals had one aim – to win the intelligence war. It is now recognised that this clandestine unit of spies shortened the war alongside Bletchley Park, and without it, the outcome of the war and restoration of democracy in Europe would have been very different.
Visit Helen Fry's website.

The Page 99 Test: The London Cage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

David Farber's "Crack"

David Farber is Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of numerous books, including Everybody Ought to be Rich (2013), The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism (2010), Taken Hostage (2004), Sloan Rules (2002), The Age of Great Dreams (1994), and Chicago '68 (1988). He lived in New York City with his family at the height of the crack cocaine years and later lived across the street from a small-time crack distributorship in Philadelphia.

Farber applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed, and reported the following:
Page 99 is one of my favorite pages in Crack. Clifford Bey is the page’s protagonist. I had interviewed Mr. Bey in Chicago in a fancy law office where he now works part-time as an investigator. Mr. Bey told me things about the crack cocaine era—the 1980s and 1990s-- that I never would have learned from any archive.

Back in the mid-1980s, Mr. Bey had just been released from the penitentiary after nine long years. He came back to Chicago as crack was first taking off in his southside neighborhood. On page 99, he starts to explain what it was like to watch crack invade his community.

The back story to the interview I did with Mr. Bey is almost as good as what he actually told me. A criminal defense attorney I know told me that Mr. Bey knew a lot about the main men who had distributed crack cocaine in Chicago. He had grown up with them and he served time with them. So when Mr. Bey agreed to talk with me I was excited; getting people involved with the crack trade to tell me about their experiences was, as you might expect, difficult.

Also as you might expect, practically the first thing Mr. Bey told me was that he was not about to tell me about anything that anyone did that was illegal. That was not good news. But he then told me a lot about what it was like to be a young black man living in an all-black neighborhood in Chicago in the 1980s, after the steel mills and car-parts factories and the small textile factories had all shut down and decent paying work for unschooled men was mercilessly hard to find. He explained why young men where he lived turned to the crack game. Page 99 tells a critical aspect of both his story and the bigger story of the book.
Learn more about Crack at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

John Ibson's "Men without Maps"

John Ibson is emeritus professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall, and reported the following:
The 99th page of my book describes two of the large photo albums put together by Ambrose Edens, a Texas Christian University Professor of Religion, definitely one of the most interesting of the “males of the generation before Stonewall” upon whom Men without Maps concentrates. Edens didn’t leave behind the sort of written evidence—memoirs and correspondence, for instance—that many of my work’s other subjects did, so I had only his several photo albums and some highly revealing interviews I conducted with some friends and colleagues of his as the primary material on which to base my investigation of his interesting life. Page 99 deals entirely with two of these albums, describes the photos in them, and speculates about the significance that the snapshots in the albums may have had for Edens. Since those albums are but one piece of evidence about him, since my discussion of the albums occurs early in my treatment of Edens, and since he is only one of the several men discussed in my book, I don’t think page 99 is necessarily the most representative single page one might select to get a sense of what my book is about. It does, however, provide a browser with a good example of my writing, to help that browser decide whether I tell a good enough story to make an entire book of my story-telling appealing.

As the title of my book suggests, I think that American men of the mid-twentieth century who were drawn to other men may aptly be described as mapless, as persons whose society gave them precious little guidance, except by way of scorn, for how to live their lives, how to be in the world, insofar as their queer sexual yearnings were involved. Acting on their yearnings was still a crime, of course, and their country’s popular culture provided no affirmative models whose sexuality might seem similar to their own. By contrast, of course, many sorts of “maps” for heterosexuals were all over the place in midcentury America, free for the asking, their acceptance indeed often insisted upon.

Men who achieved a fame of some sort appear in my book, but most of the men about whom I’ve written are more ordinary than that, with the records of their lives preserved in certain archives, such as the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell. Unlike most of the other men studied so far by my historian colleagues, the men in my book were not prominent leaders of the midcentury period’s burgeoning homosexual-rights organizations. Getting to know these “men without maps” has much to tell us about midcentury American sexuality, of course, its opportunities and definitions, its challenges and its rewards. A recurring theme in my book is that studying these mapless men informs us not only about meanings of queerness during the period, but also about the constrictions on expressions of same-sex affection that any American man of the midcentury period was likely to encounter.
Learn more about Men without Maps at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 4, 2019

Tim Stuart-Buttle's "From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy"

Tim Stuart-Buttle is Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK. The appallingly titled From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume is his first book, and a revised and extended version of his doctoral thesis. He is currently at work on a monograph that reconstructs an early modern debate to which practically every philosopher of note contributed, but which has received relatively little scholarly attention: on mankind’s desire for esteem and its social, moral, theological and political consequences.

Stuart-Buttle applied the “Page 99 Test” to From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test finds us midway through Chapter 2, which explores the moral theory of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the author of the highly influential Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711; 1714). Page 99 invites us to consider Shaftesbury’s treatment of issues – whether the soul is immortal; whether a future state of rewards and punishments is required to motivate us to behave morally; and what the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome had to say on these questions – that are central to the work as a whole. It explains that, in denying that virtue relies upon a belief in immortality and divine judgment, Shaftesbury’s primary objective was to repudiate the moral theory of his ‘friend and foster-father’: John Locke (1632-1704). Shaftesbury did so by labouring the superiority of the moral philosophy of the ancient Stoics (notably Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Horace) when compared to Christian moral theology. Like a number of more recent moral philosophers (such as Alasdair MacIntyre), Shaftesbury understood “modern” moral philosophy to have taken a horribly ‘wrong turn’ in the seventeenth century, as the methodologies of the new experimental sciences were increasingly applied to ethical subjects. Here, Thomas Hobbes was implicated alongside Locke: if recent natural philosophers reduced the world to atoms without any intelligent design, Locke and Hobbes stood accused of similarly denying any order and meaning in the moral universe. Shaftesbury claimed to find in the writings of the ancient Stoics a vision of human nature that was consistent with the existence of a truly good (non-Christian) God, who created man in such a way as to allow him to identify the good (through reason), and to discipline himself so as to pursue it. Philosophy, for the Stoics as for Shaftesbury, was a ‘way of life’ – a vision of philosophy recently revived by Pierre Hadot; and the truly virtuous individual does not require the sanctions of either civil law or divine judgment in order to live as they ought. They live virtuously because they recognise that it is only by doing so that they embrace what truly makes them human: moral autonomy, and the responsibility for making the right choices.

The page 99 test works well: it shows why early-modern philosophers identified their philosophies (and their antagonists’) with late Hellenistic philosophical traditions. Shaftesbury portrayed Locke and Hume as Epicureans of a degenerate kind: they deny that human beings are naturally sociable creatures, inclined to virtue; they portray mankind as captive to passions over which they have no rational control; and they depict God as a capricious being uninterested in human life and worthy only of fear, not love. Shaftesbury indicates the polemical advantages of identifying with an alternative philosophical tradition (Stoicism) to expose and correct such philosophical errors. But Shaftesbury’s interpretation of Locke was jaundiced: as Chapter 1 shows, Locke professed his admiration for an alternative late Hellenistic tradition – academic scepticism, identified with Cicero – which he presented as mediating between the rival errors of the Stoics and Epicureans. In Chapters 4 and 5, we see how two other influential eighteenth-century philosophers – the heterodox Anglican clergyman Conyers Middleton (1683-1750), and David Hume (1711-76) adopted a strikingly similar (Ciceronian) approach. Meanwhile Chapter 3 reveals how Shaftesbury’s most acute critic, Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), employed Epicurean motifs and sources in his attack on Shaftesbury’s philosophy.

The central objective of the book is to show how the claim of moral theology – that the moral quality of human actions must be understood in the light of God’s intentions for His created beings – increasingly came under the microscope ca. 1650-1750. This is not a triumphalist origins story of secular modernity; nor is it a MacIntyre-style narrative of the pathogenesis of ‘modern’ moral philosophy. I am attentive to the losses, as well as gains, that this development involved: if it resulted in an emaciated conception of justice, it foregrounded the importance of social relations in the shaping of individual identity. Here, the book challenges the notion that the supposed forefathers of modern liberalism – Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith – focused on the ‘atomised’ individual (to borrow from Charles Taylor). Instead, they offer us a much richer vision of human nature and human life than is often recognized. The richness and complexity of their thought might alert us to our own need to think rather harder about the challenges we face if we are to live together in such ways as contribute to our shared pursuit of happiness and meaning.
Learn more about From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue