He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America, and reported the following:
Page 99 is a typical page of Speed Capital, but not necessarily an exceptional one. It discusses the 300-mile sweepstakes race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1916. That was the only time, from May 1911 to the present, when the big race was shorter than 500 miles. (It was not held 1917-1918 or 1942-1945.) That page also discusses how Indianapolis became a place for testing automotive technologies, including some that never materialized: in this case, a fuel substitute called "Zoline," which was really a con-man's clever scheme!Learn more about Speed Capital at the University of Illinois Press website.
Page 99 imparts the book's flavor, but not the full range of courses. Speed Capital uses the story of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's early years to illustrate connections between modern transportation technologies, popular culture, capitalism, and geography. The title is a double entendre: Indianapolis was the capital of speed, but its history conveys how people devised rituals to facilitate and exhibit the speedy movement of capital. The book starts with the idea of "space annihilation": automotive speedways utilized and popularized technologies that elided the tyranny of space and time. Early on, Indianapolis's speedway was a place for both automobility and aviation. But after World War I it narrowed, becoming a place mainly for motor sport. The track also became a site for traditions and nostalgia—for looking back with fondness to earlier eras of technological transformation and popular spectacle. The speedway and its museum, which opened in the 1950s, soon became a site for a different kind of space annihilation: eliminating distance between present and past.
Page 99 briefly mentions Carl Graham Fisher, the primary founder of the speedway. Fisher is a significant yet somewhat overlooked figure in American history, and his life story is a narrative thread running through Speed Capital. Other pages more successfully invoke Fisher and Indianapolis's connections to farther-off places, including Chicago, Detroit, Miami, and New York. Many people traveled from these and other places—from all over the nation and the world—to see the famous races. The book also discusses how Fisher spearheaded important transcontinental routes, namely the Lincoln and Dixie Highways, and even famously transformed a South Florida sandbar into the popular resort town of Miami Beach. Basically, I argue, Fisher taught Americans how to enjoy cars as well as how to use them to consume geographical space.
--Marshal Zeringue