Alison L. LaCroix's "The Interbellum Constitution"

Alison L. LaCroix is Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law and Associate Member of the History Department at the University of Chicago. She served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and is the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism.

LaCroix applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, and reported the following:

Page 99 lands a reader in the midst of Chapter 2, which focuses on a gripping but largely forgotten legal controversy over a ship that docked in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1819, and from which debarked three individuals described in court records as “persons of Colour” – likely free Black seamen who had joined the crew in a Caribbean port. The ship, a brig named the Wilson, and its owner and its captain ended up at the center of a federal-court case that came before two of the great judges of the early-19th-century American bench: U.S. district judge St. George Tucker and Chief Justice John Marshall (both of whom were also Virginians).

Page 99, part of a chapter section titled “The Brig on Trial,” discusses Judge Tucker’s views on whether the Constitution gave Congress the power to regulate the migration or importation of free Black people into the United States. Tucker was “unmoved by arguments” pressed by the brig’s owner “against the constitutionality of the federal statutes” and “launched into a full-throated endorsement of the two species of congressional authority at issue in the case: the power to reinforce state law, and the power to regulate the migration and importation of persons.”

As this synopsis suggests, there is a lot happening on page 99. And the page nicely distills several of the main themes of the book. The subtitle of the book is “Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms,” and the focus is the period from 1815 to 1861. I call this the “interbellum period” because it falls between two wars: the War of 1812, and the Civil War. Constitutional history has tended to overlook this era for a number of reasons. First, it didn’t yield changes to the text of the Constitution – there were no constitutional amendments between 1804 and 1865. Second, because of this lack of change to the text, it’s easy to assume that nothing about the Constitution changed during this period. Third, the period appears to lack the grandeur of either the founding era or what the historian Eric Foner calls the “second founding,” the Civil War and Reconstruction. The interbellum period, by contrast, is filled with ugliness and tragedy, including the expansion of slavery, the forced “removal” of Native nations from their land, the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment, and the subordination of women. For all these reasons, the interbellum period is often – mistakenly – treated as what I term “constitutional flyover country.”

Page 99’s tale of the Brig Wilson is a vital piece of the book’s larger effort to recover this overlooked period in U.S. constitutional history. Moreover, the book focuses on stories and people, using narrative to build a rich picture of this complex, sometimes-rollicking, sometimes-violent era. The tale of the brig gives us larger-than-life characters such as the unforgettably named Captain Ivory Huntress, and it provides a new account of familiar figures like Judge Tucker and Chief Justice Marshall.

This forgotten episode also recasts the way that we understand American constitutionalism today. In modern constitutional law, the federal government derives much of its authority to regulate across a broad sphere – from highways to marijuana to healthcare to civil rights – from Congress’s commerce power. The standard understanding of the commerce power begins with the Supreme Court’s 1824 decision in Gibbons v. Ogden, a case involving steamboats in New York Harbor. But, as the case of the Brig Wilson shows, the law of the commerce power originated several years earlier, and it was deeply entangled with fraught and fascinating questions of race, slavery, maritime power, and the borders between state and federal authority.

Learn more about The Interbellum Constitution at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marjorie Feld's "The Threshold of Dissent"

Marjorie Feld is Professor of History in the History and Society Division at Babson College. She is the author of Lillian Wald: A Biography and Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle Over Apartheid.

Feld applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism, and reported the following:

To turn to page 99 in my book is to read the tail end of my analysis of how the Six-Day War between Israel, Jordan and Syria—also called the June War—proved pivotal to unconditional American and American Jewish support for Israel and to the growth of anti-Zionism in the US and around the world. The page also captures analysis of the significance of the 1973 war between Israel, Egypt, and Syria, known as the Yom Kippur War, the Ramadan War, and the October War. Because the 1973 war was far longer and had far more tragic casualties, American Jewish support for Israel was seen as even more important at its conclusion.

Page 99 attempts to connect these two events with a key dynamic in American Jewish life: the low threshold for dissent with regard to Israel and American Zionism. The book offers new evidence for the role of American Jewish leaders in maintaining that low threshold, marginalizing and even silencing American Jews of diverse backgrounds who did not agree that unity on unconditional support for Israel kept American Jews, and all Jews, safe. In connecting global political conflicts to foreign policy and to domestic narratives of Jewish safety, page 99 offers a useful window into the book’s overarching themes.

The book rests on archival evidence, specifically on the voices of American Jewish critics of Zionism from across the twentieth century, and for this reason the page 99 test does not work well as a browser’s shortcut overall. The analysis on page 99 relies on the work of several of my smart colleagues—Shaul Mitelpunkt stands out above all—as it is setting the scene for the third chapter titled “‘Israel—Right or Wrong’: Anticolonialism, Freedom Movements, and American Jewish life.” Scholars of Israel and Cold War politics such as Mitelpunkt helped me to understand how American Jews carefully positioned themselves in the 1960s and 1970s. Israel and the US formed a Cold War partnership in these years, just as the antiwar, Civil Rights, and other anticolonialist movements gained momentum. Activists in these movements linked Western militarism and colonialism to the oppression of Palestinians in Israel, before and after the 1967 war. Page 99’s information on ideas about Israel’s vulnerability, coupled with deep faith in Israel as central to Jewish safety, is vital to understanding how American Jewish leaders and laypeople navigated these difficult decades. If page 99 is used to test the waters, I hope that readers will dive into the entire chapter and book to learn from the evidence I present.

Learn more about The Threshold of Dissent at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David N. Gibbs's "Revolt of the Rich"

David N. Gibbs is professor of history at the University of Arizona, with a courtesy appointment in Africana studies. His books include First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (2009).

Gibbs applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America's Class Divide, and reported the following:

Revolt of the Rich starts from the fact that inequality of wealth and income in the United States has increased exponentially during the past four decades, beginning in the late 1970s, as documented by the French economist Thomas Piketty. My book seeks to answer the question of why inequality increased. The answer, based on fifteen years of archival research, is that there was a massive influence campaign by business interests and wealthy individuals that sought to direct a greater share of resources to themselves, at the expense of the majority. Business interests set aside their differences and combined forces, acting with great discipline. In essence, this influence campaign was successful, thus transforming US politics in a plutocratic direction that endures to this day.

Page 99 would not be a good place to gain an understanding of my overall argument about wealth inequality. It addresses a secondary theme, which is: How was it possible to achieve such inegalitarian policies – that were harmful to the majority -- in a Democratic political system? Page 99 addresses this question by looking at how weak the leftist opposition was. During the 1970s, the left lost its traditional focus on the working class and instead directed its appeals to the highly educated. I note how left culture increasingly disparaged working-class males – especially white males – as ignorant, violent, and racist, thus introducing a basic wedge issue into American politics. The elitist character of the left greatly reduced its effectiveness, which ensured that the business led lobby groups met little opposition. The focus on the educated also opened the left to accusations from right-wing politicians that it had become a snob left – an accusation that contained an element of truth.

Learn more about Revolt of the Rich at Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue