Andrew Porwancher's "American Maccabee"

A native of Princeton, Andrew Porwancher earned degrees from Brown and Northwestern before completing his PhD in history at Cambridge. Currently, he serves as a Professor of History at Arizona State University (SCETL).

His books include The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (2021), winner of the Journal of the American Revolution Book-of-the-Year Award; and The Devil Himself (2016), which was adapted for the stage at Dublin’s historic Smock Alley Theatre.

Porwancher applied the “Page 99 Test” to his fifth book, American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews, and reported the following:

American Maccabee passes the Page 99 Test. That page appears in a portion of the book chronicling the diplomatic aftermath of a blood-soaked pogrom in southwestern Russia in 1903. The slaughter of nearly fifty Jews inspired deep sympathy among Americans, who pressed Theodore Roosevelt to diplomatically intervene. As the reader turns onto page 99, various political players are all plotting their next moves. Will Roosevelt actually intercede on behalf of Jewry? And if he does, will Russia cut off diplomatic relations in retaliation? Amid all the uncertainty, tensions ran high.

Page 99 opens with a description of Roosevelt’s strained dynamic with Russia’s ambassador in Washington, Count Cassini. I detail how “foreign policy wasn’t the only source of friction” between them, as “both statesmen were alarmed by the combustible companionship between their irreverent daughters.” Alice Roosevelt, 19, and Marguerite Cassini, 21, proved “a rambunctious duo that romped their way through the socialite scene.” The press delighted in printing scandalous stories about Alice and Marguerite’s willful indifference to the norms of high society. Marguerite would colorfully recall, “Our friendship had the violence of a bomb.” President Roosevelt and Count Cassini each saw the other man’s daughter as a corrupting influence. This page thus reflects one of my goals in American Maccabee: to show that foreign policy had as much to do with human idiosyncrasy as with political wonkery.

The latter half of page 99 is also indicative of the book at large. That passage concerns a gathering of Jewish-American leaders at the Arlington Hotel in the nation’s capital. They descended on Washington because Roosevelt had agreed to meet with them the following day to afford them input into his foreign policy with Russia. I take pains in this portion of page 99 to include details about the hotel: “The pinnacle of luxury, the Arlington served as the accommodation of choice for princes, dukes, and emperors visiting the American capital. Numerous senators took up residence in the hotel’s elegant quarters. The Arlington’s manager enjoyed wide renown for his diligence in meeting guests’ every need.” On page 99, as elsewhere, I seek out opportunities to build the world that I’m asking my readers to inhabit.

Visit Andrew Porwancher's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bradley Morgan's "Frank Zappa's America"

Bradley Morgan, a media arts professional based in Chicago, is the author of U2’s The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships for CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and directs the station’s music film festival. Morgan also interviews authors of music and pop culture books for the New Books Network podcast.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Frank Zappa's America, with the following results:

Today is Independence Day as I write this. Here in Chicago, summer is in full swing, with the city having recently gone through a heatwave and the holiday weekend promising temperatures approaching triple digits. A small storm passed through this morning, transforming the heat into the kind of mugginess that makes clothes uncomfortable, rising humidity mixing with sweat in a way that crosses the threshold of being oppressive. It is something everyone has to deal with, albeit in different ways. Some are forced to endure the weather in ways that push the limits of their own health and safety, finding reprieve where they can under the shade of a tree or through the straw of an iced beverage. While others have the means to escape into a manufactured oasis, with air conditioning creating the illusion they are removed from the realities of their environment outside. Like the waves that crash on the shores of Lake Michigan, some bigger than others, these stifling summer days retreat and return, providing a whiplashed form of respite. One unbearable day giving way to another that is less so before an even worse day announces its arrival.

As we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial next year to mark its 250th birthday, the first 4th of July of Donald Trump’s second presidential term not only hints at the climatological challenges to come, but also serves as an allegory as to the impact his administration will have on the growing existential threat toward democratic and constitutional values. As a harbinger of what comes next, with heat indices rising in tandem with seething existential dread, the extreme temperatures and our own respective ways of managing its effects on each of us speaks to the challenges that the New Normal will demand from all Americans in the coming years.

Published in June by LSU Press, my book Frank Zappa’s America examines the musician’s messaging through song, tracing the means by which Zappa created passionate, at times troubling, art that combats conservatism in its many forms, including the threat posed by white Christian nationalism. More than examining Zappa’s music as a document of its time, my book speaks to the relevancy of his lyrics and public statements as evergreen sociopolitical commentary that borders on the prescient as fundamentalist evangelical forces that ascended Reagan to the White House have now completely dominated a major political party’s platform nearly a half century later.

Page 99 of my book, as well as many other pages, makes this connection very clear. On this page, I cite the work of Lerone A. Martin, associate professor of religion and politics at Washington University, on how Trump’s rhetoric courts and is influenced by white supremacist values that shape the larger evangelical movement’s support of his presidency. By the end of the page, I reinforce this idea by citing the work of Anthea Butler, the author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, who says that evangelicals’ grievances and fears in the wake of 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama pushed this faction further into an “open, belligerent racism that culminated in their wholesale embrace of the man they would call ‘King Cyrus’: Donald Trump. The journey to Trump is a story of how whiteness and racism combined to make evangelicals a potent voting bloc awash in racism and racial animus.”

I wrote the first draft of Frank Zappa’s America in 2023, and it was copyedited in 2024, months before the election. During Trump’s second inauguration, I was busy proofreading and indexing the manuscript, relieved that the end of the project was coming because, based on what his term would bring, and has brought so far in the months since, I could have kept adding to this book. Like the heat as a sign of worsening climate change, the growing effect of Trump’s administration surrounds us all no matter how much we may try to shield ourselves from it. The evidence of his devil’s bargain with white Christian nationalism is directly in front of us, on our televisions and social media feeds. Many have already felt that impact, and for those who feel like they are separate from it, resting calm and cool, they’ll soon feel the heat that threatens to burn everything down.

Why, and for what reason, do they believe that? Because Trump sold them a false reality, one that promised to bring a purported greatness back to America. A greatness that, for many who helped bring Trump to power, meant a life where only white men could wield power. A longing for a time that was never real as a means of wishful thinking for a future that resembles only themselves. As Frank Zappa said, “It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”

Visit Bradley Morgan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthony C. Infanti's "The Human Toll"

Anthony C. Infanti is the Christopher C. Walthour, Sr. Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and author of Tax and Time: On the Use and Misuse of Legal Imagination and Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America, with the following results:

At the top of page 99, a chart documents the amount of tax collected on the importation of enslaved persons to South Carolina from 1765 to 1775. The text surrounding that figure contains the last paragraph of the section in chapter 3 describing how the South Carolina legislature used taxation to manipulate the racial balance of the colony’s population during the quarter century preceding the Revolutionary War. That text describes the effect of a temporary £100 tax on the importation of enslaved persons:

This “prohibitory duty” mimicked the tenfold increase built into the 1740 General Duty Act after the Stono Rebellion, but it stiffened the disincentive by multiplying the highest rate of tax by ten and applying that additional tax to all imported enslaved persons on top of the base tax rate. The additional tax was in effect for three years beginning January 1, 1766. As indicated in figure 3.3, the additional tax—abetted by the Stamp Act controversy—led to a steep drop in import tax collections, evidencing a correspondingly steep drop in the importation of enslaved persons while the tax was in force. Nonetheless, import tax revenues—and imports—quickly bounced back in the early 1770s when a credit crisis led to a decline in demand in the eastern Caribbean that “caused captains … to seek more lucrative markets” in the leeward islands and South Carolina.

At the bottom of page 99, the final section of chapter 3 opens, recapping and reflecting on how “South Carolina’s legislature spent the final decades of the colonial period fine-tuning the legal regime through which it deployed the power to tax in the service of the evils of slavery, racism, and White supremacy.”

If a reader were to open The Human Toll to page 99, they would obtain a good sense of the book. As indicated at the bottom of that page, the book describes how taxation was used to support and promote the institution of slavery in the colonies that later became the United States of America. As exemplified by page 99, each chapter contains both historical data and analysis and a concluding “reflection.” That reflection synthesizes the data and analysis in the chapter and explores how the connections between taxation and slavery detailed in the chapter are similar to and/or different from those detailed elsewhere in the book.

Page 99 falls at the end of the portion of the book focused on South Carolina. South Carolina provides such an excellent example of the variety of connections between taxation and slavery in colonial America that it takes up nearly half the book. The remainder of the book is devoted to describing the connections between taxation and slavery in the other American colonies, broken down into chapters focusing on the northern, middle, and southern colonies. In addition to reflecting on the book as a whole, the conclusion suggests lessons that this fiscal history holds for present-day discussions of reparations.

Yet, page 99 provides only a teaser regarding the connections forged between taxation and slavery in colonial America. These connections, which vary from colony to colony and even within a single colony over time, fall into three categories: First, taxation was used to dehumanize enslaved persons by marking them as taxable “property.” Second, most colonies’ tax systems served as a mechanism for redistributing slaveholders’ economic losses when their enslaved persons were killed or executed under colonial slave codes, thereby opening a revealing tax window onto life in these colonial societies. Finally, the power of taxation was used to manipulate the racial balance of the colonies with the aim of better controlling the enslaved population—whether through tax incentives that shaped behavior (e.g., encouraging the purchase of more tractable enslaved persons from Africa rather than “seasoned” enslaved persons from other colonies) or through tax penalties like the one described on page 99 that were designed to curtail the importation of enslaved persons.

Learn more about The Human Toll at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John G. Turner's "Joseph Smith"

John G. Turner is professor of religious studies and history at George Mason University. His books include Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ; Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet; The Mormon Jesus; and They Knew They Were Pilgrims.

Turner applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, and shared the following:

There’s a great deal on this page! The top of page 99 is a photograph of Julia Murdock Smith, who was adopted by Joseph and Emma Smith in 1832. I narrate the poignant story on the prior page. Her mother, Julia Murdock, died shortly after giving birth to twins. The same day, Emma Smith also gave birth to twins who lived at most for a few hours. The recently widowed John Murdock, meanwhile, faced the prospect of arranging care for two newborn infants and three other children. Joseph Smith sent word to John Murdock that he and Emma would raise the twins. It was a good solution but not an easy one. Emma Smith requested that John Murdock never reveal himself to the twins as their father.

The text on page 99 discusses the fact that the Book of Mormon didn’t sell well upon its publication. That left Martin Harris, Joseph Smith’s chief benefactor, “cleaned out financially.” Did Joseph Smith take Martin Harris for a ride? “I never lost one cent,” Harris later stated. “Mr. Smith paid me all that I advanced, and more too.” He probably meant that he reaped spiritual benefits for his financial sacrifice.

The final paragraph introduces Joseph Smith’s leadership at a June 1831 church conference. I quote an early church member to the effect that Joseph was “not naturally talented for a speaker” but was “filled with the power of the Holy Ghost.” In the remainder of this section I discuss Smith’s introduction of the “high priesthood” and a series of exorcisms.

Does page 99 reflect the book as a whole?

Yes! A reader would get a good sense of my book. For starters this is a fast-paced biography in keeping with the manner of Joseph Smith’s meteoric life. Smith always juggled multiple interests: family, business, preaching, and writing projects.

This page also introduces two key thematic threads that run throughout the biography. So many debates about Joseph Smith boil down to one key question: was he a sincere prophet, or a fraud? Smith claimed that he received – from an angel – a set of golden plates containing a record written by the ancient peoples of the Americas. This became the basis for the Book of Mormon, translated “by the gift and power of God.” I contend in my book that Smith didn’t have golden plates. Indeed, he pretended to have them and convinced a number of key individuals – including Martin Harris – that they were real. Does that make Smith a fraud? I resist that reductionistic interpretation. Smith presided over miraculous healings, helped his followers have visions of their own, created a series of utopian communities, and introduced rituals that still possess sacred significance for millions of people around the world. Figures like Martin Harris are important pieces in this story. Harris invested and lost a great deal of money in Smith’s Book of Mormon project. Even when he later clashed with Smith he never accused the Mormon prophet of having defrauded him.

The June 1831 conference also gives readers a sense of the religious atmosphere that is an important theme of the book. One attendee claimed to “see God and Jesus Christ at his right hand.” Another man’s countenance grew dark and his hands clenched. Smith laid his hands on that man’s head and ordered Satan to depart. The man’s muscles relaxed. Several other men then required Smith’s prophetic exorcism.

The biography maintains this fast-paced narrative throughout, and it accelerates toward the end as Smith is sealed in marriage to more than thirty women, struggles against anti-Mormon political opposition and internal dissent, and is finally murdered by a Hancock County, Illinois, mob in June 1844.

Visit John G. Turner's website.

The Page 99 Test: They Knew They Were Pilgrims.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacy Alaimo's "The Abyss Stares Back"

Stacy Alaimo is Barbara and Carlisle Moore Professor in English and core faculty member in environmental studies at the University of Oregon. She is author of several books, including Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times.

Alaimo applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In keeping with the surrealist’s respect for dreams, this passage expresses both an urgent desire to know what the creatures look like and a resignation to the fact that they elude visual capture. Phyllis had complained earlier of “too much geography . . . and too much oceanography, and too much bathyography: too much of all the ographies and lucky to escape ichthyology,” but her dreams ironically voice a desire for ichthyology. Recall Oreskes: the ocean science in this period could have been otherwise— less militaristic oceanography and more marine biology.

Phyllis describes her dreams of the “sea bottom,” imaging benthic lifeworlds, only to then place all her hope on capture, objectification, and war: “if only we could capture one and examine it we should know how to fight them.” The novel concludes with Phyllis asking whether the latest warfare against the bathies— deadly ultrasonic waves— has yielded any knowledge. “But have they discovered what Bathies are . . . What they look like?” Cue Oreskes again, to explain how oceanography in the 1940s and 1950s was aimed at military pursuits rather than marine biology. The novel’s answer echoes the repeated historical failures to capture gelatinous animals as specimens: “Not so far as I know. All Bocker said was that a lot of jelly stuff came up and went bad in the sunlight. No shape to it.” These dismissals reveal a lack of wonder as well as a lack of scientific information. The characters also lack speculative talents as their attempts at understanding the bathies are constricted to anthropocentric expectations regarding the shape of life itself. The novel seems to critique the sophisticates’ lack of curiosity even as it declines to conjure up creaturely perspectives. The endless polite chattering about the bathies is not exactly riveting, but appropriately, it does leave the desire for the unknowable unquenched, as science, journalism, and literature become modes of inquiry in which speculation builds on fact. Moreover, the narrative’s rather nonchalant tone discourages readers from demonizing deep-sea life. The novel’s submersion of the marvelously bewildering abyssal life-forms within the unflappable tone and sedate pace of the narrative may encourage a transfer in which creatures from the abyss, however strange they may seem, are understood not as monstrous or abject or alien but instead as irreducibly different in their intelligence, yet to themselves, for themselves, and in their place, utterly ordinary. As Mike and Phyllis conclude the novel by pondering what it will be like to live with only “a

Page 99 of my book, The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep Sea Life, does suggest several strong currents flowing through the book, including the dynamics of aesthetic and scientific "capture" of species, speculations about unfathomable abyssal life, and the surreal, alien, and monstrous. So the Page 99 Test does work, to some extent, but only as a mirror image of much of the book. This page analyzes John Wyndham's science fiction novel from 1953, The Kraken Wakes, in which mysterious creatures from the deep explode onto the surface and begin to take over the planet. The characters speculate for hundreds of pages about who or what these "alien" creatures are, without ever knowing anything definitive, and without being enchanted by the beauty or mystery of the deep seas. This time period, from WWII through the late 20th century, was an era, as Naomi Oreskes documents in Science on a Mission, when U.S. ocean science was narrowly focused on military matters and ignored marine biology. The mid-20th century period, lacking a focus on deep sea biology, hovers in the middle of The Abyss Stares Back, book-ended by William Beebe's bathysphere descents "a half mile down" in the 1930s and the late 20th-early 21st century era of deep sea discovery. Beebe and one of his painters Else Bostelmann, engaged with hundreds of deep sea "specimens," depicting them as gorgeously surreal and speculating about their perspectives, lives, and habitats. The Census of Marine Life, at the end of the 20th century also complemented deep sea discovery with an emphasis on the stunning beauty and biodiversity of the marine life. While the cool speculation of the characters in The Kraken Wakes does not engender awe, passionate curiosity, or concern for deep sea life, most of the science, science writing, science fiction, art, and activist media in the book demonstrates how the aesthetics of abyssal life travels through science and popular culture to provoke wonder, curiosity, and attachment, extending environmentalism to the bottom of the sea.

Visit Stacy Alaimo's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Wardhaugh's "Counting"

Benjamin Wardhaugh lives in Oxford, UK, with his wife and children. He does research and writing based at the University of Oxford, where he is a former Fellow of All Souls College. Wardhaugh holds degrees in mathematics, music and history from Cambridge, London and Oxford. At Oxford, he has taught history to mathematics students and science to history students.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Counting: Humans, History and the Infinite Lives of Numbers, with the following results:

Open my book to page 99, and you’ll find yourself at the threshold of a new chapter—one devoted to the fascinating world of counters and counting-boards. As I note there: “The techniques of counters and counting boards dominated European experiences of counting and calculation from the fifth century BCE for more than two millennia, fading out as late as the seventeenth or eighteenth century.” The chapter’s title, “Counter culture from Athens to the Atlantic,” nods both to classic scholarship on ancient Greek numeracy and to the tactile, hands-on ways people once engaged with numbers: moving stones, beads, jetons, and other tokens across boards.

Page 99 is, admittedly, an awkward spot for this test: it’s the start of a chapter, not the heart of an argument or narrative. And since this is the chapter on Europe—one of seven, each covering a different region (Africa, the Middle East, Europe, India, East Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas)—it might give a misleadingly Eurocentric impression of the book’s global scope. But I hope even this introductory page hints at the unexpected stories I’ve tried to gather.

If you read on, you’ll meet Philokleon, navigating a day at the law courts in classical Athens—a dense, complex world of life-and-death games with counters. You’ll encounter Blanche of Castile, the medieval Queen of France who invented new ways to use counters and counting boards to control her court and her country. And you’ll discover a surprising technique for counting to ten thousand on your ten fingers.

All together, I hope it offers a fun and surprising look at how counting—so often imagined as purely abstract—was for centuries a physical, almost playful encounter with the world.

Visit Benjamin Wardhaugh's website.

The Page 99 Test: Poor Robin's Prophesies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary A. O’Dell's "Reinventing the American Thoroughbred"

Gary A. O’Dell is professor emeritus of geography at Morehead State University and the author of Bluegrass Paradise: Royal Spring and the Birth of Georgetown, Kentucky.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Reinventing the American Thoroughbred: The Arabian Adventures of Alexander Keene Richards, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Writing in 1897, Wallace, who apparently despised Arabian horses root and branch, asserted that when Richards’s “half- breeds” were put to trial, they were soundly defeated by the American thoroughbreds against which they were pitted: “Under these humiliating defeats a careful man would have hesitated before he went further, but he at once jumped to the conclusion that his defeat was not in the fact that Arab blood could not run fast enough to win, but in the fact, as he supposed, that the rascally Arabs had sold him blood that was not Arab blood. In a short time he was off for Arabia again.”

Wallace’s chronology is grievously in error. At the time Richards set off again in 1855 to purchase more Arabians, he did not possess any Anglo-Arab crosses that were old enough to compete in any racing event. Both Boherr and Zahah were pureblooded Arabian, and even Richards acknowledged that pure Arabians were not competitive against Thoroughbred Running Horses. Although he purchased Peytona in autumn 1853 and subsequently bred her to Massoud, this likely would not have occurred before spring 1854, since the traditional season for breeding horses was from March to June. Mares, having an eleven- month average gestation period, were typically bred at this time so as not to deliver a foal during either the chill of winter or the heat of summer. The result of the Massoud-Peytona match, a filly named Transylvania, was foaled early in 1855. Not even a yearling, she would not have been eligible for racing. According to Richards’s obituary in the Kentucky Live Stock Record, “it was not until 1856 that his colors, silver gray and white stripes, were seen on the turf.”

Keene Richards’s published statements clearly indicate that he was planning a second trip back to the Near East immediately on return from his first expedition: “I commenced preparing to make another trip to the East, determined to spare no trouble or expense in procuring the best blood, as well as the finest formed horses in the Desert. For two years I made this subject my study, consulting the best authors as to where the purest blood was to be found, and comparing their views with my own experience.... After two years spent in close investigation as to the best means of obtaining the purest blood of the Desert, I matured my plans and started again for the East.”

I was surprised to find that the Page 99 Test seemed to work very well for my book. Even though some context was lacking, the three paragraphs – especially the last – rather successfully encapsulate the basic theme of the book. Alexander Keene Richards, a resident of Georgetown, Kentucky, would become one of the more significant Thoroughbred breeders of the nineteenth century. Prior to the Civil War, the sport of Thoroughbred racing was more about endurance than speed, because “heat” racing was the dominant form. In heat racing events, horses would compete in multiple heats of three-to-four miles each with a short break between heats, the winner being the horse that won the most heats. Today we would consider this very cruel treatment. Horses would thus gallop at full speed for nearly twenty miles of racing in a single day, and were often permanently lamed by the practice or sometimes even dropped dead on the track.

Stamina was the key to successful competition in heat racing, and the Arabian horse was legendary for its endurance, able to run through the desert lands for miles without rest or food. The Thoroughbred horse had been developed in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by breeding common English mares to so-called “Oriental” stallions imported from the Near East. Richards believed that he could increase the stamina of American Thoroughbreds by a new infusion of Arabian blood. To achieve this, he made two trips to the Near East in 1851-53 and 1856-57, venturing into the Arabian desert to bargain directly with the Bedouin tribes for their finest pure-bred horses. He imported several outstanding Arabian mares and stallions, and also imported some of the best English Thoroughbreds for his breeding program. His experiment was interrupted by the Civil War before he had made much progress, and ultimately was judged a failure.

The first paragraph of page 99 reflects this judgement in the words of John Wallace, one of the leading equine historians of the late nineteenth century. In my second paragraph, I note some of the chronological errors made by Wallace without disagreement as to his overall assessment. The third and final paragraph presents a good summary of Richards’s breeding hypothesis and his determination to import the best Arabian stock. Although his thesis is more fully explained in the introduction to the book, a reader would be hard pressed to find any single page other than 99 that so well presents the theme of the book.

[Note: The Page 99 Test is not successful for my previous book, Bluegrass Paradise: Royal Spring and the Birth of Georgetown, Kentucky (2023).]

Visit Gary A. O'Dell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary Anne Trasciatti's "Elizabeth Gurley Flynn"

Mary Anne Trasciatti is a professor of rhetoric and the director of labor studies at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. She coedited the collections Where Are the Workers?: Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites and Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Trasciatti applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution, and reported the following:

Page 99 explores post-World War I militancy among Black working-class Americans and the violence such militancy engendered from whites. During the war, more than 350,000 Black soldiers served in the military, many with distinction. Their hopes that service would win them social acceptance from white Americans were largely unrealized as the system of racial segregation that defined and structured American civil society reproduced itself in the military. Black soldiers served in segregated units in which commanding officers were typically white, and the implicit and explicit racism they endured undermined morale. Those who opposed the war were unmoved by appeals to save democracy in Europe when it had yet to be realized at home for Black Americans.

The war and the migration of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans from the South to the North “inspired a level of activism unequaled until the modern civil rights period.” Frustrated by their wartime experience, in and outside the military, Blacks fought against physical violence and other forms of mistreatment at the hands of whites in several cities and towns during what has come to be known as the “Red Summer” of 1919. The longest and bloodiest riot was in Chicago, which lasted for thirteen days and left almost forty people dead, over half of whom were Black, over five hundred injured, and destroyed hundreds of Black homes and businesses. In rural Elaine, Arkansas, somewhere between one hundred and two hundred Blacks and five whites were killed during a riot that erupted when Black sharecroppers tried to organize a union. There were 26 different riots in 1919. Rather than address the true underlying causes of the violence (high unemployment and low wages, especially for Black workers, job discrimination, racism, etc.), law enforcement typically blamed “Black Communists” for fomenting discontent.

Page 99 does not give readers a clear sense of what my book is about. It addresses topics that are central to the book - working class organizing, social and economic inequality, political repression, anti-radicalism – but it does so within a very specific historical/political context (i.e. post-World War I labor activism and militancy among working-class Black Americans). The scope of the book is broader. Most important, the subject of the book – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn – is not once mentioned! From reading page 99 alone, no one would know that the book is a biography of an Irish American labor organizer and free speech activist.

Although page 99 does not give a clear sense of the book, I believe it reveals what Ford Madox Ford called “the quality of the whole” [emphasis mine]. Although my book is a biography, it centers on Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s political activism. Flynn spent most of her adult life fighting for and alongside workers, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality. religion, etc., as they struggled for better wages, safer working conditions, respect, and the right to organize. She deplored red baiting and often spoke out against racial discrimination and in favor of solidarity between Black and white workers when few other white labor organizers did. (In fact, she helped raise money for the Black victims of the Elaine Massacre, which is mentioned on page 99.) Thus, although page 99 is not about Flynn, it presents events and people of the kind that mattered greatly to her, it shows how red baiting was used to explain away workers’ real grievances, and it places Black workers and their issues squarely within working-class history where Flynn believed they belong.

Learn more about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Parr's "Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation"

Tom Parr is a Reader in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. He has held previous positions at the University of Essex, Graz University, Princeton University, and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is Editor-in-Chief of Law, Ethics and Philosophy.

Parr applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation: Social Justice, Technology, and the Future of Work, with the following results:

Page 99 of Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation introduces a moral objection to the structure of contemporary labour markets, which I call the illegitimacy objection. It is an objection to the fact that employers “typically exercise considerable discretionary authority over their staff,” illustrated by the harsh reality for many workers of having to “spend their days subserviently following the commands of their bosses, with little or no say over the nature or order of the tasks that they must carry out.” This objection does not target the specific ways in which such authority is exercised. It is more fundamental than this: it challenges the moral right of employers to tell their employees what to do in the first place, alleging that such workplace authority is illegitimate in much the same way that the political power exercised by undemocratic regimes is illegitimate.

Does page 99 reflect the book as a whole?

Browsers who read only page 99 will, I think, get a relatively accurate sense of what I try to achieve in this book, namely systematically to analyse various moral objections to the structure of contemporary labour markets. What is more, one of my guiding commitments is to present those ideas in the clearest terms, without obfuscation, so that we are better placed to assess their force and implications. In these respects, the text that appears on this page is representative of the broader project.

However, in one way, page 99 gives a misleading impression of the book as a whole, since the objection that I introduce is not one that I endorse. In the pages that follow, I distance myself from this outlook, which seems to overlook the way in which employers’ authority is limited by various laws. Instead, I have come to prefer an alternative approach to theorizing about these matters that focuses on the distribution of bargaining power between workers and firms. I set out that argument in Chapter 1, which is the philosophical heart of the book, and then explore the implications of that approach in the book’s second half.

Perhaps it is a stretch, but I can see one further respect in which this passage does indeed reflect the book as a whole. In particular, it introduces the reader to a novel idea that has become somewhat fashionable these days, at least among a certain category of philosophers, but one that I do not find persuasive because its foundations are too shaky. Conclusions of this kind are ones that recur throughout the entire text, which instead aims to show that more familiar moral objections to the structure of contemporary labour markets are more resilient than often assumed, and that these have more appealing implications than is generally recognized.

Visit Tom Parr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthea Kraut's "Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies"

Anthea Kraut is Professor in the Department of Dance at UC Riverside, where she teaches courses in critical dance studies. Her research focuses on the racial and gender politics of U.S. dance. She is the author of Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston and Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance, as well as the past recipient of an ACLS fellowship, an NEH fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Kraut applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies reads:

It’s February 2019, and I’m at the Jerome Robbins Division of the New York Public Library, paging through an entire folder of clippings and notes devoted to Marie Bryant. The folder is part of the research files of D’Lana Lockett, who, according to the archive catalog, “was a tap dancer, dance instructor, and dance researcher who began research on a book on African American female tap dancers.” Lockett, a Black woman, died in 2006 at age forty-four; these files are what remain of the book that she never got to write. Thanks to Lockett, Bryant’s presence in the archives here, in contrast to the USC film records, is substantive and purposeful. Learning about Lockett through Bryant, and learning about Bryant through Lockett, it is clear that Bryant was never a lost subject waiting to be recovered. It is clear, too, that my own output, like that of the white women stars I’ve been analyzing, exists in a symbiotic but asymmetrical relationship with the labor of a Black woman whose shortened life surely cannot be disentangled from structural racism and racialized health disparities. In tracing Bryant’s flight, I too re­trace the steps and stand in the place of a Black woman before me, and I too participate in a loop that is always in part indexing and in part obscuring its sources and debts.

Page 99 is, on the one hand, a departure from the bulk of Hollywood Dance-ins and, on the other, a kind of X-ray of the book as a whole. The last page of Chapter 2, the passage on page 99 forms a bookend to the opening of the chapter, which narrates my discovery of the African American dancer Marie Bryant’s mis-spelled name in the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library, which first alerted me to her thirteen-second appearance in the 1949 film On the Town. In contrast to page 99’s first-person narration, the majority of the book tells the stories of dance-ins – dancers who took the place of stars prior to filming and often served as choreographers’ assistants – whose labor supported some of the most iconic stars of midcentury film musicals in the United States between the 1940s and early 1960s.

At the same time, page 99’s single paragraph encapsulates multiple strands of the book’s methodological, historical, and theoretical arguments. The passage references the racialized power imbalances that govern the archives and evokes the methodological tensions involved in researching the off-screen reproductive labor of dancers, especially dancers of color in white Hollywood, whose influence was both everywhere and invisible. Page 99 also reflects the book’s centering of Bryant, an exceptionally talented jazz and tap dancer (pictured on the book’s cover) who was never officially hired as a dance-in, but whose importance to a history of mid-century Hollywood musicals is hard to overstate. And finally, in its allusions to interdependent but asymmetrical cross-racial relationships and to the ability of bodies to simultaneously index and conceal their debts to others, page 99 hints at the book’s theorization of dance-ins as uniquely situated to expose the reproductions, substitutions, and displacements that have helped uphold “the body” as a racialized and gendered site of power in the U.S.

Learn more about Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andreas Elpidorou's "The Anatomy of Boredom"

Andreas Elpidorou is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. His work focuses on the philosophical study of human emotions, with a particular emphasis on boredom. He has published extensively on the subject and developed a novel theoretical model of boredom that sheds light on its complicated nature and diverse psychological, behavioral, and social effects. In his written work, he explores the function, value, and dangers of boredom and strives to offer clear, precise, and critical explications of aspects of our mental lives that often remain hidden from us. He is the author of Propelled: How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Lead Us to the Good Life (2020) and numerous other publications.

Elpidorou applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Anatomy of Boredom, and shared the following:

If a reader were to open The Anatomy of Boredom to page 99, they would be cognitively disoriented—perhaps even lost. Isolated from its context, page 99 offers little insight into either the book’s objectives or its subject matter. The page appears in section 2 of Chapter 3, which belongs in Part I of the book. In this part, the book makes a sustained case—one that unfolds in three chapters—that boredom is, in some crucial sense, a unitary phenomenon. What boredom is, the book argues, is its function: the role that it occupies in our mental, behavioral, and social economy; that is, the ways in which it affects our minds and bodies and drives our actions and opinions. There are many things we have called, and continue to call, “boredom.” As long as they share the same functional core, they count as boredom—even if their psychological, physical, or social expressions differ.

Page 99 is concerned with one of many arguments advanced in this part of the book. It addresses a worry that has been raised by recent psychological studies. Psychologists have observed that the experience of boredom is often associated with different bodily states and levels of arousal. Does this suggest that there are distinct kinds of boredom—perhaps a low-arousal, apathetic type and a high-arousal, agitated type? This section argues that there is no need to divide boredom into distinct affective states on the basis of their associated arousal. Differences in arousal reflect physiological or contextual contingencies, not conceptual or essential distinctions. Boredom’s identity is linked not to its effects on our bodies but to its functional role in our cognitive and behavioral economy. As such, there is unity in boredom despite variation in its somatic expression.

I am not sure there’s a perfect page—one that, if opened at random, would provide not just a concise summary of the main arguments of the book but also a clear view of its methodological commitments. But even if such a page does exist, it isn’t page 99. What page 99 does well is to attune the reader to the level of conceptual and empirical detail that is necessary in order to engage with a phenomenon as complicated and elusive as boredom. This value, however, comes with a cost. The page dwells in the particulars but fails to reveal the bigger picture—page 99 is just one very small part of the fascinating complexities that constitute boredom. It isn’t even a tree, but a bush—perhaps a single flower—in the forest of boredom.

Visit Andreas Elpidorou's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruno J. Strasser and Thomas Schlich's "The Mask"

Bruno J. Strasser is a historian, a full professor at the University of Geneva, and an affiliate of History of Medicine at Yale University. Thomas Schlich is the James McGill Professor in the History of Medicine at McGill University, and a former practicing physician.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air, with the following results:

Page 99 reflects quite well the tone and content of the book!

This chapter—“Fog, Fumes, and Fashion”—explores the use of masks against urban pollution in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the late 19th century, such masks became popular in large British cities like London, Manchester, and Leeds. People sought to avoid breathing the mix of coal fumes, industrial vapors, and cold, damp air that made up the winter “fogs.”

Page 99 examines how French physicians reacted to what they thought was the British craze for masks. They were unanimous in condemning the practice. They found it “ridiculous”—and the fact that it was British didn’t help. Some feared that one day “entire families might be seen masked in the streets.” Masks, they thought, were useless, a symbol of the excesses of the hygienic movement. One physician even warned that if masks ever became mandatory, it would mean “the end of the kiss.”

The chapter then shifts to the Great Smog of London in 1952, during which over ten thousand people died from air pollution. Once again, many people—especially the police—wore masks. Churchill’s health minister, a chain smoker himself, didn’t believe masks could protect citizens from the smog. But facing mounting public anger, he gave in and recommended their use to save his political career.

Page 99, like the rest of the book, shows that masks have always been controversial. Masks were often seen as a convenient “technological fix” for complex medical and environmental challenges, but not everybody agreed on this kind of quick fix. In the book, we tell these stories to help us think about what kinds of environments we all want to live and breathe in.

Visit Bruno Strasser's website and Thomas Schlich's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Moritz Föllmer's "The Quest for Individual Freedom"

Moritz Föllmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He has particular interests in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and concepts of individuality and urbanity in twentieth-century Europe. His publications include Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (2013), Culture in the Third Reich (2020), and, as co-editor, Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany (2022).

Föllmer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book I characterize a “major development in Europe’s political history,” namely, “the dual adoption and expansion of liberalism by social democrats.” By this I mean that important protagonists of European social democracy, from the 1900s to the 1970s, argued that an active state was necessary to liberate working-class people from the dependencies created by capitalism and authoritarianism. In their view, widening educational access and housing provision amounted to widening choices. Hence, these social democrats adopted key tenets of liberal thought. They did so in a way that took working-class realities into account while also appealing to progressive members of the middle class. What I label “social democratic liberty” was a remarkably successful project, but it was also vulnerable to attacks. After all, it required taxation and standardization, which made it easy to accuse it of reducing choices and stifling citizens. While this critique spanned the entire twentieth century, in the 1970s it was shared by left-wing protesters, cultural conservatives, and market liberals. By the end of the Cold War, the project of social democratic liberty seemed exhausted.

Page 99 summarizes one of fifteen sections and thus one of a range of specific arguments. Yet it reflects my book’s broader thesis. Europe’s twentieth century was marked by a quest for individual freedom that assumed different shapes and meanings. In their nineteenth-century heyday, liberals might have been able to define individual freedom and impose their definition on others. But they lost this authority in the decades around 1900, and no new consensus formed thereafter. The quest for individual freedom was composed of a variety of claims and occurred in fits and starts. Still, it became so widespread that it even those who were skeptical about individual freedom (as were many socialists) or outright contemptuous of it (as were most communists) had to accommodate it to some extent.

That said, the impression conveyed on page 99 is necessarily one-sided. It privileges political history, whereas my book gives ample space to the quest for individual freedom as it played out in factories and homes, in experiments with drugs as well as discussions of morality. It also focuses on Europe proper, whereas I devote an entire chapter to how individual freedom was defined in relation to the United States and to colonies in Africa and Asia. And it happens to be the conclusion of a chapter and is thus more systematic than the bulk of the book, which pays much attention to ordinary or not-so-ordinary people’s experiences and efforts – including the working-class people who changed jobs to escape the control of a powerful factory owner or made use of what Sweden’s social democratic government had to offer while also insisting on their own choices.

Ultimately, my book is a twentieth-century European history – of the quest for individual freedom but also, even more ambitiously, through this crucial prism. It treats a variety of political currents and systems and offers many glimpses into European lives under often adverse conditions. It is this richness that motivated me to write the book and that I hope to convey to its readers.

Learn more about The Quest for Individual Freedom at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Rooney's "The Big Hop"

David Rooney is a historian and curator specializing in transport, technology, and engineering, and the author of About Time and The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future. For almost twenty years he worked at the London Science Museum, which houses the 1919 airplane first flown across the Atlantic. He lives in London.

Rooney applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Big Hop and shared the following:

It is Sunday, March 30th, 1919. We join page 99 of The Big Hop just as an aeroplane, carried aboard the Atlantic steamship Digby, has just arrived at the railway station of St. John’s, Newfoundland, after being diverted by an impenetrable pack of ice off the island’s Avalon peninsula that’s so bad nobody has seen the like in decades:

…encountered on the Newfoundland route. But this was the worst the coast had experienced for sixty years. Nothing could get through. The Sopwith aeroplane had been packed into two large wooden crates, each the size and shape of a railway carriage. They were thirty feet long and weighed over five tons apiece. Between them, they held the fuselage, wings, engine, undercarriage, and fittings. Several smaller cases stored in the ship’s hold carried parts, tools, petrol, engine oil, and other provisions. It should have been a relatively straightforward offloading job onto the dockside at St. John’s. Instead, Digby was forced by the ice field to divert to Placentia Bay, off the peninsula’s western coast. There, in the middle of the bay, it drew up alongside the postal steamer Portia, and the entire Sopwith consignment, as well as the men themselves, were transferred from one ship to the other. Then Portia steamed up the bay to the town of Placentia, where its precious cargo of crates and passengers was delivered, leaving Digby to continue on its way. The next stage of the Sopwith saga was a sixty-mile rail journey across the peninsula. The two giant crates were loaded onto flat railcars, and…

The Page 99 Test works perfectly. The Big Hop recounts the story of one of the greatest journeys of the modern age—the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. But it was a journey that started long before the aviators Jack Alcock and Ted Brown made it successfully across the ocean in an epoch-marking sixteen hours in the middle of June, 1919. Moreover, the contest involved a cast of characters far wider than Alcock and Brown. Sopwith was fielding a rival team: an Australian aviator, Harry Hawker, and his avuncular navigator, Mac Grieve.

This is why page 99 is such a great representation of the wider story. It describes, in its single paragraph, a journey that was remarkable in its own right: a perilous ship-to-ship transfer of men and a machine in the cold waters off Newfoundland. Will they reach their destination? It acts as the perfect prefiguring of the aerial journey ahead.

Page 99 also shows us just how long ago the first transatlantic flight took place. On the previous page, we meet a young man named Joey Smallwood, who is waiting at St. John’s station to meet the aeroplane and its airmen off the train. In 1949, Smallwood would become the premier of Newfoundland when the dominion joined the Canadian federation. In 1919, he was an eighteen-year-old cub reporter on the island’s Evening Telegram newspaper. None of the other journalists seemed to care that St. John’s was to become the location of the world’s most thrilling race. One of them reported the passengers due off Digby that day. After naming a few notable St. John’s politicians who had been on the ship, the writer added, “and a couple of airmen to fly across the Atlantic.” As if it was no big deal.

Would the Sopwith team arriving at Newfoundland succeed in flying all the way to Ireland? Or would they be beaten by rival contestants? On page 99 of The Big Hop, all this is yet to come; an unknowable future. Suffice to say—the ice field off St. John’s would prove to be the least of the airmen’s troubles…

Visit David Rooney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's "Heaven Has a Wall"

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, with the following results:

From page 99:

…the normative order is the sovereign state system and the drive to transcend it the gravitational pull of American sovereign exceptionalism. AmericaIsrael pulls the US toward the latter. It embodies the productive interplay between sovereign territoriality and an American aspiration to collective transcendence of the international order. Performing AmericaIsrael is an exercise in refiguring sovereignty and aspirational borderlessness. This can be seen in the 1985 US-Israel Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the first free trade agreementof its kind. World Trade Organization rules allow FTAs only if they are regional; therefore, the US and Israel have maintained since 1985 that they are a legal “region” together. No party has challenged this claim in WTO courts, and so it stands.

AmericaIsrael is part of a larger mission to realize an American—and would-be universal—political morality. It is not the only example; AmericaUkraine is another. Overwriting sovereign norms of territoriality, and enacting an exception that is also the rule, AmericaIsrael is an example of what Giorgio Agamben describes as “the legal form of what cannot have legal form.” It is an American political theology, in the sense described by Vincent Lloyd, as “a shorthand for religion and politics more generally, or where they overlap, that part of the Venn diagram where religion and politics are connected and that could be approached in a lot of different ways.

I’d say the Page 99 Test works. Heaven Has a Wall is about American borders, and page 99 deals with the US and its (lack of) borders with Israel. I use the term “AmericaIsrael” on this page to refer to a cultural, religious, and political consensus that unites the two countries almost as if they were one, tapping into jointly held fantasies of military prowess, Holy Land fascination, and a righteous overcoming of borders in the name of the right and the good.

The test is slightly misleading in that the book is not only or even mainly about Israel. It’s a broader argument that the US is best understood as a state that simultaneously enforces its borders while also circumventing and even ignoring them. There is something very American about the desire to do both: to enforce and suspend borders, to be first among equals, to make the rules but not be subject to them. The 9/11 commission report captured this with the phrase “the American homeland is the planet.” No limits. Yet borders are limits, liminal zones, places of extremes, exceptions, and special rules. You want to look over your shoulder after you cross. US borders are present and absent, avowed and deferred. Enforced and erased. Fortified and open. Borders are defended even while the ideal of America is borderless. This goes back to the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, debates over annexing Cuba, and today, of course, Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal.

It can be tricky to study something that is both present and absent. If the American border isn’t just a line in the sand, what is it? Borders are political: they’re about regulation, control, checkpoints, violence. But they’re also religious sites of redemption, enchantment, salvation, commitment, emotion, and mystery. Each chapter of the book takes on a different aspect of borders: creating, enforcing, suspending, and refusing. These alternate with short interludes meant for a general audience: Where is Guantánamo? What happens if you openly disagree with a border agent at the airport? How does it feel to cross the border as a pilgrim participating in a pilgrimage older than the border itself? What happens if the river serves as a national border, but the river moves? I also want readers to consider their own border stories, and whether they fit into the book’s framework. Tell me your stories!

Visit Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jules Holroyd's "Oppressive Praise"

Jules Holroyd is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, with research interests in social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology. Prior to joining the department at Sheffield in 2016, they had positions at Cambridge, Cardiff, and Nottingham. They were a Mind Association Fellow 2022-2023.

Holroyd applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Oppressive Praise, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Oppressive Praise is at the heart of Chapter 3 of this book - this chapter sets out a view of what we do when we express praise: such expressions are vehicles for expressing our values. I articulate the mechanisms by which praise does this; and how the view of praise I develop can explain how (even well-intentioned) expressions of praise can embody and entrench oppressive values.

Page 99 wraps up one key part of my view - that praise has the function of signalling our values, by showing what we’re willing to celebrate and promote - the bravery or kindness that the target of the praise has expressed in their behaviour, say. Then page 99 embarks on the articulation of another key bit of the view: that praise expresses values not only in the things it explicitly celebrates and elevates, but in the evaluative frameworks that an expression of praise presupposes.

Here are two examples of this (to mention examples beyond page 99, that I return to, amongst others, throughout the book): someone might express praise towards a father for the childcare they are doing (my articulation of this case draws on an example from Serene Khader and Matt Lindauer’s work on the ‘daddy dividend’). In doing so, they signal - to the target, as well as to other audiences of the expression - that they value his parenting and perhaps more generally the idea of fathers getting involved in the care of their children. Or someone might express praise for someone’s bravery, signalling that they care about courage, and were able to detect when it was displayed.

But expressions of praise might presuppose wider evaluative frameworks and assumptions that audiences might infer, and take to be widely shared by audience members. For example, praising a father for doing basic parenting might presuppose the insulting belief that fathers are not good at parenting, and doing any of it is exceptional and praiseworthy. If part of a wider pattern where fathers are praised and mothers are not, expressions of praise may presuppose - irrespective of the intentions of the person praising - that mothers’ parenting is not noteworthy, to be taken for granted. Thereby gendered stereotypes about parenting and assumptions about whose labour is valuable can be conveyed by what those expressions of praise presuppose. Or praising a fat person for their bravery in choice of dress can presuppose the oppressive idea that they will be, or ought to be, ashamed of their body (as Aubrey Gordon has written about).

Does page 99 give a good idea of the whole work? In a way yes, because it gets to the core idea of the book, about the role that praise can play in signalling and presupposing values (sometimes good values, sometimes oppressive values). It articulates the mechanisms that make praise an important part of our moral interactions but one that can also be distorted by, and can perpetuate, oppression. On the other hand, I think it is pretty hard to get a sense of exactly what is going on just at page 99, since by then we’re already in the details of the conceptual apparatus that, I argue, are needed to make sense of how praise functions. It presents some fundamental ideas of the book, but for them to fully make sense and be understood in context, I think you need to read a fair bit of what leads up to page 99!

Overall, I think you’d get a better first sense of the book by reading the examples that come earlier on - first introduced at pages 18-23, 54-58, and recapitulated at pages 76-80. Those pages give you the examples of the phenomenon that motivates the whole book - sexist praise, ableist praise, racist praise, transphobic praise and anti-fat praise… Then, if you’re super interested in the mechanisms by which praise works to entrench oppression; the implications for thinking about our practices of holding responsible; the norms for expressing praise well; or strategies for resisting and responding to oppressive praise, including when expressed through honorific statues… then please do read on!

Learn more about Oppressive Praise at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Sanbonmatsu's "The Omnivore’s Deception"

John Sanbonmatsu, Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is author of The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves and of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject. He is also editor of the anthology, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation.

Sanbonmatsu received his BA from Hampshire College and earned his PhD in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He lives in the Boston area and has an adult son.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Omnivore's Deception and shared the following:

The reader who opens my book to page 99 will land in the middle of my critique of the celebrity animal farmer Joel Salatin, who was propelled to national fame by Michael Pollan in his bestselling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006). The page begins with Thomas Jefferson's defense of simple American agrarianism against the corrupting influences of European sophistication and "luxury." Similar nationalist and conservative themes, I show, have now surfaced again in a "new" American pastoral ideal that has embraced the supposed "romance" of animal husbandry. The chapter this page appears in offers a critique of Pollan's hagiographic depiction of Salatin as a paradigm of rural virtues and American gumption, with a view to showing how this right-wing libertarian improbably became the doyen of Pollan's legions of well-heeled, urban, educated, liberal readers. As I explain on page 99, Salatin was for many years lionized in the mainstream and progressive press; then, five years ago, Mother Jones published a searing critique of Salatin, exposing his ugly views on race. Salatin, I write, "denied that 'America is systematically racist,' insisting instead that 'the failure in the Black community is dysfunctional family collapse.'"

Although page 99 is representative of my cultural critique of the "enlightened" omnivorism defended by Pollan, Salatin, and others, it is not representative of my book as a whole, because I cover a great many other themes too. My main argument is that we have effectively organized our entire existential identity as human beings around the domination of the other beings of the Earth; that this domination is undermining the ecology of our planet and ruining our souls; and that all exploitation and killing of animals for food--we kill about 80 billion land animals and up to 2.7 trillion marine animals each year--is morally indefensible and must stop. In the first half of the book, I trace the rise and lethal consequences of the modern animal economy, then demolish the myths and bad faith that prop up that system. None of our mass violence against animals, I show, is necessary or justifiable, since we can flourish easily on a plant-based diet. In the closing chapters of my book, I show that other animals have complex consciousness and emotions, and I make the case for treating them as persons or "someones," rather than as things, commodities, and slaves. Animals are not worthless beings--they are worthy of our love.

Visit John Sanbonmatsu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Crane's "'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World"

Jennifer Crane is lecturer in health geographies at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, working at the intersection of history, geography, and sociologies of health. Before joining Bristol, she held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, including being PI on a Wellcome Research Fellowship. She has published popular and scholarly works exploring how diverse publics access state welfare, analysing diverse case studies of child welfare, the NHS, and gifted children. Much of her work has employed and driven new analysis of 'experiential expertise', including her first book, Child Protection in England, 1960-2000.

Crane applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945, with the following results:

I looked to page 99 of my latest book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World, with some trepidation, without a clear sense of what chapter or what kinds of analysis would be there. What we see on this page actually feels, to me, central to the ethos and major claims of the final book – the page focuses on making visible and analysing the writings of children and young people themselves. Page 99 discusses a collective letter, written in 1979 by a group of ‘ninth and tenth graders’ in a giftedness programme in California, where, as you’ll see elsewhere in this book, such programmes were relatively prevalent. The ninth and tenth graders wrote to young people who read a British magazine, Explorers Unlimited, produced for child-members of a voluntary group, the National Association for Gifted Children. The ninth and tenth graders reached out, in particular, to share critique of the term, ‘gifted’. They wrote that, having received this label, they were ‘expected to always be straight A or on top’, and ‘push[ed] harder’ by teachers; they could also not always ‘live up to your expectations’. Instead, the children wrote, they’d like to simply be analysed and approached as ‘’human’, and understood ‘a little more’.

This letter, my page 99 argues, shows the ambivalence which many young people felt about the label gifted. And this specific letter, the next Explorers Unlimited edition recorded, merited many responses, with British children agreeing that ‘we are given a label’ and that ‘I felt just like that towards my parents’. The label then travelled, and held similar meanings for children across the Atlantic, despite very different political economy structuring around ‘giftedness’ (also discussed in the book). Some children, discussed elsewhere in the book, of course also loved the label ‘gifted’. Many children relished a sense of specialness attached to it, and in the 1970s and 1980s in particular, when ‘giftedness’ was typically taken very narrowly, to really mean rare, exceptional, special, children mobilised this label to reshape their relationships with teachers, friends, parents, and siblings. Yet other children found the pressure of the label too much, and questioned the arbitrariness of its application and also, significantly, the inequalities embedded in psychological and educational testing, which are also explored in this book. More children still felt ambivalent about this label – these mixed feelings are something that one of my PhD students, Buse Demirkan, is tracing at present through interviews.

Overall then, my book contributes to geographies and histories of childhood by arguing, foundationally, that we can and must trace the voices of the young and include these, and ‘age’ more broadly, as a critical category within our analyses. We can dismiss any claims that the young didn’t have political agency, or that their writings were never saved or recorded, and thus that their stories do not matter or can’t be accessed. With this in mind, the book traces the rise and fall of giftedness as a specific label, and the broadening out of this idea, with new connections to social mobility agendas, in the 1990s and 2000s. And central to the book is the complex ‘agencies’ exercised by young people – both empowered by ideas of their high intelligence, able to access new voluntary spaces, yet also inevitably entwined policy agendas around future leadership and, often, dismissed as critical thinkers with the assumption that any critique merely demonstrated the uniquely disruptive nature of their minds.

Learn more about 'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Eva Leach and Jonathan Morton's "Performing Desire"

Elizabeth Eva Leach is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and the author of Guillaume de Machaut, Sung Birds, and Medieval Sex Lives. Jonathan Morton is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University and the author of The "Roman de la rose" in Its Philosophical Context.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival's "Bestiaire d'amours", and reported the following:

On page 99, the discussion moves between two of the animal examples from Richard de Fournival’s darkly playful thirteenth-century fiction, the Bestiaire d’amours—those of the eagle and the woodpecker. The first-person speaker in the work, whom we call the je (the “I”), uses the eagle breaking its beak to eat as a twisted analogy for the lady needing to break her pride (figured as a “fortress”) to speak and accept the advances of the je. He then describes the woodpecker’s behaviour when a hunter stops up its nest hole with a plug or peg. The bird finds a special herb that has the power to unfasten the plug, allowing it to access its offspring. The je uses this story to figure his own desire to access the lady’s heart, lamenting that he doesn’t possess the “herb” needed to open her up. We read the je’s interpretation as a deliberate but transparent attempt to misdirect the audience of the work away from the clear implication of his own desire to penetrate her, both psychically and physically. This imagery contributes to a sequence of suggestive examples on this page, highlighting themes of penetration and lightly veiled obscenity and potential violence.

This page, nestled within the chapter on “The Place of Bodies,” offers a vivid picture of the complex and often unsettling psychic world conjured up in Richard de Fournival’s prose work. On page 99, we discuss how the Bestiaire d’amours uses animal examples to explore themes of penetration, breaking down barriers, and gaining access to the desired other. This single page represents the whole book in a few ways. It captures the Bestiaire d’amours’s distinctive method of being a warped kind of bestiary, of using animal natures for self-serving analogies. It showcases one of the book’s major lines of argument, namely that the Bestiaire d’amours conceptualises desire and subjectivity through images of containment, entry, and rupture. The overtones of obscenity and the je’s manipulative interpretations, crucial aspects of the work’s unsettling effect, are also clearly visible here.

Of course, page 99 doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t delve into the work’s status as a hybrid “prose lyric”, the subtle games it plays with performance and textuality, the subversiveness with which it parodies authoritative philosophical, Scholastic discourse, or its rich reception history, all things treated in the book as whole. Nevertheless, page 99 offers a glimpse of how the Bestiaire d’amours uniquely (and often disturbingly) uses animal imagery to explore the physical and psychological dimensions of desire.

Learn more about Performing Desire at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders by Elizabeth Eva Leach.

--Marshal Zeringue

Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, Emily Huddart, and Merin Oleschuk's "Happy Meat"

Josée Johnston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on food, gender, culture, and politics. She is the co-author, with Shyon Baumann, of Foodies (2015) and, with Kate Cairns, of Food and Femininity (2015). Shyon Baumann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His work addresses questions of evaluation, legitimacy, status, classification, and inequality. Past book projects include Hollywood Highbrow (2007). Emily Huddart is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She is an environmental sociologist with a focus on consumer attitudes and behaviors. She is the author of Eco-Types (2022). Merin Oleschuk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea, and shared the following:

Page 99 of our book falls in the chapter "Happy Meat Makes Me Feel Good," which explores the happy stories about ethical meat that some consumers focus on when thinking about their meat consumption choices. On page 99 specifically, there is an anecdote from two focus group interviewees about a pig slaughtering they witnessed. The interviewees explained that the event caused them to be especially attuned to the conditions under which animals are raised and killed and to consume mindfully. We argue that this anecdote illustrates psychologist Paul Rozin's idea that meat has become moralized, which is to say that meat consumption was previously morally neutral but has in recent decades come to be seen as having clear moral consequences. We argue also that this anecdote illustrates Sara Ahmed's argument that happiness can be ascribed to an object, which then has enhanced positive social valuation.

Readers turning to this page would learn something significant about our book, but it would be a limited window into what the whole book is about. The book covers many more concepts, arguments, and empirical findings. At the same time, the ideas of moralization and happy objects are two of the most important concepts in the book. In trying to understand why people eat meat, and why happy meat in particular, we find that happy meat helps to manage people's moral qualms about meat. Happy meat is morally acceptable because the animals are treated humanely. Animals raised ethically are objectified as highly valued and they can generate happiness via consumption. These are some of the core ideas underlying why happy meat works well for some consumers to continue to eat meat. It would seem that the Page 99 Test does not work quite as well for our book as might be hoped, but it's also not a total failure.

Our book is perhaps less well suited to the Page 99 Test than many others. It is less about advancing a single argument and is more about examining the multiple angles for understanding happy meat as a consumer phenomenon and in relation to meat eating in general. So it is not surprising that page 99 does not tell us about much of the book as a whole. While page 99 draws on a focus group transcript, the book also relies on survey data, interviews and site visits with farmers, and analysis of news stories. The other themes the book addresses include the emergence of a discursive and material "space" for happy meat aside from the industrial meat system; the meat consumption behaviours and beliefs of the average consumer; the perspectives and experiences of farmers and other workers who produce happy meat; and the social dynamics implicated in the choice to eat, or not eat, happy meat vs. industrial meat.

Learn more about Happy Meat at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue