Benjamin Mangrum's "The Comedy of Computation"

Benjamin Mangrum is Associate Professor of Literature at MIT and author of Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism (2019), winner of the Louis I. Bredvold Prize in 2019, awarded by the University of Michigan.

Mangrum applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence, and shared the following:

Page 99 is nestled within the book’s third chapter, which is titled “The One about Authenticity.” Each chapter in The Comedy of Computation examines the cultural history of the computer from a different vantage point. The third chapter shows how an "ethics of authenticity" has shaped public attitudes toward computing in the United States. I argue that this ethics appears in both anxieties about computing as well as enthusiastic support for the way the technology seems to give power to ordinary people. Page 99 is looking back to formative early moments in the development of authenticity as a moral and social ideal. I’m discussing how the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave moral weight to authenticity, contrasting this version of the ideal with later writers and philosophers. According to Rousseau’s version of the ideal, the modern individual ought to seek to come into intimate contact with his or her inner self and then live in a way that’s consistent with that interior knowledge. In the following passage, I’m distilling some of the ideas from the preceding pages:

Whether contact with the self is a secular virtue or a religious practice, the authenticity of that contact almost by necessity must be determined by the individual. This is a key element in the discursive structure of authenticity. Who else can determine whether I see the inner truth about myself? Who else could know my inner state? The modern ideal of authenticity envisions a condition of inwardness whose very structure invites, and often even privileges, a circularity in which the self serves as the measure of itself.

Here, I’m trying to identify a troubling circularity that tends to accompany an ethics of authenticity. This circularity goes back to Rousseau, but so many of the cultural sensibilities that surround the computer are also structured around it. This version of authenticity leads us to scorn or have suspicions about forms of mediation, which supposedly disrupt direct contact with our inner sense of self. The computer is, of course, a technology of mediation. Yet the basis for this skepticism about technological mediation is curiously circular. I find that circularity curious; it’s worth scrutinizing the problems and promises of these attitudes about authenticity—one among many aims of The Comedy of Computation.

I think the Page 99 Test fares pretty well with my book. On the one hand, if readers were to open my book to page 99 and encounter this line of argument, they’d likely be confused why a book about computing is talking about Rousseau. Readers would obviously need some context for this historical look backward. On the other hand, this is an important moment in the book's argument. I go on to discuss the paradox of authenticity in more detail, and I show how twentieth-century youth culture inherited and adapted an ethics of authenticity. I connect these historical trends to the cultural history of the computer in what I think are novel and under-appreciated ways. But the quoted passage above is one of the first moments where I begin to think critically about an ethics of authenticity. Is it a coherent moral discourse? What are the downsides to this ideal’s influence upon our attitudes toward technology and everyday life? I try to pose these questions in “The One about Authenticity,” and page 99 is a key moment in the development of that line of inquiry.

Learn more about The Comedy of Computation at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Land of Tomorrow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert W. Fieseler's "American Scare"

Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist investigating marginalized groups and a scholar excavating forgotten histories. A National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year and recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, his debut book Tinderbox won seven awards, including the Edgar Award, and his reporting has appeared in Slate, Commonweal, and River Teeth, among others. Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is pursuing a PhD at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow. He lives with his husband on the gayest street in New Orleans.

Fieseler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Approximately half a dozen Live Oak Klansmen posing as sheriff’s deputies kidnapped and tortured a local Black farm hand named Richard Cooks that June 1.¹ Klansmen tied thirty-five- year-old father of nine Richard Cooks to a tree beside the Suwannee River and whipped him for hours while threatening to feed him to the alligators and do the same to his children.² Two white ringleaders who impersonated deputy sheriffs during the abduction, local Klansmen Fred Sweat and Johnny Smith, later confessed their crimes to Sheriff Lewis.³ Yet after interviewing the victim, Sheriff Lewis declined to press charges against Sweat or Smith because Cooks, as he lay injured in bed, could not recall an exact enough description of his attackers to a standard that satisfied the lawman.⁴

Family members who witnessed Cooks’s kidnapping were not consulted by Sheriff Lewis as witnesses, and none of the whites present at the flogging could seem to remember who else was there. Determined not to capsize the lives of two local boys, Sheriff Lewis instead called upon Grand Dragon W. J. Griffin to internally discipline Sweat and Smith as errant Klansmen.⁵ Griffin continued at the hearing:

He [the sheriff] says, “Well, I wish you’d give them a good scolding. Somebody around here needs talking to.” He says, “We can’t put up with stuff like this.” I says, “I don’t blame you Sheriff.” I says, “If you know anything about it, why don’t you put them in jail?” He says, “Well, I know who done it, I know who did it.” He says, “I discussed it with them,” and he says, “They admitted it to me, the two of them.”⁶

When questioned by FLIC attorney Mark Hawes on the Cooks case, state attorney William Randall Slaughter, who’d called the 1955 grand jury that failed to indict Sweat and Smith, covered for Sheriff Lewis by repeatedly complaining about a lack of resources in his rural district.⁷

The scene of brutal white terrorism detailed on page 99 of American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, involving the abduction and torture of an innocent Black father named Richard Cooks by members of the Florida Ku Klux Klan, eerily encapsulates the stakes of southern lawlessness pushing our nation to the brink of a second splintering, a.k.a. my book’s major theme.

I yearned for American Scare to impart upon a 21st century reader, presumably living outside of a 1950s “Red Scare” mindset and not yearning for a nostalgic return, what racial apartheid meant from a standpoint of white advantage as well as the moral corruption of the human spirit. Writing and researching the Cooks kidnapping sequence was, in fact, so harrowing that something of its horror imprinted on my psyche, and I began to carry it bodily.

I couldn’t sleep without petrifying nightmares. My hair started falling out. I developed odd rashes and stomach ailments. Something had to change, or I knew I’d never finish the book. I decided to stop drinking and start meditating—to sunset my joyous New Orleans habit of happy hour cocktails. Just a sip of alcohol could spin my mind onto the specifics of what those Klansmen did to Cooks, and then I’d break down weeping.

Dropping my “social spirits” habit enabled me to finish American Scare in the clear-eyed manner that the book demanded, and then I got to like the “no hangover” lifestyle’s compatibility with trauma reporting. Other historians who’ve delved deeply into the mire of racial carnage have echoed to me that getting sober is a common byproduct of covering the so-called “lynching beat” (a term scholars privately use as a form of gallows humor to preserve their own sanity through inappropriate joking).

The cruelty of southern racial violence is simply too horrific, even when imagined, for a compromised mind to bear without cracking the foundations. Such tragedy is a mental weight that must borne, however, so that its effects and aftereffects are never written out of the American story.
_________________________
¹ June 1: “Collins Given Story of Negro’s Flogging,” Miami Herald, June 25, 1955, 2; “Live Oak Negro Bares Flogging,” Orlando Evening Star, June 21, 1955, 1.
² father of nine: Herbert D. Cameron, “Collins Asks Suwanee Official to Explain Flogging,” Tampa Tribune, June 22, 1955, 1; “Live Oak Negro,” Orlando Evening Star, June 21, 1955, 1;
³ Fred Sweat: W.J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958; “Flogging Details Refused,” Tallahassee Democrat, June 26, 1958, 1.
⁴ to a standard that satisfied: Hugh Lewis, Transcript of Testimony, June 26, 1958.
⁵ instead called upon Grand Dragon W. J. Griffin: W. J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.
⁶ “‘Well, I wish you’d give”’: W. J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.
⁷ who’d called the 1955 grand jury: “Grand Jury Called in Flogging,” Tampa Tribune, June 26, 1955, 1; William Slaughter, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.

Visit Robert W. Fieseler's website.

The Page 99 Test: Tinderbox.

Coffee with a Canine: Robert Fieseler & Chompers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kati Curts's "Assembling Religion"

Kati Curts is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Sewanee: The University of the South.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America, with the following results:

Page 99 of Assembling Religion shuttles readers into an analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856) as a harbinger of Ford’s white nationalism. It describes how:

In Emerson’s telling, the Anglo-Saxon in­heritors of England demonstrated “vigorous health” and “good feeding.” “They have more constitutional energy than any other people,” he wrote, and engaged in regular “manly exercises” as “the foundation of that el­evation of mind which gives one nature ascendant over another.” Such bold and brawny men, Emerson said, “box, run, shoot, ride, row, and sail from pole to pole” and “live jolly in the open air.”

Emerson’s theories of Saxon supremacy may seem an odd entry for a book about Ford Motor Company and its impact on religion in the twentieth century. In earlier pages I introduce more directly religious subjects, like Henry Ford’s techno-utopian understanding of machinery as “a new messiah” or how the Company institutionalized a social gospel. What a reader finds on page 99 is Emerson’s celebration of white masculinity, which he said was maintained through its “power of blood or race.” Ford found much to agree with in Emerson’s sentences, positing his own racialized theory of productive American manhood in a nation peopled with hearty frontiersmen of “pioneer blood.”

The Page 99 Test is thereby an apt entry into Assembling Religion. I include this analysis of Emerson between a description of Ford’s Americanization campaigns and an account of one of the first uses of the term “Fordism” (1926) by Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, a German economic historian who looked to Ford as exemplary of the kind of servant leader who would harken a “white socialism of pure, active conviction” (100). In the rest of the book, I delve into an extended analysis of Ford’s print and film productions and the industrial museum and historical village he built. In each, Ford promoted the pioneer as “a superior sort of man” for his spirit of adventure and innovation. A direct cipher for the Americans Ford most wanted to celebrate, the pioneer was cast as a character of right productivity, particularly in comparison to the “parasitic” specter of the “international Jew.” Never simply a nostalgia, the pioneer was a racialized imaginary that Ford said was “bred in the very fibers of our bodies.” (124)

If Emerson harkened the way, Ford mass produced its pioneering personification. What the Page 99 Test ultimately affords is a glimpse into the longer intellectual and relational histories upon which Ford manufactured and assembled his brand of racial capitalism.

Learn more about Assembling Religion at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hannah Frydman's "Between the Sheets"

Hannah Frydman is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures (French) at Harvard University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Between the Sheets, we find ourselves in the middle of an exploration of the Flachon affair (1911-1912)—in which it was revealed that Victor Flachon, director of the republican daily La Lanterne, and his mistress had purchased sex with minors from a pimp named Nitchevo who published ads in the newspaper—and its use by right-wing, monarchist journalists to critique the French Republic. The page begins with the conclusion of a section, detailing in several sentences how this right-wing critique drew the prominent politician Aristide Briand—a former director of La Lanterne—into the story, asserting that his work in the Chamber of Deputies largely consisted of doing Flachon’s bidding and referring to him as the “minister of Nitchevo.” After this, a new section, entitled “Advertising: A Republican Vice?” begins, zooming in on the fact that coverage of the scandal—which widely informed readers across the political spectrum of the “use of intensive advertising campaigns to attract clients in search of minors”—nonetheless never gives any sense of the content of these ads. This is despite the way they “stand out from the crowd as often long, complex, self-referential, and sometimes even funny,” such as the following ad, which ran in the Miscellaneous column:

Do you suffer from continual anxieties? incurable wounds? Do you have stains on your past? difficulties in the present? concerns about the future? Are you sad, worried, uneasy? Then come quickly to consult me. My business [maison] is not quayside, but on the mezzanine and near metro Villiers! Madame Nitchevo, 34, r. de Constantinople, Mezz. on left.

The reader who only reads page 99 would likely be quite confused: even the description of the page I provide above, which gives contextual information not contained on page 99, leaves many details unexplained, including why it matters that it “seems likely that someone well educated” wrote Nitchevo’s ads. That said, and however unceremoniously, the page does nevertheless throw the reader into many topics that are central to my book. Most importantly, a reader of this page would begin to see how concerns about sexual advertising became wrapped up in politics and lawmaking at a variety of levels, from the pages of the press to the halls of government. Between the Sheets more generally shows how classified ads placed by enterprising women like the so-called Nitchevo were at the center of a variety of political, cultural, and legal debates during France’s Third Republic (1870-1940). These conversations and the laws they inspired were spurred on by fears about a falling birth rate supposedly caused by abortion, women’s growing independence, gender subversion, and the supposedly ever-present danger of sex trafficking for innocent white women—all things that the classifieds were seen as encouraging and facilitating. As a danger to the republic and its foundation in sexual normativity, in the form of monogamous, reproductive couples, classified advertising sheds light on the sexual history of republican governance.

Visit Hannah Frydman's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lynn Matluck Brooks's "Theatres of the Body"

Lynn Matluck Brooks is Arthur and Katherine Shadek Humanities Professor, Emerita at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of John Durang: Man of the American Stage, The Art of Dancing in Seventeenth-Century Spain: Juan de Esquivel Navarro and His World, and The Dances of the Processions of Seville in Spain's Golden Age, and the editor of Women’s Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800. She was editor of Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, and thINKingDANCE.org.

Brooks applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Theatres of the Body: Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia, and reported the following:

Page 99 proves a surprisingly good place to grasp my book’s themes and methods. In fact, the structural midpoint of the book’s text lands on page 99, which opens chapter 4 of the book’s six chapters. Chapter 4, “Dancing ‘Philadelphia in Slices’ — The 1840s,” introduces the literary discourses that engaged dance, with authors “reporting, puffing, critiquing, condemning,” and describing, from their standpoints, how they experienced dancing.

Throughout Theatres of the Body, each main chapter covers roughly a decade of Philadelphia’s dance history, as linked to a selected discursive element. The book explores connections between dance and visual art in 1820s Philadelphia in chapter 2, dance and political themes (the 1830s) in chapter 3, chapter 4 draws on literary connections in the 1840s, and the scientific drive of the 1850s shapes chapter 5. Each of these themes, and others—religion, reform, music, immigration, education, and more—weave through each chapter, but the stated discursive focus remains the highlight of each dance decade, each chapter. Page 99 alerts readers to the interconnections of dance with significant cultural drives (in this case literature, publication, narrative) and, with the chapter’s opening line about George G. Foster’s newspaper serial “Philadelphia in Slices,” it also points to the “different classes, races, employments, and tastes” among “those who danced or watched dancing” in theatrical and social settings.

Philadelphia’s complexity, generating and exemplifying the turbulent unfolding of the young United States, brought its people’s embodiment of humanity, of change, of personal and group narratives, of individual and aspirational expression to a pitch of excitement and meaning in the antebellum period. Questions of equality, rights, and human status urgently motivated action, including the dancing seen on streets, social-dance floors, and stages of the “mythic” city of Philadelphia, where the founding documents of the new nation were forged. A crucible of national formation, the City of Brotherly Love was also a hotbed of dance training, performance, and commentary as the nation moved toward the cataclysm of Civil War. What role did bodies play here? Digging into the dancing of that age helps us grapple with the weight and ramifications of that question.

Learn more about Theatres of the Body at the Temple University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hanna E. Morris's "Apocalyptic Authoritarianism"

Hanna E. Morris is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the Critical Studies of Climate Media, Discourse, and Power Working Group a part of Brown University's Climate Social Science Network. Her research concentrates on the climate-media-democracy nexus and explores critical questions of power and meaning-making around climate change. She co-edited the book entitled Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time (2021) and has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals including Environmental Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of Environmental Media, Media Theory, and Politique Américaine.

Morris applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book has the re-printed image of the cover of The New York Times Magazine’s August 5, 2018, special climate change issue. The cover story was written by the journalist Nathaniel Rich. And as I write in my book: “The cover’s headline is written in small white text atop a black background, almost like the prophetic text of a Magic 8-Ball appearing in the void, and ominously declares: ‘Thirty years ago, we could have saved the planet.’”

In addition to The New York Times Magazine cover image, my following words appear along with the magazine cover:

The prophecy of a planet in peril that scientists like James Hansen warned about, according to Rich, went unheeded due to the careless “masses” duped and manipulated by fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and the Republican politicians who benefited financially from Big Oil. The out-group is the Republican Party and Big Oil, but Rich elevates the prophet—climate scientists like James Hansen—without much interest in anyone else. Climate activists, environmental justice campaigns, and the many people who have been organizing in response to climate change for decades are sidestepped and even blamed as part of “the masses” who did not follow Hansen’s call soon enough.

Readers opening to page 99 of my book would get a good idea of the whole work. It firstly gives a glimpse of the book’s critical analysis of U.S. news media (both images and text). It secondly highlights how news stories and visuals on climate change repeatedly center and celebrate “visionary sage figures” while denigrating climate activists and especially young, progressive, women of color who are a part of the climate justice movement. At its core, "apocalyptic authoritarianism" entails the construction of a “right” and “wrong” way of knowing and responding to climate change that fearmongers about an all-encompassing, apocalyptic collapse if historically privileged figures (i.e. visionary sages) are not heeded and followed. In turn, exclusionary modes of governance are legitimized as necessary while more robustly democratic alternatives are delegitimized as destabilizing and dangerous. Traditional centers of power are elevated as gods capable of “saving” the nation and planet while historically marginalized groups are demeaned as "militant Others" who are threatening this Earth-saving work. It is here where my book shows how the authority of historically privileged figures is normalized and bolstered by the U.S. press as opposed to investigated and questioned. Ultimately, my book shows how some of the most prominent news publications of record in the U.S. are fanning the flame of apocalyptic authoritarianism instead of reckoning with the roots and ramifications of both climate change and the reactionary politics of today.

Visit Hanna E. Morris's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Carruthers's "Explaining our Actions"

Peter Carruthers is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. His publications include Human and Animal Minds (2019) and Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect (2024).

Carruthers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing, and shared the following:

While I hope that page 99 of my book might provide some indication of the book’s quality, it will give very little idea what it is about. For while the book as a whole catalogs how a great deal of our common-sense psychology and the philosophical theorizing that relies on it is mistaken, page 99 is part of a discussion of one of the things that common-sense gets right. This is that there is a separate category of intentions and goals that are quite distinct from our desires, on the one hand, and our beliefs, on the other. Some philosophers, in contrast, have claimed that intentions just are a certain kind of desire, whereas others have claim that they are really a special sort of belief. In the latter case the claim is that both beliefs and intentions are really commitments to the truth of a proposition, where the distinctive thing about an intention is just that it is a commitment to make a proposition true rather than to it already being true. The text of page 99 is part of a longer discussion showing that these claims are meritless.

Philosophers have mostly addressed questions about the nature of the human mind by relying on some combination of common-sense beliefs, introspection, linguistic analysis, and intuitions generated from imaginary examples. The upshot is what I call the “standard model” of the mind (also known as belief-desire psychology), together with a number of less-standard variants. (The latter include the ideas that intentions can be reduced to desires or to beliefs, mentioned above; that knowledge is a basic kind of mental state, not a special sort of belief; and that there is a distinctive category of graded-strength beliefs, called “credences.”) I show that the standard model is excessively narrow in its scope, since it focuses entirely on so-called “intentional actions.” (These are actions that are selected and caused by our beliefs and desires.) Vast swathes of habitual, speeded, and skilled actions are unjustifiably neglected. Moreover, the standard philosophical account of belief elides together different kinds of mental state as if they were the same, while also including kinds that are actually a kind of intention. And the most popular philosophical account of desire gets the relationship between pleasure and desire completely back-to-front. Pleasures are not experiences we desire to have or to continue. Rather, desires are states that embed anticipatory pleasure in their contents. The overall methodological moral of the book is that standard philosophical techniques are completely bankrupt. To understand the mind we need to engage with the science. Readers of the book should end up with a good idea of the varieties of human action and their true explanations, as well as the real nature of the main categories of mental state that the mind contains.

Learn more about Explaining our Actions at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Human Motives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Hylen's "Gender Mobility"

Susan Hylen is Almar H. Shatford Professor of New Testament at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She is the author of three other books on gender: Finding Phoebe: What New Testament Women Were Really Like (2023), Women in the New Testament World (2018), and A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church (2015). She has also written three books on the Gospel of John, including Imperfect Believers: Ambiguous Characters in the Gospel of John (2009). Hylen serves as general editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Gender Mobility: 7 Ideas about Gender in the New Testament Period, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Gender Mobility provides a good snapshot of qualities that pervade this book. The book is a historical exploration of gender as it was constructed in the early Roman period (first and second centuries CE). Page 99 is the beginning of a section on eunuchs as a gender in the Roman world. Part of the appeal of exploring gender in another place and time is that it’s often different from our own culture’s assumptions, which can feel like they are the only possible options. We don’t have eunuchs as a gender today (at least not in the US), but Mediterranean cultures did. This chapter asks what it meant, from their viewpoint, to be a eunuch.

Also on page 99 is the beginning of a section entitled “Freeborn eunuchs.” Ancient societies were very hierarchical, and part of the argument of the book is that social status was incorporated into the construction of gender. So there wasn’t just a single gender, eunuchs, but multiple genders inflected by social status. Freeborn eunuchs had different rights and roles in society than enslaved or freed eunuchs.

In describing freeborn eunuchs, the portion on page 99 engages with the description of freeborn eunuchs in a number of ancient texts. One of the main tasks of the book is presenting and interpreting the evidence available on the subject under discussion. I hope to give readers a clear description of evidence so they can experience it and begin to form their own opinions.

In the case of freeborn eunuchs, there isn’t much evidence available, but what still exists is interesting! For example, on page 99 I explain that the freeborn eunuch, Favorinus, was not castrated, as enslaved eunuchs were, but was born intersex. The fact that he wasn’t castrated fits with the Roman understanding of freeborn status, because in their minds, freeborn men should not be castrated—this was not fitting to their social position. But there were still freeborn men who resembled eunuchs physically, and so the description of Favorinus reflects what it meant at the time to be a freeborn eunuch.

Learn more about Gender Mobility at the Oxford University Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenneth L. Feder's "Native America"

Kenneth L. Feder is professor emeritus of anthropology at Central Connecticut State University. His books include Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, The Past in Perspective: An Introduction to Human Prehistory, and Native American Archaeology in the Parks: A Guide to Native Heritage Sites in Our National Parks and Monuments.

Feder applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Native America: The Story of the First Peoples, with the following results:

The story told in a book that explores the deep history of an entire continent can be likened to the story conveyed by an archaeological site. The individual pages of the book are the equivalent of the multiple layers encountered as archaeologists navigate through time. Page 99 of Native America: The Story of the First Peoples represents one of the layers the reader digs through during their journey.

Specifically, page 99 presents a map depicting the locations of many of the most important sites where archaeologists have intersected with the trail of Native People for the period between more than 20,000 to about 10,000 years ago. This is a time when these First Peoples were adapting to an America much different from our own. That America had vast glaciers covering much of the north and was inhabited by giant beasts like mammoths, mastodons, and varieties of bison that dwarf even their enormous modern cousins. Native people successfully hunted these animals with little more than stone tipped spears, guile, and the force of their will. Had I lived then, I would have strongly considered vegetarianism!

Page 99 represents a moment in a much larger history presented in the book, one told not in cuneiform, hieroglyphs, ink on vellum, or on pages produced with a printing press. Instead, the history conveyed in Native America is written in exquisite and deadly spear points found at the sites located on page 99’s map; in miraculously preserved human footprints located in the crystalline white sands of a New Mexico desert and dating to more than 20,000 years ago; in achingly beautiful and architecturally sophisticated cliff dwellings; in giant sculptures of earth in the form of bears, birds, and an enormous snake; in intriguing paintings and etchings on the walls of soaring cliffs; and in the forensic evidence of tragic battles fought and battles lost when two cultures, one native, one newly arrived, clashed in an existential conflict.

Page 99 may present a mere moment in that deep history, but it reflects quite well the overarching message of Native America: The Story of the First Peoples presenting a part of the ongoing story I tell of the creativity, sophistication, ingenuity, and resilience of the First Peoples of America.

Learn more about Native America at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Michaels's "Test, Measure, Punish"

Erin Michaels is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Test, Measure, Punish: How the Threat of Closure Harms Students, Destroys Teachers, and Fails Schools, and shared the following:

Page 99 is the last page of a chapter, fusing some of the book’s main themes about how neoliberal accountability policies shape the educational experiences of marginalized youth. Specifically, this chapter explains why state accountability pressures drove the school’s already harsh disciplinary regime to get worse. The first part of page 99 reviews how this traditional public school (my case study of Sandview High) operated like the rather notorious “No Excuses Charter School” (NECS). However, I argue that the school’s obsession with social control was not just aimed at improving academic performance. Instead, there was also another state accountability pressure at play: improving students’ suspension and attendance rates, and this actually heightened the punitive setting. The second part of page 99 reviews some of the most painful costs of this regime for students.

Sandview High seemed to be taking the lead from NECS to figure out how to make students perform well. Yet, the focus in NECS has largely been on test scores as the key motivating factor for harsh “no excuses” disciplinary practices for the “normalization of unethical practices.” In contrast, as this case study, and the supplementary data on the ESSA presented early in this chapter reveal, adding non-test student behavior data to the ongoing neoliberal accountability focus of “measuring and punishing” schools worsens punitive schooling, just as a focus on test scores degrades academic lessons.

The pervasive social control at Sandview High, or what I call the school security regime, shaped students in ways that undermined their socialization for citizenship. Students felt mistreated, under surveillance, and contained, and often created narratives that normalized this treatment; all of which taught them that they were “custodial citizens.” That is, they were learning to tolerate an adulthood where they could expect the state to surveil them widely, even when such surveillance did not result in a formal arrest. This models the “custodial class” that Lerman and Weaver emphasize is created in the midst of wide-ranging neighborhood police patrol practices that include routine stop-and-frisks. As they note, if state surveillance is one’s only exposure to the state, there is little room to see the state as something you can make demands on as a democratic citizen entitled to make claims on their government. The intersectional analysis in this chapter also underscores the extra layers of vulnerability in students’ experiences with off-the-record punishment shaped by gender, race, and immigration. Their experiences reflect further social consequences of highly securitized schools, which create additional harms. I expand on these social consequences in the next and final chapter.

The Page 99 Test worked better than I predicted. The book’s main argument is that neoliberal accountability policies threatening schools with closure for low performance is as much about rising state carcerality (punishment and surveillance) as it is about the “business approach” traditionally associated with neoliberal education reform. Page 99 showcases the argument that state pressure on schools to improve their suspension and attendance rates is an overlooked part of how neoliberal accountability has, and continues to, include non-test metrics (like suspension and attendance rates) that also worsen education for marginalized youth, here exacerbating surveillance. I stress how this illustrates one of the ways in which neoliberal accountability ushers in more state carcerality. I also value that page 99 discusses the key consequences of this carcerality that I reveal across the book: how policing youth in school undermines their social development in terms of what they think they deserve, have to put up with, and how this is related to broader lessons for marginalized youth about what the state is and its agents. Throughout the book, I argue that neoliberal accountability policies provoked twin punitive regimes: testing and security, which had vast consequences on students beyond degenerating their academic education: it eroded their sense of political agency.

Learn more about Test, Measure, Punish at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Kramer's "Concentration Camps"

Alan Kramer is a Senior Professor in the Department of History at the University of Hamburg and Professor Emeritus of European History, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Concentration Camps: A Global History, and reported the following:

From page 99:

That decision may have been prompted by the military, which feared that epidemics might spread to the army, and threaten supply routes to the front. They therefore closed the camps at Katma and Azaz, sending the survivors to camps at Akhterim and Bab, closer to Aleppo. The new arrivals were described as ‘thousands of widows, without a single adult male . . . in an appalling state, half naked . . . including hapless children in an indescribably miserable state who resembled human monsters’. Typhus broke out, and at least 50,000 deportees died at Bab by February 1916. Three further camps near Aleppo—Lale, Tefrice, and Munbuc—appear to have served as pure death camps.

The camps in northern Syria in or near Aleppo were shut down one after the other in early 1916, with any survivors being sent down the Euphrates or the line of the Baghdad railway towards Ras ul-Ain. The concentration camp at Ras ul-Ain allowed the majority to survive for a few months until March 1916, when under the orders of the sub-directorate of deportees hundreds were taken out of the camp every day and liquidated. The vast majority were killed by the end of April.

The last phase in this intended destruction of the Armenians began with the arrival of tens of thousands in Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian desert in autumn 1915. Some 150 to 200 died every day. Whenever new arrivals boosted the population, the authorities sent convoys to Mosul. But those who were able to remain managed to build flourishing businesses and craft shops. As the camps around Aleppo were liquidated in spring 1916, the population of Armenians in Deir ez-Zor rose to 200,000. Soon they were marched in groups into the desert and almost all were slaughtered or left to die of thirst and starvation.

Few details of this mass extermination are known, and we know little of the perpetrators and decision-makers, but there is little doubt that Deir ez-Zor was a real death factory where 195,000 were liquidated: a historic crime to be placed next to Treblinka and Auschwitz. By late 1916, altogether probably 600,000 Armenians had been liquidated in the camps or on route. At least one million perished in total (see Map 2.1).

As it happens, this extract gives the reader an excellent indication of the book. The role of concentration camps in the destruction of the Armenians of Ottoman Turkey, 1915-16, described here, is barely known outside a small circle of specialists. The scale of mass murder invites comparison with Nazi genocide. While everyone knows about Nazi concentration camps, this book reveals the global history of the phenomenon. However, the book does not “relativize” Nazi criminality. To compare does not mean to equate, still less to exculpate. The aim is to explain the origins and shifting functions of concentration camps across time, beginning at the turn of the 20th century, with the Spanish policy of “reconcentración” in Cuba. The British “concentration camps” in South Africa, 1900 to 1902, in which thousands of white Boer civilians were interned, became a byword for misery and mass death. Yet the equally tragic fate of thousands of black Africans in the British camps was conveniently ignored in subsequent South African history.

Page 99 gives a correct impression of my argument that one cannot reserve the term “concentration camp” exclusively for the Nazi camps. It gives the false impression that concentration camps were invariably death camps: the great majority were not, as the book explains.

This is a transnational history that enquires after learning processes between regimes and states, including even liberal democracies. How did the memory of colonial concentration camps predetermine the Nazi decision to establish brutal concentration camps in 1933, and later to embark on policies of genocide? The colonial theme is significant in another regard: I argue that high modern empire-building is a crucial element in almost all concentration camp systems. There is moreover an intimate connection between war, or warlike mobilization, and camps.

Concentration camps, alas, have not only a past, but also a present. Conscious of the risk posed by the absence of documents that most states keep secret for three or more decades, I have attempted to take the story into the contemporary world. Even the most secretive states, Communist China and North Korea, have been unable to prevent the leaking of confidential documents which allow an insight into their camp regimes.

Ultimately, authoritarian states created concentration camps because they offer a short-cut to a projected utopia of ‘purity’, dispensing with such inconveniences as human rights, the legal system, and democracy.

Learn more about Concentration Camps at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julia Brock's "Closed Seasons"

Julia Brock is assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South, with the following results:

Page 99 of Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South brings us into Chapter 3, which tells the story of Charlie Young (1883-1970), an African American hunter, dog trainer, and hunting guide who spent most of his life and career in southwest Georgia. The page itself offers analysis on how Young’s position served the priorities and preferences of elite white sportsmen, who used black subordinates as part of their enactment of hunting pageantry. The page also quotes Young, who wrote a short memoir in 1964 reminiscing on his time as a hunter and hunting guide, reflecting on historical change in his corner of the U.S. South. His voice reveals the deep joy he took in hunting and dog training, and acts as a counterpoint to the meaning of the hunt imposed by wealthy sportsmen.

Page 99 then, highlights a central tension in Closed Seasons: the attempts by sportsmen in the early twentieth century to make the natural world fit their priorities–one open to hunting for sport yet often closed to those who hunted purely for subsistence or the market. These elite hunters, who sincerely argued on behalf of imperiled species, made bogeymen of “pothunters,” market hunters, and black men, and campaigned successfully for laws that reinforced their exclusive access to field and prey. Yet rural, non-elite southern hunters, black and white, cherished their own meaning of the hunt and struggled to assert their right to keep hunting traditions intact, often by refusing to follow new, Progressive-era laws. The book follows the evolution of game and fish laws with a close eye on the social imagination of conservation advocates, the response by everyday southerners, the changing field of wildlife science, and the increasing role of the federal government in wildlife protection.

Learn more about Closed Seasons at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Sweeney's "The Feather Detective"

Chris Sweeney is a nonfiction writer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. His first book, The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne, was named one of the best/don’t-miss books of summer 2025 by numerous outlets, including NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, The Millions, and the New York Post, and it received rave reviews elsewhere. The book tells the incredible true story of Roxie Laybourne, a scientist stationed within the Smithsonian who pioneered the field of forensic ornithology and studied feathers recovered from airplane crashes, murder scenes, poaching cases, and other calamities.

Sweeney applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Feather Detective and shared the following:

Page 99 focuses mostly on an amusing exchange that occurred in 1963 between the Smithsonian Institution's Roxie Laybourne, the subject of the biography and the pioneer of forensic ornithology, and a chicken farmer in Newton, Iowa, who claimed to have created a special instrument for quickly determining the sex of just-hatched birds that he named the “Chixexer.” At the time, Roxie was trying to develop methods for determining the sex of Whooping Cranes, which were teetering toward extinction; knowing which cranes were males and which were females was critical to improving breeding efforts. Roxie, who was a leading ornithological expert, reached out to the farmer explaining the circumstances, and received a patronizing response in which the farmer suggested she pay $300 to train under him for a few days, claiming it would save her much time and disappointment. As the page notes, Roxie did not take him up on the offer.

I am surprised to say that page 99 encapsulates some of the bigger themes in The Feather Detective and would signal to a single-page reader that this is a book about a woman scientist who is engaged in some unusual bird research and constantly running into social and scientific obstacles. The page makes reference to Roxie’s tireless work ethic and varied caseload: “When Roxie wasn’t practicing her technique at zoos or catching up on feather identifications, she was chasing down leads on bird-sexing techniques like a gumshoe reporter.” And page 99 allows readers to hear a little bit of Roxie’s voice as it directly quotes her letter to the farmer.

Interestingly, Roxie’s foray into Whooping Crane research was an aberration. Ninety-nine percent of Roxie’s cases focused on identifying tiny fragments of feathers from airplane strikes, crime scenes, and other calamities, and that is the main focus of the book. It’s called The Feather Detective, after all, not The Whooping Crane Sexxer. And yet, stripped of context, page 99 stands on its own as a telling snapshot of Roxie while giving readers a sense of the book’s narrative style. The quality of the whole, I think, is revealed in this one page.

Visit Chris Sweeney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard J. Sexton's "Food Fight"

Richard J. Sexton is Distinguished Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of California, Davis. He is founder and coeditor of Agricultural and Resource Economics Update, a University of California magazine devoted to contemporary food and environmental issues. He has published extensively in leading economics and agricultural journals.

Sexton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World, and reported the following:

Food Fight is about the challenges we will face in the 21st Century to adequately feed the world and avoid rising food prices and increasing hunger and malnutrition. Food Fight documents the increase in food demand that is certain to occur in the century and the challenges to expanding supplies sufficiently to meet demand growth due to declining agricultural productivity, climate change, pest resistance and more. It is also about destructive public policies enacted by governments around the world that are guaranteed to produce less, not more, food.

Amidst this big picture, page 99 in Food Fight does a good job of illustrating one of the key policy issues. It is part of the chapter on organic foods. People, mainly wealthier ones, like to consume organic foods because they think they are healthier than the conventional alternative, although no evidence supports such claims, and they think organic is better for the environment. However, converting land to organic production reduces the yield of that land by 30 – 45%, depending on crop and production location. This results in less food production on a given land base, raises food prices, and causes expansion of the land base in agriculture, known as extensification. Conversion of forested lands for agriculture is harmful to the environment in many dimensions, among them greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Yet governments around the world support the expansion of organic agriculture.

Page 99 discusses whether the organic yield decrement will increase or decrease in response to policy-driven expansion of organic acreage. It also addresses the adverse environmental implications due to expanded organic production and the concomitant expansion of the agricultural land base that ensues.

Commentators through recent centuries, with Thomas Malthus most prominent among them, have forecasted that the world would not be able to expand food production sufficiently to feed a growing population. They painted a bleak picture of hunger and starvation that has proven, for the most part, to be dramatically wrong. Food Fight’s message is different. Despite likely dramatic growth in food demand in this Century, and strong headwinds to expanding supplies as we’ve done in the past, we can still succeed as a global society in meeting the challenge if we stop enacting policies guaranteed to reduce food supplies and instead remove the shackles we’ve placed upon the agricultural industry and support policies to expand food supplies.

Learn more about Food Fight at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini's "Monsters vs. Patriarchy"

Patricia Saldarriaga is a professor of Luso-Hispanic studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. Among her publications, she is a coauthor of Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies. Emy Manini is an independent scholar working in contemporary literature and culture of the Americas. She is based in Seattle, Washington. She earned her PhD in Spanish literature from the University of Washington in 2002. She is a coauthor of Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Monsters vs. Patriarchy: Toxic Imagination in Global Horror Cinema, with the following results:

The Page 99 Test works well for our book. The page appears in our chapter entitled “The Coloniality of Cannibalism: Eating, Selling, and the Offerings of Racialized and Gendered Bodies.” The first lines are the conclusion of a discussion of the 2014 short film TESTEment (Dir. Gigi Saúl Guerrero,) which we examine through the lens of ritualized gender violence. We assert that this form of violence forms part of the fabric of patriarchy, evidenced by colonial, economic, and medical violence, and in its most literal form, historical and modern witch hunting. TESTEment reverses the pattern of ritual violence, portraying a matriarchal coven of witches enacting it upon a male body. Witches have been accused of cannibalism for centuries, and indeed, here the witches consume the flesh of their victim, literalizing the Eucharist with testicular sacrifice and menstrual alchemy. These witches personify the toxic imagination (as referenced in the subtitle of our book) which refers to the malignant power attributed to “evil” women to cause harm to their offspring and the male body through the workings of their imagination.

We continue with the film Jennifer’s Body (2009, dir. Karyn Kusama), in which a young woman who has been metaphorically raped in a satanic ritual becomes a demonic monster who feeds on young men. The capitalist interest of the men who seek to conjure fame through femicide results in those men being turned into meat, again inverting the process patriarchy has reserved for women. The movie subverts the coloniality of gender the moment men are the target of the monster they have created.

The subsection “Ethnic Food: Devouring Immigrants” begins on page 99, in which we introduce the ways in which immigrants and foreigners show up as cannibal fodder in horror cinema. In this chapter we point out that though during colonization the indigenous population were cast as cannibals in colonial European rhetoric, in contemporary cinema, it is minority groups who are converted into meat. Unfortunately this issue only has become more politically relevant, as in our society immigrants are being kidnapped and detained in concentration camps both here and abroad, tortured, and threatened with becoming alligator food.

On page 99, we introduce the concept of iconophagia, which has a double meaning: we consume images and icons which “feed” the culture, as we simultaneously become slaves to these images and icons which colonize our desires and futures: we are, in effect, eaten up by our icons. This discussion mirrors the broader themes of the book, in that horror icons that we produce and consume, while representing methods of oppression, can also be tools for liberation. The page is representative in that it showcases our use of cultural theory, historical trends, and intersectionality to analyse the ways that global horror films cast women and other minority groups as monsters–creatures that not only suffer as victims and outcasts, but can also demonstrate techniques for resistance.

Learn more about Monsters vs. Patriarchy at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies by Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amir Moosavi's "Dust That Never Settles"

Amir Moosavi is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Newark.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my recently published book, Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War, treats the war fiction of Iranian writer, Ahmad Dehqan. My argument about Dehqan is that, even though he is a writer who is backed by the Iranian state and whose fiction has been published by state-sponsored presses, he is a rebel and his novels and short stories from the late 1990s and nearly aughts challenge the Iranian state’s representation of the war with Iraq as a “Sacred Defense,” which largely glorifies battlefront soldiers and enchants their martyrdom.

The chapter of Dust That Never Settles in which page 99 is located is called “War Front Apocrypha.” It is the only chapter to solely treat fiction written from the perspective of battlefront soldiers. The chapter deals with short stories and novels written by Iraqi writers Jinan Jasim Hillawi and Mohsen al-Ramli, alongside Iranian writers Hossein Mortazaeian Abkenar and, of course, Ahmad Dehqan. By juxtaposing these writers’ works the chapter shows “how Iraqi and Iranian writers have defamiliarized the banal and ubiquitous wartime representations of battlefront violence to undermine and redefine” parts of the official discourse promoted by both Iranian and Iraqi states during the war. Although specific to the war front, the aim of the chapter in comparing the construction of literary counter-narratives aligns with what the rest of the book does.

Page 99 of my book leaves readers with a sense of what the book does but tells only half the story. Dust That Never Settles is a comparative study of how Iranian and Iraqi writers have dealt with this war’s representation from 1980 to the present. As such, it uses the experience of the Iran-Iraq War as an entryway to the comparative study of contemporary Persian and Arabic literatures. In this case, page 99 gives a good idea of how I deal with Iranian writers and their construction of counter-narratives to the Islamic Republic’s story of the eight-year war with Iraq. However, if a browser used page 99 to speak about the entire book, it would miss at least half of what it does, since there’s no mention of the ways that Iraqi writers have approached the conflict and the ways in which they compare or contrast with that of their Iranian counterparts.

Learn more about Dust That Never Settles at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Ojeda's "The Sad Citizen"

Christopher Ojeda is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced and a research affiliate at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. His research has been featured in CNN, NPR, PBS, Slate, and Vox.

Ojeda applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Sad Citizen: How Politics Is Depressing and Why It Matters, and reported the following:

"...how we think about and engage with the political process is profoundly shaped by our personal relationships." So begins Page 99 of The Sad Citizen. Happily, the Page 99 Test touches on one of the key findings of the book! The Sad Citizen is about why politics is depressing, and nowhere is this truer than when political disagreement creeps into our personal relationships.

We often experience politics by talking with family, friends, co-workers, and even strangers. Just the other day, a friend and I were chatting politics at a coffee shop when the stranger next to us chimed in. Suddenly, I was learning about geopolitical tension between Russia and China, the harm of generative AI, and problems with our local mayor. These conversations can shape our beliefs, keep us informed, and recruit us to action.

Talking about politics can be a source of comfort when everyone agrees. Agreeable conversations affirm our values and often inspire action. Disagreement, however, can undercut the social support we receive from loved ones. We may feel misunderstood, alone, or even hated, especially when disagreement comes to dominate a once loving relationship, and this can leave us feeling deeply depressed.

I interviewed therapists for the book and asked them about clients who felt depressed by politics. Nearly all mentioned political disagreements in the lives of their clients. I heard about an adolescent who was bullied at school for her political beliefs, a man who was certain his girlfriend would dump him if she learned how he voted, and a couple who bickered about politics whenever the news came on.

To be clear, agreeable conversations can sometimes be bad, and disagreeable conversations can sometimes be good. Echo chambers, a popular metaphor for agreeable conversations, allow misinformation to spread and extreme views to foment. In contrast, disagreeable conversations can challenge our assumptions and force us to consider new perspectives.

How do we balance the good and bad sides of political agreement and disagreement? This is just one of the questions I tackle in the book, and it is emblematic of what you can expect on other pages and in other chapters. Throughout the book, I consider the many ways politics is depressing as well as how we can navigate the sad side of politics as we try to be responsible democratic citizens.

Visit Christopher Ojeda's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aaron Kushner's "Cherokee Nation Citizenship"

Aaron Kushner is an Assistant Professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought & Leadership at Arizona State University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Cherokee Nation Citizenship: A Political History, with the following results:

Page 99 is five pages off from the book’s midpoint—it lands in the middle of the middle chapter. It discusses the plight of formerly enslaved peoples (called Freedmen) in the Cherokee Nation after the Treaty of 1866 reshaped Cherokee-United States relations following the American Civil War. Readers will find here the story of Moses Lonian, born into slavery in the Cherokee Nation in 1857, and his efforts to be counted as a Cherokee citizen after the war. A portion of the page reads:

The situation of the freedmen and their requests to become part of the Cherokee Nation provided US officials an opportunity to bring the Cherokee Nation closer to the norms established by American politics. The Cherokee resistance to incorporating the freedmen, and the freedmen’s pleas to the United States for help, gave US officials an excuse to condemn the Cherokee Nation as insubordinate, unjust, and ineffective—a condemnation that eventually led to the dissolution of the Cherokee Nation itself.

The Page 99 Test actually works well in this case. It gives the browser a quick sense of the complicated dynamics at play over the difficult question of tribal citizenship. Cherokee Nation leaders were determined to assert their sovereignty against the United States—which included preserving the ability to count and claim their own citizens. The war—in which the Cherokee Nation initially sided with the Confederacy before a large number returned to the Union camp—and the long-standing practice of race-based chattel slavery among some Cherokees, however, contributed to a treaty (which, among other things, gave Freedmen Cherokee Nation citizenship) that many US leaders saw as a means to gradually demolish the Cherokee Nation government. Freedmen and certain Cherokee leaders all turning to the United States for help over questions of citizenship (and hordes of white squatters on Cherokee lands) gave certain exploitative US officials the opportunity that they wanted to effectively end tribal governance in 1907.

The debate over Freedmen citizenship in the Cherokee Nation did not end in 1907 (and neither did the Cherokee Nation)—a US District Court ruled on the matter in 2017 and the subject has continued to periodically draw the attention of Cherokee Nation politicians ever since. I can therefore say that the Page 99 Test does indeed work for this book as a primer for a much richer political history.

Learn more about Cherokee Nation Citizenship at the University of Oklahoma Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stefan K. Stantchev's "Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea"

Stefan K. Stantchev earned his doctorate in history at the University of Michigan in 2009 and has since been employed as Assistant Professor (2009-15) and Associate Professor (2015-) at Arizona State University. Stantchev's research interests focus on the political, religious, and economic factors that shaped human relations throughout the Mediterranean (ca. 1000-ca. 1600). Stantchev prefers to work with voluminous source material, chiefly Venetian and Genoese archival and narrative sources, papal letters, and canon law commentaries. Stantchev's publications include Spiritual Rationality: Papal Embargo as Cultural Practice (2013) as well as nummerous book chapters and articles.

Stantchev applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (1381–1517), and shared the following:

Page 99 of Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (part of Chapter 3) continues a discussion—begun at the bottom of the preceding page—of how both contemporaries and modern historians have explained Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Drawing on my examination of the entire Venetian Senate record and major narrative sources, I give particular credit to historians whose insights I find especially astute. Michael Angold, for instance, rightly observed that despite centuries of rhetoric about the Ottoman threat, the West had never prepared for the city’s fall; he also noted, with equal accuracy, that the Venetians failed to treat the matter with urgency—an assessment my study corroborates. Similarly, I underscore Steven Runciman’s view that Mehmed was perceived as being under the influence of his peace-loving grand vezier, and Franz Babinger’s point that the sultan had acquired an undeserved reputation as an “incompetent boy.” At the same time, I argue on page 99 that scholarship suffers from a fundamental imbalance: whereas premodern observers often overstated the role of individual rulers, many modern historians have overcorrected. In their effort to avoid writing a “history of great men,” they have failed to grasp the decisive role that Mehmed II's leadership made in 1453, erroneously attributing his success chiefly to demographics or cannon fire.

Page 99 reflects one of my book’s two defining traits: a thorough re-assessment of major studies that gives credit where it is due while also revising specific arguments and, at times, entire explanatory frameworks. This is most evident in my engagement with Freddy Thiriet in the preceding Chapter 2: I embrace his method of a complete, personal examination of the material, but I also rebut and replace his account of Venetian expansionism in the early 15th century—a section that, appearing at the end of his book, is not its strongest. The same approach shapes my treatment of Franz Babinger (especially in Chapter 6 of my book). Babinger's work on Mehmed II oscillates between penetrating insights and wholesale misreadings of the Venetian record. Page 99 thus captures both my close engagement with individual contributions and my attention to broader historiographical trends. However, it does not reflect the book’s primary driving force: my own re-examination of the primary sources. It offers an accurate view of one of the two main dimensions of my work, but ultimately my own work with primary sources, which it does not capture, is even more important.

Leaving page 99 behind, if I were to distill the single most fundamental characteristic of my book, it is that it seeks to uncover the worldview and priorities of a specific group of people. My first book, Spiritual Rationality: Papal Embargo as Cultural Practice (2013), examined above all why popes and canonists persisted with embargoes—even when these measures rarely succeeded in halting trade. Similarly, Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea explores why the Venetian patriciate responded to the rising Ottoman power as it did during the decisive fifteenth century. In both cases, the conceptual foundation of my work lies in a fusion of the anthropologist’s question—“what are people up to?”—with the economist’s assumption that groups, however they frame or articulate their own actions, can fruitfully be analyzed as engaged in some form of maximization (though not necessarily of profit). For the patricians of Venice, that meant preserving oligarchic rule in an age of rising princely regimes across Italy and safeguarding their social and economic privileges at home.

Learn more about Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (1381–1517) at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Spiritual Rationality.

--Marshal Zeringue

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