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

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