Daniel K. Williams's "The Search for a Rational Faith"

Daniel K. Williams is a historian of American religion and politics who is currently an associate professor of history at Ashland University. Before moving to Ashland, he was a professor of history at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of several books on religion and politics in the United States, including God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right and Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro—Life Movement before Roe v. Wade. His articles on American Christianity and conservatism have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Christianity Today, and the Washington Post.

Williams applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity, with the following results:

If you flip The Search for a Rational Faith open to page 99, you will land in the middle of a chapter on Christian responses to eighteenth-century deists. One-third of the way down the page is the bold-print subheading “Charles Leslie’s Use of Historical Evidence.”

Leslie was an Anglican priest who wrote one of the most widely read refutations of deistic arguments against orthodox Christianity during the Enlightenment, but he is even more significant as a pioneer of the use of empirically based historical evidence to defend the trustworthiness of the biblical record. This became the foundation for an evidence-based Christian apologetic that is still popular in some circles today.

A reader encountering this material would get an accurate idea of my book, because The Search for a Rational Faith focuses on Christian apologists like Leslie – that is, people whose intellectual defenses of Christian faith were influential, but whose life stories and achievements have been largely forgotten.

Many people today have heard of the skeptical attacks on Christianity that came out of the Enlightenment – such as Spinoza’s historical criticism of the Bible, David Hume’s arguments against miracles, or Voltaire’s questions about God’s justice in a world of suffering – but they’re much less familiar with the responses from Enlightenment-influenced Christian intellectuals. My book analyzes those responses and demonstrates that on the whole, Enlightenment thinkers were actually more supportive of Christian faith than many have assumed. It makes this argument by examining a large number of thinkers like Leslie – that is, theologically orthodox Christians who used empirically based reason and historical or scientific examination to defend Christianity.

The Search for a Rational Faith provides a 400-year history of Christians’ intellectual defenses of the faith, first during the Enlightenment and then in the era of nineteenth-century Darwinism and twentieth-century philosophical challenges. While page 99 of the book cannot possibly cover the entire sweep of that history, it gives readers a clear idea of this theme. Leslie’s work “demonstrated the growing belief of many educated Anglicans that Christianity should be rational and provable, in the same way that any scientific principle was,” I say on page 99.

One of the central questions of this book is why so many Christians thought for so long that “Christianity should be rational and provable.” Page 99 doesn’t answer that question – but it might give readers enough of a hint to make them curious about the rest of the book.

Visit Daniel K. Williams's website.

The Page 99 Test: God's Own Party.

The Page 99 Test: Defenders of the Unborn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kent Lehnhof's "Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays"

Kent Lehnhof is Professor of English at Chapman University, where he has received the university's highest award for scholarship and its highest award for teaching. He has co-edited two essay collections, Of Levinas and Shakespeare (2018) and Shakespeare's Virtuous Theatre (2023), and has published two dozen articles and essays.

Lehnhof applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays, I discuss the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero in the context of Shakespeare's Pericles. This is highly representative, for my book aims to use these two philosophers to enhance our understanding of the ethical stakes of the Shakespearean drama. Why this pair of philosophers? Well, because they open exciting pathways by predicating their ethics on difference, rather than sameness.

Many ethical programs do the opposite. These other programs emphasize sameness, urging us to see the other as similar to ourselves and to treat them accordingly. This is the essence of precepts like "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995), however, felt that supposing the other to be same-as-the-self is not an ethical response but a reductive one. For him, ethics can only arise from a recognition that the other cannot be reduced to your mental constructs or categories. The other exceeds every thought you can think of them--and it is this radical otherness that commands your attention and makes you ethically responsible.

Adriana Cavarero (b.1947) agrees with Levinas and proposes, further, that the fundamental manifestation of the alterity of the other is the sound of their voice. Due to variations in pitch, timbre, cadence, tempo, intonation, and accent, each voice is distinctive. As a result, each voice communicates what Cavarero calls "the true, vital, and perceptible uniqueness of the one who emits it." And this expression of uniqueness, Cavarero insists, is independent of any linguistic meaning it might convey. According to Cavarero, the mere sound of the voice is sufficient. Every "vibrating throat of flesh" sounds an ethical summons prior to and apart from its verbal messaging.

I suggest that Shakespeare conceives of ethics, otherness, and voices in similar terms. Especially in his late plays, Shakespeare invests the sound of the voice with an intense ethical charge. My book, then, explores the power of speech in Shakespeare. Yet it differs from other studies of speech in Shakespeare by attending more to the sensuous and sonorous sound of the voice than to its semantic meaning and linguistic content. At the core of every chapter is the vibrating throat of flesh, communicating the alterity and uniqueness of its speaker. By attending to the ethical efficacy of the voice in Shakespeare's late plays, Voice and Ethics contends that Shakespeare concords with Cavarero that "the voice is always, irremediably relational … the voice is for the ear."

Learn more about Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michelle Pace's "Un-welcome to Denmark"

Michelle Pace is Professor in Global Studies based in Roskilde, Denmark.

Her new book is Un-welcome to Denmark: The paradigm shift and refugee integration.

Pace applied the “Page 99 Test” to Un-welcome to Denmark and reported the following:

Page 99 is the start of chapter 5 entitled "Tracing legislative intent in the Danish Aliens Act from 1983 to 2019."

Here is the text in whole:

5

Tracing legislative intent in the

Danish Aliens Act from 1983 to 2019

Introduction

[F]rom now on it must be clear that Denmark only accepts foreigners who adopt and respect Danish values, norms, and traditions, while all the others may well stay away. My approach is that when people choose to come to Denmark, and want to become citizens, it is of course because they want to become Danish, not because they want to change Denmark. In my view it is the multicultural that makes it all crack. Contrary to opposition parties, I do not see the great value in the multicultural society.

(Søren Pind, minister for refugees, immigrants, and integration, 2011)
(as quoted in Adamo, 2012: 2)

Throughout Denmark's recent history, immigration debates have changed quite drastically. From discussions on how best to ensure equal rights for guest workers during the 1960s and 1970s, to the anti-multiculturalism narratives outlined in the above quote from 2011 (see also Kivisto and Wahlbeck, 2013; Lægaard, 2013), immigration has undoubtedly contributed to various challenges for Danish policy-makers and society at large.

While political opinions may differ, to an extent, across the political spectrum and across various Danish communities, more recent debates have raised pertinent questions:

How many immigrants can the country absorb? Which kind of refugee is Denmark obliged to receive according to UN declarations? Should immigrants and refugees have access to education, health care, and the labor market, and if so, how soon? Is it better to 'assist' refugees and immigrants in distant 'safe zones' (so that they do not appear at the Danish border)? How about placing the unwanted immigrants on an isolated island to incentivize them to go back home? (Villadsen, 2021: 137)

Danish political parties all admit to the well-known fact that Denmark has one of the strictest immigration laws in Europe (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Scott Ford, 2022; Khalid and Mortensen, 2019; Kreichauf, 2020;

Page 99 will enable readers to get a strong sense of the core argument and conceptual framing of this book, but not a balanced sense of the whole work.

What page 99 communicates well, starting at Chapter 5, with the above Søren Pind quotation, immediately signals several central features of the book, namely that: Danish immigration and asylum policy is imbued with the language of 'values', 'identity', and 'cultural conformity'. This in and of itself aligns very well with my book’s title and core argument. Moreover, by framing this chapter as “Tracing legislative intent,” this page highlights the analytical approach of the book: the Aliens Act has been critically read and analysed in light of political ideology, discursive practices, and stated goals. Readers can therefore immediately understand that this book interrogates state power, integration rhetoric, and the challenges with/rejection of multiculturalism. The Danish case is also situated within a longer historical trajectory (1983– 2019), giving the book's analysis depth, continuity, and longitudinal weight. Browsers reading this page will thereby be able to conclude and appreciate that this is a serious, critical study of how Danish asylum and refugee law evolved into an exclusionary, assimilationist regime. This I believe is a fair description of the book’s intellectual project.

However, opening the book on page 99 would miss several important dimensions of the whole work, including its rich background, contextual and empirical groundwork. This contains a nuanced historical-social-policy-integration-methodological and conceptual analysis, none of which is visible here. A browser might therefore underestimate how evidence-driven the book is as well as its analytical scaffolding. Core concepts, definitions, and methodological choices developed earlier (e.g. how I define “integration,” “paradigm shift,” or “welcome/unwelcome”) are assumed rather than introduced. Browsers may also miss important nuances and/or inherent tensions. Beginning with a ministerial quote foregrounds ideology. Browsers may not appreciate how carefully I distinguish between rhetoric, law, implementation, and lived experiences of those targeted by state policies as well as those tasked with assisting and supporting them.

In conclusion, as a snapshot of the book’s core argument and stakes, page 99 does a very good job. As a representation of the book’s full scope, method, and evidence: it gives browsers a partial appreciation of the often-overlooked debate on racism and xenophobia in Denmark's immigration and integration policies, in particular in relation to the forensic investigation of the tensions, illogicalities and injustices in Denmark's racist, illiberal, exclusionary and assimilationist policies towards asylum-seekers and refugees.

Learn more about Un-welcome to Denmark at the Manchester University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Lieb's "Road to Nowhere"

Emily Lieb is an historian of U.S. cities, schools, and segregation. She has a PhD from Columbia and an AB from Brown, and she taught history and urban studies at Seattle University for more than 10 years. She is also a writer at Derfner & Sons.

Lieb applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, with the following results:

Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore is, as the subtitle says, a book about the power of a mid-20th–century highway map—not necessarily the highway itself—to wreck a city, and in particular a Black homeowners’ neighborhood in West Baltimore called Rosemont. So, it’s lucky that page 99 of the book is itself a map. It’s a page from a 1968 report from a group of city planners and engineers that shows just how much harm a proposed expressway route through Rosemont was set to cause: “bisection of residential area,” “isolation of housing by traffic,” the loss of nearly 1,000 homes and businesses.

(You can find the image, which comes from the Urban Design Concept Team’s Rosemont Area Studies(February 1968), at the University of Baltimore’s Baltimore Studies Archives here; the pages aren’t numbered but it’s page 11 of the PDF.)

It would be easy for any reader who flipped to this page of the book to see the damage the proposed expressway would do to Rosemont if policymakers ever built it. But they wouldn’t understand what led up to it, nor why the neighborhood’s story matters so much.

The story Road to Nowhere tells goes like this: Very deliberately, the people who had the power in Baltimore created a Black neighborhood in the early 1950s, robbed that Black neighborhood, labeled that Black neighborhood “blighted,” and then drew an expressway map to destroy it in the name of “renewing” it. That’s where the Urban Design Concept Team came in. By the late 1960s, people who did not live in Rosemont were starting to see the harm the highway would cause to the neighborhood and to the whole city. In the end, officials never built the road they wanted through Rosemont.

It's important to say that this was a good thing. But just not building the highway was not the answer, because the map itself had already caused so much harm. And then, instead of making amends, powerful people in Baltimore compounded the problem, targeting the neighborhood for exploitation once again.

So, as I write on page 11 of the book:

When officials in the 1970s looked around Rosemont, they saw what they called “deteriorated, neglected properties” and “a lack of interest or pride in the home and community.” In other words, they saw the “blight” they’d always expected to see. What they did not see were the consequences of their own actions. In the official version of events, policymakers had tried their best to “renew” Rosemont, but Rosemont would not be renewed. Thus [they wrote]: “We have spent a lot of money on a lot of blocks that have turned out to be unsalvageable.”

But as I say in the book, that’s a lie. “Turned out to be” is exactly the wrong way to explain what happened here. If Rosemont was unsalvageable, Baltimore had made it so.

Visit Emily Lieb's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lydia Murdoch's "What We Mourn"

Lydia Murdoch is Professor of History at Vassar College and the author of Daily Life of Victorian Women.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and shared the following:

From page 99:

The political context of the Indian Rebellion shaped how Britons grieved child death, and grief, in turn, ultimately served to strengthen British imperialism. Without access to communal British mourning rituals, including the witnessing of a child’s death and salvation, the preparation of the body, the funeral and burial service, and the marking of the grave for future visitation, survivors initially struggled to articulate and perform their grief. They pointed to their inability to mourn for children who died during war as a means to highlight the incongruity between an idealized childhood in safe, “British” domestic spaces and extreme wartime violence. These accounts suggested, in fact, that children should never have been present in such circumstances. The initial reports from Lucknow marked a “cultural trauma,” and like many mid-Victorian literary and historical representations of “the Mutiny,” they contained what Christopher Herbert identifies as a “sometimes dizzying rhetorical instability” and “incurable self-contradiction” about such fundamental questions as the excessiveness of British force, the law, race, and religion—contradictions ultimately overshadowed by repeated cries for vengeance and rising imperialist propaganda following the 1865 Jamaican Rebellion and late Victorian colonization of Africa. The swift reclamation of British grieving rituals beginning with the distribution of mourning attire as survivors made their way from Lucknow to Calcutta and the retelling of child wartime casualties as beautiful deaths surely allowed many survivors to express their sorrow more openly, providing them with comfort and solace. However, such nationalistic expressions of grief also left much unspoken and unremembered: the anguish of violent child death, the struggle for resources divided unequally among the besieged population, the awareness that Indian as well as British children were dying and that Britons were dependent on Indians for survival, and the utter loss of oneself that can come with grief for another (Bartrum’s sense that she was “stripped of all,” “empty & desolate”). . . The forms of national mourning and memory that eventually dominated public accounts reaffirmed the ties that bound all Britons along with the distinct subject positions that had been eroded during the conflict: military men and domestic women, British colonizers and Indian subjects, nurturing adults and innocent, protected children.

Page 99 is the conclusion to my third chapter, “‘Suppressed Grief’: Mourning the Death of British Children and the Memory of the 1857 Indian Rebellion.” The Page 99 Test works remarkably well as a reflection of my book’s argument and method. The chapter details British accounts of child death from shell fire, disease, and starvation at Lucknow, where civilians and troops remained under siege for several months during the colonial uprising against the British East India Company. Page 99 speaks to the underlying idea of the book that grieving enables us to rethink our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to others. Here, in the chapter conclusion, I summarize how British adults struggled to mourn the often violent deaths of children during the siege, and how, for some, the defamiliarization of mourning patterns corresponded with a questioning of self and nation. Ultimately, however, after the siege ended and Britain reclaimed violent military control of India, these unsettling deaths of children tended to be forgotten or rewritten as “beautiful deaths” and replaced with imperialist testimonies of British power.

While this chapter focuses on forms of forgotten or “suppressed” grief during the Indian Rebellion, the book’s other chapters take this argument in reverse to explore how a broad group of nineteenth-century reformers politicized their grief over child death. In response to child deaths that they increasingly understood as “premature” rather than divinely ordained, they expressed their grief in public to demand from the state a future with new political rights: freedom, citizenship, and suffrage, as well as the rights to leisure, housing, and medical care.

Learn more about What We Mourn at the the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuele Collu's "Into the Loop"

Samuele Collu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition, and reported the following:

I was kind of hoping the test would work when I went to page 99 of Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition. And… Yes! This page definitely captures something crucial about the book’s spirit, rhythm, and conceptual ambitions. Page 99 is more or less two thirds of the way into “Compulsive Repetitions,” which is the third and my favourite chapter of the book. The chapter explores, in a playfully obsessive tone, how repeated refrains, returns, and circular rituals sustain our affective attachments (in particular, compulsive attachments to romantic others but also to all sorts of dispositifs). The chapter is built around my own compulsive return to the final minutes of a filmed therapy session I observed, in which the couple in therapy decides to separate. The central idea of the chapter is to describe repetition in its (paradoxical) double affordance of thwarting psychic transformation as well as becoming the very medium through which psychic change becomes possible. In the chapter, I turn to anthropological theories of ritual as well as psychoanalysis to make this point.

At the very center of page 99 there is a short section that I loved writing and always makes me smile when I re-read it:

Some repetitions keep you exactly where you are; others could untether you from your own self. Compare binge-scrolling on TikTok for one hour to doing deep, intense, circular breathing for one hour. Both repetitions can get you high, but the kite will fly across different skies.

The idea here is, to put it simply, that repetition is the pulsing beat of psychic rituals, and that it can have radically different impacts on our lives depending on the types of cosmologies you get “wired into.” Repetition has the capacity to promote affective states of openness or to reinforce the boundaries of our own psychic patterns. Page 99 also explains this process, moving into quick conversations about ego dissolution, the subjectifying role of dispositifs, as well as my own reading of the Freudian death drive, which I provisionally describe here as a force that pushes against psychic transformation—and the infinite motions of becoming. This chapter captures the type of book I was trying to write, at least aspirationally. Sometimes it lands; sometimes, a little bit less.

Learn more about Into the Loop at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Carney's "My Father's List"

A writer and magazine copy editor in New York, Laura Carney has been published by the Washington Post, the Associated Press, The Hill, Runner’s World, Good Housekeeping, The Fix, Upworthy, Maria Shriver’s The Sunday Paper, and other places. She has worked as a copy editor in national magazines—primarily women’s—for twenty years, including Vanity Fair, GQ, People, and Good Housekeeping.

Carney applied the "Page 99 Test" to My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free, her first book, with the following results:

As much as I hoped to be the exception to the rule, I was shocked to open my book, My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free, to page 99 and find that it meets the criteria:

"What?" I wrote back. He sent me a GIF from Point Break of Keanu Reeves saying this to Patrick Swayze, just before he rides a wave likely to kill him. "I thought you watched it?" Dave said.

I looked up the phrase.

It means "go with God."

This scene took place in my first year of checking off my late father's bucket list. I had just successfully checked off "surf in the Pacific Ocean," and had plopped on Venice Beach, exhausted. I texted my brother the good news. On page 98, I shared the phrase he responded with in his text back "Vaya con dias."

Why I think this sums up my entire book:

My brother was the one to find my dad's list. He intuited that he should give it to me. He'd had it in a box for 13 years, since our dad was killed by a distracted driver. We were both young when this happened. A central conflict for me as I checked off my dad's list was whether I was doing the right thing. These were his dreams, not mine. Was it wrong that I was receiving lessons meant for him? What if I ended up unstable financially or in my career as my father often seemed to be to my teenage eyes? As I watched my status change—one I'd been attached to previously, as my job at a national women's magazine struck me as important—I often found myself studying my peers, my friends, cousins, stepbrothers and brother. I worried that I was falling behind. That they were acting like typical 40-somethings while I had regressed to age 25.

Earlier in this chapter, I describe meeting President Jimmy Carter (another list item) and listening to his Sunday school lesson, which encompassed the principles of Phillippians 2:13: "...for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." I don't give the actual Bible verse in the book, but it's an odd coincidence that just two days before hearing that Sunday school lesson, I climbed Stone Mountain with my husband, reciting my favorite Bible verse towards the top (Phillippians 3:14): "I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." Both passages emphasize the very thing my brother says at the end of that chapter: "go with God."

He was saying it somewhat facetiously, because he's funny. When Keanu Reeves says that to Patrick Swayze in Point Break, he's saying goodbye, because there is no way Patrick Swayze will survive the wave he's about to surf. But at the same time, Reeves's character respects Swayze's chutzpah. Is life worth living if you're not doing what you love? That's a question Swayze often asks in the movie.

The word 'goodbye' itself stems from the phrase "God be with you." And what is My Father's List if not a book about how to say goodbye? It's by recognizing that our loved ones continue to travel with us. Jimmy Carter said so. Keanu Reeves, too. And in that moment on page 99, so did my brother. The main blessing I needed to continue on.

Visit Laura Carney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eran Shalev's "The Star-Spangled Republic"

Eran Shalev is Professor of History at Haifa University and the author of Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic, and American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation, and shared the following:

Page 99 describes a common but now largely forgotten way in which early Americans represented the American Union: America and its republican governmental structures as a political sun. The page demonstrates how, from the founding of the United States through the Civil War, Americans across the country repeatedly employed astronomical language to conceptualize the federal system in solar terms. Drawing on metaphors that had developed within a European monarchical culture of “sun kings,” this imagery was reborn and refitted in the United States to serve a democratic and republican political culture. Page 99 offers several examples of how early Americans described the federal government as a sun sustaining “a whole planetary system” of states, or as occupying “the same relation towards the States that the sun does towards the solar system—that is, the centre of gravitation.”

The page provides a vivid illustration of the solar image as a mode of explaining the federal system, one of the central forms of imagery that the book uncovers and unpacks. At the same time, it necessarily offers only a partial view of what the book terms political astronomy. Other major components of this conceptual language are not present on this page, including, for example, the constellational mode of understanding relations among the states. Page 99 thus does not capture the full argument, but it does serve as an effective entry point and a useful test case for grasping how astronomical metaphors structured early American political thought.

While page 99 conveys one of the most prominent manifestations of political astronomy, the notion of the Union, the Constitution, or the federal government as suns that hold the political nation together, it does not present the full range of the rich astronomical language in circulation. An alternative and sometimes overlapping and even competing vision was constellational rather than solar: an understanding of the United States as composed not of a single dominant sun but of many stars, equal and harmoniously arranged. This imagery was particularly well suited to expressing the federal nature of the Union and the equality of the states. It also informed the choice of stars to spangle the American flag, a decision that cannot be fully understood without reference to political astronomy. The book further recovers the meaning of other culturally prevalent but little- examined practices, such as calling celebrities “stars” or describing them as “meteors.” To grasp the full richness of this language, one must recover the experience of the dark, star-filled skies of pre-industrial societies, in which astronomical metaphors carried an immediacy and explanatory power that has since faded.

Learn more about The Star-Spangled Republic at the University of Virginia Press website.

The Page 99 Test: American Zion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew K. Scherer's "As the Gods Kill"

Andrew K. Scherer is Pierre & Patricia Bikai Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology & the Ancient World, and Director of Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World at Brown University. He is the author of Mortuary Landscapes of the Ancient Maya and coeditor of Substance of the Ancient Maya and Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice.

Scherer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, As the Gods Kill: Morality and Social Violence among the Precolonial Maya, and reported the following:

Page 99 jumps in the middle of an important component of the book: – a discussion of how precolonial Maya fighting forces were organized. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this one-page glimpse misses the broader breadth and depth of the book, including its central aim: to think through the interplay between violence and morality. On page 99, I draw largely on early Spanish colonial sources from the 16th century AD to show that the Maya of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico amassed increasingly large armies following each expedition, relying on ever-wider political alliances to resist the earliest of Spanish incursions. The point being that Maya armies were potentially large and likely comprised of large swathes of the adult male population, as needed. While the evidence for military organization for precolonial times is more opaque, I do draw comparisons between some of the military titles employed at the time of the conquest and those that we see written in Classic period texts of the seventh and eighth centuries AD to suggest some parallels. At the very end of the page, I note that women were probably not involved in war as trained combatants, but likely were participants in ritual violence. Beyond page 99, I highlight how the use of some of these military titles provides a glimpse into the broader morality of killing at war and in ritual violence among the precolonial Maya, including the ambivalence felt towards some killers.

Learn more about As the Gods Kill at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Baring's "Vulgar Marxism"

Edward Baring is professor of history and human values at Princeton University. He is the author of Converts to the Real and The Young Derrida.

Baring applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931, with the following results:

Page 99 of Vulgar Marxism takes us to the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács and more particularly to my reading of his famous argument that “orthodox Marxism” can be found not in any of Marx’s “conclusions” but rather in his “method,” an argument he directs against the “vulgar Marxists.”

The page offers a pretty good example of my central claim. In the book I argue that, though many of the most prominent Marxist theorists of the twentieth century—like Antonio Gramsci, José Carlos Mariátegui, Karl Korsch, as well as Lukács—are normally read as esoteric intellectuals hawking a sophisticated theory accessible only to the university-educated, they were actually deeply involved in the institutions and practices of mass worker education, and their work takes on new meanings if we take this into account. In the first two chapters, I detail the most prominent model of worker education at the time, which was articulated by the German Marxist Karl Kautsky. He argued that under the conditions of capitalism, the party’s educational apparatus (schools, textbooks, lecture series, reading circles etc.) could only hope to transmit Marx’s “conclusions” to the workers and not his “method.” In redefining “orthodox Marxism” as method first and foremost, Lukács was suggesting that Kautsky had got it back to front. If the workers learnt Marx’s conclusions (especially about the impending collapse of capitalism) without the method, they might think that the revolution would happen all by itself, and then they would fail to do their part. Only by understanding Marx’s method would they realize that the power to change the course of history lay in their hands. Of course, this raised the question of how exactly the Communist Party should go about teaching Marx’s method (which is notoriously difficult) to millions of workers, especially given its limited resources. Over the rest of the chapter, I follow Lukács’s attempt to answer this question and show how it shaped his developing politics.

Learn more about Vulgar Marxism at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susannah Wilson's "A Most Quiet Murder"

Susannah Wilson is a Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick. She focuses on French cultural history from the fin de siècle to the mid-twentieth century, with an emphasis on women's lives, pathology, criminality, and drug cultures. Wilson is the author of Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book is the opening page of Chapter 5 entitled ‘The Trial’. It is the last chapter before my conclusion, ‘Afterlives’.

This chapter’s opening immediately places the reader inside a historical true‑crime narrative. Opening with a trial in Dijon in 1883, it tells us that the book deals with a violent crime and its legal consequences. Even without prior context, a reader would understand that they are reading a story inflected by law, justice, and the societal reverberations of a mysterious death, a murder for which two people are standing trial.

The page also shows that the book is as much about people and surrounding society as it is about the crime itself. The detailed portraits of legal advocates Étienne Metman and Paul Cunisset reveal key facts about the personalities and social positions of those involved. Their backgrounds, beliefs, and later achievements suggest that the legal world of provincial France is not just part of the mise-en-scene, but at the foreground of the story.

Although it reveals quite a lot, the page does not uncover all the elements that are to be found at the emotional or thematic heart of the book. It misses the centrality of womanhood, female suffering, and the broader social a medico-legal meaning of the crime. The reader does know that the case centres on a woman accused of abducting and killing a child, nor that the narrative explores the fragility and vulnerability of women’s and children’s lives in the 1880s. The eventual acquittal of Pierre Fiquet and the moral complexity it introduces also remain hidden.

Because of this, the Page 99 Test is only partially successful for my book. It offers a compelling moment, a clear sense of genre, and a strong historical tone, all of which could entice a reader to continue, or to flip back to find out the details of the story as it unfolds in the early chapters of the book. It mirrors the book’s prevailing tone, which keeps the reader engaged through its emphasis on human experience. But it withholds many of the deeper themes, strange mysteries, and dark places of human motivation that give the book its full power.

Learn more about A Most Quiet Murder at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Diamond's "Governing the Excluded"

Alex Diamond is assistant professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory, and reported the following:

A reader who opened Governing the Excluded to page 99 would find herself transported to a government meeting in Briceño, a small village in the mountains of Colombia. The meeting centers on a crop substitution program, negotiated as part of a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, that promised to provide farmers with goods to replace their coca (the plant that’s used to make cocaine) with legal crops:

In a July 2019 public meeting in Briceño to evaluate two years of the substitution program, I get my first in-person look at the new Duque-installed national director of the substitution program, Hernando Londoño. Eduardo is one local leader chosen to speak on behalf of the community. “Our whole economy was illicit,” he says. “And when you were telling us to pull out our coca, you promised productive projects in the first year. But now you’re telling us to wait. We don’t have resources to buy fertilizer, there’s no economy, there’s no work for the youth. So when will the projects arrive?”

After listening to more than an hour of complaints about state incumplimiento [broken promises], Londoño responds… “Briceño received $14 million in little over a year. But you’re saying the economy stopped because coca ended. Of course.” His voice drips with sarcasm. “But you should know there are no other municipalities in Colombia that have received this level of investment. And their economies haven’t been destroyed. With this reflection, you realize that you are privileged.... You need a change in attitude. A change in mentality. We need a substitution of people who are dedicated to licit crops.”

Beginning with this vignette would give the reader a reasonably good idea of the rest of the book, as well as the value of its ethnographic approach. By ethnography, what I mean is that while this is a book about drug economies, a landmark peace process, and capitalist development, its analysis is rooted in the stories I tell about the lives of Briceño’s farmers, stories I witnessed and collected over three years total of living in the village. This lets me show how for Eduardo (a pseudonym), growing coca lifted his family out of poverty—but also exposed them to terrible levels of violence. It shows how, in voluntarily pulling out their coca and joining the substitution program, he and his neighbors put their faith in the state, providing the basis for state authority to take hold in an area that had long been under guerrilla control. But it also shows the tremendous frustrations produced in local engagements with the state, which not only failed to deliver promised resources, but shifted blame to the farmers themselves. And finally, putting local experiences in historical context allows me to show how they speak to broader shifts: the changes in rural economies that explain why smallholding farmers like Eduardo across the world cannot simply make a living by growing legal crops without turning for help to armed groups or the state.

Visit Alex Diamond's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Hlavacik's "Willing Warriors"

Mark Hlavacik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism and Texas A&M University.

He studies controversies about education and education about controversies using historical, rhetorical, and qualitative research methods.

Hlavacik applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars, with the following results:

Page 99 of Willing Warriors contains some exposition about how the Common Core State Standards were developed to address the shortcomings of the standardized testing regime imposed under No Child Left Behind. It is important information for understanding that chapter, but not the most thrilling page in my book. So, in lieu of page 99, I’d like to suggest a few other pages that will give prospective readers a better sense of what’s in my book.

Page 2 tells the story of a suburban man who tried to ban an erotic thriller from a school library. It turned out that the library did not have the book, which made his decision to read a sexually explicit passage from it aloud at a schoolboard meeting kind of awkward.

Page 22 recounts the gruesome details of a hunting documentary that was shown to 10-year-olds, including the successful spearing, drowning, and dismemberment of a mother caribou and her calf.

Page 58 begins an analysis of Allan Bloom’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1988. The episode was titled “How Dumb Are We?” and rather than Pontiac G6 sedans, the studio audience was given the opportunity to answer for their ignorance of basic history and science on national television.

Page 75 includes excerpts from a memo written by a research assistant who was working for the Chair of the NEH, Lynne Cheney. The RA had been attending academic conferences and reporting what she saw to Cheney. At the College Art Association’s annual convention in 1992, she saw 15ft projection of “women’s genitalia” which had been “lifted from porn magazines.”

On page 114, David Barton worries aloud on The Glenn Beck Program that the Common Core will make cursive “a language as foreign to students as hieroglyphics.” Cursive is not a language.

Finally, on page 158, you get to find out what happened to the guy from page 2.

Visit Mark Hlavacik's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ronald Angelo Johnson's "Entangled Alliances"

Ronald Angelo Johnson holds the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History at Baylor University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution, and shared the following:

When opening to page 99, the reader enters the book mid-sentence, encountering a discussion of the petition from Felix. “…the cruelties of enslavement and white supremacist attitudes. He then summarized the condition of Black life plainly: “We have no Property. We have no Wives. No Children. We have no City. No Country.” In 1773, Felix, a Black Bostonian, like White American rebels in that day, submitted his grievances in writing to Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson and the House of Representatives. Felix’s call for the end of slavery during the American Revolution represents the first public, Black-authored antislavery petition to the Massachusetts legislature—and perhaps the first in American history.

A reader opening to page 99 gets a good sense of the book. There, the reader engages themes discussed throughout the book. Some are Black and White American patriots, the importance of early newspapers, the power of citizens in an American democracy to critique government leaders, the search for justice in courts, and the US’s interconnectedness with people across the world.

One sentence captures an important theme: “The revolutionary period created a sense of optimism that Felix exhibited in his petition.” The American Revolution did not solve the problems in the United States. The revolutionary moment gave people hope that problems could be solved. The sharing of news about liberties being won across the Atlantic world encouraged prominent White American men to push for independence, White American women to advocate for greater rights, free Black people to seek enfranchisement, and enslaved Africans to demand freedom.

An important part of the book is absent on page 99. This book illuminates the strong ties between the US and the French Caribbean colony Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) during the American Revolution. It would be a shame for readers to miss narratives about the Dominguan rebel Jacques Delaunay, the justice seeker Marie-Jeanne Carenan, and the future Haitian Revolution leader Toussaint Louverture.

Another sentence is instructive: “Felix submitted his petition in the hope that enslaved people could join their white neighbors in the enjoyment of articulated rights for all humankind.” The American Revolution stoked the desire for freedom and equality that lived within the hearts of Atlantic world inhabitants. In 2026, the year the US celebrates its 250th anniversary, the desire for freedom and equality lives on. That never-ending search is the inheritance—from the Founding Generation—to all citizens and immigrants who love, labor, and sacrifice to help the United States live up to the truly revolutionary ideal “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

Learn more about Entangled Alliances at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Derby's "Bêtes Noires"

Lauren Derby is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo and coeditor of The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics.

Derby applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, and reported the following:

Page 99 showcases one of the central questions of Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands – why animals figure so prominently in the popular culture and religion of Hispaniola which I explain through the prominence of hunting and extensive cattle ranching in the island’s history. Contraband sales of cattle peaked in the late eighteenth century as Dominican cattle and oxen were sold to the neighboring colony of Saint Domingue when it became the largest sugar producer of the French Atlantic since the sugar mills were driven by oxen. Due to the vast expanse of feral herds formed over centuries of pigs and cattle originally brought by Columbus as seed animals, the Dominican Republic developed a vibrant hunting culture. Hunting has not been explored much for Caribbean history but it was an important feature of Dominican everyday life and one that enabled these peasants the luxury of remaining outside of slavery and sugar plantation labor while it continued into the late nineteenth century in neighboring Cuba and Puerto Rico. Dominican hunting skills also shaped the army since troops were not provisioned as they were in Cuba, a detail also noted on that page. Hunting and extensive ranching has left its mark on popular culture from animal nicknaming practices to horned carnival costumes and most importantly storytelling about spirit demons in animal form. The fact that the animals from the Columbian exchange have become spirit demons I argue is a material manifestation of what Dominicans call the fukú de Colón – the curse of Columbus – and represent trauma since these animals were used to dispossess the indigenous population and were terrifying since the largest animal on the island had been a hutia – a large rodent - before the massive horses and cows and the violent boars and slave catching canines arrived.

Learn more about Bêtes Noires at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek J. Thiess's "American Fantastic"

Derek J. Thiess is an associate professor of English at the University of North Georgia. He is the author of Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction; Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach; and Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography.

Thiess applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, American Fantastic: Myths of Violence and Redemption, with the following results:

This is the last page of chapter 3, which is an analysis of the John Henry legend, especially as it appears in popular culture. As such it contains some final thoughts about a short story by Balogun Ojetade from 2012 titled “Rite of Passage: Blood and Iron.” The culmination of this analysis notes how this story invests “Henry with a violent agency that both activates the spirit of the legendary forms and flies in the face of the critics of redemptive violence that would reduce that violence to futile resignation.” It then nods towards a prior chapter (and a prior book of mine) discussing violence in sport, putting Ojetade’s text in a martial and sporting context. The text notes that the “relationship between sport and violence” indicates how “denouncing redemptive violence in this case would directly mean Henry’s accepting the status quo. It would mean openly accepting the violent historical context that the historian makes central in their work on Henry.” This paragraph also notes that Ojetade’s story and the other fantastical reinterpretations considered in the chapter highlight “the importance of taking seriously the ‘recycling’ of the folktale.”

The last paragraph is transitional, looking forward to the next chapter, which takes up the legendary figure of Blackbeard, noting that at this point the book is “transition[ing] us to a more overt entanglement of colonialism, religion, and capitalism.” However, it also underscores that “there is a tendency in the work of criticism to emphasize certain violences...over the potential of resistant violences and to co-opt such legends as John Henry within existing Christian mythic traditions.” A co-opting that will be even more overt in the coming chapters.

Because this page is signposting between two (of my favorite!) chapters it actually does a good job of highlighting most of the central concerns of the book. The random browser may, however, feel a little lost as the “Myth of Redemptive Violence” is not elaborated upon on this page—it’s an idea first developed in Religious Studies by Walter Wink, but that has become popular throughout historical and social scientific work. The general idea is that violence has become a kind of mythic (as myths are stories that authorize belief) focus of our society and has supplanted traditional religious, Christian, morality. The longer arc of the book demonstrates how this notion is revisionist, overtly working against Richard Slotkin’s germinal work on regeneration through violence, in order to carefully hold Christianity apart from its historical role (whether directly or apologetically) in those very violences. The central thesis of this book, then—that attempts to erase violence from our society often betrays a continued pacification strategy, via religious myth, to obscure religion’s role in colonial violence. This thesis is expressed in this chapter both in how Henry is uncritically recorded in the historical record as a quasi-biblical figure (i.e. Samson) and in how the wholesale denial of (systemic) violence obscures the potential for violent resistance in the various versions of Henry’s story.

Noting those various versions also does a decent job of explaining the methodology of the book, which is a comparative approach between folkloristic and fictional forms (“recycling” is a nod to Frank de Caro’s Folklore Recycled). This approach is heavily theorized in the introduction, so lacking that context, the browser will intuit this method, but perhaps still wonder why. Furthermore, they may be turned off by what is clearly an etic approach to the topic (as an early reviewer was). Yet again in the framework of the book, this is addressed as rather necessary to avoid criticism’s continued contribution to Christian supremacy via insider apologetics.

Visit Derek J. Thiess's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fabricio Tocco's "Precarious Secrets"

Fabricio Tocco is an assistant professor at the School of Literature, Languages & Linguistics at the Australian National University and author of the prize winning Latin American Detectives against Power: Individualism, the State, and Failure in Crime Fiction.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford’s test works remarkably well for Precarious Secrets. A glimpse of page 99 would offer a browser a very accurate idea of what the book is about. It features a scene analysis of one of the most significant Latin American political thrillers ever made: Jorge Fons’ Rojo amanecer (Red Dawn), a Mexican film made in the late 1980s. The thriller, a unique portrayal of the Tlatelolco Massacre held in Mexico City in 1968, is a paradigmatic case study of the theories that I develop throughout the book: it serves as a central example to explore how Latin American filmmakers have used precarity in favor of storytelling. I understand “precarity” in a very broad way. From the most obvious point of view, there’s the financial constraints, as Fons operated with a very tight budget. As a result, the film was shot indoors almost in its entirety. From a less evident perspective, I examine how precarity informs political censorship, too. The polysemic nature of precarity paves the way for discussions on filmmaking choices regarding sound and offscreen techniques, but also around interiority and exteriority, fiction and archive, affect and infrapolitics, motherhood and gender, as well as the invasion of the political in the personal, all explored in page 99.

This page includes a review of what important critics such as Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Samuel Steimberg, and Jorge Majfud have previously written about Rojo amanecer. I build on their arguments to go beyond them, offering a new reading of the film. Much like in the rest of the book, I engage in this page with a central concept I coined to study political thrillers: the “grammar of secrecy,” a category defined in the introduction as “a particular way of thinking about secrets, utilizing prepositions of space, such as ‘under’ and ‘above’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘behind’ and ‘in front of.’” This concept sheds light to the understudied ties between secrecy and space: if secrets are always stored somewhere, it is through this grammar and its prepositions that political thrillers hide and eventually showcase secrets. In page 99, the secret in question has to do with state-sponsored violence, a key theme that obsessively reappears in Latin American renditions of the genre.

Learn more about Precarious Secrets at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Esther Eidinow's "Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth"

Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol; she has also taught at Newman University and Nottingham University. Her research explores ancient Greek culture, especially ancient religion, magic, ritual, and belief, drawing on theories from different disciplines, including anthropology and cognitive science, and she has published widely on these topics and their intersections with the history of emotions, gender, women's histories, and environmental humanities. Her latest project, funded by the AHRC, co-created (with teachers) is an accessible virtual reality experience of visiting the ancient Greek oracle of Zeus at Dodona in the fifth century BCE, for use in classrooms.

Eidinow applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth, and shared the following:

On page 99, the reader plunges into the chapter headed ‘Air’, that is, myths of metamorphosis that culminate in the body of a man or woman changing into a form related to this element. The three other chapters in the book cover myths that describe metamorphoses related to 'Earth', 'Fire', and 'Water'.

The page opens with reflection on different versions of the Greek myth of Prokne and Philomela: in the canonical version, they are sisters who have suffered terribly at the hands of Tereus, Prokne’s husband. Before they flee him, the sisters kill Itys, Prokne’s son by Tereus, cook him, and serve him to Tereus as a meal. At this point, the gods turn Prokne into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow, and Tereus into a hoopoe. This is just one version of the myth, but as page 99 elaborates, myth is both mutable and unchanging. Even the very different versions by other ancient writers maintain the key narrative thread of the rape of a sister and the killing and cannibalism of a son.

The discussion then turns to an overview of the other stories of transformations into birds studied in this chapter—and how they depict men and women in the most extreme of situations, removed from human society. Many of these stories portray the breakdown of family order; and one argument suggests that metamorphosis is prompted by the need to exclude from a community those who have committed dreadful crimes, lest they bring down the anger of the gods.

Alongside that perspective, page 99 offers another way of reading these myths—that is, that they relate metamorphosis to the experience of intense and unbearable emotions. This chapter highlights the emotions of grief, pride, excessive and misplaced desire, and the trauma of fear and anger provoked by sexual assault.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book: page 99 includes a number of its key themes, including the nature of myths and myth-telling and how myths of metamorphosis reinforce cultural conventions and religious beliefs. But, above all, page 99 incorporates the book’s main argument—that myths of metamorphosis evoke human experiences of extreme emotion or trauma, which we now discuss in medicalised terms as fight or flight, freeze, faint and flop.

In this book, I suggest that ancient Greek men and women also experienced these physiological responses, but since they lacked our medical knowledge, they evoked these experiences through stories about bodies literally changing. For example, in the chapter ‘Air’, rather than depicting a traumatic ‘faint’ response, or describing an experience of dissociation, these stories portray men and women falling, and/or turning into birds, being snatched by winds and/or changing into stars.

As the rest of the book argues, in the ancient Greek mind, transformations like this made a sort of sense. Ancient Greek philosophical and scientific writings suggest that the elements, air, earth, fire and water, were understood to be the building blocks of everything—including humans. In ancient stories of metamorphosis, the human body’s elements are forced into another form, in moments of extreme and violent emotion; they become part of the surrounding landscape. Both men and women undergo these changes, but it is women who are the primary protagonists, deeply vulnerable both to the violence of gods and men; and to profound emotions, especially grief.

The book’s other chapters explore the mythic relationship of emotions and elements. We have all at some point talked about being so frightened that we are rooted to the spot, or turned to stone with fear. We might now understand this as a traumatic ‘freeze’ response, but in the stories described in the chapter ‘Earth’, men and women literally turn into stone, or are rooted in the earth as plants or trees. Stories in the chapter ‘Fire’ describe the power of rage at secrets revealed. Finally, the stories explored in the chapter ‘Water’ evoke the ceaseless flow of traumatic memory, and a repeating story pattern of violent separation, change and rebirth.

These myths of metamorphosis are specific to the ancient contexts in which they were told and heard, but they can also, I argue, offer insights into embodied experiences that are shared across cultures, including our own.

Learn more about Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Burstein's "Being Thomas Jefferson"

Andrew Burstein recently retired as the Charles P. Manship Professor of History at Louisiana State University. He is the author of The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Jefferson's Secrets, and several other books on early American politics and culture. He is the coauthor (with Nancy Isenberg) of Madison and Jefferson and The Problem of Democracy. Burstein’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Salon.com He advised Ken Burns’ production “Thomas Jefferson,” and was featured on C-SPAN’s American Presidents Series and Booknotes, and numerous NPR programs. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Burstein applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, with the following results:

On page 99, as he is preparing his draft of the Declaration of Independence in June 1776, Jefferson is thinking of his text as a divorce petition, casting King George III as an abusive husband:

The divorce analogy makes sense for a number of reasons. In 1772, at the high point of his career as a practicing attorney, Jefferson took extensive notes in preparing the case of a client who wished to divorce his wife. At the time it was virtually unheard of for a husband or wife to succeed in a divorce suit as we understand it, even in cases of adultery.

The rest of page 99 details attorney Jefferson’s objective in the 1772 suit, demonstrating his familiarity with legal precedent, while at the same time protecting the reputation of his client, a recently deceased physician who left no will, and whose wife had “refused his conjugal rights,” yet demanded the bulk of his estate.

It happens that the content on page 99 is a tempting snippet of the book’s themes. As “intimate history,” it speaks to Jefferson’s willingness to acknowledge the centrality of male-female relations in all facets of life. I can say that the Page 99 Test works for my book, both because it engages directly with my interpretation of the most celebrated piece of writing in American history, and it comports nicely with the book’s humanization of a historical figure whose loves and losses shaped the kind of politician he became. The two main threads I follow in this biography are fame and vulnerability, which are at the very least hinted at on page 99.

Learn more about Being Thomas Jefferson at the Bloomsbury website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina Schwenkel's "Sonic Socialism"

Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi the reader encounters a discussion of social distancing not merely as a public health measure, but as an ethical gesture— a public expression of care that shaped how people interacted with one another within reconfigured sensory environments. Marking the beginning of Act 3, this page explores the careful calibration of the relationship between “safe” distance and proximity, particularly through heightened attention to the sonic dimensions of epidemiological risk. It outlines how listening itself changed, as people attuned more deeply to coughs and sneezes that provoked new registers of anxiety, transforming connections to both the urban environment and the bodies moving through it.

This discussion emerges at a pivotal transition in the book. The chapter shifts from the end of a three-week lockdown in Hanoi (Act 2) to a different form of pandemic governance, from enforced isolation to cautious social reintegration with an emphasis on spatial distancing, as it was called in Vietnam. This also marked a reopening of the domestic economy following containment of the virus by April 2020, while much of the world remained closed. Page 99 examines how this shift in governance materialized in daily life, transforming everyday sensory experience through both spatial and sonic interventions. For example, outside commercial establishments, material markings on the ground designated two-meter distances (“stand here”), while bullhorns provided auditory reminders to keep apart. People also created their own protective boundaries to mitigate the risk of viral transmission. Market vendors—particularly women—used tape to cordon off their stalls to ensure customers transacted from a safe distance. Though a photograph of this practice originally appeared on page 99, I removed it when the tape proved too faint to see clearly.

Page 99 thus captures a particular moment in pandemic time when anxieties about viral transmission in Hanoi ran high. A COVID poem featured here reflects concerns about cross-contamination, as well as the dread of being publicly identified through contact tracing in the press. This vigilance would soon wane, however. Later in Act 3, with no reported contagion, people began to lose their fear and test the boundaries of state control. In this way, page 99 marks a specific point in the acoustic and affective rhythms at the heart of this sensory autoethnography, as they ebbed and flowed across 2020.

Visit Christina Schwenkel's website.

The Page 99 Test: The American War in Contemporary Vietnam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeff Roche's "The Conservative Frontier"

Jeff Roche is a professor of American history at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. He is the author and editor of several books and essays on American politics and the conservative movement, including Restructured Resistance, The Conservative Sixties, and The Political Culture of the New West.

Roche applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right, and shared the following:

Page 99 is early in the book’s fifth chapter in a section that describes the conflict over prohibition in Amarillo Texas in 1907. The brutal murder of a young man in the Bowery (the city’s Red Light District) had created an uproar and a demand among citizens that the city prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol. On one side were a group of people we would now call social conservatives, who believed that eliminating liquor was not just a step in creating a more righteous community, but also a signal that the city had emerged from its rough and tumble frontier phase to become a modern and moral city. On the other side were folks who we would recognize as more libertarian, who did not believe nor support any efforts to legislate morality. It also describes the violent corruption that surrounded the election to go “dry” and begins the tale of the bloody chaos of an Amarillo that was dry in name only, a time when local police and Texas Rangers fought each other in the streets and a local deputy assassinated a Ranger at the city courthouse.

Page 99 is possibly as good an indicator of the tone and style of the book as any other random page I suppose. It demonstrates the kinds of political conflicts that serve as the foundation of the book’s narrative structure and central premise – that it was local struggles over national issues that helped mold West Texas’s cowboy conservatism. It also describes an ongoing ideological conflict between the live-and-let-live libertarianism of a cattle culture and the demands for civic conformity of a small-town elite determined to see their communities grow.

The book itself covers roughly a century of West Texas history as it explains how the region became the most conservative and the most reliably Republican section of the United States. The story unfolds across dozens of vignettes (like the conflict over prohibition in turn of the century Amarillo) organized in shortish chapters written in an accessible style. The first third of the book describes the politics, culture, and economy of what I call the Agricultural Wonderland, a modern, forward-looking society, based on commercial family farming and designed as an alternative to a rapidly changing America. A place literally advertised as a white, Christian homeland on the Texas prairies. The second part of the book traces the origins of the modern Texas right-wing as it moved from a broadly conceived pro-business and anti-labor lobby to a paranoid and conspiratorially minded movement whose members believed that communists were secretly plotting to brainwash American children through subtle messaging in schoolbooks. The last third of the book describes and explains how the far-right took control of the Texas Republican Party over the course of the 1960s and turned it into a vehicle for the expression of their ideology, a project that was all but complete when the book ends with Ronald Reagan sweeping the Texas Republican Primary in 1976.

Visit Jeff Roche's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Flannery Burke's "Back East"

Flannery Burke is associate professor of American studies at Saint Louis University. She is author of A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century and From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's.

Burke applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region, with the following results:

Page 99 appears in the center section of Back East and reveals a mainstream opinion of the eastern United States held by many westerners in the twentieth century. The page begins with a complete sentence: “As it had in ‘The Plundered Province,’ Wall Street, once again, played the role of the East.” The author of the article “The Plundered Province” was Bernard DeVoto, a writer for Harper’s Magazine, a Harvard graduate, and an ardent conservationist originally from Ogden, Utah. In “The Plundered Province” and again in later articles referenced on page 99, DeVoto excoriated eastern corporations who extracted natural resources and labor from the American West and westerners who accepted and even encouraged such economic exploitation. As a westerner who had succeeded in the East, DeVoto considered himself an expert on both regions. As I write on page 99, DeVoto identified himself in the eastern press as a man who was “informed by a western sensibility but understood eastern culture.”

A browser who opened Back East to page 99 would receive an excellent introduction to the book’s primary themes. The book addresses how westerners imagined the eastern United States in the twentieth century, and DeVoto, as one of the most prolific and authoritative writers on the American West in the American East, well encapsulates the ways in which westerners both accepted and countered eastern expectations in their presentations of their home region. That these expectations influenced the material lives of westerners as much as it did their cultural and intellectual ones – from mining to forestry, ranching, farming, and tourism – is an important finding of the book and one foreshadowed by DeVoto’s articles of the 1930s and 1940s.

Page 99 also well reflects the structure of Back East, which is divided into three parts. Parts 1 and 3 explore western views of the American East from the margins of American culture. Part 1 addresses midwestern presentations of the East that non-midwesterners frequently overlooked or overshadowed while demonstrating that Chicago appeared as both a western and an eastern city in twentieth-century American culture. Part 3 examines the outlooks of westerners marginalized by their race, their status as citizens of Native nations, their language, or their efforts to farm on the arid Plains. Although such westerners’ perceptions of the American East appeared less frequently in magazines like Harper’s and universities like Harvard, they illustrate the ways in which regional narratives opened and foreclosed opportunities for greater national understanding. Part 2, in which page 99 appears, describes popular, well-published authors like DeVoto and his dear friend Wallace Stegner, whose views of the American West and the American East were often consistent with the mythology of the frontier. Page 99 illustrates how DeVoto and Stegner furthered that mythology even as they endeavored to undo its harms.

Visit Flannery Burke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kimberley Johnson's "Dark Concrete"

Kimberley S. Johnson is a political scientist and urban studies scholar whose work examines governance, institutions, and the spatial organization of power in the United States. She is also a spatial storyteller, using history, maps, and urban form to interpret cities, suburbs, and metropolitan change.

Johnson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Dark Concrete introduces one of the central tensions of Black power urbanism (BPU): how to build a just and emancipatory city within political and institutional configurations that worked against these aspirations. Page 99 captures this tension playing out in Newark during the city’s second teacher’s strike in 1971. Black and Puerto Rican activists, parents, students and educators were struggling over the control of education, and by extension the future of the city. In this sense, page 99 serves as an illuminating snapshot of the book as a whole, as similar conflicts recur across the multiple cities and policy areas, including housing and policing.

For proponents of BPU like Amiri Baraka, control over the Newark’s education system was not simply about jobs or contracts (the traditional terrain of machine politics). Instead, it was a struggle over who should teach, what knowledge should be centered, and the kinds of spaces that a new system of education could take place. Newark’s BPU activists believed that the city’s teachers and administrators were indifferent if not hostile to the needs of a now majority-Black and Puerto Rican student body trapped in crumbling underfunded schools, even as White residents (including the family of Chris Christie a future governor) and much of the teaching force, left for the suburbs. Although Newark’s education conflicts emerged in the mid-1960s, the movement for community control of schools would be epitomized in the explosive Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teacher’s Strike of 1968 in New York City, and would find its echo in Newark during the 1971 strike.

The election of Kenneth Gibson’s in 1970 as Newark’s first Black mayor appeared to create new political opening. Gibson empowered BPU activists to demand more community control and to condemn the teacher’s strike as a power grab. Yet Gibson’s political influence proved limited in effecting transformative change on the scale desired by BPU activists. Ongoing conflict with Italian American city council members and resistance from White ethnic neighborhood groups constrained Gibson’s capacity to govern. As a result, emancipatory ambitions, as well as tensions inherent in Black Power urbanism– the struggle to create just “new forms” of governance – clashed with precariousness of formal Black electoral power. Ultimately, Gibson pursued greater centralization of the school system (and more leverage over political opponents) rather than the neighborhood-based and alternative pedagogical models advocated by BPU activists. This outcome fostered decades of distrust between parents, activists and teachers on the other, stalling reform and paving the way for the state’s takeover of Newark’s schools in 1995.

At its core, BPU sought to develop “new forms,” a concept articulated by Charles Hamilton and Kwame Ture in their book Black Power (1967). Community control of education, along with ideas around housing and policing, were the most visible of these experiments taking place across the nation’s increasingly majority-Black and Brown majority cities. Dark Concrete traces this struggle not only in Newark, but also in Oakland, East Orange, and East Palo Alto, showing how efforts to reimagine urban life unfolded through experimentation, conflict and constraints. As page 99 demonstrates, Black Power urbanism ultimately reshaped the terrain of urban governance leaving legacies that continue to shape debates over democracy, equity and the right to the city.

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--Marshal Zeringue