Robert Whitaker's "Anatomy of an Epidemic"

Robert Whitaker is the award-winning author of The Mapmaker’s Wife and Mad in America. His manuscript of On the Laps of Gods won the prestigious J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, and reported the following:

Much to my delight, I turned to page 99 of Anatomy of an Epidemic and discovered that it is here that one of the major themes in the book starts to take shape. The book investigates how psychiatric medications affect the long-term course of mental disorders (as opposed to their short-term effects), and page 99 tells of the results from the first long-term study of antipsychotics conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health. In that 1960s trial, at the end of six weeks the schizophrenia patients who had been treated with an antipsychotic were faring better than the placebo patients. However—and this information appears on page 99—during the following year, researchers “were startled to discover that ‘patients who received placebo treatment [in the six-week trial] were less likely to be rehospitalized than those who received any of the three active phenothiazines.’”

This is what then follows on page 99:

Here, at this very first moment in the scientific literature, there is the hint of a paradox: while the drugs were effective over the short term, perhaps they made people more vulnerable to psychosis over the long term, and thus the higher rehospitalization rates for drug-treated patients at the end of one year. Soon, NIMH investigators were back with another surprising result. In two drug withdrawal trials, both of which included patients who weren’t on any drug at the start of the study, relapse rates rose in correlation with drug dosage. Only 7 percent of those who had been on placebo at the start of the study relapsed, compared to 65 percent of those taking more than 500 milligrams of chlorpromazine before the drug was withdrawn. “Relapse was found to be significantly related to the dose of the tranquilizing medication the patient was receiving before he was put on placebo—the higher the dose, the greater the probability of relapse,” the researchers wrote.

Something was amiss, and clinical observations deepened the suspicion. Schizophrenia patients discharged on medications were returning to psychiatric emergency rooms in such droves that hospital staff dubbed it the “revolving door syndrome.” Even when patients reliably took their medications, relapse was common, and researchers observed that “relapse is greater in severity during drug administration than when no drugs are given.” At the same time, if patients relapsed after quitting the medications, Cole noted, their psychotic symptoms tended to “persist and intensify,” and, at least for a time, they suffered from a host of new symptoms as well: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, agitation, insomnia, headaches, and weird motor tics. Initial exposure to a neuroleptic seemed to be setting patients up for a future of severe psychotic episodes, and that was true regardless of whether they stayed on the medications.

This NIMH study is the beginning moment in a history of science that then unfolds over the course of the next 50 years, with the same startling “long-term” results appearing again and again. Page 99 in Anatomy of an Epidemic foreshadows the story, which really is tragic in kind, that is told in the next 150 pages of the book.

Read an excerpt from Anatomy of an Epidemic, and learn more about the author and his work at Robert Whitaker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Balcombe's "Second Nature"

Jonathan Balcombe, Ph.D., is a former animal behavior research scientist for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and currently a consultant based in Washington, D.C. His books include Pleasurable Kingdom and The Use of Animals in Higher Education.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is an expository passage, part of my efforts to showcase animals’ diverse inner lives. I am discussing animals’ communication skills, and in particular the ability of both birds and mammals to interpret the calls of other species. Hornbills (large tropical birds) respond to monkeys’ “eagle” alarm calls but not to their “leopard” calls because the big cats aren’t a serious threat to them. Similarly, seals distinguish the dialect of local orcas who don’t eat seals from the dialect of migrating orcas who do—which sends the seals fleeing for the safety of kelp beds.

As a biologist who cares deeply about animals as sentient individuals to protect and not to eat, my aim in Second Nature is to try to nudge humankind towards a new relationship with animals. There’s a quiet revolution going on in science, with a spate of new discoveries about animal cognition, emotion, awareness, and even virtue. The paradox is that as our knowledge grows, our treatment of them falls further behind. I predict that humankind will look back on the 21st century as the Century of the Animals, when we finally came to our senses and replaced our might-makes-right doctrine with a more compassionate and egalitarian ethic—as we already did with the demise of colonialism, the slave trade, the subjugation of women’s rights, and the denial of civil rights.

Learn more about the book and author at Jonathan Balcombe's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maurice Berger's "For All The World To See"

Maurice Berger is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, and reported the following:

Page 99 of For All The World To See contains no text, and just a single photograph. But what a powerful image it is: a shot of a distraught Mamie Till Bradley as she views the casket of her fourteen-year old son, Emmett Till, murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi in August 1955. The photograph brings to life the book’s abiding issue: the crucial role that visual culture played in altering prevailing ideas about race, racism, and segregation in the period of the modern civil rights movement.

Shortly after the teenager was killed, his grieving mother distributed to the press a gruesome photograph of his mutilated corpse. Other photographs of the crime and its aftermath—from shots of Till’s funeral to the trial of his murderers—would soon follow. Asked why she thought these photographs important, Mrs. Bradley explained that by witnessing with their own eyes the brutality of segregation and racism, Americans would be more likely to support the cause of racial justice. “Let the world see what I’ve seen,” was her reply.

The publication of these images inspired a generation of activists to join the civil rights movement. By a number of measures, Bradley’s largely visual campaign to alter public opinion worked. The photographs of her shattered child were the most potent—and unimpeachable—witness to his tragic and senseless death. The images reached and moved millions of Americans, impelling a new generation of activists to join the cause. Despite this extraordinary episode, the story of visual culture’s role in the modern civil rights movement is rarely included in its history. For All The World To See is the first comprehensive examination of the ways images mattered in the struggle, and it investigates a broad range of media including photography, television, film, magazines, newspapers, and advertising.

Read more about For All the World to See at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Nelson's "The Hebrew Republic"

Eric Nelson is the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, and reported the following:

As it happens, the “page 99 test” works pretty well in the case of The Hebrew Republic. The book challenges the conventional narrative that attributes the emergence of a recognizably “modern” kind of political thought to the phenomenon of “secularization”—the exclusion of religious arguments from political discourse. The Hebrew Republic argues, in contrast, that political thought in early-modern Europe became less, not more secular with time. In particular, it assigns a great deal of significance to the fact that, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christians began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution, designed by God himself for the children of Israel. It accordingly became the central objective of political science in this period to replicate the divinely authorized Biblical constitution—and in pursuit of this objective, European Protestants became convinced (reluctantly in most cases) that they should turn for guidance to the full array of newly-available rabbinic materials. I argue that it was this encounter, rather than secularization, that yielded several of the most crucial elements of modern political thought.

Page 99 of the book reproduces a remarkably explicit defense of this enterprise written by the great seventeenth-century political theorist Hugo Grotius. He is commenting on a famous passage in Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian whose works first suggested to Europeans that Biblical Israel could be regarded as a “politeia”—a political constitution in the Greek sense. If Josephus was right about this, a fundamental question had to be answered: namely, what sort of constitution did ancient Israel embody? Greek political science had identified three basic options: the rule of one man, the few, and the many (each having a correct and a degenerate form). But Josephus argued that the Greek philosophers, due to their ignorance of revelation, had omitted one further possibility: “theocracy” (Josephus coined the term), a regime in which God himself was the civil sovereign. This was the regime of ancient Israel. Grotius endorses Josephus’s position, and then draws a set of implications from it that would prove utterly transformative, both for Grotius himself and for the many theorists he influenced (among them Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke).

Read more about The Hebrew Republic at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig Collins' "Toxic Loopholes"

Craig Collins earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis. He now teaches at California State University, East Bay.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Toxic Loopholes: Failures and Future Prospects for Environmental Law, and reported the following:

As an instructor of environmental law I was perpetually dissatisfied with the available texts because they avoided answering two essential questions:

• How well are our major environmental laws working?

• What prevents them from achieving their stated goals?

I decided to address these questions by writing my own “un-textbook.” In doing so, I tried to avoid the non-committal, austere, academic prose that forces students to consume copious amounts of coffee to avoid text-induced narcolepsy. Also, I abandoned all pretense of being a detached, disinterested academic and wrote instead as an outraged citizen of planet Earth.

By adopting this heart-felt stance I realize I leave myself open to criticism for being too partisan or “unbalanced.” So let me be clear. The balance I seek is not academic or political. It is ecological. The evidence is overwhelming: our economic and political systems are perilously out of balance with the planet and ecologically unsustainable. While our current environmental laws buy us some time, ultimately they are little more than a palliative--a bandage on a gaping wound.

Page 99 falls near the middle of my chapter on toxic waste laws like Superfund. The top of the page reproduces a bulleted list of the scathing criticisms leveled by a conference of neighborhood leaders fed-up with the EPA’s negligent efforts to clean up the toxic Superfund sites poisoning their communities. I shall quote from their list since it goes to the very heart of Toxic Loopholes’ central message:

Neighborhood leaders charged the EPA with:

• Studying a problem to death without doing anything;

• Ignoring or downplaying health problems and making a haphazard effort to compile and evaluate relevant health information;

• Discriminating against minority communities in nearly every aspect of the Superfund process, including longer response times to contaminations of minority neighborhoods and inequitable resources devoted to cleanups, health monitoring, buy-outs and relocations;

• Meeting secretly with polluters;

• Hiding vital information from the community;

• Ignoring and avoiding community input into the cleanup process;

• Favoring polluters with cheaper, less effective cleanup standards;

• Treating people as case numbers and demonstrating complete bureaucratic insensitivity to their stress, suffering and pain.

This list on page 99 is one small part of the factual evidence and the real life stories that have convinced me that America’s environmental laws, and the agencies that enforce them, are woefully inadequate. Powerful forces, emanating from the very nature of our political economy, confound the basic intent of the law and corrupt the policy-making and law enforcement process. The EPA is a fundamentally flawed agency embedded in a capitalist society where the most powerful economic actors wish to continue externalizing their environmental costs and their allies in government (from both parties) facilitate this by passing toothless laws and appointing compromised and corrupt enforcers.

Read an excerpt from Toxic Loopholes, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Miller's "Heaven"

Lisa Miller is the religion editor for Newsweek. She is the recipient of numerous journalism prizes, including the 2009 Wilbur Award for Outstanding Magazine Article for her December 2008 cover story “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage.” She has a regular column in Newsweek and on Newsweek.com, and in conjunction with the Washington Post, she helped to launch the religion website On Faith.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, her first book, and reported the following:

Jackpot! On page 99 of my new book Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife, you find the beginnings of a discussion about the virgins, or houris, of Muslim heaven. According to the Quran, the righteous will, upon arriving in heaven be waited upon by houris, "eyes large and dark, like pearls in their shells, as a reward for past deeds." (p 83) These virgins were made famous, of course, after 9/11 when it was discovered that Islamist "martyrs" often committed suicide with visions of virgins dancing in their heads.

But on page 99, the discussion takes a turn. The obsession with houris, many moderate and progressive Muslims claim, is an American idiosyncracy:

Muslims cannot understand the American obsession with houris, with the idea that Muslim heaven must be something like a sex party for boys. They laugh at our insistent questioning, and with their laughter imply that this whole orgy-in-heaven-thing is our hang up, not theirs. Our questioning is not wholly unenlightened, however.

Non-Muslim Western observers continue to have all kinds of questions about the houris. Here are two of the most compelling. 1.) Isn't Muslim heaven a sexist place? And 2.) Sex? Really? In heaven?

In the reporting of my book, I spoke to all kinds of scholars and believers. To the first question, scholars concede, that yes, Muslim paradise probably is a sexist place -- in the same way the visions offered by all Western scriptures are in some way sexist. The people who wrote down and codified Judaism, Christianity and Islam were probably (mostly) men writing for men. Two of my scholar experts -- Kevin Reinhart of Dartmouth and Leor Halevi of Vanderbilt -- pointed me to a fourteenth century Persian poem which indicates that this anxiety about the pleasures available to women in heaven is at least 700 years old. "Are there men houris as well?" asks an old woman from the grave. She gets an answer: "If you show your face there [in Paradise] / You'll not escape when they give you chase!" Even in the 14th century women were being assured that some version of the sexual pleasure available to men in Paradise would accrue to them as well.

I also spoke to Lelah Bakhtiar, an American Muslim who did a controversial feminist translation of the Qur'an in 2007. She provoked the ire of conservative Muslims world wide by suggesting that wife-beating was not ordained in the Quran, but she has views on the houris as well. Houri, she says, has no gender: it only means "black-eyed." People have traditionally interpreted houris as maidens, but they're not, necessarily. In any case, she laughs, she doesn't believe that in heaven she'll be having actual sex with actual heavenly creatures -- just as many Christians don't believe they'll actually walk through pearl gates and down streets of gold. In heaven, she says, "your body is not there. We're in a completely different form... We're not going to feel the same things there. I'm not thinking about what kind of orgy we're going to have in Paradise." Bakhtiar says that after death she hopes to be "part of the light that would shine in the world." Sex is not part of the picture.

Browse inside Heaven, and learn more about the book and author at Lisa Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas A. Bruscino's "A Nation Forged in War"

Thomas Bruscino is the author of Out of Bounds: Transnational Sanctuary in Irregular Warfare. His work has also been published in Military Review and War & Society. He is assistant professor of history at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along, and reported the following:

So imagine my delight at applying the Page 99 Test and finding a full page about vomit and toilet facilities. Among the lovely phrases found on my page 99 are "sick to our stomachs," "nauseating stench," "residue of caustic GI soap lather," "a not too peaceful crap," "vomit covered the floors and fixtures," and "cold sea-water douche." Well.

It could be worse—page 99 might have been one of those blank pages in between chapters. Then I would have had to ramble about the irony of the meaninglessness of war, since my book was an attempt to find a larger meaning in World War II. Instead, I got “a not too peaceful crap.” So let’s talk about what that means.

The reason why everyone is so sick and uncomfortable on page 99 in A Nation Forged in War is because they are soldiers on ships, headed overseas to war. Over 10 million made the trip, most of whom had never been more than 100 miles from home, and the army and navy crammed them in. Page 99 begins with the story of a soldier who won a bet by standing in one place in the hold and touching forty-two individual bunks with his rifle. That would be tough enough, but then seasickness kicked in and the troops started getting ill in those tight spaces, which had a horrible multiplying effect. And the toilet facilities were no help, as they often consisted of long troughs that the men had to straddle in full view of each other, and with their activities occasionally punctuated by splashes of sea water running through the trough. Showers, if the men got a chance to shower at all, also consisted of cold sea water, and were less than refreshing.

The troops could distract themselves by messing with the ship crew, gambling, and reading, but it was a still nasty experience. The only real comfort was that they were in it together. That was a big deal, because they came from widely different ethnic and religious backgrounds in an era when those differences meant they weren’t supposed to get along.

But they suffered together in the service in World War II, and in so doing learned to get along. Then they came home from war and taught the rest of the country to do the same. A Nation Forged in War tells that story—where it went and where it did not go.

Sometimes it got a little disgusting. Like page 99.

Learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America"

Rebecca Jo Plant is associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America, and reported the following:

Does page 99 of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America capture the “quality of the whole?” It certainly reveals my basic method as an historian, which is to present primary sources in sufficient detail to illustrate how people in the past thought and expressed themselves. On this page, I discuss two different sources, drawn from two different professional journals (Mental Hygiene and The New England Journal of Medicine). Both articles address the issue of neuropsychiatric disturbances among U.S. servicemen during World War II. The first analyzes a number of cases, including the one I cite, which concerned a young soldier who broke down in training due to his intense attachment to his mother. The second article alleged, more broadly, that pathological mothering was the underlying factor in the majority of cases involving “combat fatigue.” I use passages from these articles to show how medical authorities during World War II perceived a certain type of American mother—one who was overly dependent on her children and emotionally demanding—as harmful to the national cause. On this particular page, however, I am simply laying out evidence in support of the interpretation that I am building; one cannot really derive a sense of the book’s overall argument, or even the chapter’s main argument, from this page alone.

The chapter as a whole demonstrates how highly sentimental and prolonged mother-child bonds (especially between mothers and sons) became stigmatized over the course of the twentieth century. I argue that affective styles and ways of interacting that would have been viewed positively in the previous century came to be perceived with deep suspicion by the 1940s. For Victorian Americans, a grown son’s intense attachment to his mother signified virtuous manhood; for Cold War Americans, such a bond often evoked effeminacy and homosexuality. Elsewhere in the book, I draw on letters written by middle-class mothers to show how they internalized the cultural dictates concerning “momism” and “smother love” and sought to modulate their feelings of attachment to their children.

My discussion of “mother love” is just one component of a larger argument. By exploring a range of other issues—including the decline of maternalist politics and changing views and practices surrounding childbirth—I trace a major shift in the meaning of the motherhood within mainstream American culture. Particularly after World War II, I argue, motherhood ceased to be represented as an all-encompassing identity rooted in notions of self-sacrifice and physical suffering, and infused with powerful social and political meaning. Instead, motherhood came to be conceived as a fundamentally private, familial identity and a single component of a more multifaceted self—a role that women could voluntarily either embrace or reject.

Thus, while Page 99, with its tight focus on the concerns that medical authorities during World War II voiced about intense maternal attachment, may reflect the “quality of the whole,” it does not afford the reader a synopsis of the whole.

Excerpt:

For instance, a 1943 article in Mental Hygiene detailed the case of “Private L.,” an eighteen-year-old soldier, still in training, who appeared “emotionally distressed” and “cried frequently.” A psychiatric interview revealed that he had never previously been away from home and remained “excessively attached” to his ailing mother, who wrote to him almost daily, “complaining of her ‘sufferings’ and of her difficulty in adjusting to his absence.” In psychotherapy, Private L. gained “insight into the neurotic nature of his relationship to his mother.” The psychiatrist also sent “a sympathetic, but frank” letter to the private’s mother, “eliciting and securing her cooperation.” By redirecting Private L.’s emotional attachment toward his company, while restraining his emotionally demanding mother, the psychiatrist and company adviser together strove to transform Private L. into a “‘good soldier,’ as well as a mature man.”

Similarly, after studying two hundred neuropsychiatric patients at an Army hospital in the South Pacific, medical officers J. L. Henderson and Merrill Moore concluded that war neuroses were “‘made in America’”—particularly by the nation’s mothers. In their 1944 study, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, they argued that the single most important factor predisposing servicemen to psychological breakdown was not traumatic combat experience, but rather “distorted” familial relations. “In nearly every case, a mutually dependent neurotic relation existed between mother and child,” they claimed, sketching the typical background of a psychoneurotic soldier:

The mother was found to stand out. She was usually a “nervous woman” and had often had a nervous breakdown but was rarely hospitalized for it…. She tended to worry, particularly about her children, and to be overly concerned about them. For example, most of the mothers had waited up for their boys to come in at night up to the time that they entered the service. The father seemed to be in the background…. From these observations the following interpretation is made: The mother is an immature person who feels herself insecure and in her marriage tends to establish a childish, dependent relation to her husband.

Significantly, Henderson and Moore traced the problem of neuropsychiatric breakdown to maternal weakness: if the mother herself remained “childish” and “dependent,” her son could not develop into a mature and capable adult.

Other psychiatrists interpreted the very symptoms that predominated among neuropsychiatric casualties as evidence that too many American men could not control their dependent longings.

Learn more about Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kirsten McKenzie's "A Swindler's Progress"

Kirsten McKenzie is Senior Lecturer in History, University of Sydney.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Swindler's Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty, and reported the following:

Choose to write your history in the genre of a mystery story and the page 99 test could get you into serious trouble. Would it be a case of “Spoilers ahead”? Could I complete the assignment without giving the plot away? It was with some trepidation that I dipped inside A Swindler’s Progress, only to find that the typesetters had unwittingly played into my hands.

The story opens in a dingy court room in Sydney, in the penal colony of New South Wales, in 1835. A man stands before the dock charged with forgery and imposture. The authorities claim he is ‘John Dow’ (sometimes spelled ‘John Doe’) a former convict. The prisoner denies that name. He claims he is Edward, Viscount Lascelles, eldest son of the Earl of Harewood and heir to one of Britain’s most spectacular fortunes. He tells a melodramatic tale of betrayal and disaster. He had taken the fictitious name of John Dow, he explains, “in order that the spotless honor of my family might not be sullied by my disgrace”.

It was true that the Viscount had made a scandalous disappearance from the ranks of Britain’s elite. Had he ended up a convict under a false name? The book that follows is divided into three parts, taking the story of Edward Lascelles from the ‘Arcadia’ of aristocratic Yorkshire through ‘Ruin and Disgrace’ to the ‘Antipodes’. Along the way my intention is to reveal as much about the interlinked histories of Britain and Australia as about the stories of ‘Edward Lascelles’ and ‘John Dow’. My research uncovered a wildly improbable tale - one no less melodramatic than the story John Dow told in court. But I wanted to use it to ask bigger questions about what liberty could mean at this time of revolutionary change. Breaking the established bonds of status and rank meant the freedom to pursue individual potential, to rely on innate worth rather than on birth. But what does it mean to be free? The freedom to reinvent oneself also meant the freedom to lie.

And page 99? We have known from the first that Edward Lascelles is going to come to grief. The question is - how? p. 99 contains only the epigraph for part two of the book. But it gives a big hint at the secret about to be revealed:

My son, keep thy father’s commandment, and forsake not
the law of thy mother: Bind them continually upon thine
heart, and tie them about thy neck. ...
For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light; and
reproofs of instruction are the way of life: To keep thee from
the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange
woman.

Proverbs 6:20–24

Read an excerpt from A Swindler’s Progress, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Anderson's "Little Rock"

Karen Anderson is professor of history at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II and coauthor of Present Tense: The United States Since 1945.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School, and reported the following:

In Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School, I offer new interpretations of the school desegregation crisis that developed in that Arkansas community in the 1950s by locating it more broadly in a context of rapid social change and heightened community fears and conflicts. I illuminate these themes by centering different social actors, including white women activists organized on both sides of the issue, and by focusing on the emotional cultures, political strategies, and competing visions of the public good evidenced by Little Rock’s activists.

Little Rock received national attention in the fall of 1957 when Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the entry of nine African American students into all white Central High School. After President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered federal troops to protect the students’ right to enter, segregationists turned to new strategies, as I note on p. 99:

After the African American students returned to school on September 25, 1957, with protection from the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army and the recently federalized Arkansas National Guard, resistant white students began a long-term war of attrition designed to drive the black students from Central High. Taking advantage of the vast size of the school building and grounds, they orchestrated a campaign of verbal threats, name-calling, and physical harassment that ranged from shoving and tripping to spilling ink on students’ clothes and putting broken glass on the floor in the gym’s shower room.

The resistant white students received crucial assistance from adult supporters, including the Mothers’ League of Central High School, a small group of working class women. The Mothers’ League mobilized children as political actors and politicized their treatment when school officials tried to discipline them for harassing African American students. Their actions reflected and created a segregationist political culture focused on white “victimization” and righteous retribution against all whom they associated with desegregation. Rooted firmly in class anxieties, racial fears, fundamentalist religion, and sexual concerns, segregationists’ emotional culture fueled their movement and motivated their most important political miscalculations.

In response to segregationists’ threats to their power, school officials and their allies in the business community backed off from effectively protecting the black students, fearful that they would be creating “martyrs” to the segregationist cause. Business leaders, who were primarily concerned with maintaining a lawful image of their community in order to foster business development, adopted a politics of caution and evasion that ultimately paved the way for white flight. They faced opposition not only from the segregationists, but also from African Americans who sought to dismantle segregation at a faster pace than the glacial one desired by Little Rock’s moderates. After segregationists closed the public high schools in 1958, an organization of middle class white women, the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, formed. The liberal leaders of the WEC soon found themselves also at odds with the local power structure over issues related to race and the schools. Little Rock explains the outcomes and consequences of these interrelated struggles for local power.

Read an excerpt from Little Rock, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue