Jeremy Popkin's "A New World Begins"

Jeremy D. Popkin holds the William T. Bryan chair of history at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of many books, including You Are All Free and A Short History of the French Revolution.

Popkin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution, and reported the following:

On page 99, A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution, king Louis XVI reluctantly allows his prime minister, Loménie de Brienne, to persuade him that there is no way to avoid a catastrophic state bankruptcy except to summon an elected assembly, the Estates General, and ask it to approve new taxes. Louis is not happy about the idea. “They might overturn the state and the monarchy,” he tells Brienne. But he agrees that there is no realistic alternative.

Readers of my book will discover how justified the king’s fears were. By conceding that he would have to give his subjects a voice in making political decisions, Louis XVI fatally undermined the basic principle of the absolute monarchy he had been brought up to lead. Once they assembled in the spring of 1789, the deputies to the Estates General and the people who elected them would transform France and the world. The people storm the Bastille and the deputies would draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, outlining the principles of democracy that we still believe in today.

Forced to find ways to defend those principles against powerful enemies and to meet the demands of the poor, however, the revolutionaries would also find themselves doing things they never imagined when their movement began. They held pathbreaking debates about the rights of women and they abolished slavery in the French colonies, but they also plunged Europe into a continent-wide war and used dictatorial methods to silence domestic opposition. Louis XVI’s unhappy dialogue with Brienne on page 99 of my book is just the first of many dramatic moments that readers will relive in A New World Begins, a book that sums up my forty years of research and teaching about one of history’s most important events.

Learn more about A New World Begins at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Schaberg's "Searching for the Anthropocene"

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2013), The End of Airports (2015), and Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017), and co-editor of Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014).

Schaberg applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Searching for the Anthropocene: A Journey into the Environmental Humanities, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Searching for the Anthropocene starts with the end of a sentence: “[…]to say that our airplanes are obsolete?” The rest of page 99 develops links between commercial air travel and the Anthropocene (in short, the epoch defined by destructive human impact on the planet). Specifically, that page is referring to some disparaging comments that Donald Trump made about U.S. airports when he was on the campaign trail in 2016, calling them “a disaster.” I use this knee-jerk criticism of air travel as a refracting lens for glimpsing larger (environmental) problems.

Page 99 is representative of one of the larger concerns of the book, which is to question air travel as a dominant form of human mobility. This is an extraordinarily unpopular stance to take, as I’ve learned over the years. Even for people who hate traveling or who always complain about airport travesties, critiquing the whole enterprise is anathema. Most people insist that air travel in its current form is here to stay. But as page 99 argues, we have to seriously reassess air travel if we also want to adapt in/to the Anthropocene.

I’ve had a long running obsession with airports and commercial flight, but it may seem surprising in this book, a book about environmental awareness. (Until Greta Thunberg, flight was not really considered to be a primarily environmental subject.) The first half of the book is about my home region of northern Michigan, a beautiful place where I return with my family each summer. The second half of the book plunges into strange and seemingly disparate topics around human travel and consumer culture. I’m trying to reconcile my love of a certain place with how the Anthropocene devours place and leaves waste in its stead. And airports are a sort of litmus test for me, throughout the book: how we fly and how we think about human flight turns out to tell us a lot about how we relate to (or repress) ecology, and how we might manage our species’ future on the planet.

Learn more about Searching for the Anthropocene at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Guy Crosby's "Cook, Taste, Learn"

Guy Crosby, PhD, CFS, is adjunct associate professor of nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He is the science editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street and was the science editor for America’s Test Kitchen. He is coauthor of New York Times best-seller The Science of Good Cooking (2012) and Cook’s Science (2016).

Crosby applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Cook, Taste, Learn: How the Evolution of Science Transformed the Art of Cooking, and reported the following:

The page 99 test fails for my book Cook, Taste, Learn - How the Evolution of Science Transformed the Art of Cooking for the simple reason that the book is composed of three different, but interwoven elements, and page 99 touches on only one of the elements. The first traces in seven chapters a history of cooking from the first controlled use of fire nearly two million years ago to the emergence of agriculture during the Neolithic period to modern science’s understanding of what happens at a molecular level when heat is applied to food. The second element consists of 22 brief science sidebars that explain concepts of food and cooking science pertinent to the topics discussed in each chapter. For example, in chapter two a narrative on the evolution of domesticated bread wheat is supported by a sidebar explaining the structure and function of gluten. The third element describes seven of my favorite recipes that illustrate an important aspect of cooking science. The publisher cleverly distinguishes the three elements by printing each one on different colored pages allowing the reader to choose whether to read about evolution, history, science, cooking, nutrition or health. The book vividly illustrates how the often tragic lives of famous scientists and chefs cross-fertilized the evolution of cooking science.

Page 99 is the middle of three pages of a sidebar on "Terroir - A Taste of Place”. Most readers are well aware that terroir refers to the relationship between where a food is grown and the qualities of the food. The French first developed this concept to relate where grapes are grown and the quality of the wine. Page 99 discusses two examples in which the quality of cooked dry cannellini beans is proven to be dependent on the calcium content of the soil where they were grown, and another on microbial terroir pioneered by chef David Chang, chef/owner of the Momofuku restaurant group, who demonstrated that local microorganisms impart different unique flavors to fermented foods. The book culminates with several chapters on how modern cooking science can improve the nutritional quality and gastronomic delight of everyday food cooked at home. Science-driven changes in the way we cook can help reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases and enhance the quality and joy of life. Cooking will be seen no longer as just an art but as a perfect blend of art and science, creating simple dishes that are delicious to eat and good for our health. The book is beautifully illustrated and includes some of the author’s own works.

Visit Guy Crosby's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joyce Dalsheim's "Israel Has a Jewish Problem"

Joyce Dalsheim is a cultural anthropologist in the Department of Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has carried out extensive fieldwork in Israel/Palestine studying controversies over historical narratives, nationalism, religiosity, and the secular. Her books include Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project (2011) and Producing Spoilers: Peacemaking and the Production of Enmity in a Secular Age (2014).

Dalsheim applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self-Elimination, and reported the following:

Page 99 arrives ten pages into the chapter called “Self-elimination”—probably the most important chapter in the book. The only full paragraph on that page discusses the Haredim, also known as ultra-Orthodox Jews. They have been protesting recent policy changes that would subject them to the military draft. As a community, the Haredim have been opposed to military service because they want their young men to devote themselves to Torah study. Israel’s first Prime Minister issued an agreement in the 1940s that would allow them to do so. As a community, they are not interested in having their young people interact with the secular world, which poses a threat to their understanding of Jewish continuity.

Less observant and secular Israeli Jews complain that Haredim don’t carry their weight in society. Their men spend more time studying than earning a living, they often live in poverty, and people complain that they are “parasites” living off public welfare:

According to Israeli experts, a population uniformly participating in the national economy is essential to maintaining a “First World army,” which in turn is vital to the continued existence of the state. Survival itself means having a state and an army. This also means people having to sacrifice themselves— paying from their wealth, contributing of their time, and potentially exposing their very lives to the death and destruction of military service— to ensure survival. And having a state and an army means laborizing all Jews, moving Haredim away from their homes and places of study, even if those moves also mean eroding a way of life they have constructed as specifically and prototypically Jewish. Jewish survival, according to this logic, is dependent upon the forced or willing elimination not only of those who die in the service of their country, but also of particular forms of Jewish life.

Remarkably, the test works! This paragraph encapsulates the central irony or contradiction explored in the book: Jewish survival depends on the elimination of some forms of Jewish life. The book is concerned with how political self-determination can also entail collective self-elimination. Much has been written about the exclusionary nature of ethno-nationalism and its devastating effects on the people who are marginalized or forcibly removed from the nation. By focusing on those included in the ethnos of the nation, this book tells another side of the same story.

So many nationalisms, especially anti-colonial or sep­aratist movements, are premised on a rhetoric, ideal, or belief in its liberating quality. Political Zionism prom­ised collective Jewish self- determination, free people flourishing in their own county. And yet the sovereign citizens of Israel struggle to be Jewish there. What occurs is something Kafkaesque: Jews have achieved sovereignty but are not free to be Jewish as they see fit. Instead of being free from the forces of assimilation they faced in other countries, they now contend with the pressures to assimilate in the self-proclaimed Jewish state; to be Jewish there in ways that work with the state and its projects, primarily its settler-colonial project.

Other chapters of the book consider all sorts of struggles to be Jewish in the Jewish State. For example, secular Israeli Jews, or members of Reform or Conservative movements have to contend with the fact that only Orthodox weddings are recognized by the state, and non-Orthodox rabbis have been arrested for performing weddings. Many scholars think of these situations as a secular/religious divide, or as a struggle to become a secular state. Such explanations miss the deeper historical processes through which such a divide is imagined in the first place and ignore the ways that different observant groups also struggle against each other. More importantly, when Israelis focus on a religious/secular divide they sometimes unwittingly end up supporting a politics they claim to oppose. This is part of the complex ways that power works through modern dichotomous categories.

Learn more about Israel Has a Jewish Problem at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

S. Elizabeth Penry's "The People Are King"

S. Elizabeth Penry is Associate Professor of History and Latin American Studies at Fordham University. She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics is the penultimate page of chapter four. The chapter examines how indigenous Andeans in the Viceroyalty of Peru (modern Bolivia) responded to the sixteenth-century Spanish policy of forced resettlement into grid-patterned towns, known as reducción. An early modern attempt at social engineering, the towns, with their central plaza and straight streets and their institutions of town council (cabildo) and confraternities (cofradías), were designed to instill Spanish notions of civilization. But indigenous Andeans adapted the policy and turned it to their own ends, founding their own towns. These towns became a catalyst for a complex Andean ethnogenesis, as Andeans took the institutions of resettlement and wove them into a hybrid political and religious hierarchy that also drew on preconquest social forms. This led to a sea-change in how Andeans imagined their political community: turning away from rule by their preconquest descended nobility, Andeans embraced commoner-led government in a kind of municipally-focused local democracy. These new towns offered indigenous Andeans

some degree of self-determination and [the ability] to represent their own interests against those of priests, hacendados, [Spanish landowners], or ... their own hereditary caciques [lords]. Establishing chapels and cofradías dedicated to saints laid the groundwork for political solidarity and sovereignty within commoner-led repúblicas. Saints, particularly patron saints with their miraculous foundation stories that held that the saint had insisted on staying in a particular location, tied Andeans to place. Saints, in contrast to pre-Columbian wakas [local divinities], were more egalitarian and accepted all as their children. Membership in a cofradía tied people together through ‘fictive’ kinship capable of weaving immigrant forasteros [foreigners] into the communities they had fled to. The attraction of self-determination helps to explain why most cases of town foundation were led by commoners, facing priestly and sometimes cacical [native hereditary lord] opposition.
. . .
Forasteros’ efforts to settle in their adopted towns made cofradías and cabildo more important than ever. The new social forms of Christianity and town life made incorporation into towns easier for forasteros than it would have been before the Spanish Conquest since membership in the community could proceed through service to the community in cabildo posts and cofradía positions.

The page 99 test worked better than I expected. The page points to a central argument of my book: that Andeans created a new political identity for themselves, moving from a politics of hereditary nobility to a blended form of participatory democracy and civic Catholicism, informed by the ideals of both the Inca and Spanish Empires, but reducible to neither.

The People Are King focuses on two key moments in the transformation of indigenous lives; the first, suggested on page 99, is the sixteenth century resettlement policy and what Andeans made of it. The second moment is in the late eighteenth century when nearly continent-wide revolutions shook the colonial state and the process of ethnogenesis begun in indigenous founded towns in the sixteenth century comes to fruition. Here, drawing on a corpus of holographic rebel letters from the Great Rebellion of the 1780s, the book follows the actions of indigenous commoner rebels in their towns, rather than the native lords, such as Tupac Amaru, that historians usually document. Calling themselves ‘comuneros,’ members of a común, or commons of their town, indigenous Andeans embraced a collectivist political philosophy that called into question the legitimacy of their own native lords and ultimately threatened colonial domination. Overthrowing the native aristocracy and seeking rights as self-governing indigenous republics were at the heart of this revolutionary moment, thus making indigenous Andeans architects, not mere bystanders, of the world-transforming events of the age of Atlantic Revolutions. However, these rebels were members of the común, sovereign communities in rebellion, not the Enlightenment’s liberal individuals. Even though the rebellions were brutally suppressed, this collectivist idea of the común lives on among indigenous people of the Andes.

Learn more about The People Are King at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sean Grass's "The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative"

Sean Grass is Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is the author of The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (2003), Charles Dickens's 'Our Mutual Friend': A Publishing History (2014), and several essays on Victorian literature and culture.

Grass applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book places the reader late in Chapter 2, which takes up Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1). Because the page really gets into the intricacies of an argument specific to that novel, it is not probably worth quoting at great length here. But it does contain this short passage:

… Pip [structures] his story around the idea that his life is a debt owed, his subjectivity a deficit that must be made up to repay his sister for bringing him up by hand, or to make amends to Magwitch, Miss Havisham, Joe, and the others who have been his benefactors. The contrast that Pip draws between himself and his five dead brothers in the churchyard is that they died without repaying that debt, lying mendicant “with their hands in their trousers-pockets” after giving up “trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle” (9). The language is Darwinian but also Malthusian. Having “insisted on being born,” Pip owes a debt embedded in origins, as if biological beginnings, like textual ones, bring subjectivity into economic relations just by making it a material thing.

Even though it is focused narrowly on Great Expectations, page 99 does—in this passage, at least—illustrate a key component of the book’s argument: that the transformation of subjectivity, or identity, into a textual object during the first half of the nineteenth century brought it into new kinds of relations to the capitalist sphere. Broadly speaking, my book is an unusual one because it straddles the line between book history and postmodern theory, and between distant and close reading, to make a significant point about the proliferation and popularization of life writing during the nineteenth century. We have tended often to treat Victorian life writing as notable particularly for the ways in which it constructs identity, whether along the lines of gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity and national identity, or some other category. For these reasons and for others, until the last few decades, we have also tended to focus on certain canonical, conventional, and predictably structured instances of life writing by figures such as Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, and John Stuart Mill. But we have paid very little attention to the fact that, to paraphrase Trev Lynn Broughton, most writers produced life writing, and most publishers published it, simply to make money. In my book, then, I wanted to ask: when exactly did life writing become big business, how did it intersect with other emerging practices—from copyright law to portraiture, and from the census to the carte-de-visite—for textualizing and economizing identity, and what where the cultural implications of entangling identity with property and thus exposing it to the laws of ownership and exchange? As I argue, we can answer that question in part by examining mid-century fiction, principally though not exclusively the sensation novel, which represents in myriad ways the profound entanglement of textuality, subjectivity, and property at and after the middle of the nineteenth century. Written in the first-person, drawing from Dickens’s own life, and designed explicitly as a commodity for the market, Great Expectations exemplifies this argument and is the first novel I address, though subsequent chapters on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins all make (I hope) compelling and complementary cases. So while page 99 of The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative doesn’t really reflect the full complexities of the picture that the book offers, it certainly illustrates the way in which I bring my broad thesis to bear on one particular, and particularly familiar, mid-century novel.

Learn more about The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Camilla Townsend's "Fifth Sun"

Camilla Townsend is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of numerous books, including Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, and The Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive, which won multiple prizes, among them The Albert J. Beveridge Award awarded by the American Historical Association.

Townsend applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, and reported the following:

Indigenous youths of the late 1500s [who came to accept the Spanish friars’ story of Moctezuma’s purported belief in the “white gods”] had no way of knowing the deep history of either the Old World or the New. They had no way of knowing that in the Old World, people had been full-time farmers for ten thousand years. Europeans had by no means been the first farmers, but they were nevertheless the cultural heirs of many millennia of sedentary living. They therefore had the resultant substantially greater population and a panoply of technologies—not just metal arms and armor, but also ships, navigation equipment, flour mills, barrel-making establishments, wheeled carts, printing presses, and many other inventions that rendered them more powerful than those who did not have such things. In the New World, people had been full-time farmers for perhaps three thousand years. It was almost as if Renaissance Europe had come face to face with the ancient Sumerians. The Mesopotamians were stunningly impressive—but they could not have defeated Charles the Fifth of the Holy Roman Empire working in combination with the Pope. Had the young indigenous writers of the late sixteenth century known all of this, it would have been a relief to their minds. But that relief was denied them. And so they participated in constructing a version of events that Moctezuma would have derided—but that he had no power to change from the land of the dead.

The “page 99 test” works for Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs if we accept that a western reader’s eye will always move from left to right. Opening the book to page 99, the reader will find it on the right side. To the left, on page 98, lies a paragraph that is, in truth—I kid you not—the crux of the book. Fifth Sun tells the story of the Aztecs from about 100 years before the Spanish conquest to about 100 years after, and it does so by relying entirely on sources written in Nahuatl (the Aztec language), many of which have only recently been translated into English, or are only now being translated. It accepts as a basic premise the idea that the Aztecs were every bit as creative, smart, brave and rational as the Europeans, but that they simply did not have equivalent technology they could use to defend themselves. Why didn’t they? The paragraph above is the culmination of a section that explains the profound importance of the Old World having turned to farming millennia before the New World did. It also refers to young indigenous men in the late 1500s choosing to believe the Spanish friars who taught them that their grandparents had perceived the newcomers to be gods. But when we read the sources written by their parents and grandparents closer to the time of the conquest, we find no evidence that the people thought Hernando Cortés was Quetzalcoatl or any other god. There, it becomes clear that at the time, the Native Americans recognized they had a technological problem, not a spiritual one.

Numerous issues become much clearer when we pursue the indigenous-language sources rather than taking at face value everything the Spaniards had to say, and when we also take seriously all that archaeologists can teach us about the advent of farming and its results. Fifth Sun is an action-packed romp through the history of the Aztecs as they described it themselves in the years in which it happened, rather than as we have chosen to tell it in after years, based on the words and assumptions of other people.

Learn more about Fifth Sun at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gareth Russell's "The Ship of Dreams"

Educated at Oxford University and Queens University, Belfast, Gareth Russell is a historian, novelist, and playwright. He is the author of Young and Damned and Fair, The Emperor, and An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors. He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Russell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era, and reported the following:

The ninety-ninth page of The Ship of Dreams discusses the cabin arrangements taken on the Titanic by silent movie star, Dorothy Gibson, who was travelling back to America with her mother. Dorothy had gone to Europe to rest after a string of exhausting successes in the movie industry, but also to test the old adage about absence impact on the heart’s fondness. Dorothy was involved in a love affair with a married movie producer, Jules Brulatour, and she hoped this separation would make him consider getting a divorce so that they could be together properly.

I think Ford Madox Ford’s test might have worked rather well for The Ship of Dreams, in terms of giving a flavour of what the book is about and attempting. I try to weave the story of the Titanic, through the six passengers I have selected, to give a wider idea of what was going on in the world in 1912. Dorothy’s narrative gives the reader a view into the nascent film industry, its cruelties as well as its spectacular successes, while also highlighting some unusual features about life in the Titanic’s first-class quarters. Not all cabins cost the same price, with Dorothy occupying one of the cheapest available in the most expensive part of the liner. I hope the book, and this extract, balances the panoramic with the personal. History is the collision of people with forces beyond their control, which is what I hope I captured in The Ship of Dreams. I will leave you with some of the words from page 99, as a hearty convert to Ford’s theory:

As famous as she was, Dorothy was still part of a nascent industry and the astronomic wealth enjoyed by movie stars was nearly a decade away. A salary of $275 was huge to most of Dorothy’s generation, but not to many of the Titanic’s other first-class passengers. Tellingly, she remained preoccupied with a need for permanent security, for which she looked to marriage and not her career, which she always, perhaps fairly, regarded as inherently and terrifyingly unstable.

Dorothy and her mother shared cabin E-22, one of the cheapest rooms available in First Class. The Countess of Rothes’s maid was travelling on the same corridor. Nonetheless, Dorothy was impressed by the Titanic, which she described as ‘glorious’. The three manned lifts for First Class, running from A- through E-Deck, opened on the latter opposite the ladies’ bathroom since, like most of the Titanic’s cabins, even in First Class, the Gibsons’ room did not have its own lavatory. Sinks were provided in all first-class staterooms, but only a few of the suites on B- and C-Deck had their own private bathrooms. Communal toilet facilities, similar to those in a restaurant, were provided in lieu and this was to remain the norm in First Class until the arrival in 1938 of a Dutch luxury liner, the Nieuw Amsterdam, after which en-suites throughout First Class came to be expected. … Immediately around the corner from this bloc was Dorothy and Pauline Gibson’s two-berth white-panelled cabin, with its mahogany dressing table, wardrobe and chest of drawers, over which their porthole looked out to the sea. The voyage would offer Dorothy her final few days of rest before she met Jules for another bout of filming. At Cherbourg, she had assured a reporter from the Moving Picture News that she felt ‘like a new woman’ and ‘so happy at the prospect’ of getting back to America that ‘I couldn’t think.’

Well versed in the hyperbolic politesse of the movie industry, Dorothy had also once assured a journalist, ‘I am a daughter of Hoboken. There is a pride in that.’ Only she, and perhaps her mother, ever knew how much truth there was in that statement. On another occasion, Dorothy contrasted her stepfather’s evangelicalism with her ambition in what sounds like a more frank admission of why she had left the path expected of a girl from her background in Hoboken: ‘My father is a great man of the spirit and is contented with the simple life. But I and my mother are bohemians and we find the pleasures of this lovely world irresistible!' Whether she would find permanent access to the pleasures of the world through the career she had won for herself or the marriage she wanted remained to be seen.

Follow Gareth Russell on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arthur I. Miller's "The Artist in the Machine"

Arthur I. Miller is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London. He is the author of Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art and other books including Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc.

Miller applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“Translating one image into another … is like translating between languages, like between English and French. They are two different representations of the same world,” says Phillip Isola.

Isola and his coworkers invented a variation on GANs that he calls conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs). They are conditional because instead of starting the generator network (G) from noise, from nothing, they condition it by using an actual image. Rather than feeding the discriminator network (D) on huge caches of images, they use pairs of images, such as a black-and-white image of a scene and the same scene in color. Then, they input a new black-and-white scene into the generator network. Initially D rejects the new scene, so G colorizes it. In other words, the output is conditioned by the input, which is what GANs are all about. As a result, Pix2Pix, as Isola calls his system, requires a much smaller set of training data than other supervised learning algorithms.

Thus Isola discovered how to translate an image of one sort into another sort: Pix2Pix, pixels to pixels. As he puts it, all those “little problems in computer vision were just mapping of pixels to pixels.” While style transfer transfers the style of one image onto another, creating an image “in the style of” a painting by Picasso, for example, Pix2Pix goes further. Like Leon Gatys, who invented style transfer, Isola is interested in perception, how we see.

My personal litmus test for reading a book is to be gripped by the first sentence in the first substantive section. If I had to make this decision on the basis of page 99 of The Artist in the Machine I would be tempted to put it back on the shelf. While what is on this page is highly interesting – almost magical – the reader will have to have gone through preceding chapters to know, for example, what a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) and style transfer are. Opening up to page 99 could give the prospective reader the impression that this is a book meant for a computer scientist. Not so. I wrote The Artist in the Machine for the educated layperson interested in learning about the up-to-date ways in which AIs (artificial intelligences) can amazingly create art, literature and music of a sort that we cannot imagine. My book focuses on concepts and uses no mathematics. So, the page 99 test does not work for my book.

Those aficionados of AI who open to page 99, will be struck by how an artificial network machine, trained on pairs of images, one in black and white and the other in colour, can colorize an image. The process is called Pix2Pix. Artists use it to create highly interesting works. Examples are in The Artist in the Machine. Pix2Pix also shows how a machine can take on its own creativity to produce an original work of art.

For some decades I have written about creativity in humans and touched on creativity in machines. In this book I have addressed both with focus on machines. I discuss how my own theory of creativity can apply to machines which, in the future, will create art, literature and music with emotions and consciousness. These works will interest us and their brethren too and perhaps will be even better than we can produce. In this way humans and machines can bootstrap each other’s creativity.

Visit Arthur I. Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cynthia A. Kierner's "Inventing Disaster"

Cynthia A. Kierner is professor of history at George Mason University and the author of Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the first page of the fourth of six chapters of Inventing Disaster. Titled "Benevolent Empire," this chapter examines how colonial Americans increasingly expected disaster relief from Britain after 1755, when the king and Parliament sent the impressive sum of £100,000 in aid to Portugal after a massive earthquake annihilated Lisbon, the Portuguese capital. The first page of this chapter reads as follows:

The Lisbon earthquake was more a turning point than a starting point in the history of British benevolence. In addition to local philanthropy to aid the poor and the sick at home, eighteenth-century Britons sometimes sent charitable gifts to the king’s American subjects. The most impressive case of British aid to colonists came in response to the Charleston fire of 1740, when the relief efforts of colonial governors, London merchants, and others were supplemented by a sizable contribution from the king and Parliament. Government relief for Charleston, which was not widely publicized, was an act of statecraft designed primarily to preserve order in a valuable colony that seemed vulnerable to slave insurrections and also to Spanish attacks from nearby Florida. In 1755, by contrast, disaster relief for Lisbon, whatever its other purposes, was presented and perceived as state-sponsored humanitarianism first and foremost.

Despite the outpouring of support for Charleston in 1740, colonists’ routine and explicit expectation of relief from Britain in the aftermath of disasters was a post-Lisbon development. The king’s gift to Portugal was a grand gesture that resonated profoundly among subjects who cherished the ideal of a benevolent monarch. Fortified by the lessons of Lisbon, colonists sought help from the mother country in the wake of calamity. More often than not, Britons assisted colonial disaster victims but—like the £20,000 dispatched to Charleston, a city that had suffered some £250,000 in fire-related losses—the sums provided were less a practical remedy for a dire situation than a performance of benevolence…

In some ways, the Page 99 Test works for Inventing Disaster, but in others it does not. On the one hand, this page points readers to several important issues at the heart of my story, most notably the increasingly dependable spread of information about disasters across the Atlantic world, the clamor of affected populations for post-disaster assistance from both government officials and private charities, and the idea that humanitarian aid could be deployed both to relief suffering and to maintain order. (Spoiler alert: disaster survivors were less apt to expect, and even less likely to get, relief in post-revolutionary America.) On the other hand, because the material on page 99 is overwhelmingly argument and analysis, it is not really representative of the entire book, which is full of graphic and heart-wrenching disaster stories and also some terrific illustrations.

Inventing Disaster traces the gradual coalescence of the idea and culture of disaster over nearly three centuries. I argue that a new modern response to calamity grew out of three Enlightenment-inspired developments: the spread of information via trade, travel, and print; belief in science, human agency, and progress; and the growing influence of the culture of sensibility. Page 99 stands more or less midway between the beginning and end of my story. In the Jamestown colony (1607) famines, diseases, and other deadly things routinely happened, but few people knew about them and no one really sought to relieve the suffering or even to prevent it in the future. By the time we get to the Johnstown flood (1889), disaster relief and prevention, as well as the popular culture of calamity, looked in most respects much like it does in twenty-first-century America.

Learn more about Inventing Disaster at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue