Sushma Subramanian's "How to Feel"

Sushma Subramanian is a science and health journalist whose writing has appeared in Slate, The Atlantic, Elle, Scientific American, Discover and many others. Her radio work has aired on WBEZ and CBC. She has twice been a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and was the winner of a Newswomen's Club of New York Front Page Award. She has received research support from The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the Genetics and Behavior Journalism Fellowships. Subramanian teaches journalism as an assistant professor at the University of Mary Washington and advises the student newspaper.

She and her husband are also award-winning Peep dioramists.

Subramanian applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch, and reported the following:

On page 99, I discuss attachment theory. This is a psychological concept that many readers probably already know about. To put it as plainly as possible, the relationship that you have with your parents defines the relationships you have with others over the course of your life. I apply it, additionally, to the way we use touch. Some people might describe themselves as extremely affectionate, and others might say they're more standoffish. Part of that is due to whatever their personal, inborn setpoint is for touch. But early interactions with others also build on that innate characteristic. So for instance, you might be someone who was actually born with a deep need to connect physically with others, but your parents maybe weren't that way. So you learned to suppress over time what you actually need. As an adult, you might say you're touch averse, but there's a lot to unpack under that.

This section is quite personal to me because I am someone who once considered myself to be touch-averse, but I really started to question that assumption as I did my reporting. Does this particular page give a good or poor idea of the entire work, though? Umm yes and no! It's an important thread to the book, to be sure. But I don't want to give the impression that it's a work of psychology or memoir. I try not to write about myself too much, except where it's most necessary, and the book covers a range of scientific fields. I think a lot of what I observe about touch in that section, however, mirrors the way people think about it in other fields ranging from biology to haptic engineering. It's a highly emotional sense, of course.

The book is a mix of hard and soft science, which is why I liked touch so much as a subject. You can write about it in a highly scientific way and also a more poetic and lyrical way. It's impossible to disentangle the sense of physical touch from our feelings, in other words. So this section is just heavier on the feelings end of things.

Visit Sushma Subramanian's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nathaniel Robert Walker's "Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia"

Nathaniel Robert Walker is an Associate Professor of Architectural History at the College of Charleston.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my new book has almost everything. I was, in fact, rather amazed and delighted to see how many different themes and issues from the book made an appearance on that single page! There was only one thing missing—but it was the most important thing of all. It was as if the page had the whole ice cream shop, including staff and customers, and money was changing hands, but there was no ice cream.

The basic premise of my book is that, before suburbs slowly but surely came to dominate many of our lives in the 1900s, there was a century or two of dreaming for an ideal suburban world…a world far from the dense hustle and smoky bustle of industrial cities, away from the slums and the stones. These dreams took several forms, with the most important being dozens upon dozens of Victorian science-fiction and utopian novels that foretold a future of mechanized, high-tech suburban bliss. To help my readers understand these sometimes wonderful and sometimes insane (and sometimes wonderfully insane) visions, I have to situate them in context, fleshing out the real urban world as Victorian architects worked in it, critics and reformers debated it, and everyday people experienced it. I have to help my readers understand the ways that Victorians drew upon older sources—such as the Bible or popular poetry from bygone eras—and leveraged emerging sciences to condemn cities and raise the possibility of a suburban alternative. Page 99 is full of this contextual discussion and offers almost every species of it. It takes my readers to London in 1847, as an important writer discusses a plan by an architect to disperse the poor of London from their foul rookeries by building new commuter cottage suburbs on railway lines:

…many Victorians saw Moffat’s scheme as a viable path to urban redemption. Andrew Winter of The People’s Journal was absolutely convinced; he argued that the wealthy were already leaving the city behind, such that the commercial and business district of “London proper at night, as far as the houses are concerned, is nearly deserted.” This was a fact, as the suburban fringes had proven so tempting that by the middle of the century, even middle-class families had all but abandoned the heart of London. Most commutes still required lengthy journeys by carriage, omnibus, or foot, but a small number were accessible by train. A three-mile hike from a humble but decent terrace house with a rear garden to a centrally located office would not be unusual for an average clerk, who might even celebrate the exercise.

The time had come, Winter argued, “when the working classes should follow the good example set by their superiors in the social scale.” If one rolled out a map of London and studied its “terrible physiology,” it would become clear that its streets were “but the frontier of a kingdom of which the upper classes know as little as of the interior of Japan.” Slums filled the nooks, lanes, and courts that made up the core of blocks, which “caged” London workers. In the industrial towns, he lamented, people lived in cellars and died young. In dramatic moral terms that can perhaps best be described as Augustinian, Winter argued that the problem cut straight to the original spirit of humanity:

... there is a moral as well as a physical scurvy—as the lime to the sailor in the great ocean, so is the smallest plant . . . to the poor mechanic shut up in our vast brick-and-mortar Babel. Trees, flowers, and “the green garniture of fields” are the natural companions of man, and in proportion to the length of time which you banish him from their society, so will he be distorted from the true image in which he was originally made. It was no idle saying—God made the country, but man made the town.

Page 99 gives us so much: an historical discussion of real London, reference to an architect’s railroad reform scheme, and a healthy chunk of journalistic criticism that summoned the Bible, evoked the ancient writings of Augustine and a dead British poet, threw the gauntlet in terms of hygiene and medicine, fretted over a growing gulf between the classes, and even exhaled a thin whiff of racism. It is Victorian urban criticism in a nutshell. The only thing that is missing is the core of my book: utopian science-fiction visions of a radical new future. So, perhaps Page 99 is perfect in every way. It establishes the urban world of the 1880s, its problems, and its debates, and then, I can only hope, leaves readers wanting to learn more about Victorian dreams for a solution: visions of suburban utopia that could be beautiful and enchanting, while also horrible and destructive.

Learn more about Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tina Frühauf's "Transcending Dystopia"

Tina Frühauf is Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University and serves on the doctoral faculty of The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the editor of the award-winning Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (2014) and has published widely on German Jewish music culture and twentieth-century music.

Frühauf applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989, and reported the following:

From page 99:

… The peculiar dialectic between cultural change and persistence is an indicator of the complexities the Jewish community faced in reestablishing itself after the Holocaust and for a provisional new beginning. This confluence of two seemingly dichotomous processes, a mobility in its own right, was not limited to Jewish communities. It extended to the cultural mainstream of all occupied Germany during the later 1940s, and music’s role therein is widely acknowledged. Cultural historian Hermann Glaser asserts that “from the very beginning of cultural life in the occupation zones of Germany, discontinuity and continuity were contradictory elements of the same structure, often hardly separated from each other.” According to Glaser there were more continuities than caesuras.

For Jewish communities, continuity and persistence also expressed itself in the fluctuation of numbers. By 1948 over one hundred communities existed again, resurrecting previously disbanded congregations primarily in bigger cities. Most of them numbered fewer than 50 members. Among the larger ones were Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, and Munich in the West, Dresden and Leipzig in the East, and the former capital of Berlin. But the manic exhilaration of the immediate postwar years quickly began to fade. …

This excerpt from page 99 of Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989 closes the book’s first part, titled “After the Rupture: The Interregnum and the Culture of Rebirth,” which centers on the remarkable return of Jewish musical activity that emerged in occupied Germany against all odds. A world was in ruins, a population so gravely diminished that a rich cultural life seemed unthinkable. And yet, hope and strength led to a rebirth that manifested itself, amongst other things, in musical practices. As such, page 99 captures the cultural significance of the first postwar years from a broader perspective, reading the developments during this time from the angle of continuance versus discontinuation as agents of cultural mobility. This aside, as much as 1945 was a juncture in history, page 99 represents a juncture in Transcending Dystopia—the penultimate page of the first part of the book, after which the trajectory of music in the Jewish communities would take new turns, with the foundation of two very different German states, and in a divided Berlin. The second part, “Music in Motion,” looks at the Jewish communities in West Germany; the third part “The Presence of Absence,” scrutinizes Jewish (heritage) music in East Germany; and the last part, “Music as Vortex” examines the unique case of Berlin. All parts rely on musical practices to draw together three areas of inquiry: the Jewish community, the postwar Germanys and their politics after the Holocaust, and on the concept of cultural mobility. Within these pillars, the chapters of each part cover a wide spectrum of topics from music during commemorations, on the radio and in Jewish newspapers to synagogue concerts and community events; from the absence and presence of cantor and organ to the resurgence of choral music. What binds these topics tightly together is the specific theoretical inquiry of mobility, which also surfaces on page 99.

Visit Tina Frühauf's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leslie Margolin's "The Etherized Wife"

Leslie Margolin is a professor of rhetoric, sexuality, and counselling at the University of Iowa. His books include Goodness Personified: The Emergence of Gifted Children and Under the Cover of Kindness: The Invention of Social Work.

Margolin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Etherized Wife: Privilege and Power in Sex Therapy Discourse, and reported the following:

At the top of page 99, readers will see a well-known psychologist's (Joseph Wolpe) verbatim description of how he treated a woman who could not tolerate sexual intercourse. Then they will see my reaction to this description:

Wolpe's technique, and this example, are quite famous, but as I read and reread Wolpe's description of how the treatment proceeded, I could not help thinking about the woman, his patient, whose significance as a human appears to have been reduced to that of a receptacle capable of receiving a series of imaginary and real rod-shaped objects into her vagina, culminating in the reception of her husband's penis. Wolpe described the case as a success because, like many of the others described in the sex therapy literature, the woman patient, in the end, was able to accept a penis into her vagina. But the question remains, why did Wolpe exclude any information on her motivation and frame of mind? Why did he see the intercourse goal as so important that it justified portraying her simply as an orifice that needed to learn to accept increasingly large objects until, finally, that orifice could comfortably accommodate a penis?

I believe that page 99 provides an excellent idea of what the book is all about.

This page shows, as does the entirety of my book, how, for decades, women have been objectified and humiliated in what we call "sex therapy."

Learn more about The Etherized Wife at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alisha Rankin's "The Poison Trials"

Alisha Rankin is associate professor of history at Tufts University. She is coeditor, with Elaine Leong, of Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 and author of Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany, which won the 2014 Gerald Strauss Prize for Reformation History.

Rankin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Poison Trials throws the reader into the middle of a gruesome scene at Prague Castle in 1561. It portrays a test of poison and antidote on a prisoner condemned to be hanged. This anecdote was related by the surgeon Claudius Richardus, who worked at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I. The very top of page 99 explains that the prisoner was given nothing but bread and water a few days before the test, so that his body would be more accessible to the poison (powdered root of an aconite known as napellus). I then describe Richardus’ excruciatingly detailed account of the poison’s painful effects on the prisoner, followed by the man’s fight for his life once he took the antidote (bezoar). In this case, the man survived, was set free, and was given a small payment for his participation. The page ends by noting Richardus’ interest in creating a “more certain” test than a previous, failed poison trial described earlier in the chapter, and it begins a description of a second trial overseen by Richardus along the same lines.

The Page 99 test works fairly well for my book. It is an important part of Chapter Three, which shows how physicians and surgeons at European princely courts recorded and shared detailed accounts of poison trials, in both private documents and printed books (Richardus’s text was a letter that ended up in print). I argue that these accounts deliberately depicted poison trials as learned, scholarly medical experiments, in contrast to dramatic poison demonstrations conducted in the marketplace by lower-class empirical practitioners. Page 99 also touches on themes that are important in other chapters. For instance, this prisoner was set free and given a payment – a small sign that humans used for potentially fatal tests required special treatment, the main theme of chapter 4 (on early medical ethics). The antidote, bezoar, is a focus in Chapter 5, which places poison trials within the global drug trade and the princely drive to collect exotic naturalia.

At the same time Page 99 misses some important aspects of the book. It makes no mention of the empirical practitioners who play a big role in the book, or of the ancient and medieval precedents to these tests. I also don’t want to reduce the book to the horrifying descriptions of what happens when you give poisons and antidotes to humans. These anecdotes are one of the most striking and sensational aspects of the book, but they only appear in a few chapters, and I am more interested in the questions they raise about experiment, authority, and ethics. The poison trials themselves feel very distant, but the “big questions” of the book are things we are still grappling with today.

Learn more about The Poison Trials at the University of Chicago Press website.

Follow Alisha Rankin on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Merryman's "Clipped Wings"

Molly Merryman is the founding director of Kent State University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and an associate professor of Sociology. She is also a documentary filmmaker and the Historic Research Producer for the WASP documentary Coming Home (2020). Merryman is the research director for Queer Britain, the UK's national LGBTQ+ Museum.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her classic book, Clipped Wings: the Rise and Fall of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II, and reported the following:

Page 99 includes part of my written discussion about the Congressional hearings held in order to extend militarized status to the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II. Because military service was segregated to only include white men, each branch of the military had to request an extension of militarization to include women. As each of these bills came forward, Congress debated larger cultural expectations of women. This was particularly pronounced with the bill for militarizing the WASP, because flying military planes was regarding as a masculine endeavor.

This page focuses on remarks made on June 21, 1944 made by Minnesota Representative Joseph O’Hara, in opposition to the bill that would have extended to Women Airforce Service Pilots the militarized status that they were promised and that the War Department needed to maintain the important war work these pilots were engaged in. The bill was opposed by a lobbying group of civilian male pilots and men who were awaiting military pilot training stateside, in part because these men did not want to serve in combat.

As I write on this page, Representative O’Hara condemned the WASP bill, describing it as a piece of social legislation and referred to skilled military pilots as “very attractive lady pilot(s).”

By constructing the WASP militarization bill as “social legislation,” O’Hara shifted the focus of the bill from legislation that was developed to further the American war efforts to legislation that was shaped as governmental sponsorship of leisurely activities of a privileged group. The assumptions of members of Congress about the intentions and abilities of women pilots specifically and women generally clouded their abilities to recognize the resolution as it was submitted—as enabling legislation sponsored by the Army Air Forces and the War Department.

While most of Clipped Wings addresses the program itself—how it was formed, who the pilots were and what they accomplished—page 99 does get at the pulse of a key struggle related to the program—that of militarization. For sadly, despite the significant accomplishments made by the WASP and the support that the Army Air Forces and War Department had for the program, Congress denied them militarization and disbanded them before the war was won. And they did this because of sexist assumptions, not because of facts. They did it because they and lobbying groups believed that women should not have the right to fly military planes. As a consequence, these women were denied pay, participation in the GI Bill, and many other rights, rewards and privileges that had been promised them when they volunteered to serve.

So while page 99 is not the heart of Clipped Wings, it is the book’s jugular vein—and on this page we begin to see the jugular being torn, an act which effectively killed the participation of women as military pilots for the next 30 years and destroyed the careers of these military pilots permanently.

Learn more about Clipped Wings at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeanne E. Abrams's "A View from Abroad"

Jeanne E. Abrams is Professor at the University Libraries and the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, where she is also Director of the Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society, and Curator of the Beck Archives, Special Collections. She is the author of First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role (2018) and Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health (2013).

Abrams applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A View from Abroad: The Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe, and reported the following:

Unfortunately, in regards to A View From Abroad, the page 99 test does not work very well for my book. In an effort to compare the European experience of John and Abigail Adams with another prominent early American couple, page 99 focuses not on the Adamses, the subjects of my volume, but instead on the travels of Sarah and John Jay. Jay had served as the president of the Continental Congress, and in 1770 Jay was named minister to Spain in order to seek financial and political support for the new American nation. The Jays and Adamses became friends but came from different backgrounds and led different lives in Europe.

My main thesis in A View From Abroad is that the European journeys of John and Abigail Adams expanded their life experiences and honed their analytical skills. It allowed them a breadth of perspective they could not have experienced in America. They came face-to-face abroad with some of the most powerful people in the world (including the French rulers Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and England’s King George III and Queen Charlotte) and witnessed first-hand national traditions that had been developed there over centuries. Yet their time in the Old World only served to enhance their American loyalties as they were transformed from highly intelligent and articulate provincials to sophisticated world travelers. In Europe, they were exposed to an intellectual and cultural environment far richer than they could have imagined. In significant ways, their sojourn in Europe played a pivotal role in shaping their notions about American identity and nationhood and provided them with a real life frame of comparison. The Adamses returned to their homeland with a set of attitudes towards American society that had been reinforced, strengthened, and even evolved from those they had held when they set out. Their articulate, entertaining writings, particularly their letters to family and friends back home, provide us with an intimate and fascinating portrait of life in 18th century Europe from the royal courts to those who barely earned enough to feed and clothe their families.

Learn more about A View from Abroad at the New York University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tim Harford's "The Data Detective"

Tim Harford, “the Undercover Economist”, is a Financial Times columnist, BBC broadcaster, and the author of nine books (most recently How To Make The World Add Up / The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics) and the podcast “Cautionary Tales”.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Data Detective and reported the following:

Page 99, pleasingly enough, is the beginning of a chapter. It opens with a delightful excerpt from Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man:

Rule Four

Step Back and Enjoy the View

The shortest-lived creatures on the Disc were mayflies, which barely make it through twenty-four hours. Two of the oldest zigzagged aimlessly over the waters of a trout stream, discussing history with some younger members of the evening hatching.

“You don’t get the kind of sun now that you used to get,” said one of them.

“You’re right there. We had proper sun in the good old hours. It were all yellow. None of this red stuff.”

“It were higher, too.”

“It was. You’re right.”

- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

The newspapers had an alarming message for Londoners in April 2018:

“London’s Murder Rate Is Higher than New York’s for the First Time Ever!” The headlines played into a narrative of gangs gone wild. And if we ignore for a moment that the very definition of “murder” differs on either side of the Atlantic, this claim is also perfectly true. In February 2018, there were fourteen murders in New York City, but fifteen in London.

But what should we conclude? Nothing.

We should conclude nothing because that pair of numbers alone tells us very little. If we want to understand what’s happening, we need to step back and take in a broader perspective.

Not a bad representation of my book - which is an attempt to help readers think more clearly about the world, by being wiser about statistical claims, and wiser about themselves. Each chapter begins with a quotation - they range from Umberto Eco's Serendipities to The Empire Strikes Back, Watchmen, and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Each chapter is phrased as a 'rule'; a habit of mind that I've found it useful to cultivate in my own work as an interpreter of the news and the numbers. Some of my favourite chapters tell a story - about an art forgery, about a computer gone wild, or about how one of the richest and most famous economists on the planet came to grief - but others, like this one, begin with an example and proceed swiftly enough to practical advice

Learn more about the book and author at Tim Harford's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Tim Harford: top 10 undercover economics books.

The Page 69 Test: The Undercover Economist.

The Page 69 Test:The Logic of Life.

The Page 99 Test: Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

The Page 99 Test: The Undercover Economist Strikes Back.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer M. Rampling's "The Experimental Fire"

Jennifer M. Rampling is associate professor of history at Princeton University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700, and reported the following:

The test checks out. Page 99 is the last page of chapter two of my book, which summarizes the argument and closes with a bit of foreshadowing of where my story will go. I’ve just spent the chapter outlining a new approach to alchemy in fifteenth-century England, which often appears in the context of patronage. “Sericonian alchemy” is a practice that uses base metals (disguised using the cover name “sericon”) as the prime matter of the alchemical work. It was popularized by George Ripley, an Augustinian canon fallen on hard times who tried to win the favor of an ecclesiastical patron, the Archbishop of York.

Ripley highlighted two advantages of his approach: it’s easily affordable, thanks to its inexpensive ingredients, and it’s multifunctional—sericon is the chief ingredient of the “vegetable stone,” allegedly a powerful medicinal remedy that, when suitably prepared, also transmutes base metals into gold (chrysopoeia). Interest in this profitable substance did not end with Ripley:

Sericonian alchemy would continue to shape English alchemical discourse well into the seventeenth century. By the 1650s, a readerly preference for the transmutational goals of Ripley’s Compound would gradually divert attention from the multipurpose practice outlined in the Medulla, which prized the medicinal vegetable stone above the mineral work. Yet the robustness of Ripley’s alchemy lay not just in its success as a practical rendering of the prestigious pseudo-Lullian corpus, but also in its adaptability to new interpretations based on differing circumstances. By reading “sericon” not only as red lead, but as any one of a variety of leaden compounds—or as a different metal entirely, or even as a nonmetallic ingredient such as tartar—Ripley’s own commentators could substitute new ingredients while still producing interesting chemical outcomes, often with chrysopoeian goals. They could also do so affordably. At once philosophically intelligible, morally unimpeachable, and practically efficacious, Ripley’s vegetable stone would become the constant, yet ever-varying, refrain of English alchemy.

As the spoiler on page 99 reveals, sericonian alchemy became very popular in early modern England—it features in nearly all the alchemical patronage suits addressed to Queen Elizabeth I, for instance. The problem for readers, though, was that “sericon” could be interpreted in many ways. Ripley probably intended a mixture of red lead and copper, but later practitioners substituted other ingredients in their quest for convincing practical results. Throughout the book, I map how this mingling of experimentation and close textual reading gave rise to new kinds of chemistry, while retaining the authority of medieval adepts like Ripley. Sadly, the designated page doesn’t have much to say much about these individual readers, or about the diverse settings in which they worked. And you’ll just have to take it on trust that “pseudo-Lullian” alchemy gets covered in chapter one. Still, if you want a snapshot of my argument, you could do worse than turn to page 99.

Learn more about The Experimental Fire at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elliott Young's "Forever Prisoners"

Elliott Young is Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII and Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border and co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 200 asylum cases and has written for the Huffington Post, the Oregonian, and the Utne Reader.

Young applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Forever Prisoners is about the clash between executive authority over foreign affairs and the putative constitutional rights that all people, whether authorized immigrants or not, have within the United States. During World War Two, Japanese Peruvians were kidnapped by the US military in Peru and forcibly brought to the United States to be placed in Immigration and Naturalization service (INS) camps as “enemy aliens.” Even though they were forced to come to the United States, the legal basis for their detention was “illegal entry,” an argument that is so bizarre that it would make Kafka blush. Courts refused to review how the Japanese Peruvians arrived in the country, claiming that this was beyond their jurisdiction, and only upheld the grounds that these individuals had indeed arrived on US soil without authorization. The ulterior motive for these detentions was to exchange these Japanese Peruvians for American civilians captured by the Japanese.

This page gets at one of the central arguments of the book, which is the twisted logic of immigration law and the way that non-citizens in the United States often find themselves subject to detention without the benefit of constitutional protections given the courts deference to executive prerogative in foreign affairs and over immigration. The book covers 140 years of history and the episode involving Japanese Peruvians is just one of the many ways non-citizens have been detained for indefinite periods of time with little recourse to legally challenge their imprisonment. Yet, if a reader was to just read this one page, they would understand the central assertion of the book that the US government has used the immense coercive apparatus of the state to deny liberty to immigrants and other foreign-born people in the country. We stand on the precipice of the possibility for a dramatic shift in the way the new Biden government will approach immigration, but to make true progress, he must move beyond the past 140 years of immigration restrictions and not just the last four years of Trumpism.

Learn more about Forever Prisoners at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue