A. Tunç Şen's "Forgotten Experts"

A. Tunç Şen is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450–1600, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Rukn al-Amuli contends that the astrolabe is the best instrument for executing these astronomical operations, which are essential for casting horoscopes and practicing electional astrology. He nonetheless posits that this craft, along with the mathematical sciences more broadly, is a type of intellectual endeavor that cannot flourish without “the support of rulers and statesmen.” For the past twenty years—since he completed his zij (astronomical handbook with tables) and another treatise on the celestial globe that has yet to be discovered—Rukn al-Amuli laments that he has been bereft of royal support. Notwithstanding possible exaggeration as a plea to his new patron, Abu’l-Qasim Babur Mirza (d. 1457), the Timurid ruler in Khurasan, to whom he dedicates his treatise on the astrolabe, al-Amuli’s life over the past two decades seems to have devolved into an unmitigated disaster. He details a series of afflictions that beset him, not the least of which was his prolonged separation from loved ones and constant relocations to distant places. More recently, his odyssey took him to India and Kerman, during which he was plagued by political turmoil, massacres, and famine.

The Page 99 Test works intriguingly well for my book, which traces the lives of several astral experts—known as munajjims—from the Ottoman and broader Persianate worlds of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These experts shared similar life trajectories: they were well versed in mathematical and astral sciences, constantly sought the patronage of powerful figures, asserted their intellectual superiority over peers and rivals, and offered vital services to audiences eager for interpretations of the heavens. Yet despite their enduring presence and significant contributions, they were largely forgotten—not only in modern times, but even in their own.

There are various reasons why they fell into oblivion. Their expertise over the workings of the heavens is perhaps best characterized by its ambivalent nature. It was a kind of expertise both transmitted and omitted, prized and stigmatized. Munajjims demonstrated technical proficiency in the mathematical sciences, astronomical knowledge, and astrological techniques but were often criticized, even caricatured—both in the medieval and early modern periods and in contemporary times—as simpletons lacking reliable bodies of knowledge. The knowledge required to practice their profession, especially as related to astrology, was text-centered and openly circulated, yet it was not commonly taught within the formal educational institutions of madrasas. While munajjims’ services—such as calculating auspicious hours, casting horoscopes, producing annual almanacs, and providing on-site astrological counsel—appealed to royals and the general public alike, they also faced skepticism from various segments of society, and sometimes even harbored their own doubts about the limitations of their science. Finally, munajjims were not the sole experts in the domain of predicting the future. They operated alongside, and sometimes in competition with, other figures—so-called occult practitioners or masters of esoteric arts—such as dream interpreters, geomancers, experts in the science of lettrism, and mystics claiming to possess mantic powers, whose authority relied upon distinct bodies of knowledge and hence occasionally came into conflict with munajjims’ expertise.

Learn more about Forgotten Experts at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Gubser's "Their Future"

Michael Gubser is professor of history at James Madison University. He has published three books on European intellectual history and international development.

Gubser applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Their Future: A History of Ahistoricism in International Development, with the following results:

The ninety-ninth page of my new book Their Future: A History of Ahistoricism in International Development provides an interesting angle on the whole work, but I think it suggests that the book is more persistently theoretical than is in fact the case. It occurs early in the fourth chapter, which is entitled “The History Wars.” The chapter discusses two major mid-century development theories: modernization theory, which emerged in the United States, and structuralism, pioneered in Latin America. In particular, page 99 summarizes one of the most famous theories in the recent history of development: Walt Rostow’s Five Stages of Economic Development (1960). Drawing on the history of Western industrialization, Rostow argued that the evolution from traditional agrarian societies to the modern industrial ones always passed through the same five historical stages. Unless they were somehow stalled along the way (by, for example, a war or a communist takeover), all developing societies would follow the path blazed by the West and would eventually come to resemble the modern USA. Thus, while his five-stage model was a historical theory, it denied the value and relevance of actual historical experiences outside Europe and the US – and even Western history was radically simplified into a five-step schema. I call this approach historical ahistoricism – the use of an abstract history to deny the detail and variety of actual histories. The suppression of local history and experience is a central theme of my book. Rostow himself went on to advise John F. Kennedy and support the Vietnam War, partly in the name of modernization. And his modernization theory was revived and updated at the end of the Cold War by Francis Fukuyama in a famous article on the end of history.

But Their Future discusses more than theories of development. It also examines development projects and practices in several countries and continents, most notably Guatemala, Zambia, and Bangladesh. So the page 99 focus on a key economic development theory accurately reflects parts of my analysis, but it misses the book’s geographic range as well as the many discussions of local projects and histories around the globe.

Learn more about Their Future at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Hartman's "Karl Marx in America"

Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars and Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times.

Hartman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Karl Marx in America, and reported the following:

From page 99:

… course, since the AFL had the most to lose to it. But even some within SLP ranks condemned the strategy.

A group of SLP dissidents led by Morris Hillquit revolted in 1899. These “kangaroos,” as DeLeon loyalists nicknamed them—a nineteenth-century political term of derision for a crook—opposed both dual unionism and DeLeon’s regime. At the annual SLP meeting, the kangaroos attempted to take physical possession of the party’s printing press. A brawl broke out, but the Hillquit group failed to dislodge the DeLeon stalwarts. The rebels then took the matter to court, where they sued for the name and property of the SLP, only to lose. DeLeon maintained control, but he and the party were damaged by this schism. DeLeon and the SLP fell from their perch atop the socialist movement, replaced by Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party of America that formed in 1901.

Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party

If anyone in history personifies American Marxism, it is Eugene Victor Debs. He rallied more Americans to the cause of class struggle than anyone else. Yet Debs was not always a fire-breathing class warrior. The Indiana-born revolutionary started his political career promoting the idea of a “grand cooperative scheme” that would allow people to “work together in harmony in every branch of industry.” Rather than a working-class struggle over the means of production, the young Debs called for the creation of utopian colonies modeled on a Christian vision of a city on a hill. The future of socialism, for him at the time, lay in the vision imagined by Robert Owen. Debs believed that a rapacious form of capitalism had betrayed the spirit of brotherhood—a spirit that had long animated Americans—and that the moral example set by the utopian community would help convince others to live up to their highest ideals.

Sinclair Lewis called Debs the John the Baptist of American socialism. Daniel Bell described him as “the man whose gentleness and…

Page 99 of Karl Marx in America does indeed convey something central to the book, where I argue that Marx’s thought was more important in shaping American political discourse than most people realize. Page 99 is part of Chapter Two—“Working Class Hero”—about how the militant labor and socialist movements of the Gilded Age took up Marx as inspiration and as strategic guide to fighting against the emergent industrial and corporate capitalism that had taken shape in the United States and had made the lives of millions of workers pretty miserable.

Page 99 represents a transition in the chapter from discussing the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) led by the explicitly Marxist Daniel DeLeon, which ultimately failed to capture the hearts and minds of most radical workers, to discussing the Socialist Party of America led by the incomparable Eugene Debs. Although Debs, much more so than DeLeon, was immersed in longstanding American political traditions like Christianity, republicanism, and populism, his experience with the labor movement and even more so, capital’s repression of the labor movement, made him more amenable to Marx’s ideas. And when he read Marx while in prison in 1894, he was converted to Marxism and took American socialism down the Marxist road. The Gilded Age was thus one of what I call the "Marx booms," periods in US History when lots of Americans read the bearded communist philosopher favorably.

The book consists of nine chapters, chronologically ordered from the US Civil War to the present, which dig deep into how Marx interpreted the United States (the focus of Chapter One—“American Revolutionary”) and even more so, about how Marx’s ideas came into contact with people working out political problems in America. Out of what might be called “the Marx-America dialectic,” three distinct versions of Marx emerged: the Marx who famously centered labor as the driving force of value in a capitalist society; the Marx whose ideas mixed with other American political traditions to form hybrid political tendencies; and the Marx whose repulsive theories helped liberals and conservatives work out their own ideas about America.

Learn more about Karl Marx in America at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A War for the Soul of America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frank Krutnik's "Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers"

Frank Krutnik is an emeritus reader in film studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton. His publications include Popular Film and Television Comedy; In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity; and Inventing Jerry Lewis; and he is coeditor of Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era.

Krutnik applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers: Radio and Film Noir, and shared the following:

Page 99 concludes the chapter “The Transmedial Seriality of Michael Shayne #1: From Book to Film”. The page wraps up the discussion of the low-budget B-film series in which the Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) cast Hugh Marlowe as Brett Halliday’s private eye Michael Shayne. Even though reviewers complained that the PRC series was hampered by budgetary restrictions, with verbal exposition often substituting for dramatized action, these films were more faithful to Halliday’s version of Michael Shayne than the earlier Twentieth Century-Fox series, in which Lloyd Nolan took a broadly comic approach to Shayne.

The final paragraph summarizes the differences between these two film series and the common conception of what a film noir is and does. These series films “are modest in their budgets and their ambitions, never engaging seriously with the implications of the murderous activities their detectives investigate”. Unlike many cherished noir movies, they avoid complex storytelling strategies or an emphasis on the ‘fallen world’ of American modernity. Even so, such B-film series performed a valuable role in contributing to double-feature programming and the studios’ obligation to theatre owners, as well as representing “significant developments in the Michael Shayne media franchise”. At the same time as audiences were able to watch the PRC films in cinemas, they could also listen to the detective’s adventures on the radio, courtesy of a popular series from the Mutual Broadcasting System, as well as engaging with Halliday’s ongoing book series. The various media “produced widely differing versions of Shayne, but they were recognizable iterations of an established cultural figure, the hard-boiled private eye, that had achieved substantial familiarity across U.S. popular culture by the late 1940s”

The Page 99 Test does not really provide a successful snapshot of the book as a whole. It certainly illustrates one of its key themes - the questioning of conventional approaches to (film) noir - but there is no mention of the central topic of radio drama. It is the following chapter that examines in detail the various appearances of Michael Shayne on the airwaves, including a convincingly noir approach to the detective by Jeff Chandler.

Visit Frank Krutnik's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas A. Tweed's "Religion in the Lands That Became America"

Thomas A. Tweed is the Harold and Martha Welch Professor of American Studies and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. A past president of the American Academy of Religion, he is editor of Retelling U.S. Religious History and author of Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion and Religion: A Very Short Introduction.

Tweed applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History, and shared the following:

Page 99 falls in chapter three, “Imperial Religion: Agricultural Metaphors, Catholic Missions, and the Second Sustainability Crisis, 1565-1756.” The preceding chapters chronicled religious history, from a rock shelter ritual in 9200 BCE attended by an ancient foraging community in present-day Texas to Christopher Columbus’s first encounters in 1492 with Taíno fishing-farming communities in the Caribbean. I set up the page 99 section about “Mexico and Peru” on the previous page, where I note that “the religious history of the Spanish colonies north of the Rio Grande starts in the Caribbean and Latin America, because that’s where the patterns were set that would shape the first settlements and missions in the lands that became the US.” Those patterns included importing enslaved Africans and displacing local Natives, as when Columbus, who returned in 1493, built a church cemetery on an earlier Taíno burial ground, thereby building the first colonial metropolis on “a Native necropolis.”

Page 99 suggests that “Native maltreatment continued in the Aztec ceremonial center in the Valley of Mexico and the Incan ceremonial center in the Andes Mountains.” I describe a Spanish attack during an Aztec ceremony in Mexico City’s Great Temple in 1521, when, as a Native witness reported, “the blood flowed like water and gathered into pools.” I then note that some Spanish Catholic clerics in the Caribbean and Latin America protested the horrific maltreatment of Indigenous Peoples, as when one pious critic reported that “Christians grilled shamans until they ‘howled in agony.’” The protests reached Rome, where in 1537 the pope declared that Natives were “truly men” who should not be deprived of their liberty. I end the section with a comment: “It might seem astonishing that a church leader believed it necessary to declare Natives were human beings, but apparently it needed to be said.”

Ford Madox Ford’s Page 99 Test works well in at least two ways.

First, it shows how my account differs from the classic scholarly stories of American religion, which focused on theological ideas and Protestant churches and traced the rise and fall of Protestant public power. Page 99 illustrates the book’s animating aim—to craft a new plot by changing the story’s temporal span, spatial scope, and organizing themes. The page expands the geographical scope to Central and South America, just as earlier chapters had extended the chronological span to 11,100 years before the present. English Protestants, who are central characters in other stories, aren’t the focus on page 99, and, when they appear in the next chapter, the narrative doesn’t employ the usual motifs to recount a tale about the rise and fall of Protestant influence.

Second, the Page 99 Test offers a glimpse of the book’s main arguments—about “sustainability crises” and religion’s role. I chronicle three social and environmental crises in the lands that became America: the Cornfield Crisis (1140-1350), the Colonial Crisis (1565-1776), and the Industrial Crisis (1873-1920). The first crisis, discussed in the preceding chapter, was resolved as stressed farming communities moved away, scaled down, and reduced hierarchy. The other two crises remained unresolved and were bequeathed to subsequent generations. The Industrial Crisis is the topic of a later chapter, but the Colonial Crisis is introduced in the chapter that includes page 99: “As isolated settler outposts became interconnected imperial provinces a second crisis of sustainability flared up between 1650 and 1750, when empires’ emissaries sanctioned the displacement of Natives and the enslavement of Africans.” Page 99 includes details about the spiritually-sanctioned processes that, when redeployed north of the Rio Grande, generated socially and environmentally stressed niches like the slave plantation and the Indian reservation. Finally, page 99 identifies both atrocities and protests and, thereby, reinforces another of the book’s main points—that in the long history of the lands that became America religion both made things better and made things worse, sometimes inhibiting and sometimes promoting individual, communal, and environmental flourishing.

Learn more about Religion in the Lands That Became America at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: America's Church.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greta Lynn Uehling's "Decolonizing Ukraine"

Greta Uehling is an anthropologist who specializes in the study of war, conflict, and population displacement. A professor at the University of Michigan, she teaches seminars on human rights and humanitarianism for the Program in International and Comparative Studies.

Her new book, Decolonizing Ukraine: How the Indigenous People of Crimea Remade Themselves after Russian Occupation, shows readers how understanding Crimea is essential for understanding Ukraine — and the war with Russia — today.

Uehling applied the "Page 99 Test" to Decolonizing Ukraine, with the following results:

Page 99 finds me, the author, sitting on a rough-hewn bench in the back room of a community center, interviewing singer songwriter and Eurovision winner, Jamala. Her winning song is about her people’s 1944 deportation according to an order by Stalin.

The lyrics describe her great grandmother’s realization that her infant daughter has died in the crowded deportation train car. The song broke a previously enforced silence surrounding deportation and raised awareness about the event, now recognized by the government of Ukraine as genocide.

Page 99 is part of an entire chapter devoted to Jamala because as a representative of a Muslim Indigenous group, the Crimean Tatars, she was a major catalyst in the process of Ukrainian national identity becoming more accepting of ethnic and religious diversity.

The victory was significant, I explain, because it provided an opportunity to collectively acknowledge past injustices and grieve human losses in ways that had been impossible before. Music harnesses the power of empathy to heal communities and build empathy.

I link my discussion of Jamala to processes that took place in the United States following the murder of George Floyd, which led Americans to more deeply reckon with racial hierarchies and discrimination in the United States.

This discussion, grounded in philosopher Charles Taylor’s adaptation of Hegel, highlights that recognition of one’s identity by others is a vital human need.

A reader opening to page 99 would gain a clear sense of the style and methodology of the work as a whole. They would quickly see that my approach relies on primary sources. As a cultural anthropologist, I conducted 90 one-on-one interviews over a three-year period in locations across Ukraine to write the book, and my interview with Jamala is one of them.

A reader would also observe that the book interweaves my personal experiences of conducting fieldwork into the broader narrative. As an ethnographer, the process of uncovering the story is itself an integral part of the story I tell.

This page explores the power of collective grieving as a catalyst for social solidarity, a theme that resonates throughout the book, where emotions are central to the analysis. In other chapters, readers encounter emotions such as fear, hatred, and empathy, each playing a critical role in shaping political and social dynamics.

Finally, the page introduces the concept of recognition, emphasizing its significance in Indigenous struggles for self-determination, which have largely been framed through the lens of being seen, heard, and acknowledged.

A reader turning to page 99, however, would not encounter the book’s overarching argument. They would also lack essential contextual information—such as who the Crimean Tatars are, what it means to be Indigenous, and why Indigeneity holds particular significance in contemporary Ukraine.

In summary, the browser’s test offers a certain degree of usefulness, particularly in giving readers a glimpse of the book’s style, methodology, and thematic concerns. However, it does not convey the overarching argument of the work, nor does it provide key background information necessary for fully understanding the broader context and significance of the narrative.

Decolonizing Ukraine brings readers into the lives of the Ukrainians, Russians, and Crimean Tatars who opposed Russia’s takeover of Crimea, many of whom fled for government-controlled Ukraine. I focus in particular on the Crimean Tatars because they were disproportionately affected by Russian occupation, and I believe their experiences offer a unique vantage point on Ukraine.

As a whole, the book opens a window onto how a historically disadvantaged group, that had been vilified and demonized for centuries, not only survives repeated episodes of ethnic cleansing but succeeds in transforming how they view themselves and how they are viewed by others, thereby gaining more meaningful social inclusion and political power in Ukraine.

Visit Greta Uehling's website.

The Page 99 Test: Everyday War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin M. McGeough's "Readers of the Lost Ark"

Kevin M. McGeough is a Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Geography & Environment at the University of Lethbridge, where he holds a Board of Governor’s Research Chair in Archaeological Theory and Reception. He co-directs archaeological excavations in Jordan and in Canada.

McGeough applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Readers of the Lost Ark: Imagining the Ark of the Covenant from Ancient Times to the Present, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Readers of the Lost Ark introduces the Parker Expedition, an expedition in which British explorers sought to recover the lost Ark of the Covenant from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Ark of the Covenant is the chest that God instructs Moses to have built, and, according to the biblical account, had dangerous properties and powers. The Parker Expedition sought to find the Ark, and they had raised money for the expedition believing that its discovery could be quite profitable. Working surreptitiously in one of the most religiously and politically contested spaces in the world, the team’s excavations near and on the Temple Mount eventually set off a riot in Jerusalem from which they had to flee for their lives. Page 99 introduces the main characters involved in this expedition: Lt. Montague Parker, formerly a British soldier, and Valter Henrik Juvelius, a Finnish mystic who believed that he could decipher hidden messages in the Bible, especially those related to the Temple of Solomon. Juvelius’s decipherment was not a traditional translation but involved a reimagining of biblical history from that presented in the Old Testament. Juvelius, interacting with ancient Rabbinic accounts, offered a new version of history where King David hid the Ark of the Covenant in a secret location in Jerusalem, from which it was later removed by King Hezekiah. Parker and Juvelius thought that they could find this secret hiding spot.

The Page 99 Test works really well for my book (and in fact the publisher and I had decided to make this chapter the free preview chapter well before I thought to check page 99). Most readers will know of the Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones film (the name of which inspired the name of my book), in which the fictional archaeologist races the Nazis to discover this ancient biblical weapon before they do. Page 99 introduces this curious story about a real-life quest for the Ark, one rooted just as much in fantasy interpretations of the ancient relic as Indy’s story. For the Parker Expedition was not based in the scientific study of the Bible or the archaeology of Jerusalem; it invoked mystical thinking driven by impulses to find lost treasure. It was not a typical archaeological expedition; it was the attempt of untrained amateurs to use psychic techniques to decode supposed secret messages in the Bible in order to find lost treasure. This specific example well captures what my book is about, which is not so much what the Ark of the Covenant actually was (although I do address that) but more how the Ark has come to be meaningful for different communities in different contexts. Readers of the Lost Ark explores how the biblical accounts of the Ark are ambiguous enough to inspire all sorts of different interpretations of what the Ark was, what it was used for, and where it could be now.

Learn more about Readers of the Lost Ark at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tiffany D. Joseph's "Not All In"

Tiffany D. Joseph is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of Sociology and International Affairs Program at Northeastern University. She is the author of Race on the Move: Brazilian Migrants and the Global Reconstruction of Race.

Joseph applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare, with the following results:

From page 99:

[The explicitly racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric of the] …past decade has generated a climate of fear that has diminished Latinx and other immigrants’ willingness to seek health care around the country and even in Boston. These themes surfaced among the individuals I interviewed in 2012–2013. They encountered language-based difficulties in making and scheduling appointments and obtaining transportation, suffered from providers’ implicit and explicit discriminatory treatment, and feared being profiled and detained on the way to appointments, which could lead to their arrest and deportation. Thus, racialized legal status discrimination was pervasive in Latinx immigrants’ experiences with the Boston healthcare system.

How Language Hinders the Medical Encounter

Limited English proficiency (LEP) hindered immigrants’ communication with healthcare providers, which intensified all the other forms of discrimination they might encounter. For the estimated 25 million individuals in the United States with LEP, language presents a huge structural barrier to obtaining health care, from scheduling appointments and seeing providers to filling and accurately taking prescriptions. While the inability to obtain necessary information in one’s primary language may seem an inadvertent consequence of migration, it represents a violation of anti-discrimination law. As I discussed in Chapter 1, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects the right of individuals to receive language-appropriate information and assistance in federally funded institutions. Consequently, the inability to receive such assistance is a form of racial discrimination, which compromises LEP individuals’ engagement with meso-level institutions. Like many primary English speakers, I previously took for granted the privilege of making appointments and communicating with healthcare professionals in my primary language. As I interviewed stakeholders, I realized how many patients ran into these racialized legal status barriers when attempting to obtain health services.

I asked Brazilian and Dominican respondents about the quality of their interactions with medical providers. Francisca, the Brazilian who complained that the government made it difficult to apply for coverage,…[described the problem her family faced when getting care].

The Page 99 Test definitely applies to my book and gives a reader a good idea about the central themes of Not All In with regard to how racial and anti-immigrant discrimination negatively shape immigrants’ healthcare access. This page references how language, specifically having Limited English Proficiency (LEP), is a tremendous barrier to all aspects of navigating the healthcare system. First, having limited English proficiency (LEP) makes it difficult to schedule appointments. Second, language differences limit effective patient-provider communication and may result in longer waiting times if medical interpreters are unavailable. In both cases, immigrants reported feeling that providers mistreated them or were inpatient when additional language resources were needed. Thus, language – either not speaking English or speaking with an accent – was a crucial factor that sometimes contributed to immigrants’ experiences of discrimination in the healthcare system and their broader lives.

Not All In confirms a stark truth about our healthcare system: health coverage does not guarantee access to health care. Obamacare was a historic reform, but everyone has not benefited from it due to policy design (for immigrants) or lack of policy implementation (for Americans in states that did not expand Medicaid). But, even when people have coverage, like most immigrants I interviewed in the book, they experienced significant barriers to enrolling in coverage and then getting care with that coverage. Their limited English proficiency made it difficult to schedule appointments and effectively communicate with providers, particularly if medical interpreters were not available. Beyond that, long-standing documentation status restrictions in health policy alongside structural racism in the healthcare system meant immigrants experienced discrimination based on their racialized legal status – the intersection of race, ethnicity, and documentation status. Fears of being pulled over by police or immigration enforcement in route to obtaining care also made immigrants afraid to see their providers. Though the book focuses on immigrants, most of us can relate to not understanding complicated insurance lingo, finding a primary care provider taking new patients or with certain insurance, or effectively communicating with our doctors. But the most marginalized among us must contend with explicit and implicit discrimination that make it more difficult to obtain the best quality health care we can get.

Visit Tiffany D. Joseph's website.

The Page 99 Test: Race on the Move.

--Marshal Zeringue

Justin Eckstein's "Sound Tactics"

Justin Eckstein is Associate Professor of Communication, Media, and Design Arts at Pacific Lutheran University and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. He is the coeditor of Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production.

Eckstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sound Tactics: Auditory Power in Political Protests, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book opens within a case study of HU Resist, a student activist group at Howard University, at a moment of intensification. It documents their shift from a localized student protest to a broader civic movement, interweaving historical resonance, digital amplification, and material solidarity. On this page, readers encounter HU Resist not merely as agitators but as archivists of Black student resistance, building an audiovisual, participatory infrastructure grounded in both community and critique. Their tactical soundwork—chanting, video, and responsive surveying—creates a scene of deliberative listening as much as vocal protest. The page concludes as a financial aid embezzlement scandal breaks, layering institutional critique atop historical commemoration.

The page does not function as an uncanny synecdoche of the book, but it does pulse with its dominant rhythms. A browser landing here would glimpse the book’s commitments: a study of how student sound and speech shape publics, how institutions get narrated from their margins, and how protest reorganizes the auditory. Yet, absent is the theoretical scaffolding that situates HU Resist within broader arguments about heckling, voicing, and institutional aurality. Without that framework, one might misread the work as primarily ethnographic rather than rhetorical. Still, it is a good shortcut—just not a complete one.

The HU Resist case sits at the heart of the book’s wager: that sound—both as noun and adjective—offers a tactical vocabulary for those operating under constraint. Sound as a noun refers to the material vibrations that are heard and felt; sound as an adjective connotes practical judgment, a sense of fittingness within a given situation. Earlier in the chapter, HU Resist had discovered the improvisational force of the heckle, using it during a campus convocation to call out institutional complicity. When the financial aid scandal surfaced, they recalibrated, turning to Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” as a sonic indictment of administrative failure. Their ability to pivot, remix, and reframe in response to evolving institutional conditions exemplifies the logic of “sound tactics”: using auditory presence to reorganize what counts as sayable, audible, and actionable within public space.

HU Resist exemplifies the book’s broader claim: that protest sound is not ambient noise but deliberate, moral argument. Across case studies—from student walkouts to urban casseroles—Sound Tactics theorizes how constrained groups use auditory forms to render demands urgent, affectively charged, and institutionally disruptive. These are not just sounds; they are sound judgments. Protesters deploy pitch, rhythm, and repetition as rhetorical resources that compel recognition

Learn more about Sound Tactics at the Penn State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew F. Schmader's "Uncovering America's First War"

Matthew F. Schmader has been conducting archaeological research in central New Mexico for more than forty years. He has conducted research on sites of every major cultural time period in New Mexico and served as the Albuquerque City Archaeologist for ten years. He is currently an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.

Schmader applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Uncovering America's First War: Contact, Conflict, and Coronado's Expedition to the Rio Grande, and reported the following:

My page 99 is actually very important but is on a topic not quite within the main theme of the book. The best quote is: “The scale and pace of other changes (such as architecture and settlement patterns) in the late pre-Contact era of the middle Rio Grande pueblos is paralleled in the ceramic record.” Here I describe that the Ancestral Pueblo world was going through substantial and systemic change in the century or less before the arrival of the first Europeans and outsiders in 1540. This was quite consequential, because those changes in fact helped strengthen pre-Contact Pueblo social organizations to a degree that helped it withstand a major impact from the outside. Without these changes, the Pueblos may have been less resilient to great external stresses.

The main storyline of the book is about the collision between the world’s greatest superpower at the time—the burgeoning Spanish empire—and the most populated area of the American Southwest, which was located in the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico. The book details material signs of conflict, of battles fought between not only Europeans and Pueblos, but also involving hundreds of Mexican Native soldiers brought to bolster the European ranks. The stand-off was epic, a life and death struggle for the very survival of Indigenous cultures versus the forces of European expansionism. The Ancestral Pueblos succeeded where other societies went extinct, and the Europeans came up empty in their quest to find Asia. What emerged instead is a blend of cultures unique to the American Southwest, with syncretism in religion, intermarriage, and unique lifeways. It was a painful birthing process, marked by constant Indigenous resistance and by Spanish determination to establish some sort of colony. As often happens in history, nobody got everything they sought and the outcome produced unexpected results—in this case, New Mexican culture.

Learn more about Uncovering America's First War at the University of New Mexico Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue