Benjamin Mangrum's "The Comedy of Computation"

Benjamin Mangrum is Associate Professor of Literature at MIT and author of Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism (2019), winner of the Louis I. Bredvold Prize in 2019, awarded by the University of Michigan.

Mangrum applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence, and shared the following:

Page 99 is nestled within the book’s third chapter, which is titled “The One about Authenticity.” Each chapter in The Comedy of Computation examines the cultural history of the computer from a different vantage point. The third chapter shows how an "ethics of authenticity" has shaped public attitudes toward computing in the United States. I argue that this ethics appears in both anxieties about computing as well as enthusiastic support for the way the technology seems to give power to ordinary people. Page 99 is looking back to formative early moments in the development of authenticity as a moral and social ideal. I’m discussing how the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave moral weight to authenticity, contrasting this version of the ideal with later writers and philosophers. According to Rousseau’s version of the ideal, the modern individual ought to seek to come into intimate contact with his or her inner self and then live in a way that’s consistent with that interior knowledge. In the following passage, I’m distilling some of the ideas from the preceding pages:

Whether contact with the self is a secular virtue or a religious practice, the authenticity of that contact almost by necessity must be determined by the individual. This is a key element in the discursive structure of authenticity. Who else can determine whether I see the inner truth about myself? Who else could know my inner state? The modern ideal of authenticity envisions a condition of inwardness whose very structure invites, and often even privileges, a circularity in which the self serves as the measure of itself.

Here, I’m trying to identify a troubling circularity that tends to accompany an ethics of authenticity. This circularity goes back to Rousseau, but so many of the cultural sensibilities that surround the computer are also structured around it. This version of authenticity leads us to scorn or have suspicions about forms of mediation, which supposedly disrupt direct contact with our inner sense of self. The computer is, of course, a technology of mediation. Yet the basis for this skepticism about technological mediation is curiously circular. I find that circularity curious; it’s worth scrutinizing the problems and promises of these attitudes about authenticity—one among many aims of The Comedy of Computation.

I think the Page 99 Test fares pretty well with my book. On the one hand, if readers were to open my book to page 99 and encounter this line of argument, they’d likely be confused why a book about computing is talking about Rousseau. Readers would obviously need some context for this historical look backward. On the other hand, this is an important moment in the book's argument. I go on to discuss the paradox of authenticity in more detail, and I show how twentieth-century youth culture inherited and adapted an ethics of authenticity. I connect these historical trends to the cultural history of the computer in what I think are novel and under-appreciated ways. But the quoted passage above is one of the first moments where I begin to think critically about an ethics of authenticity. Is it a coherent moral discourse? What are the downsides to this ideal’s influence upon our attitudes toward technology and everyday life? I try to pose these questions in “The One about Authenticity,” and page 99 is a key moment in the development of that line of inquiry.

Learn more about The Comedy of Computation at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Land of Tomorrow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert W. Fieseler's "American Scare"

Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist investigating marginalized groups and a scholar excavating forgotten histories. A National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year and recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, his debut book Tinderbox won seven awards, including the Edgar Award, and his reporting has appeared in Slate, Commonweal, and River Teeth, among others. Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is pursuing a PhD at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow. He lives with his husband on the gayest street in New Orleans.

Fieseler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Approximately half a dozen Live Oak Klansmen posing as sheriff’s deputies kidnapped and tortured a local Black farm hand named Richard Cooks that June 1.¹ Klansmen tied thirty-five- year-old father of nine Richard Cooks to a tree beside the Suwannee River and whipped him for hours while threatening to feed him to the alligators and do the same to his children.² Two white ringleaders who impersonated deputy sheriffs during the abduction, local Klansmen Fred Sweat and Johnny Smith, later confessed their crimes to Sheriff Lewis.³ Yet after interviewing the victim, Sheriff Lewis declined to press charges against Sweat or Smith because Cooks, as he lay injured in bed, could not recall an exact enough description of his attackers to a standard that satisfied the lawman.⁴

Family members who witnessed Cooks’s kidnapping were not consulted by Sheriff Lewis as witnesses, and none of the whites present at the flogging could seem to remember who else was there. Determined not to capsize the lives of two local boys, Sheriff Lewis instead called upon Grand Dragon W. J. Griffin to internally discipline Sweat and Smith as errant Klansmen.⁵ Griffin continued at the hearing:

He [the sheriff] says, “Well, I wish you’d give them a good scolding. Somebody around here needs talking to.” He says, “We can’t put up with stuff like this.” I says, “I don’t blame you Sheriff.” I says, “If you know anything about it, why don’t you put them in jail?” He says, “Well, I know who done it, I know who did it.” He says, “I discussed it with them,” and he says, “They admitted it to me, the two of them.”⁶

When questioned by FLIC attorney Mark Hawes on the Cooks case, state attorney William Randall Slaughter, who’d called the 1955 grand jury that failed to indict Sweat and Smith, covered for Sheriff Lewis by repeatedly complaining about a lack of resources in his rural district.⁷

The scene of brutal white terrorism detailed on page 99 of American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, involving the abduction and torture of an innocent Black father named Richard Cooks by members of the Florida Ku Klux Klan, eerily encapsulates the stakes of southern lawlessness pushing our nation to the brink of a second splintering, a.k.a. my book’s major theme.

I yearned for American Scare to impart upon a 21st century reader, presumably living outside of a 1950s “Red Scare” mindset and not yearning for a nostalgic return, what racial apartheid meant from a standpoint of white advantage as well as the moral corruption of the human spirit. Writing and researching the Cooks kidnapping sequence was, in fact, so harrowing that something of its horror imprinted on my psyche, and I began to carry it bodily.

I couldn’t sleep without petrifying nightmares. My hair started falling out. I developed odd rashes and stomach ailments. Something had to change, or I knew I’d never finish the book. I decided to stop drinking and start meditating—to sunset my joyous New Orleans habit of happy hour cocktails. Just a sip of alcohol could spin my mind onto the specifics of what those Klansmen did to Cooks, and then I’d break down weeping.

Dropping my “social spirits” habit enabled me to finish American Scare in the clear-eyed manner that the book demanded, and then I got to like the “no hangover” lifestyle’s compatibility with trauma reporting. Other historians who’ve delved deeply into the mire of racial carnage have echoed to me that getting sober is a common byproduct of covering the so-called “lynching beat” (a term scholars privately use as a form of gallows humor to preserve their own sanity through inappropriate joking).

The cruelty of southern racial violence is simply too horrific, even when imagined, for a compromised mind to bear without cracking the foundations. Such tragedy is a mental weight that must borne, however, so that its effects and aftereffects are never written out of the American story.
_________________________
¹ June 1: “Collins Given Story of Negro’s Flogging,” Miami Herald, June 25, 1955, 2; “Live Oak Negro Bares Flogging,” Orlando Evening Star, June 21, 1955, 1.
² father of nine: Herbert D. Cameron, “Collins Asks Suwanee Official to Explain Flogging,” Tampa Tribune, June 22, 1955, 1; “Live Oak Negro,” Orlando Evening Star, June 21, 1955, 1;
³ Fred Sweat: W.J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958; “Flogging Details Refused,” Tallahassee Democrat, June 26, 1958, 1.
⁴ to a standard that satisfied: Hugh Lewis, Transcript of Testimony, June 26, 1958.
⁵ instead called upon Grand Dragon W. J. Griffin: W. J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.
⁶ “‘Well, I wish you’d give”’: W. J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.
⁷ who’d called the 1955 grand jury: “Grand Jury Called in Flogging,” Tampa Tribune, June 26, 1955, 1; William Slaughter, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.

Visit Robert W. Fieseler's website.

The Page 99 Test: Tinderbox.

Coffee with a Canine: Robert Fieseler & Chompers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kati Curts's "Assembling Religion"

Kati Curts is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Sewanee: The University of the South.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America, with the following results:

Page 99 of Assembling Religion shuttles readers into an analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856) as a harbinger of Ford’s white nationalism. It describes how:

In Emerson’s telling, the Anglo-Saxon in­heritors of England demonstrated “vigorous health” and “good feeding.” “They have more constitutional energy than any other people,” he wrote, and engaged in regular “manly exercises” as “the foundation of that el­evation of mind which gives one nature ascendant over another.” Such bold and brawny men, Emerson said, “box, run, shoot, ride, row, and sail from pole to pole” and “live jolly in the open air.”

Emerson’s theories of Saxon supremacy may seem an odd entry for a book about Ford Motor Company and its impact on religion in the twentieth century. In earlier pages I introduce more directly religious subjects, like Henry Ford’s techno-utopian understanding of machinery as “a new messiah” or how the Company institutionalized a social gospel. What a reader finds on page 99 is Emerson’s celebration of white masculinity, which he said was maintained through its “power of blood or race.” Ford found much to agree with in Emerson’s sentences, positing his own racialized theory of productive American manhood in a nation peopled with hearty frontiersmen of “pioneer blood.”

The Page 99 Test is thereby an apt entry into Assembling Religion. I include this analysis of Emerson between a description of Ford’s Americanization campaigns and an account of one of the first uses of the term “Fordism” (1926) by Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, a German economic historian who looked to Ford as exemplary of the kind of servant leader who would harken a “white socialism of pure, active conviction” (100). In the rest of the book, I delve into an extended analysis of Ford’s print and film productions and the industrial museum and historical village he built. In each, Ford promoted the pioneer as “a superior sort of man” for his spirit of adventure and innovation. A direct cipher for the Americans Ford most wanted to celebrate, the pioneer was cast as a character of right productivity, particularly in comparison to the “parasitic” specter of the “international Jew.” Never simply a nostalgia, the pioneer was a racialized imaginary that Ford said was “bred in the very fibers of our bodies.” (124)

If Emerson harkened the way, Ford mass produced its pioneering personification. What the Page 99 Test ultimately affords is a glimpse into the longer intellectual and relational histories upon which Ford manufactured and assembled his brand of racial capitalism.

Learn more about Assembling Religion at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hannah Frydman's "Between the Sheets"

Hannah Frydman is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures (French) at Harvard University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Between the Sheets, we find ourselves in the middle of an exploration of the Flachon affair (1911-1912)—in which it was revealed that Victor Flachon, director of the republican daily La Lanterne, and his mistress had purchased sex with minors from a pimp named Nitchevo who published ads in the newspaper—and its use by right-wing, monarchist journalists to critique the French Republic. The page begins with the conclusion of a section, detailing in several sentences how this right-wing critique drew the prominent politician Aristide Briand—a former director of La Lanterne—into the story, asserting that his work in the Chamber of Deputies largely consisted of doing Flachon’s bidding and referring to him as the “minister of Nitchevo.” After this, a new section, entitled “Advertising: A Republican Vice?” begins, zooming in on the fact that coverage of the scandal—which widely informed readers across the political spectrum of the “use of intensive advertising campaigns to attract clients in search of minors”—nonetheless never gives any sense of the content of these ads. This is despite the way they “stand out from the crowd as often long, complex, self-referential, and sometimes even funny,” such as the following ad, which ran in the Miscellaneous column:

Do you suffer from continual anxieties? incurable wounds? Do you have stains on your past? difficulties in the present? concerns about the future? Are you sad, worried, uneasy? Then come quickly to consult me. My business [maison] is not quayside, but on the mezzanine and near metro Villiers! Madame Nitchevo, 34, r. de Constantinople, Mezz. on left.

The reader who only reads page 99 would likely be quite confused: even the description of the page I provide above, which gives contextual information not contained on page 99, leaves many details unexplained, including why it matters that it “seems likely that someone well educated” wrote Nitchevo’s ads. That said, and however unceremoniously, the page does nevertheless throw the reader into many topics that are central to my book. Most importantly, a reader of this page would begin to see how concerns about sexual advertising became wrapped up in politics and lawmaking at a variety of levels, from the pages of the press to the halls of government. Between the Sheets more generally shows how classified ads placed by enterprising women like the so-called Nitchevo were at the center of a variety of political, cultural, and legal debates during France’s Third Republic (1870-1940). These conversations and the laws they inspired were spurred on by fears about a falling birth rate supposedly caused by abortion, women’s growing independence, gender subversion, and the supposedly ever-present danger of sex trafficking for innocent white women—all things that the classifieds were seen as encouraging and facilitating. As a danger to the republic and its foundation in sexual normativity, in the form of monogamous, reproductive couples, classified advertising sheds light on the sexual history of republican governance.

Visit Hannah Frydman's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lynn Matluck Brooks's "Theatres of the Body"

Lynn Matluck Brooks is Arthur and Katherine Shadek Humanities Professor, Emerita at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of John Durang: Man of the American Stage, The Art of Dancing in Seventeenth-Century Spain: Juan de Esquivel Navarro and His World, and The Dances of the Processions of Seville in Spain's Golden Age, and the editor of Women’s Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800. She was editor of Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, and thINKingDANCE.org.

Brooks applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Theatres of the Body: Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia, and reported the following:

Page 99 proves a surprisingly good place to grasp my book’s themes and methods. In fact, the structural midpoint of the book’s text lands on page 99, which opens chapter 4 of the book’s six chapters. Chapter 4, “Dancing ‘Philadelphia in Slices’ — The 1840s,” introduces the literary discourses that engaged dance, with authors “reporting, puffing, critiquing, condemning,” and describing, from their standpoints, how they experienced dancing.

Throughout Theatres of the Body, each main chapter covers roughly a decade of Philadelphia’s dance history, as linked to a selected discursive element. The book explores connections between dance and visual art in 1820s Philadelphia in chapter 2, dance and political themes (the 1830s) in chapter 3, chapter 4 draws on literary connections in the 1840s, and the scientific drive of the 1850s shapes chapter 5. Each of these themes, and others—religion, reform, music, immigration, education, and more—weave through each chapter, but the stated discursive focus remains the highlight of each dance decade, each chapter. Page 99 alerts readers to the interconnections of dance with significant cultural drives (in this case literature, publication, narrative) and, with the chapter’s opening line about George G. Foster’s newspaper serial “Philadelphia in Slices,” it also points to the “different classes, races, employments, and tastes” among “those who danced or watched dancing” in theatrical and social settings.

Philadelphia’s complexity, generating and exemplifying the turbulent unfolding of the young United States, brought its people’s embodiment of humanity, of change, of personal and group narratives, of individual and aspirational expression to a pitch of excitement and meaning in the antebellum period. Questions of equality, rights, and human status urgently motivated action, including the dancing seen on streets, social-dance floors, and stages of the “mythic” city of Philadelphia, where the founding documents of the new nation were forged. A crucible of national formation, the City of Brotherly Love was also a hotbed of dance training, performance, and commentary as the nation moved toward the cataclysm of Civil War. What role did bodies play here? Digging into the dancing of that age helps us grapple with the weight and ramifications of that question.

Learn more about Theatres of the Body at the Temple University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hanna E. Morris's "Apocalyptic Authoritarianism"

Hanna E. Morris is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the Critical Studies of Climate Media, Discourse, and Power Working Group a part of Brown University's Climate Social Science Network. Her research concentrates on the climate-media-democracy nexus and explores critical questions of power and meaning-making around climate change. She co-edited the book entitled Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time (2021) and has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals including Environmental Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of Environmental Media, Media Theory, and Politique Américaine.

Morris applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book has the re-printed image of the cover of The New York Times Magazine’s August 5, 2018, special climate change issue. The cover story was written by the journalist Nathaniel Rich. And as I write in my book: “The cover’s headline is written in small white text atop a black background, almost like the prophetic text of a Magic 8-Ball appearing in the void, and ominously declares: ‘Thirty years ago, we could have saved the planet.’”

In addition to The New York Times Magazine cover image, my following words appear along with the magazine cover:

The prophecy of a planet in peril that scientists like James Hansen warned about, according to Rich, went unheeded due to the careless “masses” duped and manipulated by fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and the Republican politicians who benefited financially from Big Oil. The out-group is the Republican Party and Big Oil, but Rich elevates the prophet—climate scientists like James Hansen—without much interest in anyone else. Climate activists, environmental justice campaigns, and the many people who have been organizing in response to climate change for decades are sidestepped and even blamed as part of “the masses” who did not follow Hansen’s call soon enough.

Readers opening to page 99 of my book would get a good idea of the whole work. It firstly gives a glimpse of the book’s critical analysis of U.S. news media (both images and text). It secondly highlights how news stories and visuals on climate change repeatedly center and celebrate “visionary sage figures” while denigrating climate activists and especially young, progressive, women of color who are a part of the climate justice movement. At its core, "apocalyptic authoritarianism" entails the construction of a “right” and “wrong” way of knowing and responding to climate change that fearmongers about an all-encompassing, apocalyptic collapse if historically privileged figures (i.e. visionary sages) are not heeded and followed. In turn, exclusionary modes of governance are legitimized as necessary while more robustly democratic alternatives are delegitimized as destabilizing and dangerous. Traditional centers of power are elevated as gods capable of “saving” the nation and planet while historically marginalized groups are demeaned as "militant Others" who are threatening this Earth-saving work. It is here where my book shows how the authority of historically privileged figures is normalized and bolstered by the U.S. press as opposed to investigated and questioned. Ultimately, my book shows how some of the most prominent news publications of record in the U.S. are fanning the flame of apocalyptic authoritarianism instead of reckoning with the roots and ramifications of both climate change and the reactionary politics of today.

Visit Hanna E. Morris's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Carruthers's "Explaining our Actions"

Peter Carruthers is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. His publications include Human and Animal Minds (2019) and Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect (2024).

Carruthers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing, and shared the following:

While I hope that page 99 of my book might provide some indication of the book’s quality, it will give very little idea what it is about. For while the book as a whole catalogs how a great deal of our common-sense psychology and the philosophical theorizing that relies on it is mistaken, page 99 is part of a discussion of one of the things that common-sense gets right. This is that there is a separate category of intentions and goals that are quite distinct from our desires, on the one hand, and our beliefs, on the other. Some philosophers, in contrast, have claimed that intentions just are a certain kind of desire, whereas others have claim that they are really a special sort of belief. In the latter case the claim is that both beliefs and intentions are really commitments to the truth of a proposition, where the distinctive thing about an intention is just that it is a commitment to make a proposition true rather than to it already being true. The text of page 99 is part of a longer discussion showing that these claims are meritless.

Philosophers have mostly addressed questions about the nature of the human mind by relying on some combination of common-sense beliefs, introspection, linguistic analysis, and intuitions generated from imaginary examples. The upshot is what I call the “standard model” of the mind (also known as belief-desire psychology), together with a number of less-standard variants. (The latter include the ideas that intentions can be reduced to desires or to beliefs, mentioned above; that knowledge is a basic kind of mental state, not a special sort of belief; and that there is a distinctive category of graded-strength beliefs, called “credences.”) I show that the standard model is excessively narrow in its scope, since it focuses entirely on so-called “intentional actions.” (These are actions that are selected and caused by our beliefs and desires.) Vast swathes of habitual, speeded, and skilled actions are unjustifiably neglected. Moreover, the standard philosophical account of belief elides together different kinds of mental state as if they were the same, while also including kinds that are actually a kind of intention. And the most popular philosophical account of desire gets the relationship between pleasure and desire completely back-to-front. Pleasures are not experiences we desire to have or to continue. Rather, desires are states that embed anticipatory pleasure in their contents. The overall methodological moral of the book is that standard philosophical techniques are completely bankrupt. To understand the mind we need to engage with the science. Readers of the book should end up with a good idea of the varieties of human action and their true explanations, as well as the real nature of the main categories of mental state that the mind contains.

Learn more about Explaining our Actions at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Human Motives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Hylen's "Gender Mobility"

Susan Hylen is Almar H. Shatford Professor of New Testament at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She is the author of three other books on gender: Finding Phoebe: What New Testament Women Were Really Like (2023), Women in the New Testament World (2018), and A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church (2015). She has also written three books on the Gospel of John, including Imperfect Believers: Ambiguous Characters in the Gospel of John (2009). Hylen serves as general editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Gender Mobility: 7 Ideas about Gender in the New Testament Period, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Gender Mobility provides a good snapshot of qualities that pervade this book. The book is a historical exploration of gender as it was constructed in the early Roman period (first and second centuries CE). Page 99 is the beginning of a section on eunuchs as a gender in the Roman world. Part of the appeal of exploring gender in another place and time is that it’s often different from our own culture’s assumptions, which can feel like they are the only possible options. We don’t have eunuchs as a gender today (at least not in the US), but Mediterranean cultures did. This chapter asks what it meant, from their viewpoint, to be a eunuch.

Also on page 99 is the beginning of a section entitled “Freeborn eunuchs.” Ancient societies were very hierarchical, and part of the argument of the book is that social status was incorporated into the construction of gender. So there wasn’t just a single gender, eunuchs, but multiple genders inflected by social status. Freeborn eunuchs had different rights and roles in society than enslaved or freed eunuchs.

In describing freeborn eunuchs, the portion on page 99 engages with the description of freeborn eunuchs in a number of ancient texts. One of the main tasks of the book is presenting and interpreting the evidence available on the subject under discussion. I hope to give readers a clear description of evidence so they can experience it and begin to form their own opinions.

In the case of freeborn eunuchs, there isn’t much evidence available, but what still exists is interesting! For example, on page 99 I explain that the freeborn eunuch, Favorinus, was not castrated, as enslaved eunuchs were, but was born intersex. The fact that he wasn’t castrated fits with the Roman understanding of freeborn status, because in their minds, freeborn men should not be castrated—this was not fitting to their social position. But there were still freeborn men who resembled eunuchs physically, and so the description of Favorinus reflects what it meant at the time to be a freeborn eunuch.

Learn more about Gender Mobility at the Oxford University Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenneth L. Feder's "Native America"

Kenneth L. Feder is professor emeritus of anthropology at Central Connecticut State University. His books include Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, The Past in Perspective: An Introduction to Human Prehistory, and Native American Archaeology in the Parks: A Guide to Native Heritage Sites in Our National Parks and Monuments.

Feder applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Native America: The Story of the First Peoples, with the following results:

The story told in a book that explores the deep history of an entire continent can be likened to the story conveyed by an archaeological site. The individual pages of the book are the equivalent of the multiple layers encountered as archaeologists navigate through time. Page 99 of Native America: The Story of the First Peoples represents one of the layers the reader digs through during their journey.

Specifically, page 99 presents a map depicting the locations of many of the most important sites where archaeologists have intersected with the trail of Native People for the period between more than 20,000 to about 10,000 years ago. This is a time when these First Peoples were adapting to an America much different from our own. That America had vast glaciers covering much of the north and was inhabited by giant beasts like mammoths, mastodons, and varieties of bison that dwarf even their enormous modern cousins. Native people successfully hunted these animals with little more than stone tipped spears, guile, and the force of their will. Had I lived then, I would have strongly considered vegetarianism!

Page 99 represents a moment in a much larger history presented in the book, one told not in cuneiform, hieroglyphs, ink on vellum, or on pages produced with a printing press. Instead, the history conveyed in Native America is written in exquisite and deadly spear points found at the sites located on page 99’s map; in miraculously preserved human footprints located in the crystalline white sands of a New Mexico desert and dating to more than 20,000 years ago; in achingly beautiful and architecturally sophisticated cliff dwellings; in giant sculptures of earth in the form of bears, birds, and an enormous snake; in intriguing paintings and etchings on the walls of soaring cliffs; and in the forensic evidence of tragic battles fought and battles lost when two cultures, one native, one newly arrived, clashed in an existential conflict.

Page 99 may present a mere moment in that deep history, but it reflects quite well the overarching message of Native America: The Story of the First Peoples presenting a part of the ongoing story I tell of the creativity, sophistication, ingenuity, and resilience of the First Peoples of America.

Learn more about Native America at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Michaels's "Test, Measure, Punish"

Erin Michaels is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Test, Measure, Punish: How the Threat of Closure Harms Students, Destroys Teachers, and Fails Schools, and shared the following:

Page 99 is the last page of a chapter, fusing some of the book’s main themes about how neoliberal accountability policies shape the educational experiences of marginalized youth. Specifically, this chapter explains why state accountability pressures drove the school’s already harsh disciplinary regime to get worse. The first part of page 99 reviews how this traditional public school (my case study of Sandview High) operated like the rather notorious “No Excuses Charter School” (NECS). However, I argue that the school’s obsession with social control was not just aimed at improving academic performance. Instead, there was also another state accountability pressure at play: improving students’ suspension and attendance rates, and this actually heightened the punitive setting. The second part of page 99 reviews some of the most painful costs of this regime for students.

Sandview High seemed to be taking the lead from NECS to figure out how to make students perform well. Yet, the focus in NECS has largely been on test scores as the key motivating factor for harsh “no excuses” disciplinary practices for the “normalization of unethical practices.” In contrast, as this case study, and the supplementary data on the ESSA presented early in this chapter reveal, adding non-test student behavior data to the ongoing neoliberal accountability focus of “measuring and punishing” schools worsens punitive schooling, just as a focus on test scores degrades academic lessons.

The pervasive social control at Sandview High, or what I call the school security regime, shaped students in ways that undermined their socialization for citizenship. Students felt mistreated, under surveillance, and contained, and often created narratives that normalized this treatment; all of which taught them that they were “custodial citizens.” That is, they were learning to tolerate an adulthood where they could expect the state to surveil them widely, even when such surveillance did not result in a formal arrest. This models the “custodial class” that Lerman and Weaver emphasize is created in the midst of wide-ranging neighborhood police patrol practices that include routine stop-and-frisks. As they note, if state surveillance is one’s only exposure to the state, there is little room to see the state as something you can make demands on as a democratic citizen entitled to make claims on their government. The intersectional analysis in this chapter also underscores the extra layers of vulnerability in students’ experiences with off-the-record punishment shaped by gender, race, and immigration. Their experiences reflect further social consequences of highly securitized schools, which create additional harms. I expand on these social consequences in the next and final chapter.

The Page 99 Test worked better than I predicted. The book’s main argument is that neoliberal accountability policies threatening schools with closure for low performance is as much about rising state carcerality (punishment and surveillance) as it is about the “business approach” traditionally associated with neoliberal education reform. Page 99 showcases the argument that state pressure on schools to improve their suspension and attendance rates is an overlooked part of how neoliberal accountability has, and continues to, include non-test metrics (like suspension and attendance rates) that also worsen education for marginalized youth, here exacerbating surveillance. I stress how this illustrates one of the ways in which neoliberal accountability ushers in more state carcerality. I also value that page 99 discusses the key consequences of this carcerality that I reveal across the book: how policing youth in school undermines their social development in terms of what they think they deserve, have to put up with, and how this is related to broader lessons for marginalized youth about what the state is and its agents. Throughout the book, I argue that neoliberal accountability policies provoked twin punitive regimes: testing and security, which had vast consequences on students beyond degenerating their academic education: it eroded their sense of political agency.

Learn more about Test, Measure, Punish at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue