J. Michelle Coghlan's "Sensational Internationalism"

J. Michelle Coghlan is Lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of Manchester, UK. Her work has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, the Henry James Review, and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities.

Coghlan applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century, and reported the following:

Sensational Internationalism tells the story of the Paris Commune’s spectacular afterlife in American literary, visual, and performance culture following the suppression of the seventy-three day uprising in May 1871 and well into the 1930s (and beyond). In refocusing attention on the Commune as a key event in American cultural and political life, the book profoundly shifts our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century as well as the role that a variety of nineteenth and early twentieth century media forms—from touring panorama and big-budget pyrotechnic shows to illustrated weeklies, children’s adventure fiction, and agit-prop pamphlets—played in sustaining the Commune as specter and spectacle in U.S. culture. But it also charts how the Commune provided a vital, if now largely forgotten, site for extra-national feeling and international solidarity that continued to resonate with a variety of American radicals for over five decades.

Page 99 finds us in the third chapter of the book, “Radical Calendars,” which explores the expansive annual role that the Commune occupied in late-nineteenth century U.S. radical print and performance culture, in particular the essays and speeches of three of the most prolific if still under-studied American women radicals of the period: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and Voltairine de Cleyre. Reading this spectacular annual cycle of commemoration—complete with oratory, tableaux vivants, music and dancing—as at once counter spectacles and radical acts of counter-cultural memory, I show how U.S. radicals reclaimed the crushed Parisian uprising as a living blueprint for revolutionary agitation and a key locus of international feeling rather than as a failed radical past.

From page 99:

The internationalist bent of this [Commune] festival is not surprising. As we’ve seen, cross-national anniversaries were being held across the country since the early 1870s and well beyond the turn of the century, and coverage of later Chicago festivals—for example, reports on the 1891 celebration that ran in the Atchison Champion and Raleigh (North Carolina) News and Observer—similarly observed, “The Paris Commune anniversary was celebrated by half a dozen nationalities in Chicago.” Its inclusion in the volume, however, signals an extra-national affiliation and culture of memory that highlights long before Haymarket and its aftermath how the history of American labor is a story at once within and beyond national borders.

This page encapsulates the argument I make in the chapter, but it also gets at the way that I tell that story. For in order to show how vital the Commune was to U.S. radical calendars and make this vibrant memory and movement culture more audible to American literary studies, I turned not just to the print archive left by radical organizers and publishers but also to the mainstream metropolitan newspapers which anxiously—and with no veiled hostility—telegraphed accounts of these speeches and gatherings across the country and far beyond the reach of radical print networks alone. In so doing, the book reveals both the remarkable aftershocks of the Commune and reverberations of leftwing culture in this period.

Learn more about Sensational Internationalism at the publisher's website.

My Book, The Movie: Sensational Internationalism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert L. Kelly's "The Fifth Beginning"

Robert L. Kelly is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. He is a past president of the Society for American Archaeology, current editor of American Antiquity, author of The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers, and coauthor of two popular textbooks, Archaeology and Archaeology: Down to Earth. He has conducted archaeological research throughout the western United States for more than forty years.

Kelly applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us about Our Future, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the last page of The Fifth Beginning’s penultimate chapter, so that tells you something about the book: it’s short. I figured someone might actually read a short book, and having your book read is the point, right?

Page 99 also marks the end of the book’s discussion of four major transitions--I call them beginnings--in humanity’s six-million-year history. And that with “hindsight we can see that dramatic changes in the material record of humanity’s odyssey on earth—stone tools, art and burials, villages, domesticated crops, elaborate tombs, palisades, temples, palaces, and so on—point to equally dramatic changes in how people related to one another.” I then ask: “Is that it? Are we at the end of history?” and propose that the answer lies in whether “another major shift [is] visible from an archaeological perspective.”

The final chapter argues that the material record of the Anthropocene suggests we are indeed in a fifth beginning, a time when, once again, the character of human life will change significantly and irreversibly. This change will be comparable to the origin of technology, culture, agriculture and the state.

All these beginnings are emergent phenomena, the result of evolutionary processes aimed at achieving one lifeway that eventually turn humanity into something completely different. Using an understanding of the first four beginnings as practice, in the final chapter I look at how three processes, the escalating cost of war, the global reach of capitalism, and a global communication network seem likely to result in the replacement of war, capitalism, and the nation-state with new methods of conflict resolution, a new form of economy, and global self-governance. It’s the end of life as we know it. Despite recent events, I take a hopeful view on humanity’s future, focusing not on chaos but on humanity’s great potential.

.Learn more about The Fifth Beginning at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen L. Moore's "As Good As Dead"

Stephen L. Moore is the author of eighteen books on World War II and Texas history. A sixth generation Texan, he is a graduate of Stephen F. Austin State University.

Moore applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, As Good As Dead: The Daring Escape of American POWs From a Japanese Death Camp,and reported the following:

As Good As Dead is the tale of eleven American POWs who escaped a Japanese camp in the Philippines after their captors elected to annihilate every last prisoner. The manner in which these men survived a brutal gauntlet and persevered through the subsequent manhunt of the Palawan Massacre is almost unbelievable. The fact that eleven survived to tell their stories led directly to assaults on other Japanese camps that freed more than 3,600 Allied POWs.

By page 99 of the book, my readers have experienced a wide variety of horrible treatment administered to the American POWs. Despite the previous starvation, beatings, and cruel torture, page 99 hints that what the American POWs have endured in their first year and a half under the Imperial Japanese Army is about to take a turn for the worse. Palawan’s dreaded military police unit, the Kempei Tai, has just received a new senior officer, Master Sergeant Taichi Deguchi. His arrival foreshadows for the reader that the fate of our heroes will not be kind.

From page 99:

Deguichi became second in command of the Palawan unit, but he was soon number one on the American prisoners’ most-hated list.

Powerfully built and possessing a chilling stare, Deguichi became feared for his irrational and unprovoked outburts, in which he beat prisoners simply for fun. Deguichi was serving as the acting commander of the Kempei Tai when two more Americans tried to escape from Palawan. His handling of the affair was the most horrific war crime that the POWs had yet experienced.

Deguichi’s Kempei Tai recovers the two American escapees, proceeds to torture them for days before the entire camp, and then executes them. Other men had previously broken out of Palawan’s Camp 10-A, but the new policy of the Kempei Tai would put a damper on future efforts.

By December 14, 1944, only 150 American POWS remained on Palawan Island. On that date, their Japanese commanders opted to dispose of every living man, hoping to wipe their existence clean as Allied troops advance through the Philippines under General Douglas MacArthur. Eleven men who simply refuse to give in to their fate will survive an atrocity in what is one of the least known great escape stories of World War II.

Visit Stephen L. Moore's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Battle for Hell’s Island.

Writers Read: Stephen L. Moore.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hermione Giffard's "Making Jet Engines in World War II"

Hermione Giffard has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making Jet Engines in World War II: Britain, Germany, and the United States, and reported the following:

Page 99 is part of my case study of the work done by de Havillands on the Goblin jet engine. Rather than focusing on the titular inventor, it, like the book, emphasizes the other people who worked on early jet engines and the way in which knowledge and resources transferred from a pre-existing technology (piston aircraft engines) to the new engines.

Throughout, the book connects deep technical design decisions and ideas to the previous knowledge of the designer (how the old was the scaffold for the new), in this case Frank Halford, and to institutional concerns (Halford’s company changed from a consulting bureau to a part of an aero-engine company during the war). Here we see in detail how the temperaments and experience of different individuals corresponded to different engineering decisions. Far from understanding invention as the act of an independent individual, we see that invention is influenced by the organizations where it occurs.

This page illustrates well how developing a jet engine fit in with the institutional goals of the existing aero-engine industry. Although rarely mentioned, all of the early jet engines that were used by military air forces (the first in 1944 in Britain and Germany) were produced by existing aero-engine companies, each of which had existing wells of expertise and resources.

Making Jet Engines in World War II uses the case of making jet engines to offer a different way of understanding technological innovation, one that reveals the complicated mix of factors that go into any decision to pursue an innovative, and therefore risky technology. The book shows how the approaches of different nations to the jet engine differed because of each country’s war aims and industrial expertise. Germany, which produced more jet engines than any other nation, did so largely as replacements for more expensive piston engines. Britain, on the other hand, produced relatively few engines—but, by shifting emphasis to design rather than production, found itself at war's end holding an unrivaled range of designs. The US emphasis on development, meanwhile, built an institutional basis for postwar production.

Technology is shaped by many things; it is up to us to recover them if we want to understand the decisions that still shape our world today.

Learn more about Making Jet Engines in World War II at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heather Dalton's "Merchants and Explorers"

Heather Dalton is an ARC Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and a member of The Cabot Project at the University of Bristol. The focus of her current project is transnational relationships and family ties in trading networks in the 15th and 16th century Atlantic. As a historian born in England and living in Australia, she is also interested in early contacts between Australasia and Europe.

Dalton applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Merchants and Explorers: Roger Barlow, Sebastian Cabot, and Networks of Atlantic Exchange 1500-1560, and reported the following:

From February 1527 to August 1528, Roger Barlow, merchant and contador to the Spanish king, explored the vast river system of the River Plate in South America with Sebastian Cabot. In doing so, he became the first Englishman to set foot in present day Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil, and the first to write a detailed eyewitness account of America.

As well as being an explorer, servant of Charles V, and ally of Sebastian Cabot, Barlow was also an avid proponent of expanding English trading routes. He and Cabot carved out successful careers in Seville at a time when there were fortunes to be made in supporting voyages and supplying Castile’s burgeoning settlements across the Atlantic. They and their companions instigated a voyage of discovery and survived the hardships of months at sea. When both men returned to the British Isles—Barlow around 1531 and Cabot in 1548—they had trading, navigational, and exploratory knowledge that made them truly unique. In 1541 while living in Wales and unsettled by the fall of his patron Thomas Cromwell, Barlow presented Henry VIII with a cosmography in the hope of gaining the king’s support for further voyages. This cosmography contained his personal account of the River Plate.

Page 99 of Merchants and Explorers is representative of my book in that at its core is Atlantic exploration. Halfway down the page is the heading 'A CANNIBAL ‘FEAST'. This signals the fact that in this account, Barlow included a description of how the Guaranís fattened and then ritually slaughtered their prisoners of war before eating them (Guaraní is the word for warrior in the Tupí-Guaraní dialect). This description is the first detailed description by a European to have survived. Barlow wrote it over a decade before the German Hans Staden was captured by the Tupinambá and witnessed a similar ritual. Barlow included the description of cannibalism in order to emphasise the otherness of the New World and, like Staden, to titillate his reader.

Learn more about Merchants and Explorers at the Oxford University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Merchants and Explorers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sharon Farmer's "The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris"

Sharon Farmer is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris takes the reader to the heart of a discussion of immigrants from Italy and Cyprus who worked as entrepreneurs and artisans in the Parisian silk industry of the late thirteenth century. The evidence concerning these immigrants, and the positive role that they played in the Parisian economy at the time, speaks to key contemporary questions about immigrants and local economies that are playing out at this very moment in Britain, France, and the U.S.

As I explain in the introduction to the book (which you can read online at the University of Pennsylvania Press’ website), between 1950 and 1990, French medieval historians of the Annales school played a major role in perpetuating a myth that nearly all French people of the twentieth century had descended from peasants who once worked the French soil. Such claims were extremely erroneous – but they played a powerful role in constructing French national identity. French historians such as Gérard Noiriel have already debunked those claims by examining the important role that immigrants played in French society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My book takes that examination back even further, thereby suggesting that the French “melting pot” is centuries old.

The book also elucidates the role that the influx of immigrants could play in transforming relationships between the sexes. When Italian business men of the thirteenth century moved to Paris, gained recognition as local taxpayers, and married French women, they adapted business practices that were much more open to women’s economic activities than were the business practices of their male relatives who remained in the towns of Northern Italy. And when Mediterranean artisans introduced new silk technologies to Paris, they ended up working in an industry that provided much more space, than was the case in their towns to the south, for prominent women artisans and entrepreneurs. Indeed, the new silk industry that took shape in late thirteenth century Paris ended up providing some of the best employment opportunities that were available for women anywhere in Europe at the time.

Learn more about The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam Kotsko's "The Prince of This World"

Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago. His books include Why We Love Sociopaths (2012) and Politics of Redemption (2010).

Kotsko applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Prince of This World, and reported the following:

The curious thing about page 99 of The Prince of This World is that it does not explicitly mention the devil at all. Instead, it discusses two key steps in the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury’s famous text Why God Became Human. First, it talks about the dynamic by which God entraps the sinner into an unpayable debt. For Anselm, we owe God absolute obedience:

Anselm characterizes this obedience, which every rational creature (angelic or human) owes to God unconditionally and perpetually, as a way of giving God his proper honor. By disobeying God, the creature is depriving God of the honor due to him, and not only does this create a debt to God, but it digs the sinner ever-deeper into the hole.

Secondly, it begins discussing a curious feature of Anselm’s text—the fact that he pictures God as a property developer, trying to fill all the units in his heavenly city after some of the angels unexpectedly rebel against his rule.

While this passage may seem purely expositional, it is revealing of the roots of the project. A close reading of Why God Became Human convinced me that the devil could serve as a kind of index for tracking major shifts in Christian thought. Most contemporary Christians follow Anselm’s account of why the incarnation of Christ is able to save us—namely, that he was somehow making up for our sins, paying off our debts vicariously. Previously, theologians embraced the view that Jesus came to set us free from the domination of the devil. Anselm aggressively refutes the previous view, and in so doing he ushers in a huge change to Christian political theology—for the worse, in my opinion.

Finally, the discussion of debt and property development reflects the fact that I view the seemingly abstract theological debates about the devil as surprisingly and even urgently relevant for understanding the deep dynamics of contemporary Western societies. We are all increasingly entrapped in debts that we can never repay—both literal debts and more figurative obligations, such as the impossibly absolute submission the police demand from black Americans—and told that it is nonetheless our responsibility to fix the situation. Unfortunately for us secularized sinners, however, no savior appears to be forthcoming.

Learn more about The Prince of This World at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erynn Masi de Casanova's "Buttoned Up"

Erynn Masi de Casanova is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of the award-winning book Making Up the Difference: Women, Beauty, and Direct Selling in Ecuador (2011) and co-editor of Bodies without Borders and Global Beauty, Local Bodies (both 2013). With Afshan Jafar, she is co-editor of the series Palgrave Studies in Globalization and Embodiment.

Casanova applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Buttoned Up: Clothing, Conformity, and White-Collar Masculinity, and reported the following:

Positioned right after the photo insert of white-collar men dressed for work, Chapter 4 bears the title “The Metrosexual is Dead, Long Live the Metrosexual!” This is where you will find page 99 of Buttoned Up.

In my research for the book, I interviewed a diverse group of white-collar men in three U.S. cities to find out how they decided what to wear to work each day. How did they feel about office dress codes? How did they adapt their dress to different situations and positions in the workplace hierarchy? How did changes in the world of work—from increased precarity to Casual Friday—affect their self-presentation? These questions are important because they expose the cultures and working conditions within business organizations, allowing us to explore what it means to wear the white collar in the 2000s. Based on men’s vivid accounts, I show how they engage in a strategic embrace of conformity, following official and unofficial clothing rules in order to fit in and move up at work. In most company cultures, these rules discourage ostentation and experimentation, and men feel pressure to dress sedately and professionally (a loaded term, as my book shows) whether they work in a casual office or a suit-and-tie environment. Even men who may be interested in fashion and trends may make the strategic decision to conform while at the office. Conformity in dress is one manifestation of a larger regime of social conformity, which can have the concrete effects of squelching dissent and discouraging diversity.

The chapter in which we find page 99 considers a subset of 30 interviews, in which the word “metrosexual” came up. This word conjures images of youngish, urban men who spend time and money on looking good and dressing well. Men I interviewed offered both positive and negative views on the metrosexual stereotype. While a few embraced the label, more men saw “metrosexual” as an insult, a veiled way of calling a man gay. Despite the increasing acceptance of gay people in U.S. society, this link to sexual orientation is what made the metrosexual term an insult. Some interviewees claimed that the term was passé, and that it had lost its sting over time. This claim is the main point of page 99. One interviewee said: “It’s just a label for normal.” Another said:

“you can no longer look at someone, and because their belt matches their shoes, assume that that person is gay… People are realizing that it’s a socially acceptable—and it’s really an expected—thing to dress well.”

Another interviewee also reflected on metrosexuality and sexual orientation, saying that with the emergence of the term “metrosexual… a straight guy can be interested in what he wears more.” Drawing on these and other interviews, I argue:

While the term may still be stigmatizing, then, some of the practices it evokes are not stigmatized any more… the word loses its power because the things that metrosexuals supposedly do become seen as normal.

In many areas of contemporary life in the U.S., ideals of masculinity and socially acceptable performances of masculinity are shifting. Among the new values is the idea that real men can care about their appearance. Beauty, fashion, and grooming become things that (straight) men are allowed to engage with. In the rest of the chapter, though, I show that although the range of “normal” masculine practices is expanding, the normalization of metrosexuality does not lead to an embrace of femininity. The privilege that straight men experience vis-à-vis women and gay men remains unchanged. In corporate workplaces like those of my interviewees, these inequalities can have real consequences for women and gay men as marginalized workers: lower salaries, promotions denied, smaller networks. So we shouldn’t be too quick to celebrate the diffusion of metrosexual sensibilities and practices, which does little to disturb existing hierarchies and promote inclusion.

Learn more about Buttoned Up at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Making Up the Difference.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Neary's "Fugitive Testimony"

Janet Neary is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-century African American Literature and Culture in the English Department, Hunter College, City University of New York.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives, and reported the following:

In Fugitive Testimony I examine slave narratives through conceptual frameworks borrowed from contemporary visual art, and, conversely, demonstrate how certain modes of what I call textual visuality are traceable to these early texts. While present-day artists who use slave narratives in their work—including Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker—are often celebrated for their savvy and ironic treatment of the seemingly antiquated conventions and race rituals governing the structure and function of these early literary texts, I show how the ex-slave narrators themselves deploy sophisticated visual discourse to challenge racist assumptions and to undermine the control exerted over them as narrators by the abolitionist publishing juggernaut. Focusing on the visual challenges ex-slave narrators present to those assumptions, the book illuminates the sustained challenge African American cultural producers present to the damaging race rituals that reify a black/white binary in all phases of racial capitalism.

Applying the Page 99 Test, I was surprised to see how accurate it was! In the course of writing the book I realized that not only were ex-slave narrators challenging the visual logic of dominant culture—which understood sight as an objective function and visual material as self-evident—but that they were also advancing an understanding of visuality founded on sight as a subjective operation and visual material as a matter of interpretation inseparable from its context. The book demonstrates the stakes of these distinct treatments of visual material: an evidentiary paradigm of visuality (“seeing is believing”) insisted on by white abolitionists, which resulted in countless reproductions in image and text of the brutalized black body; and a subjective paradigm of visuality which was skeptical of the objectifying potential of these portrayals of brutality and instead offered intersubjective recognition as visuality’s paramount function. On page 99 of the book I give an account of a story related in William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom in which an escaped slave dresses as a white planter and returns South to purchase his sister. Although the sale goes through, the sister doesn’t recognize her brother in disguise and refuses to go with him until he shows her a likeness of their mother. While it seems the image operates as proof of their relation, in fact it represents the sentimental familial connection between the two that can’t be seen under the laws of slavery. The parable demonstrates the triumph of human recognition over objectifying evidence.

Learn more about Fugitive Testimony at the Fordham University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Napoli's "Ray & Joan"

A journalist for over thirty years, Lisa Napoli was among the pioneering team of reporters at the New York Times who covered the early days of the dot-com era.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…the fiscally prudent Harry wanted to take the company public, the ultimate triumph for a serious businessman, while Ray was wary of that path. He wasn’t keen on having to live by Wall Street’s rules and regulations. Harry believed selling stock was the only chance they’d get to personally cash in on their hard work.

Though Ray would religiously devour the morning sales reports for each store—paying particular attention to the numbers from Rapid City, where Rollie was still at the helm—he continued to find the nuts and bolts and rules and regulations of the financial world of no interest. Those “codfish aristocrats.” he sniffed, knew nothing about real work. He preferred his role as chairman-salesman, swooping in to police the parking los for trash and micromanaging the presentation of food by the hourly workers, confabbing with the franchisees on whose backs the business had been built. They revered him.

With a swagger, he liked to dangle the carrot of a franchise to select associates and friends. To make it possible for some of Jane’s family to get in on the game, Ray waived the required cash deposit, which had risen to $15,000. Harry was not only angry about this bush-league transgression: he worked to block it, calling on the corporate lawyers to support his resistance. Everything needed to be above-board, by the book, so that the ledgers were as bulletproof and defensible as possible. Ray harrumphed and managed to front the necessary deposit money to the relatives himself.

Today, unless you’re of a certain age or a business student, you probably don’t know the name Ray Kroc. In his time, he was the legendary founding chairman of McDonald’s. But that was a carefully constructed myth that omitted the reality—that the brothers McDonald came up with the assembly line process that moved along fast food, and that another man named Harry Sonneborn cooked up the winning franchise formula that allowed the sleepy desert burger stand to flourish.

On page 99 of Ray & Joan, Harry and Ray are headed for their ultimate denouement, but not before Harry gets his wish, which turns each man into an instant-multi-millionaire. At this stage, circa 1965, Ray is still married to Jane, the second wife he married as a placeholder while pining for his true love, Joan—who had spurned him earlier. (He’d gone ahead and divorced his first wife, anyhow.) To tell the story of Joan the great philanthropist, of course, you had to tell the story of how Ray got rich-and how he and she finally came together.

Visit Lisa Napoli's website.

Writers Read: Lisa Napoli.

--Marshal Zeringue