Kenneth W. Harl's "Empires of the Steppes"

Kenneth W. Harl is Professor Emeritus of Classical and Byzantine History at Tulane University, New Orleans. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on steppes civilizations, Roman history and numismatics, and has written extensively on Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Viking culture.

Harl applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in chapter 5 and it discusses how the charismatic nomadic leader (the first known in history) Modu chanyu (209-174 B.C.) used Chinese scribes to create a bureaucracy so that he could rule his nomadic confederation of the Xiongnu more effectively. Foremost, they adapted the Chinese ideograms to the language of the Xiongnu.

Page 99 is an appropriate introduction to the work, because I wrote from the perspective of the nomads who are known largely from written accounts of their foes and victims so that they are demonized as uncouth barbarians. The information on page 99 instead depicts these nomads on the Mongolian steppes as very quick studies who appreciated writing, technology, and material goods of the urban civilization of imperial China. They were far from maniacal barbarians bent on seizing plunder and slaves. They had to learn and adapt from their neighboring sedentary civilizations if they were to survive on the harsh conditions of the steppes. Therefore page 99 deals directly with a major theme of the book.

I wrote this book during the pandemic of 2020-2021, when my wife and I had to isolate given our age and medical condition. I had recorded a version of this course ten years earlier for the Teaching Company, but since then I gained so much more knowledge and rethought my ideas. Foremost, I wanted to present the little known history of these people from their perspective and also their contributions to the civilizations of Eurasia. The first half of the book deals with the earliest Eurasian nomads in Antiquity. The second half covers the Middle Ages in which the Turks and Mongols figure as the main nomadic peoples. The reader will be struck by how all these diverse nomadic peoples struggled to survive in such harsh conditions. They twice changed warfare by devising the light chariot in the Bronze Age, and then the mounted horse archer in the early Iron Age. Foremost, Attila the Hun emerges as a crucial figure in the birth of Medieval Europe, and one of the great ifs of history. If he had succeeded in taking Rome and marrying the empress Honoria, he might have created a Hun-Roman state so that the history of Europe would have been very different. Genghis Khan emerges as an exceptional strategic genius, but even greater credit goes to Kublai Khan, his grandson, who united China for the first time in four centuries and ensured that China would emerge as a world power. The reader will be amazed to realize that the thirteenth century was the Mongol century because they imposed a peace over Eurasia that resulted in revolutionary changes due to trade and the transmission of technology, ideas, and goods. Throughout the book, I have striven to make these people of long ago come alive so that the reader can sense what the spirit of these distant times was like, and why we should study these people.

Learn more about Empires of the Steppes at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erik R. Scott's "Defectors"

Erik R. Scott is Associate Professor of History and director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (2016) and editor of The Russian Review.

Scott applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World, and reported the following:

Defectors gained fame for crossing some of the most heavily fortified borders of the Cold War world, and their flight in turn imbued these borders with even greater political significance. While Berlin Wall was the most famous section of the Iron Curtain, the line dividing capitalism and communism took many different forms. Speaking of the Inner German Border, page 99 of Defectors notes:

The Inner German Border was long, at over 600 miles; it was winding, with broad bulges and cul-de-sacs; it divided villages, spread across rivers, ran along a major autobahn route, and even made its way into the Baltic Sea.

The page goes on to discuss some of the border enforcement technologies that emerged during the Cold War: concrete guard towers, anti-personnel mines attached to tripwires, floodlights, closed-circuit surveillance cameras, and concealed gamma-ray detectors.

One of the most interesting discoveries I made in researching this book was that borders between allied socialist countries were also uneasy places. Later on in this page, I explore how Soviet bloc states shared border technologies even as the Soviet Union spied on border enforcement officers in other Warsaw Pact countries and defended the primacy of its claims on defectors. As I write toward the end of the page:

A 1958 agreement concluded between the USSR and its socialist allies established the basis for any member state to extradite criminals from any other member state. However, in a telling sign of the hierarchy within the alliance, extradition from the Soviet Union could be prevented if the individual was also accused of committing a crime on Soviet territory, a loophole that allowed Moscow to hold individuals from neighboring socialist states who entered the Soviet Union without authorization.

These hierarchies within the communist camp created resentment among the Soviet Union’s allies and ultimately helped undermine the Iron Curtain.

While Defectors explores the construction of Cold War borders in many other places across the globe, page 99 does give the reader a good sense of the primary ideological fault line of the era.

Learn more about Defectors at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carolyn L. Kane's "Electrographic Architecture"

Carolyn L. Kane is author of High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure and Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America’s White Imaginary, and reported the following:

On page 99, there is a historical discussion of one electrographic sign: The “Leaders of the World” sign (aka “Roman Chariot Race” by Ellwood E. Rice; 1909, NYC). It describes how the sign took three months to complete and was so large, it needed to be shipped from Dayton to New York City in eight railroad cars, the leading chariot requiring a car of its own. Once installed, the infrastructure was so elaborate, its concealment behind a complex of steel bars formed the physical equivalent of a three-story house (remember, this was 1909). The front of the sign was positioned on the south-facing side of the Hotel Normandie’s roof on Broadway and 38th Street, doubling the hotel’s height.

Page 99 is a good test. It offers a strong example of a New York City ("spectacular") which the book is concerned with analyzing––i.e. the historical development of large-scale electric signs in New York City in Las Vegas over the last century.

The book analyzes how, over the course of the last century, a white imaginary developed in America, fueled by entrepreneurial success, technological and scientific innovation, and an emergent polychromatic landscape of light and color previously unimaginable. Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America’s White Imaginary charts this history by focusing on the technical and aesthetic development of large-scale illuminated signage in New York City’s Times Square and Las Vegas’s Freemont Street, with special attention to the understudied role whiteness has played in these transformations.

While polychromatic, electrographic architecture may seem an unlikely candidate to allegorize America’s white imaginary, it is precisely for this reason—and for the claims to diverse and democratic color in places like Times Square (in the most ethnically diverse metropolis on the eastern seaboard)—that it is a prime candidate. Drawing on technological histories of illuminated light, architecture, and aesthetics, the book interrogates one of the most untapped questions of our times: How do the visual diversity, unpredictability, and heterogeneity of American urban centers like New York City also perpetuate historically entrenched legacies of Western chromophobia, running alongside the proliferation of urban capital?

Learn more about Electrographic Architecture at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Philps's "The Red Hotel"

Alan Philps served as Moscow correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Telegraph. He has been foreign editor of the Telegraph and Editor of The World Today, the Chatham House magazine. His book The Boy from Baby House 10 captured the mood of Russia in the 1990s through the experience of an abandoned child. It has been translated into five languages, turned into an NBC documentary and the film rights are currently optioned by Footprint Films.

Philps applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War, and reported the following:

Page 99 covers the last evening of an organised press trip ‘to the Smolensk Front’ for the American and British journalists in Moscow. It turned out to be more of a kindergarten crocodile than a snapshot of the Red Army’s fight against the Nazi invader. The journalists never got to the front or heard a shot fired in anger, but they did enjoy nightly banquets with heaps of caviar, dishes of quails in sour cream, delicately wrapped chocolates and gallons of vodka.

Vernon Bartlett, the senior member of the press pack, has worked out that these delicacies were not an indication of the logistical prowess of the Red Army but had been secretly brought from Moscow in one of the press pack’s cars. Bartlett is itching to tell his hosts that the journalists would rather have eaten buckwheat groats and rye bread with the soldiers, but he holds his tongue.

‘This was not the moment to point out that sharing the officers’ usual rations would have suited the guests better than the Potemkin banquets that had been set before them. As required, he gave fulsome thanks to the Red Army for their hospitality, and proposed toasts to the flourishing of the Anglo-Soviet alliance.’

The only woman reporter, the British communist Charlotte Haldane, has come to Moscow full of passion to record the exploits of the heroic Red Army under Stalin’s wise leadership. But she is unnerved by the sight of a procession of starving peasants dressed in rags. They must be collaborators, she thinks, being punished for working with the Germans. A Red army officer puts her right: ‘They were peasants who were still resisting collectivisation, putting their energies into the tiny family plots they were allowed to keep and grudgingly giving to the collective the minimum of labour they would get away with.’ This was a very different view of Soviet agriculture from the images of apple-cheeked peasant women clutching abundant sheaves of wheat that she had seen in the pages of the Daily Worker.

Page 99 marks a crucial stage in the correspondents’ realisation that they are being duped and manipulated to present a sanitized version of Stalin’s Russia. It is a pivotal moment in the narrative. A browser who had read the book cover and then turned to page 99 would nod and think: yes, this is what I was expecting. In that respect, the Page 99 test applies to this book. But would this browser be inspired to buy the book by the words on page 99? I’m not sure. There are other passages where the moral dilemmas and unheroic compromises of the correspondents are presented more starkly and with more pathos, pages where the browser would not just nod, but exclaim: ‘I hadn’t expected that! This is a book I must buy.’

One strand of the book absent from page 99 is the role of the visiting correspondents’ Soviet ‘secretary-translators’, the women on whom the reporters – almost all men – relied for real news, companionship and a lot more. The Metropol Hotel in Moscow, where the journalists lived, worked and downed their vodka, was a magical island in the grim greyness of Stalin’s Russia, where fraternisation between westerners and Soviet women was tolerated, even encouraged, by Stalin’s secret police. The relationships that sprang up, and the price paid by some of the brave translators for sharing forbidden secrets, these are the elements that provide the book’s narrative drive and that I would have liked the browser to stumble upon.

Visit Alan Philps's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Boy from Baby House 10.

--Marshal Zeringue

Doris L. Bergen's "Between God and Hitler"

Doris L. Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and World War II and comparatively in other cases of extreme violence. Her publications include War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, now going into its fourth edition, with translations into Polish and Ukrainian. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has taught in Canada, the USA, Germany, Poland, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

Bergen applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany, and reported the following:

On page 99, readers find themselves with the German military chaplains in defeated France in the late summer of 1940. Chaplains' reports, submitted up the chain of command, gave glowing accounts of their ministry during and after the invasion. Yet in the midst of the Wehrmacht's triumph, chaplains conveyed mixed messages. They were overworked, they complained, left with inadequate support to address the mental and physical needs of wounded soldiers. Although they were responsible for seeing to the proper burial of the dead, they lacked access to the vehicles and fuel that would allow them to do their job. Some chaplains' reports hinted that their superiors deliberately undermined them: without the means to reach the combat troops, they easily fell suspect to the charge of not really caring about the men. Meanwhile, chaplains also criticized the soldiers they served. When not fighting, they observed, most German soldiers behaved badly, plundering homes and cheating the locals. The chaplains were too few in number, they lamented, to stop the rot. Page 99 captures one key theme, but it is not representative of the book as a whole. The precarious situation of the Wehrmacht chaplains is important, and I argue that their insecurity about their place within the Nazi system is one of the reasons they tried so hard to prove their worth. But page 99 draws solely on sources produced by the chaplains themselves. Throughout the book, I complicate and interrogate chaplains’ narratives by providing other perspectives, for example, from Jews targeted in the German war of annihilation.

My book is organized chronologically, and the chapter in which page 99 falls, on the conquests of Poland and France, is followed by the explosion of violence in the German assault on Soviet territory in 1941. That next chapter, titled "Saving Christianity, Killing Jews," analyzes chaplains’ direct encounter with the mass murder of Jews, including children, and the destruction of Soviet POWs and civilians. Chaplains’ acquiescence, their willingness to preach God’s unconditional love to the agents of genocide, was not an aberration. The habit of cooperation, going back to the early years of Hitler’s rule and deepened in the brutal attacks on Germany's neighbors in 1939 and 1940, proved hard to break, and the higher the stakes became, the less likely it was that chaplains would venture out of the ruts of their well-worn path. Page 99, with its quotidian grumblings from chaplains in occupied France, is part of the explanation why the Wehrmacht chaplains would continue to serve loyally, even after seeing fellow Germans burn villages along with their inhabitants in Greece, watching partisans be hanged in Yugoslavia, and witnessing mass shootings of Jews in Lithuania and Ukraine.

Learn more about Between God and Hitler at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Campbell F. Scribner's "A is for Arson"

Campbell F. Scribner is Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Maryland. He is the author of The Fight for Local Control and the coauthor of Spare the Rod.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Is for Arson: A History of Vandalism in American Education, and reported the following:

From page 99:

If the true goal of education is for the student to recognize herself as autonomous, to discover the meeting point between the world and the individual life, then education cannot be conceived of simply as linear growth and the mastery of skills. It requires the development of interiority, the suspension of certainty, and the possibility of negation, which Sartre (following Heidegger) associates with destruction.

Readers will learn a lot by turning to page 99 of A is for Arson! Most importantly, that while it is a work of academic history—with insights into evolving interpretations of property destruction and various attempts to control it—the book has a deeply existentialist bent. Whereas Part I examines school property damage as a form of politics and resistance (by students, parents, taxpayers, and sometimes teachers), that argument is unlikely to surprise critical readers. Page 99 comes in the introduction to Part II, when the voice and structure of the book take an unexpected and wholly original turn. Four essays blend historical and philosophical insights to explore the experience of vandalism in the past and ask whether breakage or defacement themselves had any educational value. The essays use thinkers such as Heidegger, Jaspers, Arendt, and Nietzsche to analyze doodles in nineteenth-century textbooks, initials carved into desks in the 1920s, smutty messages on bathroom walls in the 1960s, and orgies of window-breaking in the 1970s. In each case, the essays offer conjectural arguments about the development of selfhood outside of the official curriculum. Thus, A is for Arson tries to take children seriously not only as historical agents who exercise power and engage in political struggle, but as individuals coming into being through emotion and wonder.

Learn more about A Is for Arson at the Cornell University Press website and follow Scribner on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: The Fight for Local Control.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Gregory Pegg's "Beatrice's Last Smile"

Mark Gregory Pegg is Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom and The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Beatrice's Last Smile: A New History of the Middle Ages, and reported the following:

The mother of Gregory, bishop of Tours, scolded him around the turn of the seventh century for only daydreaming about the “deeds of saints” and not writing (and preaching) of these miraculous exploits in the speech of common people. “Therefore, don’t hesitate and don’t delay doing this,” she told her son, “because you will be faulted if you are silent.” As Christ “chose not orators but fishermen, not philosophers but common men [rustici],” so Gregory, like a new apostle, would spread news of saints and their “splendid deeds of power” in the everyday Latin still spoken throughout much of Merovingian Gaul. And so he wrote his Seven Books of Miracles (Libri septem miraculorum) as a literary and spiritual experiment in rusticitas — ordinary speech for describing the extraordinary. For Gregory, saints as dead holy men (who often had been bishops like him in life) joined heaven and earth at their tombs. Their corpses were like high-energy conduits humming with and radiating the power of God from on high, as well as relaying prayers up to heaven from supplicants. They were at once lifeless in their tombs and brilliantly alive in paradise. Gregory reconfigured every miraculous event throughout Gaul as a manifestation of one of these very special dead persons, so that there was no longer any paganism or superstition, just a lack of awareness of who really caused wonder and redemption in the world.

Gregory of Tours and what is now known as the cult of the saints is what I write about on page ninety-nine in my book, Beatrice’s Last Smile: A New History of the Middle Ages. The title comes from Dante Alighieri’s early fourteenth-century Divine Comedy when Beatrice (whom he loved in his youth before her early death) smiles at him one last time in paradise — a smile that reveals to him the meaning of love and the universe, indeed all existence that ever was and ever will be. Beatrice’s last smile encapsulates the history of the Middle Ages because it evokes the ebb and flow of holiness and humanity in the living of a life that shaped the medieval West. This ebb and flow is described on page ninety-nine for Gregory of Tours and his saints.

In this sense, Ford Madox Ford’s observation about page ninety-nine works quite well for Beatrice’s Last Smile: A New History of the Middle Ages.

Learn more about Beatrice's Last Smile at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Titolo's "Privatization and Its Discontents"

Matthew Titolo is Professor of Law at the West Virginia University College of Law. He researches nineteenth-century American legal and political history and teaches American legal history as well as commercial law courses.

Titolo applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Privatization and Its Discontents: Infrastructure, Law, and American Democracy, and reported the following:

Infrastructure and privatization have both been persistent themes in modern political debates over the role of government in the economy. Scholars writing about these issues today situate them in the frame of networks, platforms or utilities to map the public and private forces that materialize the market state. Privatization and Its Discontents situates this debate in the American context as a problem for law, politics and the economy from the 18th century down to our own time. The book brings sweeping themes of infrastructure and the public-private divide into conversation with statutes, court decisions and intellectual history to situate infrastructure at the center of American statecraft, and maps the conflicting ideas of the public good, markets and political democracy that shape modern liberalism.

The book is an extended historical essay on the development of infrastructure in its various forms throughout American history. It begins with a broad overview of Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton on political economy, public goods and the state. As the book progresses it uses historical documents to bring the story to life in a detailed way. When we apply our Page 99 Test, it illustrates the level of care for close reading of legal texts that substantiates the book’s larger project.

Page 99 begins in the middle of a long quote from a New Hampshire court decision from the 1850s. It falls roughly in the middle of Chapter 3 in a 6-chapter book. On page 99 I am discussing how state governments used the power of eminent domain to build infrastructures as varied as canals, railroads and turnpikes, illustrating how the market state was itself an extended public-private venture. So, in that sense, page 99 is a nice illustration of the book’s broader themes.

However, a reader turning to page 99 to get an idea of the book as a whole would probably miss the interdisciplinary nature of the project. Page 99 shows Privatization and Its Discontents as a book about legal history, which it is. But it is also a book about the broader ideas that shape our contemporary infrastructure politics. Thus, the Page 99 Test passes, but only barely. The reader will get a lot of detailed legal analysis in this book, so in that sense the test is helpful in this case. But a complete read of the book would reveal how those details tie into larger historical currents that are not apparent on page 99.

Learn more about Privatization and Its Discontents at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marcia C. Inhorn's "Motherhood on Ice"

Marcia C. Inhorn is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs in the Department of Anthropology and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, where she serves as Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies.

Inhorn applied the “Page 99 Test” to her newest book, Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Motherhood on Ice tells the story of Sita, a humanitarian health care worker who has tried dating apps, speed dating, matchmaking, and “arranged introductions,” but has yet to find a committed reproductive partner, particularly within her Indian-American community. Sita laments the “quality” of the men who “ping” her on dating apps, finding their focus on her physical appearance to be both superficial and sexist.

The Page 99 Test works in some ways for Motherhood on Ice because the partnership problems facing Sita are the very reason why American women are now freezing their eggs in record numbers. Sita’s story exemplifies the “mating gap,” or the lack of eligible, educated, and equal male partners available for marriage and childbearing.

In some ways, Sita is representative of the hundred-plus women in this book. She is a highly educated professional woman in her late thirties, who has frozen her eggs because she longs for—but has yet to achieve—the “three P’s” of partnership, pregnancy, and parenthood. Sita has certainly not undertaken egg freezing for career planning purposes. Like most women who freeze their eggs, Sita is well established in her career and can afford the high costs of a $10,000-15,000 egg freezing cycle. Sita is also not intentionally “deferring,” “delaying,” or “postponing” her fertility. Like most women who freeze their eggs, Sita wishes she had children now. But Sita is stuck in “reproductive waithood,” waiting for a suitable mate to come along. This mating gap reflects an underappreciated, but growing gender-based educational disparity in the United States. To wit, college-educated American women now outnumber college-educated American men by the millions, especially between ages 22 to 39, the prime reproductive years. Such educational disparities are particularly pronounced in U.S. minority communities, which is why college-educated American women of many racial and religious backgrounds are now freezing their eggs in the absence of educated male partners. In essence, egg freezing is a stop-gap technological solution to a gender-based social problem well beyond women’s individual control. But, for those who can afford it, egg freezing also offers new reproductive choices, hopes, and opportunities—giving women like Sita a costly chance to hold onto their motherhood dreams.

Visit Marcia C. Inhorn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin Killeen's "The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought"

Kevin Killeen is Professor in English and Early Modern Literature at the Universityof York. His books include The Political Bible in Early Modern England (2017).

Killeen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought describes how seventeenth century readers in Reformation Europe encountered, quite sceptically, the theological and poetic gymnastics of a fifth-century mystic, Dionysius the Areopagite, together with other figures who grapple with 'negative theology', what cannot be said about the divine, except by negation. In some ways, then, the page is untypical, in looking at a florid patristic figure and a medieval legacy, but the Renaissance is a magpie era, pilfering and recycling the past, plundering its resources shamelessly.

The book is an account of such plundering, how early modern thought was at one and the same time suspicious of and enamoured by the acrobatic paradoxes and the 'rousing impossibilities' of negative theology. Even while the Protestant North often considered the mystical to be bogus, mere Catholic candy floss, it remained impressed with its elegant poetics, its toolkit for imagining what lay just beyond the thinkable. And it borrowed this inherited set of logic-twisting strategies to think about the natural world, and natural philosophy. Science too, it turned out, needed its epistemological ruses. Reason and logic, the era discovered, could only take you so far.

As such, the book looks at the porous hinterlands of religion, science and the literary and addresses how early modern natural philosophy encountered its own set of unknowables - the physics of creation, the infinitesimal, the limits of reason - and how it concocted ways to speak about these elusive realms, and the forbidding complexity of a world that remained shot through with mystery.

Learn more about The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue