Casey Michel's "Foreign Agents"

Casey Michel is the Director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, as well as a writer, analyst, and investigative journalist working on topics ranging from kleptocracy, illicit finance, dark money, foreign lobbying, and foreign interference to the legacies of Russian and Soviet colonialism.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, and reported the following:

The premise of page 99 is simple: Moscow has, for decades, attempted to interfere in the highest ranks of American politics, and attempted to aid specific American presidential candidates wherever and however it can. From Josef Stalin's efforts to launch Henry Wallace to the presidency in 1948 to Moscow's efforts to support Adlai Stevenson in 1960 and beyond, the Kremlin's efforts to steer American politics long predates its interference and influence operations in 2016. But there is one clear difference: before 2016, every major American candidate the Kremlin attempted to cultivate previously had turned them down. And then Donald Trump came along, and opened the doors to as much Kremlin aid as he could.

And that, in a sense, summarizes what much of Foreign Agents is about: foreign regimes have tried for decades—in some cases centuries—to access leading American politicians, and to lobby and influence them for specific policy outcomes. In the process, they've built the foreign lobbying industry into the multi-billion-dollar behemoth it now is. But it is only in recent years—and thanks especially to America's most prominent politicians, such as Trump—that these regimes have achieved a level of success they've only dreamed of, injecting themselves directly into the White House in ways we're only just now learning about.

All of this is why I wrote Foreign Agents: to reveal what the foreign lobbying industry once was, and what it's since become, and how it's become so wildly, devastatingly successful. Because it's no longer just traditional lobbyists themselves who are helping these regimes. It's now PR agents and law firms, consultancies and former congressional officials, even think tanks and universities who've transformed into vehicles of influence for foreign regimes. In the process, they've opened untold doors to the most kleptocratic regimes on the planet—all of whom are bent on tilting American policy, remaining in power, and pillaging their populations as long as they possibly can.

It's not a new effort, as page 99 of Foreign Agents makes clear. But it's one that's found unmitigated success—and one that would make figures like Stalin green with envy.

Visit Casey Michel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Edward Green's "Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God"

Jeffrey Edward Green is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Shadow of Unfairness and The Eyes of the People.

Green applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God, and reported the following:

From page 99 [footnotes omitted]:

…Whitman answers the child by treating the grass as the “flag of my disposition,” a mirror of Whitman’s own selfhood and, in keeping with the Emersonian tradition, what is reflected in this mirror is imbued with a quasi-divinity, pointing to the elevation and ennoblement of the self: “hopeful green stuff,” “the hand- kerchief of the lord,” “a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,” a “produced babe,” “a uniform hieroglyphic.” Even the darkest rendering is still affirmative: “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” In Dylan’s poem, a child, in contemplating the grass and through the grass himself, savagely rips grass out of the ground, remorsefully acknowledges yet also interrogates his guilt (asking “How can this bother me?”), and then likens himself to “a frightened fox” and “a demon child.” This is but one example of how Dylan departs from Emerson and Thoreau, the latter of whom, for instance, concludes and counterbalances his grim castigation of his fellow citizens for their insufficient outrage against slavery in “Slavery in Massachusetts” by finding promise of redemption in a white water lily: “What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower!”

While Dylan does think that local improvements in specific social contexts can be made—at least his own episodic political efforts imply as much—he rejects providentialism, contemplating that the arc of the moral universe either does not exist or bends toward permanent injustice. Even if Dylan is less forthcoming than Emerson and Thoreau in expounding this competing, more pessimistic vision, his reticence in this respect itself has theoretical implications insofar as it leads him to refrain from the metaphysical excesses of Emerson and Thoreau when they imagine a divine spark existing within each human being, when they find moral reassurance in natural beauty, and when they postulate a divine energy working for the ultimate good of the world. Dylan’s conception of self-reliance, and of the problem of a self-reliant individual turning away from the fight against injustice, is simply not buttressed by these speculative, self-congratulating logics. The question at stake is not simply whether, in the abstract, people should be optimistic or pessimistic about the direction of the world, but for whom such dispositions are relatively more appropriate. Hope…

In this case, the Page 99 Test would be partially vindicated. Page 99 has a lot to say about a significant element of Part I one of my book—the part in which I argue that Dylan is almost unique in the history of political thought in publicly disclaiming his willingness to commit himself to a social justice cause he has helped to lead (the civil rights movement) because he has come to believe that the commitment to social justice conflicts with his commitment to being a self-reliant, free individual. The only other thinkers I know of who do something roughly similar are Emerson and Thoreau. Yet as much as Dylan belongs in their tradition, he is also importantly distinct. He is less self-satisfied in his self-reliance than are Emerson and Thoreau. There are numerous features of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s self-satisfaction, and of Dylan’s contrasting lack of self-satisfaction. One key issue—the issue discussed on page 99—has to do with providentialism. Emerson and Thoreau would have agreed with what Theodore Parker and later Martin Luther King Jr. said: “that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.” Dylan, however, disagrees. When he practices self-reliance, he does so with the expectation that there is no arc to moral universe, or that it tends toward injustice. Part of their disagreement concerns nature. Whereas Emerson and Thoreau—and poets inspired by them such as Whitman—could find evidence of providentialism in nature, Dylan, in such works as his “Poem to Joanie,” refuses to find in nature a source of moral comfort. Dylan perhaps agrees with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman that nature is a mirror of humanity, but what this mirror reflects is something far from comforting. If anything, when Dylan treats nature as a mirror, what it reflects back is the human being as a dangerous and unreliable being.

But there are more reasons Dylan rejects providentialism than what is discussed on page 99. There are also more bases on which to compare and contrast Dylan to the nineteenth century tradition of self-reliance besides providentialism. Further, there are more features of my argument that Dylan—almost unique within the history of political thought—testifies to the collision between freedom and justice besides his relationship to the nineteenth century tradition of self-reliance. And, in the broadest sense of the message of my book, my book is concerned with tracing three sets of conflicts Dylan testifies to (and the ethical implications that follow from these conflicts): not just the conflict between freedom and justice, but also the conflict between freedom and God as well as between God and justice. Put differently, the book is not just concerned with Dylan’s remarkable withdrawal from the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but—among other topics—his conversion to evangelical Christianity in the late 1970s and its aftermath as well as his longstanding pessimism about politics and the possibility of achieving peace and justice in the world. So page 99 gives a part of a part of a part of a part—I hope an interesting and illuminating part, but still a fragment.

Learn more about Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Eyes of the People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniela R. P. Weiner's "Teaching a Dark Chapter"

Daniela Weiner is a Lecturer in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education at Stanford University. She has published in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, and Journal of Contemporary History.

Weiner applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Teaching a Dark Chapter: History Books and the Holocaust in Italy and the Germanys, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book discusses some tactics that East German school history textbooks in the early 1960s used to deflect complicity and how those tactics mirrored or diverged from those employed by West German schoolbooks.

Page 99 is an important part of my analysis. It points to one of the main thrusts of my book’s argument— that I isolate the early 1960s as a critical moment in the development of educational narratives about the Nazi/Fascist past and the Holocaust. However, if a reader were to open to the book to page 99 and read only it, the reader might come away with the erroneous impression that my book is first and foremost about East German textbooks (perhaps in relation to West German textbooks). Page 99 fails to reflect the transnational comparison between Italy, East Germany, and West German textbooks that is at the heart of my study and that differentiates my book from much previous historical work.

Indeed, the inclusion of Italy is fundamental to my book’s premise. As I explain in the introduction to my book, while there are some other comparative studies that address East German and West German methods of coming to terms with the past using educational materials, Italy is usually left out of this analysis. But including Italy is quite important; Italy serves as an essential comparative partner to the Germanys when understanding the post-fascist educational experience. Italy had a history of fascism a decade before Hitler ever came to governmental power in Germany. Furthermore, Allied occupying forces saw the textbook revision process in Italy (deFascistization) and in Germany (deNazification) as closely interconnected. So, it’s a shame that a browser’s test that opened to only page 99 would fail to include Italy.

Learn more about Teaching a Dark Chapter at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan Forth's "Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement"

Aidan Forth is an associate professor of British, imperial, and global history at MacEwan University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement, and reported the following:

Camps: A Global History examines mass confinement across a broad historical canvas. Early chapters explore workhouses, labor colonies, slave plantations, and the many camps of the colonial world. Later chapters turn to Guantanamo Bay, the mass internment of China’s Uyghurs, and the detention of Palestinian refugees. A central challenge—and central payoff—of a book of this nature is to recognize diversity while highlighting patterns and practices that have recurred across multiple historical contexts. Page 99, near the beginning of chapter 4, sees this process in action. The focus is an infamous site of mass confinement: the Soviet gulag. As a short, synthetic work, Camps cannot possibly offer a thorough or definitive history of this richly studied topic. Instead, the goal is to draw connections and comparisons with other times and places—and in the process, to shed new light on a familiar subject.

Following a brief consideration of the gulag’s pre-history, including penal exile in Tsarist Siberia and Civil War counterinsurgencies against guerrilla rebels, page 99 examines Soviet collectivization in the 1930s. Rarely discussed in scholarship framed by national rather than global history, military and colonial dynamics were crucial to the gulag’s development. Class warfare was more than metaphorical, page 99 argues, as Bolsheviks approached the Soviet countryside like “a foreign country to be invaded, occupied, and conquered.” As Jozef Stalin noted, western countries had funded industrialization through the “‘merciless exploitation’ of colonial peoples.” Yet, with “no (overseas) colonies ‘to plunder’,” the Soviet Union “squeezed its own peasantry”—conceived with dehumanizing, often colonial tropes—in a campaign more violent “than nineteenth-century enclosure or the concomitant consolidation of colonial holdings.” Such practices generated resistance from Ukrainian partisans, Islamic Basmachi militants, and land-holding kulaks, who were incarcerated, en masse, as “an act of virtual war.” In this way, at least, the gulag resembled “the colonial camps of Cuba and South Africa (chapter 3)…[and] the ‘strategic hamlets’ and ‘new villages’…[of] Malaya and Vietnam (chapter 7).” And yet, the chapter cautions, the gulag increasingly functioned in a “world of…paranoid conspiracies rather than real insurgencies.” As such, a revolutionary “plot mentality,” inherited from the French Revolution, along with tactics of authoritarian rule shared with Nazi Germany and Communist China, complemented structures of colonial and military occupation in the Soviet countryside.

Learn more about Camps at the University of Toronto Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Barbed-Wire Imperialism.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. L. Schellenberg's "What God Would Have Known"

J. L. Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University. He is the author of ten books and 70 published articles. His first book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, introduced a new argument against theism that remains the subject of much discussion. Also influential is a trilogy from Cornell and several subsequent volumes on a sceptical form of religion compatible with the denial of theism. These latter ideas are placed into an evolutionary context and made generally accessible in a short work from Oxford called Evolutionary Religion.

Schellenberg applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, What God Would Have Known: How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian Doctrine, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book gives part of my argument for supposing that what I call “the Big Narrative” – the story embedded in the Bible of God’s dealings with human beings across many centuries – is false. Here is close to 99% of what appears on that page:

Why should we not endorse [the Big Narrative]? Suppose we ignore the somewhat unsavoury part about God’s jealousness with regard to worship, focusing on social injustice when considering what according to the story has gone wrong, and set aside the fact that doing good for its own sake rather than for reward or to avoid punishment appears to be insufficiently emphasized. Even so, two major points cry out for attention.

First, notice how instead of social and psychological complexity, the gift of biological and cultural evolution subtly intertwined, we have an oversimple portrayal of ‘good guys and bad guys.’ On one side are the righteous, on the other the wicked, easily identified and distinguished, with the wicked quite able to be righteous instead if only they tried or, if regarded as incorrigible, entirely to blame for being in this condition. An analogy comes from the movies: think of 1950s Westerns. Even if today’s movies involving crime and bad behaviour are themselves criticizable in many ways, they do convey the complexity of human motives and social interactions more faithfully than did most of those Westerns. Likewise, what we have learned from various religious and philosophical traditions and from science about the subtleties of human nature and its relation to other wider facts has shown the shortcomings of the repeated raw contrasts in the Big Narrative between good and evil. There is no room here for sincerely held alternative religious beliefs or the cultural factors that might have produced them, for mixed motives, for the influence on behaviour of unconscious factors or of abuse in childhood, for addiction, for poor mental health and disorders such as sociopathy, for systemic factors traceable to the advent of agriculture and stratified societies, or, in the background, for biological evolution.

Second, there is the mistaken assumption, on the part of anyone who acquiesces in the Big Narrative, that even their creator, who knows all the relevant causal factors and lovingly numbers all the hairs on their heads, will justly respond to the bad behaviour of the ‘wicked’ with violent punishment and, in the end, complete destruction. God, in other words, is seen as exhibiting and sanctioning behaviour we have learned signals emotional or moral immaturity as well as a poor success rate when it comes to improving behaviour and contributing to long-term human flourishing (here it is worth contemplating why we see less today in the way of corporal punishment and more in the way of prison reform). Would an unsurpassably great personal being suffer from such immaturity?

So would someone who turns to page 99 in my book, reading what you’ve just read, get a good idea of what the whole work is about? Well, it would be nice to be able to ask you what you think it’s about after reading this excerpt. Since I can’t do that, let me guess – and I’ll include the assumption that you know and have thought about the work’s title and subtitle and have figured out that “the Big Narrative” refers to biblical content. Putting 2 and 2 together, I imagine you may hit on the thought that, given what goes into the concept of God, including omniscience, any God there may be would have to have known way back then, when the Big Narrative was formed, all manner of things that intellectual and moral development have made clear to us only much more recently. Probably you’ll also pick up on the fact that I think this is some kind of problem for the Big Narrative, and by extension for the religious views that require it to be true.

If you got this much from the Page 99 Test, you would grasp a central idea of the book, but you would still be mostly in the dark about how I develop and apply it in the book. You would see that, unlike many other critics of classical Christian doctrine, I take human cultural progress to reveal how much God (if there were a God) would have known way back when rather than revealing an ignorant and obtuse deity – a quite contemptible figure, in the view of Richard Dawkins. The key is not to let what the biblical writers say about God determine what goes into our idea of God. If God is by definition omniscient then God would have to know everything we know! But the Page 99 Test will leave you wondering why I think this matters, in relation to the truth of Christian doctrine. It won’t even tell you which Christian doctrine is at stake in the chapter to which page 99 belongs.

So let me tell you. It’s the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus. This doctrine, as I argue in Chapter 5, is in effect an extension of the Big Narrative. And the main idea of the chapter (very roughly) is that the followers of Jesus could have been correct in elevating him to divinity and placing him into the Big Narrative in the way they did only if they were following in thought what God had already done; only if God too were operating within the thought world of the Big Narrative. But if the Big Narrative is false, a picture not just peripherally but in its central features unworthy of God, then we must say that God – any real God there may be – would not be associated with the Big Narrative in this way. By identifying with Jesus in the manner required by the divinity doctrine, which according to Christians involved raising Jesus from the dead, God would indeed be confirming something, as has often been said. But this thought should be worrisome instead of deemed helpful, because what God would be confirming is a picture that centrally features an oversimplified understanding of human psychology, an inappropriate response to wrongdoing, and the condoning of violence – a false picture.

That’s a summary of what I call the Big Narrative Argument, which is then developed in Chapter 5 in four more specific ways which – so I argue – show how human intellectual and moral development can be used to undermine the doctrine of a divine Jesus. The other chapters of the book address other doctrines, also on the basis of “what God would have known,” until, by the end, we have twenty new arguments against Christianity’s central classical claims about reality. Only one has to be right for Christian doctrine to be false. If you read the book, let me know which argument you think has the best chance of being right!

Visit J. L. Schellenberg's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Will to Imagine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Bartlett's "History in Flames"

Robert Bartlett is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews. His books include The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350, which won the Wolfson Literary Prize for History. He has written and presented three television series for the BBC, Inside the Medieval Mind (2008), The Normans (2010), and The Plantagenets (2014).

Bartlett applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts, and reported the following:

Page 99 of History in Flames is deep in the build-up to the Irish civil war of 1922, when those fighting for Irish independence had to decide whether to accept a half-way house or not. The half-way house on offer was (1) a partitioned Ireland and (2) a "Free State" that recognized the British monarch as its head of state. The two sides on this issue began fighting and one consequence was the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland and the incineration of 800 years of Irish historical records.

This is what the book is about - the loss of written records of the medieval past, not though flood, mice or accidental fires, but though human violence. It begins with discussion of how a manuscript culture works - everything is hand written and hence precarious, and we wonder how can we know what has been lost, what can be saved.

Theere are five case studies, from Strasbourg in 1870 to Chartres in 1944. And a conclusion "we make the past but can also lose it".

Learn more about History in Flames at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages.

The Page 99 Test: Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Freeman's "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground"

Andrea Freeman, a pioneer in the field of food politics, is a professor at Southwestern Law School. A Fulbright scholar and author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, Freeman has published and appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, The Takeaway, Here & Now, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Black Agenda Report, and more. She lives in Los Angeles.

Freeman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ruin Their Crops on the Ground comes near the beginning of the chapter titled The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk. It describes the government’s struggle to store the big orange blocks of American cheese that the USDA had to buy because of subsidies in the Farm Bill that support dairy farmers. The USDA filled all the cold storages in the U.S. with cheese then rented a half-acre cave in Kansas and piled cheese blocks from floor to ceiling. But it still had too much cheese on its hands. The agency created a public-school milk program to try to get rid of some of the unwanted beverage. As the school milk program grew over the decades, public school students became less and less white.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book. This page introduces the reader to different ways the government has approached the challenge of supporting an industry whose product is undesirable to most of the population because they experience lactose intolerance or other harmful effects of consuming milk. The last sentence foreshadows the link between dairy policy and racism.

If page 99 piques the reader’s interest, they can continue reading the chapter to discover the different ways that milk and white supremacy have interacted over time. They will meet USDA milk marketing superstar White Gold, a fabulous rock opera star who reminds his Black back-up singers The Calcium Twins how he told them that milk would make their time of the month – a ride down the red river – easier for them and him. They will learn that public school students who want an alternative to cow’s milk have to go to a doctor for a diagnosis that they have a disability. This rule helps dispose of a subsidized commodity by giving it to people who get sick from it - just to boost corporate profits.

Learn more about Ruin Their Crops on the Ground at the Metropolitan Books website.

The Page 99 Test: Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice.

--Marshal Zeringue

William A. Everett's "The Year that Made the Musical"

William A. Everett is Curators' Distinguished Professor of Musicology Emeritus at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is contributing co-editor to The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (with Paul R. Laird, 3rd edition, 2017) and currently edits the series Cambridge Elements in Musical Theatre.

Everett applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre, and reported the following:

Page 99 forms part of the discussion on the musical comedy Sitting Pretty, which in 1924 reunited the writing team of Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse, who had achieved tremendous fame during the previous decade with their series of so-called “Princess Theatre Musicals.” Sitting Pretty exemplifies one of the book’s main through-lines: creators and stars of the past were returning to Broadway and West End musical stages, as well as those in continental Europe, in an effort to rekindle their earlier successes.

In addition to such re-appearances from past celebrities (and continuations of long, unbroken careers of others), a new generation of creators and performers were cementing their collective and individual star status in 1924, such as the siblings George and Ira Gershwin (1924’s Lady, Be Good! was the first show for which the brothers wrote the complete score). In addition to this dovetailing of the remembered and the yet-to-be-remembered, musical theatre in 1924 was very much a transnational enterprise. Different English-language versions of the Berlin blockbuster Madame Pompadour were playing in London (huge hit) and New York (massive flop) that year, in addition to an Italian-language version that opened in Milan. Zarzuelas that opened in Madrid transferred to Buenos Aires, and an English-language revision of a well-known zarzuela opened in London as The First Kiss. New management at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna ushered in Emmerich Kálmán’s Gräfin Mariza (Countess Maritza), with productions taking place later that year in Berlin, Warsaw, Venice, Budapest, and elsewhere. Confluences of the past and the present were thus coupled with all sorts of geographical mobilities, not to mention the continued permeability and osmosis between genres such as operetta, revue, and musical comedy. The overall result was a highly variated tapestry held together through an innate sense of glamour. Page 99 of The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre, which explores Sitting Pretty, provides a closer look at one of these threads.

Learn more about The Year that Made the Musical at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Tibble's "Crusader Criminals"

Steve Tibble is a graduate of Cambridge and London Universities, and is a research associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is one of the foremost academics currently working in the field of the crusades, and is the author of the warfare and strategy chapters in both The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades and The Cambridge History of the Crusades (2023).

Tibble's publications have been critically acclaimed and include The Crusader Armies (2018) and The Crusader Strategy (2020), short-listed for the Duke of Wellington's Military History Prize), and Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain (2023).

Tibble applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a microcosm of the central thesis of Crusader Criminals - the idea that the medieval Middle East became a 200-year long demographic vortex, pulling in 'the usual suspects' from across most of the known world, into a dystopian blood-fest that was as much about criminality as it was about warfare. It looks at the example of the Turkic entrants into the arena, but the book as a whole looks at all the cultures, ethnicities and religions involved. Here goes with a cut down version of the page:

Crusaders visiting the area might have been unruly; but the situation was, if anything, even worse with the Turks called in to help their Muslim neighbours. At best, these were men to be tolerated and treated with suspicion, rather than wholeheartedly welcomed. At worst, the local Arab population saw them as little better than the enemies they were brought in to fight...

Steppe mercenaries were, in many ways, a general’s dream. Granted, discipline might be a problem; but these were hard men and, with the right leadership, they could be almost seamlessly turned into a voracious and formidable military machine... What the vast majority had in common, however, was that they, like so many of the soldiers fighting in the period of the crusades, were young foreigners. Even when fully employed, they were hard to handle. But they were always borderline criminals – men who were armed, drifting and looking for any opportunity they could grasp.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the real problem of the crusades was not religion.

It was young men. Dislocated. Disinhibited. And in disturbingly large numbers. They were the propellant that stoked two centuries of unceasing warfare and shocking levels of criminality. The reason they caused such problems was not that they might be over-entitled, over-sexed or over-opinionated about religion – though they were often all of those things. The ultimate cause, and the ultimate reason why these men were the driver of the chaos that engulfed the medieval Middle East, was far more basic – and it was demographic and anthropological, rather than theological.

Criminality was rife in the medieval crusader states and their neighbours. It was fundamentally driven by two interconnected factors. One was the over-abundance of young (and often armed) men in the population. The other was the way in which these men were so strangely disengaged from the societies in which they found themselves.

But why was that? Why was there such a disproportionate level of testosterone in the air? After all, most medieval societies were at war for long periods of time – but very few experienced the levels of violence and criminality seen in the Middle East of the crusades. And why were these men so problematic? Unruly and underemployed soldiers were always disruptive, but rarely on such a scale. Clearly, something was very different. And for this difference to be sustained for two centuries, the reason had to be systemic, rather than anything more coincidental.

Above all, why were there so many young and dislocated men in the region?

The first trigger was climate change. Deteriorating weather conditions impacted upon the nomadic Turkic tribes of the western Eurasian steppes. And that caused the second problem: unco

ntrolled mass migration. The nomadic tribes entered the Middle East in force and all the local sedentary societies did their best to fight back.

An arms race had begun in earnest. In a pre-industrial age, that race inevitably found its pr

imary expression in the acquisition of warm bodies. Everyone made a dash to attract as many potential out-of-region recruits as possible – and that process ground on for two centuries.

As these were truly international wars, they drew in troops from absurd distances – European troops (including crusaders) from as far west as the Atlantic coast of Ireland; soldier-slaves from sub-Saharan Africa; or steppe cavalry from central Asia and the Silk Roads. All were welcome. All were useful. And all were grist to the unremitting mill of blood and violence.

The proportion of young, armed men in the region inevitably shot up – and that was doubly jarring, because the civil population had previously been so largely demilitarised. But these men were not just there in huge numbers: they were generally foreigners, with very different customs, and as such were culturally desensitised. These were men both simultaneously alienated and yet strangely liberated. With this new and unstable population in place, levels of violence soared and remained spectacularly high – even by the standards of a region noted for its enduring lawlessness.

A chaotic and supremely dangerous crime wave was coming into its own.

Visit Steve Tibble's website.

The Page 99 Test: Templars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oliver Rosales's "Civil Rights in Bakersfield"

Oliver A. Rosales is a professor of history at Bakersfield College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Shaw lamented. As administering the War on Poverty continued in Kern, dismantling the grassroots aspects of the antipoverty movement by delegating authority away from TAP, the CSO, and the neighborhood councils—the war grassroots organizations that had initiated the War on Poverty three years prior—became the de facto position of local government.

Anti-statist opposition toward the antipoverty movement continued well into the Reagan gubernatorial years of 1967-1975. The end result pitted Mexican Americans and African Americans against each other in competition for financial resources in the rural welfare state, much to the political benefit of anti-statist Republicans. The following chapter examines the emergence of the Chicana/o civil rights movement in the content of multiracial civil rights activism in greater Bakersfield. In many ways, the limits of the antipoverty movement encouraged civil rights activists to push for civil rights reforms in other venues.

This test is scary accurate! This excerpt comes from the end of the book’s third chapter, which covers the war on poverty in Bakersfield, California during the 1960s. At the conclusion of this chapter, I foreshadow the struggle African Americans and Mexican Americans in greater Bakersfield encountered as the war on poverty unfolded in the 1970s. Specifically, tensions within and among racial coalitions became divisive compared to the early war on poverty years when federal legislation passed in 1964 mandating “maximum feasible participation of the poor,” as well as the racial solidarity engendered by the Delano Grape Strike in 1965. The excerpt also foreshadows the role of the political right in mobilizing a counter movement to civil rights reform, first during the war on poverty by using the mechanisms of local government, and later in new ways as the civil rights movement continued.

As a whole, the Page 99 Test is accurate because it captures the fomenting of racial coalitions between Black and Brown activists and the issues that pulled these groups together across racial lines. The excerpt also highlights how backlash and counter mobilization stirred activists to press for reform in other venues as noted at the end of the page where the next chapter examines the Chicana/o student movement in Bakersfield. In brief, civil rights reform was messy in greater Bakersfield during the 1960s and 1970s. The story isn’t always linear, but reform was complicated and overlapped with other movements and activisms. The messiness of the story is important though because it showcases the breadth, scope, and diversity of civil rights reform beyond the farm worker movement, which heretofore has been much more well documented in American labor and civil rights historiography.

Learn more about Civil Rights in Bakersfield at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue