Matthew Warner Osborn's "Night Hawk"

Matthew Warner Osborn is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. He is the author of Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture reproduces a print titled Philadelphia Taste Displayed, or Bon-Ton Below Stairs by James Aiken, circa 1830. The print is a color lithograph in which a group of drunk and sloppy white men gather around a table of oysters. To the left is a bar with large decanters of wine and a sign that reads, “City privilege, sell without a license.” The bibulous group are being waited on by two Black men: a waiter, who stands in the foreground with bare feet and a smiling bartender who surveys the scene. The clock is close to midnight. The white men are obviously drunk and dressed in ridiculously foppish clothes, except for one who is dressed in olive drab. He wears a broad, brimmed hat, and knickers, which were decidedly old fashioned in 1830. At the time, this man’s dress would have marked him as a caricature of a Quaker. Aiken was a popular engraver who produced works of political satire, and Philadelphia Taste Displayed was one of his most memorable prints.

Aiken’s lithograph is one of the most compelling pieces of historical evidence in Night Hawk, and thus I do believe it reveals the “quality of the whole.” That said, if this was the only page a reader saw, they would be quite confused, as there is no superhero in the picture nor anything that indicates “mass culture.” At the time I first encountered Aiken’s print, I did not recognize the Quaker, and it took me years to figure out that it was intended to memorialize “The Night-Hawk, No. 53,” which was his most famous column.

My book tells the never-before-told two-hundred-year-old story of a flying, sometimes invisible superhero, whose adventures appeared on the front page of the first radical socialist newspaper in American history. Between July 5, 1828, and July 3, 1830, the weekly Mechanics’ Free Press published sixty-one Night Hawk episodes. Each running around 1,000 words long, they describe the nocturnal adventures of a superhuman vigilante fighting for justice on city streets. The anonymously authored Night Hawk was the public champion of the nation’s first successful labor party.

Oyster cellars were one of the Night Hawk’s favorite haunts. In Philadelphia, African Americans had long held a monopoly on the business of selling oysters from carts on street corners. By the 1820s, Black entrepreneurs were able to rent out permanent locations, usually in basements. While enormously popular among white working-class residents, oyster cellars also caused controversy. Taverns had to pay a hefty fee to the city for the right to sell alcohol. Oyster cellars circumvented the law by increasing the price of the oysters and providing liquor for free. This outraged the city’s temperance society, which was largely bankrolled by Philadelphia’s wealthy business class. The pervasive and virulent racism of the time heightened temperance activists’ fears about these Black-owned businesses.

The Night Hawk became a hero to working men by calling out the hypocrisy of the city’s wealthiest residents, or “the fashionable,” as he called them. In No. 53, the Night Hawk revealed, in a long and comical soliloquy, that young Quakers could be commonly found in the city’s oyster cellars. In 1830, the wealthy Quaker Roberts Vaux was the president of the city’s temperance society. So, the Night Hawk was mocking him by revealing that his children could be found quaffing oysters and liquor in cellars run by Black men. Aiken’s print preserved this joke in the city’s memory. The print is direct evidence of the Night Hawk’s popularity in 1830 but also his enduring influence. This same scene shows up fifteen years later in George Lippard’s novel Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845), which quickly became the biggest best seller yet published in the United States. The novel opens in an oyster cellar, and Lippard references Aiken’s print in two passages. So, this image is also compelling evidence that one of the most influential American novels of the nineteenth century took important inspiration from the radical socialist Night Hawk.

Learn more about Night Hawk at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Philippe Huneman's "Profiling"

Philippe Huneman is Director of Research at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS/Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne), and the author, most recently of Why: The Philosophy Behind the Question (2023).

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Profiling: How Predictive Algorithms Shape Identity and the Social Fabric, with the following results:

Page 99 of Profiling: How Predictive Algorithms Shape Identity and the Social Fabric describes how, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the French government used a technique called "nudge" to influence the overall behavior of the population, deterring people from going outside so that the circulation of the virus could be slowed down, and the curve of new cases flattened. "Nudge" means: slightly reorienting the behavior or beliefs of someone, not by constraining her, nor by incentivizing her financially, nor by trying to convince her with an argument, but by redesigning her environment in order to increase the probability that she will take the expected decision. It is a strategy theorized by economists and legal scholars, designed to make supposedly irrational people, in a market or a society, behave more rationally without constraining them (we are in democracies) or convincing them (which is of no use, since they are irrational). A nudge functions by redesigning the so-called architecture of choices, so that the "best" choice becomes more likely to be taken. Unlike in classical paternalism, "best" here is supposedly best for the individual herself, either directly (not getting ill, not losing money, etc.) or indirectly, through her participation in shaping a better environment. The theory of nudge belongs to what economists call "soft paternalism," since the nudging authority does not intend to impose on citizens an absolute idea of what is good: nudges are supposedly meant to turn people toward their own long- term desires, which they risk forgetting by making short-termist choices. Yet, like any paternalism, this theory assumes that the subjects cannot, by themselves, do what is good for them.

In the context of Covid-19, the nudge described on page 99 was the obligation to fill out a form called the "self-attestation" before leaving home, on which one indicated the reason for going out - walking a pet, helping an elderly relative, etc. - and its timing (staying outside for more than one hour was forbidden). Going outside when it wasn't mandatory therefore became more costly at every level: one needed to spend time filling out a tedious form, and failing to do so would cost €150 if a police officer checked. This made the choice to "stay home" more likely overall, making the circulation of the virus more difficult, and the nudged subject more likely to remain healthy.

Thus, page 99 of Profiling does not pass the test, since it is a description of a particular nudge, illustrating what a nudge is as a technique of governing populations; it does not tell you what is in Profiling, since it functions more as an example of the concept of nudge - examined in Chapter 4 - than as an element or summary of the book's original argument. It does, however, offer another perspective on that general argument.

The book indeed begins with a description of profiles: sets of data points of various kinds related to a given individual (e.g., you), drawn from innumerable data of all types and formats (gathered by diverse and more or less public means), and allowing for detailed algorithmic predictions. Profiles thereby allow firms, governments, banks, insurance companies, and platforms like Amazon or Netflix to predict one's behavior, tastes, and votes, and therefore to offer tailored consumption of goods and services, movies or music, loans, etc. Profiling argues that, together with these profiles, and with a specific anthropology based on the notion of biases - often interpreted within the framework of a simplified evolutionary biology - nudges define a system that has major effects on individuals (their time, their affinities, etc.), on social structures, and on styles of government.

But one can also enter the analysis of this system by focusing first on nudges, and then on profiles and their algorithms. In fact, nudges thrive in digital environments, since a screen constitutes a fully controlled architecture of choice. With these nudges, profiling - the key concept of my book - takes on a second sense: it is not only about predicting behavior (think of the "profiler" in thrillers) but about shaping it. To profile someone here means to give her what is most likely to nudge her toward a targeted behavior, since her profile predicts - through correlation with other profiles—how she would react to exposure to specific content, especially Instagram or Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and so on. The subtitle of the book - How Predictive Algorithms Shape the Social Fabric - can thus be understood through a meditation on what favors and calls for nudging. In this sense, starting with page 99 constitutes a possible entry point into the system of profiles, which is the structure investigated in my book, Profiling.

Visit Philippe Huneman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James C. Nieh's "The Language of Bees"

James C. Nieh is a Professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution and an Associate Dean in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and a recipient of the Hambleton Award for his bee research and the Springer Nature Editor of Distinction Award.

Nieh applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Language of Bees, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds me trying to determine how the stingless bee Melipona panamica tells nestmates where to find food. One possibility was “piloting”: perhaps an experienced bee simply flies ahead and leads recruits to the food source. Unfortunately, these bees shoot out of the nest remarkably quickly, making them extremely difficult to follow. We tried large white backgrounds, fluorescent powders, and even an elaborate arrangement of fishing lines and bee-like objects designed to misdirect departing recruits. None worked. The page ends as we turn to a different experiment: separating recruiters from recruits to test whether recruits can still obtain information about distance and direction.

For The Language of Bees, the Page 99 Test works surprisingly well. A reader opening the book to this page would get a good sense of both what the book is about and how I tell the story.

The book is about how bees communicate, but it is equally about how scientists discover what their signals mean. Page 99 captures that process well: there is a biological mystery, a plausible hypothesis, several failed attempts to test it, and then a new experiment prompted by those failures. That pattern recurs throughout the book. Science rarely proceeds neatly from question to answer, and some of the most interesting discoveries arise when an apparently sensible approach does not work. It can be heartbreaking, especially in the tropical heat, but sometimes the sweat is worth it.

It is also appropriate that page 99 features a stingless bee rather than the familiar honey bee waggle dance. One of the book’s central themes (despite its title, and this is deliberately provocative) is that there is no single “language of bees”. Different species have evolved remarkably different ways of sharing information, shaped by their ecology and social lives.

So page 99 is not a summary of the whole book, but it is a good shortcut to its spirit: follow the bees, test the idea, and when an approach fails, try another way of asking the question.

Learn more about The Language of Bees at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

W. Jason Miller's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"

W. Jason Miller is a Distinguished Professor and public scholar who acts as a cultural detective, unearthing the hidden connections that reshape American history. From discovering a lost recording of MLK’s first "I Have a Dream" speech to his latest revelation of the secret mentorship between Langston Hughes and Nina Simone, Miller bridges the gap between rigorous archival research and compelling public narrative.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power reads:

But before he left Lagos, Nigeria, just in case he had wondered how it truly felt to be a father of the bride, Hughes found himself trying to check out of room #203 of the Federal Palace Hotel owing more than five hundred dollars. The sum, accrued from various charges not covered by AMSAC, forced him to wire home and wait through an excruciating series of telegrams and transfers.

Readers opening to page 99 of the book, the last paragraph of chapter 6, would get an innate sense of the podcast-style storytelling and detail captured throughout the book. Flipping to this page, a reader would be intrigued to wonder exactly how Langston Hughes used a 1961 lunch invitation at John F. Kenedy’s White House to secure singer Nina Simone a honeymoon sponsored by the CIA.

December 1961 featured a series of American musicians traveling (all expenses paid by the CIA) to perform in Nigeria to unknowingly promote American capitalism at the height of the Cold War. I listened to several podcasts to shape the opening hook, storyline, and suspense of this entire chapter. The seven years of research anchoring the book comes through in the details of naming the exact hotel rooms used by Hughes and Simone. Flipping back just one page reveals why Nina could not stay even longer (as she wanted) on her first overseas trip. On New Year’s Eve of 1961, “The Amazing Nina Simone” played Carnegie Hall for the first time as an “added attraction,” joining fellow North Carolinians John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk as concert headliners.

Visit W. Jason Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jen Thompson's "Wild Pivot"

Jen Thompson is a former political campaign manager and counsel in the US House and Senate. She successfully made up for a massive campaign deficit by orchestrating events with the President of the United States and other key figures. She has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and others. Thompson left politics after managing the most nationally watched Senate campaign in 2002 and moved to Australia. Born in Chicago, Thompson has lived in twelve cities, seven states, and three countries, and has traveled to many more. She currently lives in Redlands, California.

Thompson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten, with the following results:

From page 99:

It was Sunday morning, and the street was totally silent. I stood on the front stoop for a few moments to get my bearings, and as I began walking, I remembered the old saying about how discovering God’s meaning is like chasing a wild boar in the forest. Even if you search for many days on end, you might never catch the boar; you might not even catch a glimpse of him. But there is absolutely no chance of catching the boar if you don’t even attempt the chase.

I had never heard of the Page 99 Test before, but then I turned to page 99 of my memoir, Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten. How brilliant of author Ford Madox Ford to come up the idea that the quality of the whole will be revealed to you by turning to page 99. Wow! That is an absolute truth about page 99 of my memoir.

Chasing the Boar is an old proverb that I use throughout my book. It appears in the third vignette, several chapters are entitled Chasing the Boar, and it is the very last sentence of my memoir. It is also front and center on page 99!

I say often that Wild Pivot is a book that’s all about politics that has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Yes, the thread of the book is the nationally watched, very intense Senate campaign that I ran years ago, but really, Wild Pivot is about having the courage to listen to our inner calling and transform ourselves into the most real, truest versions of who we are. “Chasing the Boar” is how I’ve described that process.

After I almost died in a fiery car crash on the campaign trail, I had a moment of clarity that changed my life, and I started to listen – finally, after decades of shutting my inside voice down – to what my insides were trying to tell me. I discovered that everything I’d given myself to promoting (achieving power, money and fame at any cost to boost my own ego) was fundamentally misaligned with the person I am at my core. This process of discernment took me years. It was messy, painful, and confusing. I mean, really: Who gives up all the things I did in a search for inner truth? Nobody! It’s so difficult to admit that the job, or the marriage, or our lives don’t fit who we are. But I believe we all have that inner voice, and mine told me to keep chasing the boar.

Wild Pivot travels back and forth in time through vignettes between my past and present with painful lessons described in raw, jarring detail. But it is also funny, because I believe that laughing at myself is a very powerful medicine. In the end, Wild Pivot is meant to be a memoir of hope. The rewards of authenticity are immeasurable.

I’m still chasing the boar!

Visit Jen Thompson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lara M. Brown's "Thomas Jefferson’s Landmark Deal"

Lara M. Brown currently serves as a senior policy advisor to the Center on Civility and Democracy at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. Previously, she held academic posts at the George Washington University and Villanova University. Among her scholarly publications, she is the author of Amateur Hour: Presidential Character and the Question of Leadership.

Brown applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Jefferson's Landmark Deal: The Politics of the Louisiana Purchase, and shared the following:

If you were to solely examine page 99 of Thomas Jefferson’s Landmark Deal, you’d find a lot of information about the entire book. The reason for this is because page 99 falls within the book’s conclusion and happens to be centered around the character of Jefferson’s political leadership. This page number coincidence is because this book is part of a University of Kansas Press series of short—under 50,000 words—texts on landmark presidential decisions.

Starting at the top, I discuss and quote a few renown scholars—Susan Dunn, Doris Graber, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf, who summarized Jefferson’s aspirations for expanded liberty in an expansive republic, while noting his contradictory impulse to act as the public's trustee and the nation’s patriarch. Jefferson believed he knew what was best to restore the revolutionary values of 1776, and to chart a course for America’s future. Although often pleasantly solicitous, Jefferson didn't really think he needed to ask anyone much of anything. Consequently, when it came to the diplomatic maneuverings and convoluted negotiations that eventually manifested in the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, Jefferson was neither transparent nor democratic. Adapting his tactics to political circumstances, he tended towards secrecy and duplicity in his dealings with his fellow partisans, the public, and Congress. All told, Jefferson cared more about his preferred policy ends than his specific political means. In this instance, his ends included Americans controlling the port of New Orleans, possessing navigation rights on the Mississippi River, and resetting relations and reviving trade with France.

But as the book shows, and is also discussed on page 99, there was nothing novel about Jefferson’s foreign policy leadership during his presidency. He was who he had always been. As I explained, “character is the constant that infuses all aspects of presidential leadership,” and Jefferson had always been more focused on realizing his political ideals than remaining consistent in his personal actions. His temperamental inclination to avoid direct conflict often led him to surreptitiously pursue his aims. In a longer discussion of the book, I remarked that Jefferson was a “politician who was more apt to stab you in the back than shoot you in the face.” It was precisely these tendencies that helped make Jefferson well-suited to patiently pursue a diplomatic deal with Napoleon Bonaparte.

While there is certainly a lot more in this compact volume, page 99 gets to the heart of the book’s argument about the character of Jefferson’s political leadership.

Visit Lara M. Brown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Edmans's "The Madness of Markets"

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and a widely recognized global expert on behavioral finance, responsible business, and misinformation. He has spoken at Davos, testified in the UK House of Commons, and reached millions through his TED talks and contributions to the BBC, CNBC, and The Guardian. He is the author of May Contain Lies, which received huge acclaim from the Times, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. His first book, Grow the Pie, was a Financial Times Book of the Year.

Edmans applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions–and How to Exploit Them, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions – And How To Exploit Them is about herd behavior in investing. It says:

But blindly copying someone else’s trades is too naive a strategy. What really matters is access to information. The skill lies in taking other people’s insights, mixing them with your own research, and then deciding whether to act. Veronika Pool, Noah Stoffman and Scott Yonker studied how fund manager networks affect how they select their stocks. They found that, when investors happen to live in the same neighbourhood – literally just down the street – their portfolios overlap more than if they only share the same city. Looking this closely rules out other explanations like city-wide newspapers or a conference coming to town. And when money managers become neighbours, the overlap only appears after the move, not before – so it’s not just similar preferences. Most importantly, the information they shared was useful. Trades linked to neighbourhood ties outperformed by 6-7% per year: what spreads from over-the-fence chats is signal, not smoke. Sometimes, the crowd really does have wisdom.

But fund managers don’t just talk shop with other fund managers. Their circles are wider. As we’ve seen, Facebook allows us to trace these broader networks. That earlier study [by Michael Bailey, Ruiqing Cao, Theresa Kuchler and Johannes Stroebel] measured friendships between individuals; a similar research team linked entire places. They built a “Social Connectedness Index”, which measures how strong Facebook friendship ties are between two areas.

The Page 99 Test works well for several reasons. First, the book is based on top-tier academic research that’s but highly relevant for practitioners. These papers are on whether following the crowd improves returns. Second, the book is nuanced. It’s easy to say that following others is mindless mimicry, but data isn’t always on the side of the snark. It depends on who you’re following and what. Page 98 describes a study which shows that fund managers who simply copy their peers’ trades underperform. However, Pool, Stoffman, and Yonker study connections with fund managers, rather than simply mimicking fund managers. If you discuss ideas with them, this might indeed be valuable – just like working on a group project at school helps you learn more than copying your classmate’s homework. The Facebook study investigates connections with friends, rather than professional fund managers, and page 100 explains how it doesn’t improve returns.

Page 99 is part of Chapter 4 of the book, “Monkey See, Monkey Buy: Viral Herding in Markets”. It discusses one of the newest and most exciting strands of research in finance – social forces – and one that is particularly relevant for the real world. In the past, interaction was confined to people you see at work or in the pub. Now, you can discuss stocks with Facebook friends you haven’t seen for years, or Redditors without even knowing their name or face.

Neither copying everyone blindly nor tuning everyone out is the way to go. Instead, you should distinguish signal from smoke, and decide whether you want to learn from the crowd, front-run it, or bet against it. The danger lies in drifting from one role to another without realizing it. Herding can ruin you – or it can rescue you. The key is knowing which footsteps are worth following.

Visit Alex Edmans's website.

The Page 99 Test: May Contain Lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeremy Tirrell and Kate Maddalena's "Disgustatory!"

Jeremy Tirrell is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His articles and chapters have appeared in publications such as Technical Communication Quarterly, Enculturation, POROI, Kairos, American Journal of Entrepreneurship, and Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition.

Kate Maddalena is associate professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, and Information Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her articles and chapters have appeared in publications such as Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Theory, Culture & Society, and POROI.

Tha authors applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Disgustatory!: A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption, with the following results:

Page 99 of Disgustatory! describes a paradigm shift in microbiology that happened around 2015 and had implication for all of the life sciences, especially medicine. Basically, researchers declared that we should no longer consider individual organisms–the human body, for example–as individuals, at all. Rather, we should think of our bodies as holobionts, or “biomolecular networks” that include the microorganisms that live on and inside us. From this perspective, I am not an autonomous, singular creature. I am a large colony of microorganisms. Further, I am not easily distinguishable from my environment; the bacteria on the table in front of me that get on my fingers and into my mouth are constantly becoming part of me, and when I leave my biological traces on the table, I am becoming part of it. The very bottom of page 99 transitions to our consideration of this holobiontic paradigm via Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection.

At first glance, the Page 99 Test does not work very well for our book. A passing reader might think that the book is a history of microbiology, which it most definitely is not. But looking closer, it does exemplify a few things about the experience of reading Disgustatory! First, you’ll find out lots of things you didn’t know. The book is full of little mini-histories and facts that fascinate and intrigue. The fact that microbiology had a profound paradigm shift in 2015 is probably news to most people. Second, you’ll probably be able to relate to it–when you think about it, you might realize that you did notice that your own conversations about health had turned away from cleanliness and sterility to things like probiotics and maintaining a healthy microbiome during the last decade.

And finally, the turn to Kristeva’s concept of abjection at the bottom of the page is a sample of the larger lens of the book. We take theories of the Gothic (in this case, a sense of profound body horror) and map them onto the weird wellness discourses of our contemporary moment: restrictive diets, lab-grown meat, fecal transplants, kombucha cultures, meal replacement powders, intentionally ingested intestinal parasites, to name just a few. All of these things are compelling and strange aspects of “health” discourse that contribute to a confusing and frankly scary moment in the history of health.

Visit Jeremy Tirrell's website and Kate Maddalena's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Trevor Herbert's "The Brass Band Story"

Trevor Herbert is a former foundation scholar of the Royal College of Music. He was a trombone player (modern and period instruments) with various orchestras and ensembles, particularly the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Welsh National Opera, the Taverner Players and the Wallace Collection. He is Emeritus Professor of Music at the Open University where he developed a global reputation as an expert on the history and performance practices of brass instruments.

Herbert applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Brass Band Story, and shared the following:

‘Nothing separates the brass band more clearly from the rest of the musical world than the resilient centrality of contesting in its culture.’ These are the opening words of the new chapter that begins on page 99 of my book. I explain the Victorian origins of contesting and how it has been adopted in every country where the British model of the brass band is used. Contests occupy a marginal place in other forms of music making, so their pre-eminence in the world of the amateur brass band has prompted ridicule: to Charles Dickens they were ‘a musical prize fight’. The problem is easily understood. Listening to twenty or more bands, each playing the same piece in succession, is not an inviting prospect for everyone, and the idea that musical expression can be measured and scored to select ‘a winner’ is heavy with aesthetic contradictions. But that’s only how it’s seen from the outside.

An argument can be easily made to show that contests and brass bands were made for each other. They were introduced in the nineteenth century as mass entertainment for the working class. A standard instrumental format was introduced to encourage equivalence; this led to a bespoke repertoire and a unique musical idiom. Contests were and remain congregations of like-minds, and while local rivalries once drew vast audiences, a more subtle set of factors are at play in the modern era. They have become sites of pleasure that produce performances rich in musical nuance.

In my book I plot a much wider narrative about bands, their players and the lives they have led in music, how they weathered industrialisation and deindustrialisation, survived, modernised, internationalised and thrived over almost two centuries. This very British musical phenomenon has a fascinating and multi-faceted history. At every stage its momentum has been nourished by the heady excitement of the contest. Without it this very distinctive form of music making might prevail only as a memory: of a brief, temporary phase in Britain’s music history. For the full story read from page 99: remarkably it hits the exact spot – the epicentre.

Learn more about The Brass Band Story at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David B. Williams's "In the Range of Fire and Ice"

David B. Williams is an author, naturalist, and tour guide. He is the author 12 books, including the award-winning Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound plus Wild in Seattle: Stories at the Crossroads of People and Nature, Cairns: Messengers in Stone; Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology; and Waterway: The Story of Seattle’s Ship Canal and Locks, the latter two of which were finalists for the Washington State Book Award. Williams is a Curatorial Associate at the Burke Museum and writes a free weekly Substack newsletter, the Street Smart Naturalist. He lives in Seattle.

Williams applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, In the Range of Fire and Ice: A Human and Natural History of Washington’s Cascade, and reported the following:

Ninety-nine pages into in my new book about Washington’s Cascade mountains, In the Range of Fire and Ice, and I am still making connections between people and geology. The page comes in the middle of my chapter focusing on mining and quarrying, a story that stretches back more than 10,000 years to the earliest visitors to the Cascades. Those people who first found high quality rock in the mountains quarried material that they used to make exquisite tools, many of which have been unearthed in archaeological sites. The early visitors also traded the rock they quarried and those tools reveal the extensive trade networks across the region.

For mining, I focus on the one important mining town in the Cascades, Monte Cristo, where a lone miner first came across gold ore in 1889. His discovery led to John D. Rockefeller spending more than $2.5 million (about $850 million today) on developing the mines. This included building almost 60 miles of railroads, a massive ore concentrator, and a smelter. Because of the harsh weather, which restricted most activity to late summer and early fall, workers took six years to fully ramp up mining. Two years later, an epic rainstorm hit and wiped out much of the infrastructure. Monte Cristo never recovered and the population dropped from a peak of perhaps 2,000 to almost none.

Is page 99 a good illustration of the book? Yes. As illustrated in this section, each chapter, which focus on subjects such as glaciers, wolverines, mountain goats, fire, fish, and Mount St. Helens, weaves history, information from experts, and thoughts on how the mountains influence human history. Page 99 though lacks my time in the field and some of my personal perspective, which I hope draws people more into the stories of place. Ultimately, I hope this mix of science, history, and field time encourages people to head out into the mountains and find their own stories of this magical range of fire and ice.

Visit David B. Williams's website.

The Page 99 Test: Stories in Stone.

The Page 99 Test: Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound.

--Marshal Zeringue