Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder's "The Revolution Will Be Improvised"

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century transnational American literature and culture. Her teaching and research interests include multiethnic literature and culture, (specifically African American and Latinx Studies), performance studies, women of color feminism, southern studies, and social movement activism. She received her PhD from University of Mississippi in English; an MA in American Studies from Columbia University; and a BA in English/Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton.

Rodriguez Fielder applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism, and reported the following:

The cultural workers of the civil rights movement improvised because they had to, but also because the techniques of improvisation opened space for people to relate to each other in a new way. On page ninety-nine of The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism, I write concluding paragraphs to my chapter, “A New Lesson for Activism,” which traces the creativity of education reform across performance and literacy programs. I make the case that both the education reform and experiments in protest theater were operating in the “same method of fomenting intimacy” (99). The transformation that happens through improvisation moves education from how we teach to how we relate.

The Page 99 Test works beautifully for The Revolution Will Be Improvised. On this page, I argue that improvised performance maintains the right to complexity, in other words, that art made for protest could carry within it multivalent perspectives and ideas. Much of the protest performances I discuss in this chapter, such as the Free Southern Theater’s version of Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson and the actos of El Teatro Campesino, have been relegated to “early work,” suggesting unfinished or underdeveloped art. I write, “The performances of El Teatro Campesino and the Free Southern Theater define ‘fully human life’ as the right to complexity–of interpretations and emotional responses that may be in conflict with one another” (99). I ask us to acknowledge the complexity within the improvisation process and that much of what makes this work so powerful happened off-stage in the process of intimacy-making between activists and the local people they worked with. We are left to interpret the traces of this intimacy left behind in the works of art they created.

Some early readers of my book argued that my chapter on pedagogy/education reform didn’t fit well in a book about art activism. Page 99 proves otherwise and emphasizes a point I make elsewhere in the book about interpurpose art, that improvised social justice-oriented art intertwines multiple intentions together: gathering, relationality, propaganda, consciousness-raising, experimentation, etc. The performances they created to educate also did the work to define performance to how we recognize it today as explosive social commentary. And a chapter about education reform in the civil rights movement has a place within a book about experimental art.

Learn more about The Revolution Will Be Improvised at the University of Michigan Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthony J. Stanonis's "New Orleans Pralines"

Anthony J. Stanonis is a New Orleans native and independent historian. He received his BA in history from Loyola University New Orleans and his MA and PhD in history from Vanderbilt University. His publications concentrate on tourism, foodways, and culture in the American South.

Stanonis applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, New Orleans Pralines: Plantation Sugar, Louisiana Pecans, and the Marketing of Southern Nostalgia, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…. These African American women “seemed, indeed, relics of the good old days before the war every one of them; for their quaint old-time courtesy, so different from the rude manners of the day, their neat old-time blue gingham dresses, with white kerchief and quaint bandana tignon, made up a typical picture that can nowhere be seen but in this dear old Crescent City.”

Any economic strivings by these African American women were buried beneath white nostalgia. The performance of racial supplication erased African American’ opposition to Jim Crow. When the praline “mammies” performed their street cries, one announced “in her broken English how she was a good cook in a fine old family before the war, but now she ‘got ole; no money, no more ole mistress. She got for ter make livin’, and so she go roun’ dem street for sell dose nice praline.” When she then burst forth with a tune in French, the guests “went fairly wild; they applauded and applauded.” Never mind that the local hardware merchants had arranged this racial performance to satisfy the expectations of their guests from around the nation. And never mind that the African American women explicitly voiced that her performance stemmed from financial need, not devotion to the white population. The act resonated.

The popularity of praline mammies convinced local white boosters to make their presence a staple of the promotional repertoire ….

Flipping to page 99 is a quick way of reaching a core argument of the book and works perfectly for achieving a succinct summation of the historical role of the praline and its sellers in New Orleans.

The praline embodied a conflicted meaning. The enslaved on Louisiana’s sugar plantations originated the flat patty formed from brown sugar and pecans. They carried the confection to New Orleans after the Civil War, where it became quickly popularized within the tourism industry.

For African American women, the praline offered economic opportunity and uplift out of enslavement. Black cooking skills converted locally foraged pecans with brown sugar, often acquired from a black market in edibles that thrived in New Orleans during the nineteenth into the early twentieth century. The confection fostered household income while powering bodies with affordable calories and nutrients.

Such street hustle by African Americans, however, threatened the beliefs of Jim Crow-era white New Orleanians ensconced in Lost Cause mythology. White writers and tourism boosters generally transformed the perception of the Black vendors by recasting them in mammy imagery, as seen on page 99. Their colorful headwear became quaint rather than a clever means of drawing customers’ attention. Their white aprons and other clothes conveyed submission to whites’ needs rather than a savvy means of heralding cleanliness.

While the Page 99 Test doesn’t explore the history and cultural meanings of brown sugar and pecans, both major aspects of the book that inform perceptions of the praline seller and the praline, the human roles reflected by cultural debates over the praline vendor and her wares appear in sharp focus on that page.

Visit Anthony J. Stanonis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ashley Lawson's "On Edge"

Ashley Lawson is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Her research centers on twentieth-century American literature and women’s creativity. She has published essays on Zelda Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, Shirley Jackson, Sara Haardt, and Estelle Faulkner. In addition to these specialties, her teaching interests include Iranian and Japanese women writers, femmes fatales, and the American gothic.

Lawson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, On Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett, and reported the following:

From page 99:

...very first issue (Letters 255) and thus before she considered publishing there. Highsmith’s path to publishing works of science fiction was different. Even before The Price of Salt became a lesbian classic in its pulp form, Highsmith already had a familiarity with this side of the publishing industry because her first job as a writer was in comic books. Starting in 1943 and continuing for about six years, she worked first at Michael Publishers, where she wrote text for biographical comics on real-life personages, and then at Fawcett, where she wrote scripts for superhero characters like Pyroman and Captain Midnight (A. Wilson 94–95). Though in her journals Highsmith contrasted pulp fiction to “fine writing” and deemed it “nonsense-taken-seriously” (Patricia 320), Susannah Clapp argues comics were an ideal medium for her, because “her language is not self-consciously elegant. The syntax isn’t supple. She isn’t discursive or elaborate” (97). Though Brackett’s writing proves that science fiction could, in fact, include ornate and beautifully written prose, the genre also commonly made use of the more stripped-down style for which Highsmith became known. Similarly, Noel Mawer has described an overarching pattern in Highsmith’s writing in which “fantasy can be ‘truth,’ can be preferable to reality (or simply necessary); it is all that matters to some people, and may lead them anywhere” (63), an ethos that was also popular among writers of the speculative genres.

The influence of the gothic on science fiction is another useful point of intersection within the diverse range of work all three authors produced. According to Aldiss, “The methods of the Gothic writers are those of many science fiction authors, particularly the magazine contributors of the nineteen-thirties, -forties, and -fifties” because these writers “brought the principle of horrid revelation to a fine art, while the distant and unearthly are frequently part of the same package” (19). Sarah Lefanu has likewise connected women’s sci-fi to Ellen Moers’s influential concept of the female gothic, arguing that both offer “strong-minded heroines” as well as a way to “challenge dominant literary conventions and to produce a literature that can be at once subversive and popular” (25). Though some variations of the speculative genres took a more optimistic approach, all three of these writers were attracted to the end of the spectrum that used the genre as a means of illustrating the darker side of human nature and our tendencies toward self-destruction.

Though Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin has claimed that author wrote “only one published story that truly qualifies as science fiction” (384), she in fact published five pieces in science fiction venues between 1953 and 1958, and these stories should be read according to this generic background. The piece that is commonly cited as an indisputable work of sci-fi, likely because it is so different from anything else that Jackson wrote, is her story “Bulletin”...

The Page 99 Test is a fairly useful way to get a clear sense of my approach and argument in my book. It falls in Chapter 4, which is about the science fiction writing that these authors did (when only Brackett is usually credited with writing in the genre). This page happens to touch briefly on all three authors I cover, and it also shows how I explore the intersections between the usually strictly delineated genres: in this case the connection between the gothic and science fiction.

Learn more about On Edge at the Ohio State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lindsay Weinberg's "Smart University"

Lindsay Weinberg is Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the Tech Justice Lab at John Martinson Honors College, Purdue University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age, and reported the following:

From page 99:

These forms of individualizing self-care that WellTrack encourages students to adopt stand in stark contrast to the self-care practices envisioned by Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde in the epilogue of A Burst of Light. Lorde situates self-care as a strategy of resistance against intersecting forces of oppression that shape the lives of marginalized people: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." In Lorde’s formulation, self-care cultivates a combative form of resilience in the face of social and political forces that seek to stifle one’s ability to survive. It is important to heed feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s warning about treating all forms of self-care as inherently neoliberal, which collapses the distinction between self-care practices indebted to the tradition of Black feminism with the forms of self-care that perpetuate dominant socioeconomic paradigms. WellTrack, however, promotes an understanding of self-care that is separated from an account of the social and economic forces contributing to mental illness, which disproportionately harm marginalized students. Rising levels of precarity under neoliberalism are what intensify insecurity, subsequently increasing efforts to anticipate and predict.

Data Capture and Consent

WellTrack’s design for self-tracking, like most digitized commercial self-tracking apps, doubles as a form of capitalist dataveillance, meaning surveillance that uses technology to generate digital data that can be captured, monitored, and exploited for profit-seeking. While users of this app engage in self-care in that they record information about themselves in order to optimize and improve their mental health, the app also monitors and collects information about users for commercial gain.

Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age is about the proliferation of digital technology within universities, and its implications for economic and racial justice. While there is no universally agreed upon definition of a smart university, these initiatives generally include the use of data-intensive digital technologies to do some or all of the following: monitor and automate aspects of student learning, extracurricular participation, and progress to degree; manage facilities and resources; produce new revenue streams; support research activities that lead to external funding; and purportedly enhance campus security and student wellness.

If a reader were to open the book to page 99, they would encounter a discussion of WellTrack in Chapter 3 on “Wellness.” WellTrack is a mobile phone application modeled on cognitive behavioral techniques, which is used at a range of universities across North America for students to self-track symptoms of anxiety and depression. Page 99 gives the reader a decent sense of the book’s overall critical framing, in that I am critical throughout the book of ways that technologies are used to reframe structural issues in higher education as problems that can be “solved” through students’ individual behaviors and choices. In the case of Welltrack, instead of universities meaningfully redressing issues of inadequate in-person campus mental health resources, financial pressures as a result of skyrocketing tuition, or issues of institutional climate, students are encouraged to self-monitor using a for-profit software tool designed for data capture.

More broadly, the book is concerned with how digital tools that promise to solve some of higher education’s most intractable problems raise issues of student privacy, discrimination, and exploitation, and accept as a given policies that treat higher education as an individual investment rather than a public good. The book is equally concerned with the ways that corporate-backed technologies are becoming default infrastructure for teaching, learning, and researching within U.S. public universities, as well how administrators and campus police forces intensely monitor the lives of those who work and live there.

Finally, while the book details the ways that student recruitment, retention, security, and wellness are being restructured around the production of digital data in ways that undermine racial and economic justice, it also emphasizes concrete examples of resistance that hopefully inspire readers to take on active roles in the struggle against smart universities.

Learn more about Smart University at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margarette Lincoln's "Perfection"

Margarette Lincoln is Visiting Researcher at the University of Portsmouth and Curator Emeritus at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, where she was Deputy Director until 2015. She was a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London from 2015 to 2020, and Visiting Researcher at the University of Portsmouth 2021 to 2024.

Lincoln applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Perfection: 400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty, and reported the following:

Page 99 explains that Victorians often judged a woman’s skin problems to be the result of an irregular lifestyle and therefore a matter of personal failure. From the 1840s, active management of the skin was essential to a woman’s beauty routine, partly owing to new discoveries about the function of the skin’s pores and glands. A growing acceptance that skin had to ‘breathe’ added weight to criticism of tight corsets, and specialists advocated cold bathing to tone the pores.

This page gives a partial indication of what the book is about. Readers using the Page 99 Test would see that the book is about the pressure on women to look their best. They would see that Victorian judgements about a woman’s appearance might be prejudiced and based on imperfect scientific knowledge. They might gather that the book considers body shape and hygiene as well as skin. They might even appreciate that much beauty advice has been whimsical.

But the book actually deals with an extended time span, from 1650 to the present. It is holistic in approach, covering hair, teeth, body shape, diets, spa retreats, makeup and hygiene, as well as skin. It is well illustrated and contains much humorous detail, exploring the lotions, deodorants, undergarments, spells and beauty aids which have seduced users over the centuries. And it is also inclusive, exploring expressions of gender identity, and showing how a history of perceptions of beauty is inseparable from ideas about race and the history of colonialism. Read on!

Visit Margarette Lincoln's website.

The Page 99 Test: London and the Seventeenth Century: The Making of the World's Greatest City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erik Kenyon's "Philosophy at the Gymnasium"

Erik Kenyon received his PhD from Cornell University in classics. He is a philosopher, musician, and weightlifter, who teaches Latin and humanities at Friends Academy, Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He is the author of Augustine and the Dialogue and a coauthor of Ethics for the Very Young.

Kenyon applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Philosophy at the Gymnasium, and reported the following:

Page 99 starts, “and queens. Unlike most rulers, they will approach ruling as a burden in comparison to the delights of philosophy, yet one that they must shoulder for the sake of the city that raised them. While the masses will be left to chase shadows, people with a sense of how the world actually works will keep them in line as best they can. Having an army at their disposal will help. The goal is for the city as a whole to flourish.” This conclusion to a section ties together main ideas from Plato’s Republic: class distinctions between rulers, army and masses; educational requirements for rulers; real-world knowledge vs. “shadows” on the wall of Plato’s Cave. How this fits with the chapter title, “Women at the Gym,” is unclear.

A new section, “The Method of Hypothesis in Republic 1-7,” reminds readers of a philosophical method, explained in chapters on Plato’s Symposium, which “proceeds as investigators keep identifying the question behind the question until they arrive at a most basic question,” after which they try out hypothetical answers to all these questions. Using this methodology as a lens, the remainder of the page lays out core questions that drive Republic’s first seven books. This proceeds from “Is justice profitable?” to “What is justice?” and “What is good?” at breakneck speed.

Philosophy at the Gymnasium uses Greek philosophers as coaches for ‘wrestling with’ questions that are still timely today. Page 99’s emphasis on methodology captures this, as do its connections between education, politics and life. That said, this page concludes a discussion spanning four chapters and takes ideas, which are laid out more carefully above, ‘at a sprint.’ This missing puzzle piece, what any of this has to do with women at the gym, is that ancient gyms were both venues for nude athletics and schools for future citizens. The present chapter stresses that Republic’s forays into the nature of knowledge are introduced by the suggestion that women, as future rulers, “must strip naked and wear virtue instead of clothes.” This collision of body and soul, quirky and profound, captures the flavor of the book well.

Visit Erik Kenyon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Kornfield's "Invoking the Fathers"

Sarah Kornfield analyzes the public persuasion of sexism. A feminist rhetorical critic, Kornfield’s research explores the politics of gender within U.S. television, religion, and governance. She is an Associate Professor of Communication and Women's & Gender Studies at Hope College.

Kornfield applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Invoking the Fathers: Dangerous Metaphors and Founding Myths in Congressional Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Invoking the Fathers opens with two substantive quotes from U.S. senators, followed by my analysis of these speeches along with other senators’ speeches from the prior pages.

Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) celebrated Constitution Day by stating,

Two hundred thirty-two years ago, our Founding Fathers gathered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and signed a document that remains the supreme law of the land today. In those two hundred thirty-two years, the United States has become the most powerful, the most prosperous Nation in the history of the world, and that success has come as a result of the framework set by our Constitution. The genius of the Framers was their determination to maximize the freedom of the individual while recognizing the need for a central government limited in size by our Constitution.

Likewise, Senator James Lankford (R-OK) stated,

On September 17, 1787, this great experiment was finalized to try to form what they considered a more perfect Union, and the birth of our Constitution happened. This was a radical experiment in self-government, and most of the rest of the world at the time stared at those whom we now call our Founding Fathers and thought, that will never work.

These speeches focus on the past, on a specific moment of origin: September 17, 1787. Senator Daines (R-MT) calls attention to this origin moment by situating it in space—Independence Hall, Philadelphia—and situating it in time by repeating the phrase “two hundred thirty-two years.” Senator Ernst (R-IA) focuses on this origin moment by framing the Constitution as a material item, a “gift” bestowed on us by the “Founding Fathers.” This activates the inheritance framework so frequently used in congressional discourse. Senator Lankford (R-OK) personifies this sense of inheritance and lineage by describing the Constitution as birthed—by the fathers—on September 17, 1787.

These celebrations of Constitution Day engage in the typical veneration of the “Founding Fathers,” positioning them as exceptionally wise. Senator Ernst (R-IA) states that the founders had “incredible foresight”; Senator Daines (R-MT) applies the word “genius” to the founders; and Senator Lankford (R-OK) suggests they were so brilliant the rest of the world could not even conceive of how their plan might work.

How well does this page represent my book? Page 99 does a good job of showing readers what they can expect from Invoking the Fathers in terms of topic, evidence, and method! This book is an analysis of how contemporary congresspeople talk about the “Founding Fathers” and that comes across very well on page 99.

Page 99, however, does not give readers a clear sense of Invoking the Fathers’ overarching argument. It shows readers what I am analyzing and how I approach the topic, but does not zoom out to the book’s larger interpretive argument. Namely, it does not show how, by revering the founders as fathers, contemporary political discourse (1) constructs us-other binaries between real America and everyone else, (2) frames this real America as exceptional, (3) imagines a possessive relationship, in which the “Founding Fathers” belong to “us,” and “we” to them, (4) uses material appeals to frame this exceptional America as real, and (5) assumes that this real America is inherited by real Americans—the “us.” At every turn, the “realness” of the United States is defined by its lineage to the “Founding Fathers,” normalizing a sense of lineage in which some people—the founders’ supposed heirs—have greater claims to the country and its governance. Ultimately, this shapes what it means to govern in the name of “the people” and who can be “the people.”

Page 99 does, however, provide evidence for this argument by specifically pointing to the sense of lineage and inheritance in Senators Daines’ and Lankford’s speeches, and it speaks more broadly to the myth of American exceptionalism.

Page 99 is part of my favorite chapter in Invoking the Fathers. Reading through years of congressional speeches, I was shocked to find that congresspeople spend a lot of time on ceremonial speeches—for Constitution Day, National Bald Eagle Day, National Bible Week, and so on. I enjoyed writing this chapter so much, in part, because I was so surprised to find these ceremonial speeches in the Congressional Record. These speeches venerate the “Founding Fathers” and the founding era, drawing on and playing into the myth of American exceptionalism.

Learn more about Invoking the Fathers at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan A. Brewer's "The Best Land"

Susan A. Brewer was born in Oneida, New York, and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she taught the history of American foreign relations. She is the author of To Win the Peace and Why America Fights.

Brewer applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Best Land introduces two men, both in their twenties, who played a significant role in the early development of what would become my hometown, the city of Oneida in Madison County, New York. The first is Sidney Breese of New Jersey, a Yale graduate, lawyer, and employee of the Holland Land Company. The second is Angel Deferrier, the son of a poor French nobleman and the daughter of a colonial official who had made a fortune in Canada, was imprisoned in the Bastille for defrauding the state, and pardoned by Louis XV. Angel, who served Louis XVI as a royal bodyguard, fled during the French Revolution, contacted the Holland Land Company, and traveled from New York City to the frontier with Sidney in the 1790s.

At first, I thought that page 99 failed the test of revealing the whole book, but upon consideration I rather think that in some way it does. As was often the case in the local histories I have read, Natives are missing from this page. The only mention of Indigenous people concerns the image of two “savages” on the ancient coat of arms of Angel’s family. This symbolic, rather than actual, presence of Native people was a familiar one in my childhood. I had grown up in Oneida without realizing that Oneida Indians still lived on their ancestral lands. At school where we cheered on our team called “Oneida Indians,” the Oneidas, along with the rest of the Haudenosaunee or People of the Longhouse, had disappeared from our textbooks after the American Revolution.

As illustrated by Angel’s story, however, that was not true. When he came to Oneida territory, he followed in the footsteps of his forefathers by marrying a woman from a family of property and influence. In Angel’s case, he married Polly Denny, a Mohawk/Oneida woman. In contrast to Page 99, much of the rest of the book is about generations of Polly’s family. For over a century, Polly’s family lived on what would become my family’s farm, called “the best land” by my grandfather whose parents had bought it from Angel and Polly’s grandchildren.

Angel Deferrier and Sidney Breese, along with a multitude of land speculators, turnpike, canal, and railroad developers, settlers, and squatters, had come to Oneida territory in search of wealth, opportunity, a home. The Oneidas, including members of Polly’s family, tried strategy after strategy to hold on to land guaranteed by the United States that New York State acquired using deceit, corruption, and illegally made treaties. They initially secured help from Sidney and Angel, but both men eventually took an active part in the dispossession of the Oneidas. Remembered as gentlemen with elegant manners and gracious homes, Sidney and Angel built their prosperity on broken promises. Page 99 introduces these key characters in The Best Land, a history of settler colonialism and Indigenous perseverance filled with love and betrayal.

Learn more about The Best Land at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Why America Fights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brycchan Carey's "The Unnatural Trade"

Brycchan Carey is professor of literature, culture, and history at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published numerous books and articles on the cultural history of slavery and abolition.

Carey applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807, and reported the following:

The Unnatural Trade asks how late eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as a “dread perversion” of nature, charting that process across a century and a half of writing about African and Caribbean environments and people by British colonists and, later, abolitionists. In a book of around 220 pages, it should come as no surprise that page 99 describes an author and a moment around halfway through that process. The page is one of ten discussing the notorious historian and racial theorist Edward Long (1734–1813) and his infamous History of Jamaica, which was published in three volumes in 1774 and which compares Black people with orangutans. I go on to discuss those disturbing passages, for which Long has been dubbed “the father of English racism,” but on page 99 I show how in the History of Jamaica he moves from a highly aestheticized account of the Jamaican environment and its natural wonders to a more pragmatic call for its exploitation. Long’s parish tours, I argue, “reveal him an author with a keen eye for detail, a genuine appreciation of wildlife, landforms, and meteorology.” He is eager to emphasize the economic benefit of properly conducted natural history and he calls for more funding for top-quality scientific research into the Jamaican environment—while slamming amateur naturalists who he condemns as “the despicable tribe of insect-hunters, and collectors of gimcracks” who have brought the science of natural history into “contempt and ridicule.” Proper naturalists, he argues, understand that God has created Jamaica for the benefit of colonists and may “instruct us in the means by which our health may be preserved, our life prolonged, our agriculture improved, manufactures enlarged and multiplied, commerce and trade extended, and the public enriched.” For Long, I conclude, “the Caribbean environment is a resource supplied by God for the benefit of the British people and economy and natural history a tool in its exploitation.”

Reading page 99 in isolation would certainly give a reader an insight into some of the key themes of the book. It offers a reading of an important piece of environmental literature that was written in the service of the Caribbean plantocracy and it shows how one writer could use his Christian faith, his belief in European supremacy, and his desire for economic expansion to justify colonial expansion and exploitation. It also shows how natural history and agricultural writing are deeply entwined with colonial discourses in this period. But unlike much of the rest of the book, page 99 has little to say about enslaved people and nothing about the slave trade. It also discusses the writing of one who was an unambiguous advocate for plantation slavery and a notorious racist. Many of the earlier 98 pages of the book assess the writing of naturalists who were instead ambivalent about enslavement, or who at least questioned its humanity. Many of the following 123 pages discuss those like Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, and Thomas Clarkson who worked actively to abolish the slave trade, and implicitly enslavement itself. In this case, the Page 99 Test is partially successful in that it foregrounds the role of natural history in the history of colonial resource exploitation, but it is less successful in showing the part played by naturalists in recording the brutal realities of the slave trade and plantation slavery, and not at all successful in showing how abolitionists seized upon and deployed that literature.

I hope someone who read page 99 of The Unnatural Trade would be intrigued enough by its glimpse into this complex literature to go back to page 1 and read the book through. The book as a whole tells the story of the part played by environmental writing in the development of British attitudes toward the slave trade and colonial slavery in which colonists increasingly presented slavery as an unalterable part of the natural order, but abolitionists, and increasingly the British public, saw it instead as a “dread perversion” of nature that needed to end. The book guides the reader through the writings of colonists and slave traders, explorers and scientists, enslaved people and abolitionists, poets and novelists, across a century and half, and concludes by showing the influence this writing would have on the next century of resource imperialism in the nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa.” Page 99 is a good entry point, but The Unnatural Trade has a great deal more to offer.

Learn more about the book and author at Brycchan Carey's website.

The Page 99 Test: From Peace to Freedom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher R. Pearl's "Declarations of Independence"

Christopher R. Pearl is Associate Professor of History at Lycoming College and the author of Conceived in Crisis: The Revolutionary Creation of an American State.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Declarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution, and reported the following:

For Declarations of Independence, the Page 99 Test captures the essence of the book's central themes. On this page, colonial Pennsylvania and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) work intently to keep Lenape (Delaware) leader Teedyuscung from leaving the Northern Susquehanna River Valley for the Ohio region. Both Pennsylvania’s colonial government and the Haudenosaunee recognize Teedyuscung’s strategic importance as the leader of the Susquehanna Nations—a coalition of Indigenous nations whose presence stabilizes the Northern Susquehanna River Valley against Connecticut settlers’ encroachments—his influence could either uphold or fracture the region’s tenuous balance of power. The ambitions of these settlers challenge both the Haudenosaunee’s claims to the territory and the “unpurchased lands” that Pennsylvania’s Penn family considers within their purview. Meanwhile, Teedyuscung and the Susquehanna Nations also pursue their own independence, aiming to secure autonomy in the region from both the Haudenosaunee and encroaching British colonies.

On page 99, Teedyuscung ultimately agrees to stay in the Susquehanna Valley, but this does little to ease the fierce colonial rivalries that continually destabilize the frontier. The escalating tensions foreshadow a larger conflict that could endanger both local Indigenous autonomy and British colonial control.

This page exemplifies several key elements of Declarations of Independence: the relentless Indigenous efforts to defend their lands amidst rival colonial ambitions, and how these struggles create a volatile frontier that could dramatically shift power dynamics throughout the colonies and the British Empire. More importantly, page 99 underscores that the struggle for independence was far more complex than American colonists versus the British Empire. It was a layered fight, involving Indigenous nations and colonial players alike, all striving for sovereignty and survival.

Teedyuscung’s skillful negotiations and his unwavering defense of Indigenous sovereignty are also emblematic of the “declarations of independence” made by diverse peoples throughout the revolutionary era. His pursuit of autonomy for the Susquehanna Nations highlights a broader, multifaceted struggle for land and freedom that shaped this critical period—and, as the book argues, laid essential groundwork for what would become the United States. Page 99 is not just a snapshot of colonial rivalry but a pivotal moment that resonates throughout the broader narrative of America’s paths to independence.

Learn more about Declarations of Independence at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue