Kate Haulman's "The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America"

Kate Haulman is an associate professor of history at American University. She is the author of the prize-winning The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America and co-editor of Making Women's Histories: Beyond National Perspectives. An active public historian, she has worked on several exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

Haulman applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America, and shared the following:

My first thought was, “Page 99 is not even half a page of prose! What does that reveal about the ‘quality of the whole?’” Happily, the 19 lines of text express the book’s main theme and claim. But they certainly don’t tell the whole story. In fact, there’s an important narrative and interpretive element they do not capture. Read on!

Page 99 of the Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America is the final page of chapter three and close to the middle of the book, which runs six chapters and 210 pages. Titled “Mother Mary,” the chapter explores antebellum depictions of Mary Ball Washington, George’s mother, in biographies (both of her and of George) as well as images. Biographies like these grew in importance in this period, instructing American readers in morality, virtue, patriotism, and, in the case of Mary, ideal motherhood. Through these works the “Mother of Washington” figure, first sketched in 1826, took shape through a canon of stories that depicted an increasingly domestic, loving, and piously Christian woman, one who bore the lion’s share of responsibility for her son’s greatness. Men and women writers alike fashioned this portrait, some drawing from newly available evidence such as Mary’s Bible and books of devotional literature. In contrast to actual American women who were engaging in public, political discourse, basing claims to engage the state on issues such as abolition in Christian, republican motherhood, the private and retiring Mary served as a counterpoint. She was a true Christian, republican mother (and slaveholder) from the Revolutionary past itself, her son the undeniable proof of her worth.

The page connects the chapter’s argument to the book’s: across the nineteenth century, elite white men and women used Mary (really, the Mother of Washington figure) to lay claim to the founding past, lodging their vision and version ideal motherhood in it. Yet they also did so through attempts to erect a monument to her at the site of her grave in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which the page does not mention. The story of the monument to Mary, Mother of Washington, serves as both a narrative throughline in the book and important feature of Revolutionary commemoration, one that exposes the paradox of a monument to a mother. First proposed and backed by elite men, the monument got off the ground in the early 1830s to great fanfare but languished unfinished for more than six decades. Some made pilgrimages to the site to pay homage to Mary’s memory while others vandalized the incomplete structure and even used it for target practice; such was the range of engagement by the public. There were practical reasons for its status, mainly lack of funding. But the lack of will to complete it and meaning of the monument as it ran to ruin suggests the ambivalence around erecting a monument, a public structure typically reserved for male heroes, to a mother. Mothers were supposed to be private, retiring, domestic figures—in fact, in those very qualities lay Mary’s greatness. Her son George was the monument. Only when two elite women’s groups organized in the early 1890s did the Mother of Washington finally get her monument.

Learn more about The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Denise Z. Davidson's "Surviving Revolution"

Denise Z. Davidson is Professor of History and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Georgia State University. She is the author of France After Revolution and coauthor of Le roman conjugal.

Davidson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters, with the following results:

Page 99 of Surviving Revolution appears a few pages into a chapter on the weight that bourgeois families in early nineteenth-century France placed on intergenerational ties and responsibilities as visible in their childrearing practices. The page delves into an episode dating from January 1817, when Catherine Arnaud-Tizon, the matriarch of one of the families discussed in the book, finds herself in conflict with her youngest daughter, Adèle, who is pregnant with her first child. After Adèle expressed a lack of interest in following her mother’s advice, Catherine wrote to her eldest daughter, Amélie, for the second time in two weeks to express her shock and frustration. (A quotation from the first of the two letters appears on the previous page.) In addition to voicing her feelings, Catherine’s letter provides details on key components of preparing for childbirth in these years including choosing the right “accoucheur” (a male midwife or doctor) and a wet nurse, matters about which Catherine had strong opinions. Catherine then explains that she will not stay with Adèle while waiting for her to go into labor, because “like you, I realize that our young household needs to take care of itself. We must allow them to figure things out on their own, and I assure you that I will no longer attempt to offer them advice…. I will go only when my presence becomes necessary.” The chapter argues that intergenerational cooperation was essential to families’ successful navigation of the challenges they faced as France moved from republic to empire and back to monarchy. This letter provides a rare example of such cooperation going less than smoothly, a situation that caused the more experienced woman to feel angry and hurt. Such feelings rarely appear in the correspondence that serves as the basis for this study, as letter-writing served primarily as an opportunity to share good news and reinforce positive emotional ties. The page ends with a few lines introducing a new topic: the family’s discussion of Adèle’s due date, which sheds light on how people worked through such matters before the rise of modern medical knowledge and techniques.

Does the Page 99 Test work? The answer in this case is yes and no. Readers turning to page 99 would get an accurate image of the book’s approach: a focus on private, intimate spaces and discussions through the lens of familial correspondence. The anecdote discussed on the page serves as a typical example of the nitty-gritty of everyday life that fills much of the book and that I argue gives us a deeper understanding of bourgeois lifestyles and attitudes during this chaotic period in French history. In addition, the letter writer, Catherine Arnaud-Tizon, a mother of four who lived through the Revolution in Lyon and later helped her husband run their business in Rouen, plays a prominent role throughout the book. However, this single page does not give much insight into the book’s larger arguments about what it meant to be “bourgeois” in the decades following the French Revolution and how wealthy families navigated this period of rapid change. In addition, the topic of pregnancy and childbirth occupies only a small space in this chapter and rarely appears elsewhere.

Surviving Revolution is divided into two parts. Part one provides a brief overview of the lives and trajectories of the two families at the center of my story from about 1780 to 1830. Part two contains five thematic chapters focused on marriage, childrearing, business and property, socializing, and politics. Relying largely on the thousands of letters I read in the archives, these chapters discuss networking and correspondence practices as essential tools that these families relied upon as they lived through regime change, warfare, and economic crises. The strategies these families employed to survive during this chaotic moment in history included focusing on family and the pleasures of private life and relying on longstanding, trusted allies to help them to accomplish their goals. These methods dating from two hundred years ago may help readers reflect on their own efforts to persevere through difficult times.

Learn more about Surviving Revolution at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Decoteau J. Irby and Ann M. Ishimaru's "Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change"

Decoteau J. Irby is professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, codirector of the Center for Urban Education Leadership, and coeditor of Dignity-Affirming Education. Ann M. Ishimaru is the Killinger Endowed Chair and professor of educational foundations, leadership and policy at the University of Washington College of Education, and author of Just Schools: Building Equitable Collaborations with Families and Communities.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book is the first page of Chapter 6, “Designing Work Routines and Process(ing) Tools: An Infrastructure of Strategic Equity Leadership” by Maurice Swinney and Decoteau Irby. It opens with a quote by Maurice Swinney on his time as the first equity officer in a large urban district:

People often ask me “How did you accomplish these things?” “How did you build the Equity Office to sustain itself?” I strategically designed the office with a focus on creating internal and external organizational routines, which are processes for engaging teams, in prioritizing work, creating tools to support it, structuring time and effort, and providing support and feedback.

We believe our book passes the Page 99 Test, as the page highlights three defining features. First, the book amplifies the voices of actual practitioners, who have done the work of equity leadership on the ground. We feature the experiences and strategies of equity leaders, especially Black women and other women of color, navigating challenges and making change.

Second, the book weaves together our own research with practitioner insights, in this case, illustrated by the chapter collaboration with researcher and editor Decoteau Irby. The book is co-authored by a mix of practitioners and academics, giving readers a balanced view of both day-to-day leadership practices, framed by almost a decade of research on the topic of leadership for equity by some of the field’s leading researchers.

Third, it positions leadership practices, such as the creation of organizational routines, as the drivers of systems change. Rather than focusing solely on individual leaders with formal titles, we illuminate how leaders “colored outside the lines” with others to improve learning and well-being for children, especially those least well served by the status quo. We hope this helps readers to develop a strategy orientation to their own leadership.

One thing page 99 does not address is the way the book recognizes geographical differences and socio-political events that shape leadership practice. For example, the first section of the book “Mornings” recounts what equity leadership entailed at the end of the second Obama administration and into the first election of Donald Trump. The second and third sections, “Middays” and “Evenings,” offer insights into equity leadership from the Covid-19 pandemic, the movement for Black lives, and the pushback on diversity, equity, and inclusion work throughout the Biden administration, and up to the final term of Donald Trump.

After reading our book, we want readers to understand three things. One, there are clear differences in what equity leadership practices look like across space and time. Two, leadership turnover should be expected because the work draws resistance, challenges, and vitriolic pushback. Third, despite the pushback, leaders, especially Black women, have demonstrated a level of creativity and commitment that continues to influence, institutionalize, and sustain changes that benefit students who depend most on public education.

Visit Decoteau J. Irby's website and Ann M. Ishimaru's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helen Morgan Parmett's "Stadium City"

Helen Morgan Parmett is the Edwin W. Lawrence Endowed Professor of Forensics and an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television.

Morgan Parmett applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Stadium City: Sports and Media Infrastructure in the United States, and shared the following:

Sports stadiums play an oversized role in contemporary city life. This is especially true for residents who live in and around the neighborhoods in which stadiums are built, which are often in politically and economically marginalized parts of the city, where land is cheaper and the political capital of its residents weaker. Page 99 of Stadium City concludes the the chapter on the city of Atlanta’s professional baseball team’s (the Braves) departure from urban Atlanta’s Turner Field for greener pastures, bigger tax incentives, and the whiter fans of Suburban Cobb County. The page concludes my remarks on the efforts of the Turner Field Benefits Coalition, an activist group of neighborhood residents and supporters, which demanded greater community benefits for the neighborhoods surrounding Turner Field in the subsequent developments being planned to replace the stadium and its parking lots. The page begins by noting that since its formation, the group had splintered into various factions, with some of the group making deals with developers and others arguing for more transparency and more investment in the existing structures and cultures of the neighborhood. The page focuses especially on how, even though the group was not entirely successful in garnering benefits nor in preventing gentrification from future development, it did contribute to a discourse that both drew from and shaped future resistance to stadium building in Atlanta and beyond. The page includes an image from the tent city the group installed around Turner Field, where the group called for resistance to the kind of displacement that too often comes from stadium and other sporting-oriented development projects.

Page 99 is a pretty good representation of what readers will find in Stadium City. The book contends with the cultural and spatial implications of stadium building in the U.S. in both contemporary and historical contexts. This page concludes the book’s section on stadium building in Atlanta. Together with the other two sections on stadiums in Seattle and Minneapolis, the book argues that stadiums embody what I call a sportification of place, wherein stadiums work to reshape cities (and their residents) according to the logics and values associated with mediated sporting culture. This page emphasizes agency—neighborhood residents are not just passive actors or problematic populations to be displaced or reshaped by new sporting developments. Stadiums are sites of struggle over who and what the neighborhood is for. But resistance is hard, and it can be especially challenging to build and maintain coalitions to sustain that resistance. Page 99 is a good example of how even though the book contends with how stadiums have historically razed neighborhoods or led to displacement in the name of urban renewal and revitalization, it also emphasizes how residents have not just passively accepted this remaking of their neighborhoods into shiny new versions imagined by developers and urban, corporate elites. They resist and articulate other senses of place that lay claim to alternative ways of valuing, inhabiting, and practicing urban space that contests the sportification of place.

What readers might miss from page 99, however, is the central role that media culture plays in the sportification of place. Stadium City theorizes sports stadiums as urban media infrastructures—they are at once mediatized, mediated, and mediating sites that constitute, direct, and govern urban space and spatiality in complex ways. Page 99 concludes with a gesture to this broader focus on the intertwinement of stadiums, media, and urban space, as it turns attention to how stadiums help to constitute a city’s image and brand. Whether through integrating forms of media that help to govern and control stadium and urban space, construct a city’s image, or to experiment with new forms of surveillance and data collection, stadiums are more than places in which our favorite teams play a game. They are central nodes in our cities that impact our everyday lives and spatial practices, whether we ever attend a game or not.

Learn more about Stadium City at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Lindauer's "The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts"

Matthew Lindauer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at CUNY Graduate Center. He specializes in moral and political philosophy, moral psychology, and experimental philosophy, and has published numerous articles in these areas in journals including Philosophical Studies, Journal of Moral Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, and Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy.

Lindauer applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts, with the following results:

The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts develops a theory of the different ways in which moral and political concepts, like ‘justice’ and ‘solidarity,’ are supposed to help us solve practical problems in the real world – how they can be “fruitful” for this purpose. They can do so by motivating the right kinds of actions, preventing the wrong kinds, helping us fight back against problematic social phenomena like bias and prejudice, generating consensus, and guiding action. Page 99 of the book sits in the middle of Chapter 3, where I am responding to key objections and challenges, which was maybe the most fun chapter to write.

At the top of page 99, I’m considering the challenge of what to do when these different aspects of problem solving conflict with one another. For example, what if a given conception of justice would be widely accepted by the general public but not very useful to activists and other people who are most committed to fighting injustice? I first note that the fact of competing demands is not a unique issue for my theory – ordinary life is full of them, too (take the balancing act of being a good parent and a reliable friend). But I also think my view helps us make progress on how to approach these philosophical tradeoffs. Insofar as those most engaged in a struggle are getting to the heart of a practical problem and likely to generate a workable solution, it may be that it matters more that a conception of justice empowers them rather than achieving the broadest consensus possible. Still, if we care about practical problem solving we will have to keep the value of achieving buy-in from the broader public in mind, as well as the fact that generating consensus among those most committed to promoting justice will often be important.

The Page 99 Test works well for this book, in part, because I am arguing for the importance of bringing multiple approaches together to understand the practical problems that we face – it would be very hypocritical not to explore an approach like this one. While the 99th page lies in the middle of a chapter defending rather than articulating my theory of normative fruitfulness, I think chapters like this one can be very important for strength testing and understanding the contours of a theory. A reader who picked up the book at page 99 would get a sense of how my view handles some challenges that scientifically-informed theories of morality and justice face. And whether they ultimately agreed with me or not, I also hope that they would get a sense of my openness to critical engagement and revision, which are to my mind the most important aspects of a scientific worldview, particularly one that aims to address practical problems that we face in this moment.

Visit Matthew Lindauer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mariya Grinberg's "Trade in War"

Mariya Grinberg is an assistant professor of political science and member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She focuses on international relations theory and international security. Her research interests center on the question of how time and uncertainty shape the strategic decisions of states, examining economic statecraft, military planning, and nuclear strategy.

Grinberg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Trade in War: Economic Cooperation across Enemy Lines, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, the reader will find an assessment of the changing expectations of the length of war among British decision-makers in World War I. The page picks up the story in 1915, remarking on the sense of optimism around the launch of the Dardanelles campaign. However, by the middle of the year, given the failure of the Dardanelles campaign to restart a war of movement, expectations of a short war once again gave way to planning for a long war.

The Page 99 Test would rather grievously deceive the reader about the contents of the book. Judging purely from page 99, a reader might expect this book to be a military history of World War I. In fact, the book explains wartime trade – why states would allow their own firms to trade with the state’s military opponents during open hostilities. British decision-making in World War I is one of the cases used to test the argument; other cases include the Crimean War (1854-6), World War II, and the United States wartime trade in its post-Cold War conflicts.

The book argues that states develop nuanced wartime commercial policies, determining how each product will be treated during the war. Products that can be quickly converted into military capabilities by the enemy are prohibited from trade, while those that take a while to become useful on the battlefield are more likely to be traded. Products that are essential for the key domestic industries of the state are also traded in war. Furthermore, states tailor their commercial policies to the war they expect to fight. When states expect a a short war, more products can be traded with the enemy; while expectations of a prolonged war bring a more restrictive wartime commercial policy.

Page 99 captures British expectations of the length of war – which in 1915, in the moment of optimism allowed them to continue importing German dyes, which were integral for the British textile industry. However, the changing expectations towards a long war in 1915 ended such imports and brought prohibitions on the export to the enemy of food, cotton manufacture, rubber, and other raw materials. All of which were previously allowed to be traded with the enemy. Of course, for these details, the reader would have to reach page 109.

Visit Mariya Grinberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew A. Szarejko's "American Conquest"

Andrew A. Szarejko is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wartburg College. His work has been published in journals such as PS: Political Science and Politics, Millennium, The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and The Journal of Global Security Studies. He is also the editor of Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations amid COVID-19.

Szarejko applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy, and shared the following:

Page 99 of American Conquest is near the end of Chapter 4. After examining the origins of the Northwest Indian War (1790-1795) in Chapter 2 and the process by which military basing decisions helped U.S. forces defeat the countervailing Native American coalition in Chapter 3, I turn in Chapter 4 to the ways U.S. forces brought the perceived lessons of the “Indian Wars” abroad. More specifically, Chapter 4 is about how the U.S. military brought a sort of nascent counterinsurgency doctrine learned (and continually re-learned) on the American frontier into the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). Page 99 speaks to “lessons learned” processes that the U.S. military has since established to try to more systematically codify the lessons of recent experiences in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I caution against trying to make law-like generalizations on the basis of such experiences.

This gives readers a good sense of what I am doing in this book. I am not just interested in the origins of the Northwest Indian War; I am also interested in the ways its influence lingers in U.S. foreign policy and American politics. Readers who continue a few more pages into Chapter 5 will find the most recent events I discuss—debates in Fort Wayne, Indiana, concerning whether to celebrate the city’s namesake and the victorious general in the Northwest Indian War, Anthony Wayne.

Page 99 also speaks to my interest in how foreign policy professionals continue to use the Indian Wars as an analogy. There I begin a final section in Chapter 4—a coda in which I discuss how a U.S. military official, Colonel Elbridge Colby, justified indiscriminate violence in the Philippines with reference to the purportedly “savage,” “uncivilized” nature of the Filipino insurgents. I then turn to a description of how Colby’s great-grandson and President Trump’s current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge A. Colby, has used the “Indian Wars” as an analogy in some of his own work on military strategy. In short, American Conquest is about the origins and legacies of the Northwest Indian War, and page 99 underscores those central concerns.

Visit Andrew A. Szarejko's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julija Šukys's "Artifact"

Julija Šukys is associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, where she teaches the writing of memoirs, autobiographical writing, essays, and archival research methods. She is the author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007). Šukys holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto.

Šukys applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives, with the following results:

Page 99 of Artifact lays out the background for Amy Bishop’s tenure denial. That denial was the reason Bishop opened fire on her colleagues during a faculty meeting, killing three colleagues. As part of my research, I interviewed Bishop’s former department chair. We talked about Bishop’s career trajectory. “Amy wasn’t stupid or incapable of receiving tenure,” said Debra Moriarity in the interview. “It’s just that her timing was bad and that she spent too much time developing the [cell] incubator and not enough producing the kind of scholarship that would have secured her position at the university.” Page 99 then takes us through the kind of research activity that would have earned Bishop tenure: ‘“at least two papers a year,’ that is, ten papers before tenure (which usually comes in Year 6 of an academic appointment as assistant professor),” plus a solid record of grantsmanship. The final paragraph introduces the issue of gender, and whether or how institutional structures played a role in Bishop’s professional struggles.

Page 99 of Artifact isn’t a terrible representation of the book’s concerns, but it has the disadvantage of falling mid-weeds, so to speak. I write incrementally, so each paragraph, section, and chapter builds on the last. To enter the book at this point in the Amy Bishop story feels like walking into a documentary film 1/3 of the way through. It’s not disastrous, but you’ve got to work quite hard to catch up.

The idea to write this book grew out of those three events. One was a shooting in a writing classroom. That occurred at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. The event shook me because that could have been my classroom—I too teach writing. Then came the second event: a law professor at the University of Missouri sued the university administration for the right to carry his weapon with him on campus. Finally, within two weeks of that lawsuit, there was a third event, this time at the University of Northern Arizona, a couple of students shot one another at a fraternity house.

That third shooting happened shortly before I was about to travel to Flagstaff, Arizona, to attend a large nonfiction writers’ conference. Suddenly our writing community was talking about this event on social media. There was talk of whether we, as a community of writers, should address this violence at the conference. I remember reading a passing comment: “Somebody should write about this.” That’s when the idea went ding, ding, ding in my head. Maybe this was a way to deal with the discomfort, disquiet, and fear I’d been carrying while on campus.

I ended up traveling to and writing about five different campuses where shootings occurred. I’m an archival researcher by nature, so, as is my habit, I arrived on each campus and then headed out to see what its archives held. I tracked the story the archives told me about each shooting. Every archive told me something different. Slowly, the book began to take shape.

In the end, Artifact became a text about what institutions collectively choose to remember, about what they willingly forget, what they silence, what they keep, what they trash. The book is also about my love for the university. It’s about the ways the university grows increasingly broken. And it’s about my beloved profession, that is, being a professor.

Visit Julija Šukys's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven A. Dean's "Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law"

Steven A. Dean is an award-winning author and a Professor of Law and the Paul Siskind Research Scholar at Boston University. He has spoken at the United Nations and testified in Congress about the impact of racism on tax law. Dean's work forced President Biden to change course on tax havens and forced the leading international tax policymaking organization to withdraw a major marketing brochure. He led the world's foremost graduate tax law program at NYU and practiced tax with leading global law firms. Dean earned his law degree from Yale. His books include For-Profit Philanthropy (2023), Social Enterprise Law: A Multijurisdictional Comparative Review (2023), and Social Enterprise Law: Trust, Public Benefit, and Capital Markets (2017).

Dean applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow, and reported the following:

On page 99, I describe how the 2000 US presidential election shaped the fate of the OECD’s effort to blacklist tax havens. The change in Treasury leadership—from Lawrence Summers, Clinton’s secretary and the OECD initiative’s strongest supporter, to Paul O’Neill, Bush’s pick and one of its fiercest critics—proved decisive. Personnel shifts like this can make the difference between momentum and collapse in global tax diplomacy.

The page also considers the role of right-wing think tanks, especially the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (CFP), which mobilized opposition to the OECD plan. Even if the CFP exaggerated its influence, it managed to forge improbable alliances, linking the Heritage Foundation with members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The section closes by speculating how different things might have looked had Al Gore won in 2000—a reminder that international tax law is never just about taxes but about politics, power, and identity.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Yes—almost eerily well. A browser landing on this page would immediately see the book’s central themes at work: how domestic political battles in the United States shape global tax policy, how right-wing institutions exert surprising influence, and how questions of race and identity are never far from the surface.

Page 99 captures the larger argument of the book: international tax law cannot be understood without grappling with racial capitalism. The Clinton-to-Bush transition, the replacement of Summers with O’Neill, and the lobbying of groups like the CFP all illustrate how seemingly technical tax rules are embedded in struggles over legitimacy, sovereignty, and belonging.

This single page shows both the drama of individual political actors and the deeper structural forces at play. That’s what the book does throughout: reveal how international tax law reflects and reinforces racialized hierarchies, while also tracing the moments of resistance—from small states labeled “havens” to dissenting voices within US politics—that sometimes push back against those hierarchies.

In short, if you opened the book to page 99, you would get a very good sense of what the book is about.

Learn more about Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frances R. Aparicio's "Replaying Marc Anthony"

Frances R. Aparicio is Professor Emerita in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. She is the author of Negotiating Latinidad: Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago and Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, among other books, and coeditor of various critical anthologies.

Aparicio applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Replaying Marc Anthony: Sonic, Political, and Cultural Resonances, and shared the following:

If one reads page 99 in Replaying Marc Anthony, its discussion around singing in English, crossover, and the Latin music industry serves as a window to the rest of the book. Fueled by my curiosity regarding how Marc Anthony's arrangements and songs allow him to resonate with specific communities and identities, Chapter 3 delves into his engagements with Anglo rock and roll, freestyle and R&B in the song "I need to know."

Page 99 describes the ways in which Marc Anthony was discursively framed as a “crossover” act around 1999, when he first performed “I need to know” on Good Morning, America on July 23. Yet his musical history evinces the opposite, as he started his singing career in the 1980s singing freestyle in English in local New York clubs, to later sing salsa in Spanish in 1993. Refuting these mainstream notions of “crossover,” Marc Anthony reaffirms his bicultural and bilingual upbringing as the foundation for these linguistic dilemmas. I document the ways in which his arrangements deploy forms of translanguaging or Spanglish, as in his unexpected version of Bread’s “Make it with you.” This chapter analyzes Marc’s multiracial arrangements in “I need to know” as a sonic text and performance that rewrites so-called “American music,” and specifically rock and roll, as sounds that also belong to racial minorities in the United States.

Known as the King of Salsa and as a global celebrity, Marc Anthony is also, as I propose in the Introduction, a “listener” himself who has brilliantly curated songs that resonate with multiple audiences and listeners. By highlighting the rich diversity of voices, singers, songs, and musical traditions with which he has been in dialogue, we can better understand the sonic, cultural and political meanings and resonances of his repertoire. This framework allows me to argue that some of his most canonical songs have circulated hemispherically and globally, thus hailing multiple identities that include Puerto Rican, Latino, Latin American, American, Black, and Algerian/North African. Rather than just “Latin pop,” Marc Anthony offers us serious sonic incursions that allow us to acknowledge ourselves within the colonial precarity of our lives. The impact of Marc Anthony is profoundly felt by Puerto Ricans, Nuyoricans and so many others in the U.S. Latinx community as we critically listen to our own vulnerabilities through the power of his extraordinary voice.

Learn more about Replaying Marc Anthony at the Ohio State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue