Volha Charnysh's "Uprooted"

Volha Charnysh is a Ford Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Uprooted: How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Uprooted discusses associational life in West German communities that received Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe after WWII. Simply put, associational networks did not cross group boundaries. The locals found numerous ways to exclude expellees from their associations, including rules based on duration of residency, property ownership, and religious affiliation. For example, a local rifle association in Westphalia only accepted Catholics and stipulated that its chairman be a long-time resident. Page 99 illustrates the effect this had on the expellees:

Expellees dealt with exclusion not only by retreating into the private sphere but also by founding their own associations and interest groups […] A survey conducted in the early 1950s indicates that 20 percent of expellees participated in clubs alongside natives; 40 percent were active in expellee organizations; and the remaining 40 percent were entirely isolated (Wurzbacher 1954, 146).

Page 99 successfully conveys the first part of my book’s argument: rearranging ethnically homogeneous populations in space creates new cleavages based on migration status and region of origin. Germans who did not experience uprooting resented having to accommodate their expelled compatriots. They closed their ranks to defend access to jobs and housing. Expellees likewise stuck together, organizing around their shared experience of forced migration and economic hardship.

Unfortunately, readers who stop at page 99 would miss out on the book’s central message: Forced migration negatively impacts societal cohesion in the short term but ultimately creates opportunities to build stronger states and more prosperous economies. By engendering new societal divisions and eroding cooperation needed for public goods provision, the arrival of forced migrants also creates a window of opportunity for strengthening the state. Uprooted heterogeneous societies have more to gain from the state’s presence and are also less able to resist the expansion of state authority. As governments invest more resources into these communities, they build greater institutional capacity. This enhanced state capacity, combined with the skills migrants bring from their diverse places of origin, can improve economic performance in the long run.

My book draws on qualitative and quantitative evidence from Poland – whose borders were moved 200 km west in 1945, uprooting millions of Poles and Germans – and West Germany – which received German expellees from Poland and other countries. Within-country analysis maximizes internal validity, while cross-country comparisons support the generalizability of my conclusions.

I do hope page 99 inspires readers to delve deeper into Uprooted!

Visit Volha Charnysh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James M. Brophy's "Print Markets and Political Dissent"

James M. Brophy specializes in modern European history, particularly the social and political history of nineteenth-century Germany. He received his B.A. from Vassar College, did graduate training at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, and took his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He has written Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800-1850 (2007) and Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Prussia, 1830-1870 (1998). He has co-edited Vormärzliche Verleger zwischen Zensur, Buchmarkt und Lesepublikum (2023) as well as Perspectives from the Past: Sources in Western Civilization (1998; 7th ed., 2020). In addition, he published over three dozen essays on modern European history. He is the former president of the Central European History Society and currently sits on the board of editors for the Journal of Modern History.

Brophy applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Print Markets and Political Dissent in Central Europe: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800-1870, and reported the following:

Page 99 is indeed an instructive page for readers. To understand how forbidden political literature circulated in Germany and Austria, the book follows three hundred publishers who created print markets that advocated constitutionalism and rights-bearing citizenship. How publishers printed and sold banned literature between Napoleon and German unification was no easy matter. Censorship and surveillance were watchwords of the political order under Prussia and Austria. The underground book trade therefore depended on the trust of other booksellers and their commercial networks to evade state control and circulate illegal print matter. This page showcases one of the book trade’s leading political publishers: Heinrich Hoff. A committed democrat, he typifies his profession’s savvy to combine profit with political principles. The revenues from his balanced list of print matter – newspapers, novels, history, and scientific treaties – enabled him to speculate on illicit political pamphlets and books. Hoff deftly gamed the censorship system and brought banned print to market. His civic courage is noteworthy but so is his goal to extend democratic ideas to common readers. Using formats of popular and middlebrow literature (e.g., magazines, almanacs, calendars), he condensed and simplified issues of freedom and political representation for social groups not privy to elite political philosophy. Using an expanding publishing landscape and the clandestine exchange networks of bookdealers, Hoff and other publishers promoted political literacy for the dawning era of mass politics. Hoff’s end is poignant. During the Revolution of 1848, Baden’s government arrested and imprisoned him. Having fled to the US, he died in 1852 penniless in New York City. These citizens of print and their role in creating a democratic public sphere beckon our attention.

Learn more about Print Markets and Political Dissent in Central Europe at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eva Payne's "Empire of Purity"

Eva Payne is assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi. Her writing has appeared in publications, such as the Journal of Women’s History and Radical History Review.

Payne applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution, and reported the following:

A curious reader browsing Empire of Purity would be lucky to land on page ninety-nine! The page illustrates one of the book’s central arguments: US anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution efforts were a crucial means of extending US imperial power under the guise of protecting women. The page appears in the final section of chapter 3, which details the development of laws criminalizing “white slavery” in the early twentieth century. Anti-white slavery laws were paradoxical, designed both to protect “innocent” white American women from being kidnapped into prostitution, and to exclude and deport foreign prostitutes, whom officials painted as a danger to the nation. In addition to the domestic implementation of these laws, my book is interested in how they operated outside of the US mainland.

As the following passage demonstrates, US officials used white slavery laws to expand their authority in US territories like the Panama Canal Zone, as well as sovereign states like the Republic of Panama:

Preventing white slavery justified increasing US control over immigration to the Republic of Panama as well as the Canal Zone. The US government appointed an officer to work with US quarantine officials, as well as the Panamanian government, to forbid “undesirables” from entering the Republic, even though Panamanian officials licensed prostitution. Through his efforts, the officer reported, “a number of white-slave dealers and notorious prostitutes were thereby turned back and not permitted to debark and yet others were deterred from attempting to come into the Republic.” (99)

Through their war on white slavery, US officials on the isthmus of Panama took charge of crucial state functions, including policing immigration and prostitution.

In addition to presenting my argument about US empire, the page’s first sentences show how US officials used white slavery laws to police racial boundaries and maintain white supremacy. And the end of the page introduces evidence that despite US officials’ claims that they were rescuing victims of forced sex trafficking, many women migrated and sold sex because it was the best economic option available to them. What’s missing on the page, however, are the perspectives of women who sold sex, which are centered throughout the book. While the Page 99 Test doesn’t capture the full geographic scope of the book, which has chapters about Europe and Asia as well as the Americas, nor the extent of my source base, it gives the reader a surprisingly accurate sense of the book’s key interventions.

Visit Eva Payne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas R. Jones's "Cervantine Blackness"

Nicholas R. Jones is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He is the author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, and coeditor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production.

Jones applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Cervantine Blackness, and reported the following:

From page 99:

[…] palpitates and perspires an erotic life of desire. Things are done in secrecy—behind and within closed doors.

I have always been struck by the homosocial, queer bond between Loaysa and Luis. Critics have also noticed their intimate proximity. In Del teatro a la novela: El ritual del disfraz en las Novelas ejemplares de Cervantes, Eduardo Olid Guerrero highlights how Loaysa “attracts and seduces” Luis with his guitar and music. Alban K. Forcione also confirms similar interactions between the two in his 1982 classic Cervantes and the Humanist Vision. What strikes me as odd remains how and why scholars have acknowledged, on the one hand, yet have evaded, on the other hand, the explicit naming—calling out the social interaction and proximity for what it is—of the textual potential apparent in Loaysa’s and Luis’s interracial and same- gendered bond to each other throughout the novella. I cannot help but to explore the productive possibility of queering Luis in these terms, along the lines of the same-gender relations between white men and black men. Expanding on our understanding of how queerness ebbs and flows in El celoso extremeño, I gravitate toward Roland Betancourt’s important work on Byzantium, eunuchs, and institutionalized spaces, where homosocial, homoerotic, and same-gender intimacy had room to maneuver in certain cordoned-off, private, or homosocial spaces, even if they manifested differently than in our own time.

Quoting Eve Sedgwick’s classic definition of “queer,” Betancourt reiterates that queerness for Sedgwick moves as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excess of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” On queerness I privilege Robert Reid-Pharr’s framing of the term: “If there’s one thing that marks us as queer, a category that is somehow different, if not altogether distinct, from the heterosexual, then it is undoubtedly our relationships to the body, particularly the expansive ways in which we utilize and combine vaginas, penises, breasts, buttocks, hands, arms, feet, stomachs, mouths and tongues in our expressions of not only intimacy, love, and lust, but also and importantly shame, contempt, despair, and hate.” The diversity of textual material from El celoso extremeño that captures Luis’s and Loaysa’s connection and proximity to each other, through music, song, and dance, implore us to rethink Luis, through modes, spaces, and temporalities of queerness, in terms of vulnerability. Vincent Woodard in The Delectable Negro compels us to think about how “a master would often choose a ‘favorite’ male slave as the […].

On page 99 of Cervantine Blackness, readers will meet my closing remarks on book’s third meditation, “Rethinking Luis.” This meditation historicizes and unpacks the sociocultural range of blackness exhibited by the old, black eunuch Luis from the story El celoso extremeño (1613). To achieve this, I distill and make meaning out of the intersecting phenomena that BDSM and pornography, music, queerness, and sound harness in my study of blackness as a fecund space to think through the material consequences of Cervantes’s construction of Luis.

The Page 99 Test works beautifully and readers would get an excellent idea and sense of Cervantine Blackness. Uncannily, of the hundreds of pages in my book, page 99 is the very best single page to introduce browsers to the book’s core tenants. In short, the “test” absolutely serves as a good browser's shortcut to Cervantine Blackness, precisely because the book is deliberately irreverent, rambunctious, and wayward. Taking methodological cues from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Cervantine Blackness concerns itself with breaking open archival documentation—literary and otherwise—from Cervantes’s and his contemporaries’ worlds so that they might yield a richer picture of pre-Enlightenment Iberian black social life. Through vulnerability and risks, I prefer to think of Cervantine Blackness as a fugitive text, marked by the errantry with which it identifies and that it catalogs. In this spirit and in its queerness, I read against the grain and press at the limits of the historical and literary archives associated with Cervantes and those in his writerly orbit. Waywardness in this book speculates about what might have been. As a method, the wild ideas reverberating in this book reimagine blackness through Cervantes’s spirit of irony conveyed in writings—yet also his pulcritud, or neatly nuanced details—that simultaneously flicker before our eyes.

Learn more about Cervantine Blackness at the Penn State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amogh Sharma's "The Backstage of Democracy"

Amogh Dhar Sharma is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. He has previously worked as a Departmental Lecturer in Modern South Asia Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and as a Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at the Queen's College, Oxford. His research interests include comparative politics, political communication, and the political economy of development in South Asia.

Sharma applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Backstage of Democracy: India's Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The Computer and the ‘Computer Boys’

After Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October 1984, Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as the PM, and two months later the party achieved a landslide victory in the general election. Although as the PM, Rajiv Gandhi had less time to devote to managing intra-party affairs, nonetheless data collection and computer-based analysis continued to form the two legs of his plan of professionalising the party. Assisting him in the process was a growing team of advisors comprising technocrats, civil servants and business and media professionals. In his speech at the INC centenary celebrations in Bombay in 1985, Gandhi lashed out at ‘power brokers’ in the INC and promised to purge them to strengthen the party (R. Gandhi 1985). To operationalise this plan, he turned to Sam Pitroda to prepare a detailed vision document charting out the course of reform in the party (Nugent 1990, 64–66; Pitroda and Chanoff 2015, 147). Satyanarayan Gangaram ‘Sam’ Pitroda was an engineer and entrepreneur who had returned to India from the US in the early 1980s. Soon after, he was appointed as Gandhi’s advisor on the government’s ‘technology missions’ and played a major role in India’s telecom revolution. A close confidant of Gandhi till the end, Pitroda also played a crucial role in managing the INC election campaigns in 1989 and 1991 (Merchant 1991, 283; Nugent 1990, 66; Pradhan 1995). Gandhi’s reliance on technocrats like Pitroda, who had no formal associations with the INC, was indicative of his suspicions about the efficacy of most party bureaucrats and his tendency to bypass the party’s organisational machinery in the hopes of eventually reforming it.

Soon after being elected as the PM, Rajiv Gandhi introduced a programme for creating a computerised database of all members of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. In September 1985, a pro forma was circulated among all INC MPs asking them to provide details of their educational qualifications, tax history, language proficiency, marital status, number of children, countries visited by them, previous membership of political parties, history of association with the INC, public meetings and rallies addressed by them in their constituency, nature and duration of visits to their constituency and their participation in parliamentary proceedings. A similar technique of computerised data collection had previously been trialled among MPs and MLAs in Bihar. The purported aim of this exercise was to provide Gandhi with easily accessible information about all INC MPs ‘at the push of a button’, in the hope that ‘[t]his [would] help remove groupism and prejudiced selection[s]’ in the formation of parliamentary select committees. In other words, the INC computer was to act both as a virtual panopticon that could…

It appears that the Page 99 Test only partially works for The Backstage of Democracy. While the excerpt certainly reflects some of the key themes that run through the book, it doesn’t manage to capture the central focus – namely, election campaigns! From the excerpt above, the reader may rightly surmise that the book focuses on the interface between technology and politics in modern India, particular the tendency of technological fetishism (for example, centered on computers, as in the case of the passage that has been quoted) and the role and power that technocratic elites enjoy in political decision making. However, it may give the reader the faulty impression that the book is more historical in its orientation than it actually is. The primary focus of the book is to explore the changes that have taken place in India’s election campaigns over the last decade. The roots of these changes can certainly be traced to the 1980s and the section above is part of the book where I flesh out this contextual overview.

Nevertheless, I am quite glad that the Page 99 Test threw up this section. Writing this section of the book was notoriously difficult because of a lack of adequate archival material and because key interlocutors were not available to be interviewed. But in the end, this was also the part of my research that was the most analytically rewarding and enjoyable. At times, it felt like almost a detective story – piecing together the most disparate clues on how India’s political elites in the 1980s had started using computer technology and large-scale data gathering to rethink how electoral strategizing and intra-party politics could be managed. For readers interested in the longer story, the book awaits…

Learn more about The Backstage of Democracy at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Merten Reglitz's "Free Internet Access as a Human Right"

Merten Reglitz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Free Internet Access as a Human Right, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book does two things. It first concludes and summarises the argument of chapter 4. This argument is that internet access should be recognised as a human right because having such access has become necessary for having sufficient or adequate opportunities to exercise our political human rights (e.g. free speech, free information, free assembly) today. Secondly, page 99 introduces a crucial objection to this argument, namely that we don’t need a new, stand-alone human right to internet access because such access is already protected by our existing human rights such as our right to free speech. Beyond page 99, the chapter goes on to discuss and to defuse this objection.

Page 99 gives you a good idea of what the book is like because it summarises one of its central arguments. Moreover, the consideration of an objection is central for building and defending philosophical arguments. So page 99 contains some of the essential elements of a philosophical work, which this book is. At the same time, page 99 is not representative of the book. This is because it doesn’t contain any examples of how the internet is used by people, governments, and companies. It also doesn’t contain any explanation of how these uses of the internet matter morally, and for our human rights. These examples and their normative analysis make up much of the book.

This combination of philosophical argumentation with normative analysis of examples of internet use is a crucial contribution that the book makes to the existing literature. Philosophers and other researchers have discussed individual aspects of the internet. They have investigated e.g. what the internet has done to people’s understanding of knowledge, how it has enabled more powerful ways of expressing ourselves, what new ways of misinformation it unfortunately also makes possible, or how it has transformed how we spend our time and interact with each other. What the book does with these considerations (and many other examples) is to make the case for a new universal entitlement that would guarantee a minimum internet connection for everyone and which, importantly, will require public institutions to ensure a certain quality of internet access for people. This should be such that the internet can be used as an empowering medium, rather than one that is used to maximise profits, monitor populations and oppress political opponents, or to misinform and manipulate. The book’s main conclusion is that public institutions ought to adopt a new human right to free internet access as a foundation of a vision of the internet that, as the UN hopes, will contribute to “the progress of mankind as a whole.”

Learn more about Free Internet Access as a Human Right at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Munson's "Ingenious"

Richard Munson is an author and clean-energy advocate. His books include Tech to Table: 25 Innovators Reimagining Food, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern, From Edison to Enron, Cardinals of Capitol Hill, and Cousteau: The Captain and His World.

Munson applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ingenious describes Benjamin Franklin’s efforts after the French and Indian War to advance a union between England and the American colonies. It states:

As the war wound down, Franklin weighed in on the peace negotiations to suggest that England assume control over Canada rather than Guadeloupe, arguing that the British Empire needed to secure North America’s northern and western frontiers. He asserted that settlements in the Mississippi valley and Quebec would offer substantial benefits to the mother country, providing an immense outlet for British industry.

The Page 99 Test doesn’t work that well because by page 99 (of 197) Franklin is still loyal to the British king, even suggesting Americans would not “unite against their own nation [England], which protects and encourages them.” That page also does not address Franklin’s science, which this biography asserts is the throughline that integrated Benjamin’s diverse interests.

I argue that historians have highlighted certain of Franklin’s actions – particularly diplomacy – and ignored others – particularly science. One of the most cited biographies devotes only 30 of its 500 pages to Benjamin’s experiments and observations, and an encyclopedia maintains that “Franklin never thought science was as important as public service.”

I disagree. With all due respect to Franklin’s public service, we wouldn’t be discussing his diplomatic prowess were it not for his fame as a leading scientist, which opened doors for him in France, Britian, and the colonies.

Franklin gave us practical advances – including lightning rods, efficient stoves, and bifocals – as well as innovative research on electricity, heat, chemical bonds, weather patterns, and so much more.

Benjamin also used his science politically. Believing Americans would be recognized by European elites only if they could demonstrate technological and scientific strength, he created a scholarly association dubbed the American Philosophical Society, which was one of the first efforts to have representatives from all the then fiercely independent colonies work together.

Ingenious argues we don’t know Franklin as well as we believe nor as richly as he deserves. It concludes by suggesting Benjamin’s continued relevance:

"As a vocal set of modern-day activists reject science and dismiss fact, Benjamin (one of our nation’s founders) highlights the importance of verifiable analysis. As zealots impose their religious beliefs, he makes the case for tolerance. As censors ban books and limit debate, he defends printers and free speech."

Visit Richard Munson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Clare Mulley's "Agent Zo"

Clare Mulley is an award-winning public historian, author and broadcaster, primarily focused on female experience during the Second World War.

Her new book is Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter, the critically-acclaimed biography of Elżbieta Zawacka, the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi German-occupied Poland. Previous titles include the award-winning The Woman Who Saved the Children, on Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children although not fond of individual youngsters; The Spy Who Loved, a biography of the first woman to serve Britain as a special agent in the Second World War and who was acclaimed as Churchill’s ‘favourite spy’, Krystyna Skarbek aka Christine Granville; and The Women Who Flew for Hitler, which tells the story of Nazi Germany’s only two female test pilots, one of whom tried to save Hitler’s life while the other tried to kill him. Mulley’s books are widely translated, and have all been optioned for film or TV.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to Agent Zo and reported the following:

From page 99:

Zo was in full self-preservation mode. Striding into an upstairs dining-room, when she saw no exit she took a napkin from a table, draped it over her arm, and headed back to the staircase. Before she could climb any further, someone pulled her roughly to one side. Gesturing her to be silent, Paco steered Zo into a backroom. It struck her that she had no idea whether he was playing both sides, or if the guards had simply come to the inn for a glass of beer and been lucky. Before she had gathered her thoughts, Paco shoved her out of a side door directly down onto the mountainside…

'Agent Zo', in fact Elżbieta Zawacka, was very much the courageous woman of action during the Second World War, so it seems fitting to stumble across her evading Nazi German arrest, on page 99 of the book, through a mixture of cool presence of mind and being thrown from an upstairs door! This was in the spring of 1943, when she had already served behind enemy lines for over three years, as an intelligence officer and courier for the Polish resistance ‘Home Army’. Having already had a particularly close escape, forcing her to leap from a fast-moving steam-train, Zo had now been appointed as the only female emissary of the commander of an Allied army, and sent with microfilm across almost 1,000 miles of occupied Europe, to Britain.

Despite this close shave, as well as almost drowning in the water tender of another train, and being shot at in the freezing mountain passes of the Pyrenees, Zo completed her mission. That September she became the only woman to parachute from Britain to enemy-occupied Poland, where she took part in the largest organised act of defiance against Nazi German-occupation: the Warsaw Uprising. The great irony of her dramatic true story is that she was a hair’s breadth from capture from the very first day of the war to the last, but she was only ever arrested by the Soviet-imposed communist regime in her own country, Poland, after the war. To say more would be to give too much away…!

Visit Clare Mulley's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Women Who Flew For Hitler.

The Page 99 Test: The Women Who Flew For Hitler.

My Book, The Movie: Agent Zo.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Furley's "Myths, Muses and Mortals"

William Furley is emeritus professor of Greek at Heidelberg University and research fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies, London. His publications include Greek Hymns and three editions of plays by Menander: Epitrepontes, Perikeiromene, and Misoumenos.

Furley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Myths, Muses and Mortals: The Way of Life in Ancient Greece, and reported the following:

Page ninety-nine of my book comes from a chapter on travel and exploration in ancient Greece. It illustrates the Greeks' spirit of enterprise and discovery by a work of fantasy, the True History, by the second-century (AD) satirical writer Lucian. He describes an adventurer's fantastic voyage into the unknown starting from the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) and exploring space, the heavenly bodies and far-flung lands. Here is an excerpt:

Although Lucian emphasizes that nothing he will relate of his fantasy journey is true, he says that makes him more honest than many other `historians' in that respect: `In one respect I am telling the truth---when I admit I'm lying.' (4) Lucian's narrator tells how he made preparations for a journey starting at the Pillars of Herakles. This landmark, the Straits of Gibraltar, was, for the Greeks, already the end of the known world. Their ships plied the Mediterranean, even if they knew that Phoenicians had gone further, even, by then, circumnavigating the continent of Africa, as they claimed (see Herodotus 4.42). So when Lucian's narrator says that he set off from Gibraltar to discover the `end of the world', this project was equivalent to that of Columbus in 1492: it was a voyage into the unknown. Although invented, the spirit in which he undertook the adventure is typical of the real-life spirit of Greek exploration by sea.

Page ninety-nine of my book is, as it happens, a useful sample of the whole. It illustrates my method throughout which is to introduce the Greek world through illustrative passages of literature and documentary evidence, place them in their historical context, and interpret the events and sentiments they are transmitting. The passage also reflects the intention of my book which is to explore the fascination of the ancient Greek world in an adventurous spirit, although my account is firmly grounded in the real written and visual record left by the Greeks.

The chapter on travel/exploration is one of nine focusing on various aspects of the 'Greek experience', ranging from love and celebration to warfare and philosophical thought. Central is a long section on Daily Life which, very roughly, follows important moments in the ancient Greek's day, from shopping in the morning at the Agora, messaging each other with writing tablets, to dinner-time entertainment and night-time street crime. As sources for these forays into ancient mentality I use works of literature from Homer at the beginning to the late Greek romantic novels, from historical works to courtroom speeches, from private curse tablets to public inscriptions. Most of our evidence comes from ancient Athens, but my scope covers writers and individuals from all over Greece and spans nearly a millennium. The emphasis throughout is not on history, although the story hangs on an historical frame, but on the Greeks' own expression of their feelings and experiences as they navigated these aspects of life. The text is illustrated by over fifty images, a good many of them taken by myself over the years.

Visit William Furley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Melissa Zinkin's "Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason"

Melissa Zinkin is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University (SUNY). She has published articles on Kant, philosophy of art, and feminist philosophy.

Zinkin applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason, and reported the following:

At the top of page 99 of Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason one finds the heading "Comprehension." The rest of the page discusses the passage where Kant defines "comprehension." For Kant, comprehension is the highest degree of cognition. He writes that "to comprehend (begreifen) something (is) to cognize (it) through reason...to the degree that it is sufficient for our purpose." He distinguishes comprehending something through reason from conceiving (concipiren) it by the faculty of the understanding. I note that in German "begreifen" means "to grasp," whereas "concipiren" means "to sketch." From the distinction between these two words-- "grasping" vs. "sketching," we already get a sense of Kant's contrast between how we know something through reason and how we know it through the understanding. The former is a thorough and deep engagement with an object, the latter is preliminary and superficial.

Someone opening my book to page 99 would land on a discussion that introduces a core theme; for Kant, reason is that special faculty by which we have deep cognition, that is, comprehension, of an object. A major aim of the book is to show that for Kant reason is not just the faculty by which we get things "right." As we see today, "getting it right" is an ability that can be outsourced to machines. Human reason is deeper than that. It is that faculty by which human beings learn for ourselves the organizing principles of objects and what makes them what they are. It is also that faculty by which I comprehend for myself why some action is the one that is right for me to perform. By deeply comprehending the "rightness" of objects and actions through reason we make our ideas about them integral to our way of thinking and develop the capacity for good judgment about them in the future.

Later in the chapter that contains page 99, I argue that for Kant the activity of comprehending something is the same activity that is involved in judging something to be beautiful; we think deeply about its central purpose. This is also a central thesis of my book; that our capacity to judge that something is beautiful is fundamental to our capacity to deeply comprehend objects and actions in general.

Learn more about Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue