Stacy Alaimo's "The Abyss Stares Back"

Stacy Alaimo is Barbara and Carlisle Moore Professor in English and core faculty member in environmental studies at the University of Oregon. She is author of several books, including Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times.

Alaimo applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In keeping with the surrealist’s respect for dreams, this passage expresses both an urgent desire to know what the creatures look like and a resignation to the fact that they elude visual capture. Phyllis had complained earlier of “too much geography . . . and too much oceanography, and too much bathyography: too much of all the ographies and lucky to escape ichthyology,” but her dreams ironically voice a desire for ichthyology. Recall Oreskes: the ocean science in this period could have been otherwise— less militaristic oceanography and more marine biology.

Phyllis describes her dreams of the “sea bottom,” imaging benthic lifeworlds, only to then place all her hope on capture, objectification, and war: “if only we could capture one and examine it we should know how to fight them.” The novel concludes with Phyllis asking whether the latest warfare against the bathies— deadly ultrasonic waves— has yielded any knowledge. “But have they discovered what Bathies are . . . What they look like?” Cue Oreskes again, to explain how oceanography in the 1940s and 1950s was aimed at military pursuits rather than marine biology. The novel’s answer echoes the repeated historical failures to capture gelatinous animals as specimens: “Not so far as I know. All Bocker said was that a lot of jelly stuff came up and went bad in the sunlight. No shape to it.” These dismissals reveal a lack of wonder as well as a lack of scientific information. The characters also lack speculative talents as their attempts at understanding the bathies are constricted to anthropocentric expectations regarding the shape of life itself. The novel seems to critique the sophisticates’ lack of curiosity even as it declines to conjure up creaturely perspectives. The endless polite chattering about the bathies is not exactly riveting, but appropriately, it does leave the desire for the unknowable unquenched, as science, journalism, and literature become modes of inquiry in which speculation builds on fact. Moreover, the narrative’s rather nonchalant tone discourages readers from demonizing deep-sea life. The novel’s submersion of the marvelously bewildering abyssal life-forms within the unflappable tone and sedate pace of the narrative may encourage a transfer in which creatures from the abyss, however strange they may seem, are understood not as monstrous or abject or alien but instead as irreducibly different in their intelligence, yet to themselves, for themselves, and in their place, utterly ordinary. As Mike and Phyllis conclude the novel by pondering what it will be like to live with only “a

Page 99 of my book, The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep Sea Life, does suggest several strong currents flowing through the book, including the dynamics of aesthetic and scientific "capture" of species, speculations about unfathomable abyssal life, and the surreal, alien, and monstrous. So the Page 99 Test does work, to some extent, but only as a mirror image of much of the book. This page analyzes John Wyndham's science fiction novel from 1953, The Kraken Wakes, in which mysterious creatures from the deep explode onto the surface and begin to take over the planet. The characters speculate for hundreds of pages about who or what these "alien" creatures are, without ever knowing anything definitive, and without being enchanted by the beauty or mystery of the deep seas. This time period, from WWII through the late 20th century, was an era, as Naomi Oreskes documents in Science on a Mission, when U.S. ocean science was narrowly focused on military matters and ignored marine biology. The mid-20th century period, lacking a focus on deep sea biology, hovers in the middle of The Abyss Stares Back, book-ended by William Beebe's bathysphere descents "a half mile down" in the 1930s and the late 20th-early 21st century era of deep sea discovery. Beebe and one of his painters Else Bostelmann, engaged with hundreds of deep sea "specimens," depicting them as gorgeously surreal and speculating about their perspectives, lives, and habitats. The Census of Marine Life, at the end of the 20th century also complemented deep sea discovery with an emphasis on the stunning beauty and biodiversity of the marine life. While the cool speculation of the characters in The Kraken Wakes does not engender awe, passionate curiosity, or concern for deep sea life, most of the science, science writing, science fiction, art, and activist media in the book demonstrates how the aesthetics of abyssal life travels through science and popular culture to provoke wonder, curiosity, and attachment, extending environmentalism to the bottom of the sea.

Visit Stacy Alaimo's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Wardhaugh's "Counting"

Benjamin Wardhaugh lives in Oxford, UK, with his wife and children. He does research and writing based at the University of Oxford, where he is a former Fellow of All Souls College. Wardhaugh holds degrees in mathematics, music and history from Cambridge, London and Oxford. At Oxford, he has taught history to mathematics students and science to history students.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Counting: Humans, History and the Infinite Lives of Numbers, with the following results:

Open my book to page 99, and you’ll find yourself at the threshold of a new chapter—one devoted to the fascinating world of counters and counting-boards. As I note there: “The techniques of counters and counting boards dominated European experiences of counting and calculation from the fifth century BCE for more than two millennia, fading out as late as the seventeenth or eighteenth century.” The chapter’s title, “Counter culture from Athens to the Atlantic,” nods both to classic scholarship on ancient Greek numeracy and to the tactile, hands-on ways people once engaged with numbers: moving stones, beads, jetons, and other tokens across boards.

Page 99 is, admittedly, an awkward spot for this test: it’s the start of a chapter, not the heart of an argument or narrative. And since this is the chapter on Europe—one of seven, each covering a different region (Africa, the Middle East, Europe, India, East Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas)—it might give a misleadingly Eurocentric impression of the book’s global scope. But I hope even this introductory page hints at the unexpected stories I’ve tried to gather.

If you read on, you’ll meet Philokleon, navigating a day at the law courts in classical Athens—a dense, complex world of life-and-death games with counters. You’ll encounter Blanche of Castile, the medieval Queen of France who invented new ways to use counters and counting boards to control her court and her country. And you’ll discover a surprising technique for counting to ten thousand on your ten fingers.

All together, I hope it offers a fun and surprising look at how counting—so often imagined as purely abstract—was for centuries a physical, almost playful encounter with the world.

Visit Benjamin Wardhaugh's website.

The Page 99 Test: Poor Robin's Prophesies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary A. O’Dell's "Reinventing the American Thoroughbred"

Gary A. O’Dell is professor emeritus of geography at Morehead State University and the author of Bluegrass Paradise: Royal Spring and the Birth of Georgetown, Kentucky.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Reinventing the American Thoroughbred: The Arabian Adventures of Alexander Keene Richards, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Writing in 1897, Wallace, who apparently despised Arabian horses root and branch, asserted that when Richards’s “half- breeds” were put to trial, they were soundly defeated by the American thoroughbreds against which they were pitted: “Under these humiliating defeats a careful man would have hesitated before he went further, but he at once jumped to the conclusion that his defeat was not in the fact that Arab blood could not run fast enough to win, but in the fact, as he supposed, that the rascally Arabs had sold him blood that was not Arab blood. In a short time he was off for Arabia again.”

Wallace’s chronology is grievously in error. At the time Richards set off again in 1855 to purchase more Arabians, he did not possess any Anglo-Arab crosses that were old enough to compete in any racing event. Both Boherr and Zahah were pureblooded Arabian, and even Richards acknowledged that pure Arabians were not competitive against Thoroughbred Running Horses. Although he purchased Peytona in autumn 1853 and subsequently bred her to Massoud, this likely would not have occurred before spring 1854, since the traditional season for breeding horses was from March to June. Mares, having an eleven- month average gestation period, were typically bred at this time so as not to deliver a foal during either the chill of winter or the heat of summer. The result of the Massoud-Peytona match, a filly named Transylvania, was foaled early in 1855. Not even a yearling, she would not have been eligible for racing. According to Richards’s obituary in the Kentucky Live Stock Record, “it was not until 1856 that his colors, silver gray and white stripes, were seen on the turf.”

Keene Richards’s published statements clearly indicate that he was planning a second trip back to the Near East immediately on return from his first expedition: “I commenced preparing to make another trip to the East, determined to spare no trouble or expense in procuring the best blood, as well as the finest formed horses in the Desert. For two years I made this subject my study, consulting the best authors as to where the purest blood was to be found, and comparing their views with my own experience.... After two years spent in close investigation as to the best means of obtaining the purest blood of the Desert, I matured my plans and started again for the East.”

I was surprised to find that the Page 99 Test seemed to work very well for my book. Even though some context was lacking, the three paragraphs – especially the last – rather successfully encapsulate the basic theme of the book. Alexander Keene Richards, a resident of Georgetown, Kentucky, would become one of the more significant Thoroughbred breeders of the nineteenth century. Prior to the Civil War, the sport of Thoroughbred racing was more about endurance than speed, because “heat” racing was the dominant form. In heat racing events, horses would compete in multiple heats of three-to-four miles each with a short break between heats, the winner being the horse that won the most heats. Today we would consider this very cruel treatment. Horses would thus gallop at full speed for nearly twenty miles of racing in a single day, and were often permanently lamed by the practice or sometimes even dropped dead on the track.

Stamina was the key to successful competition in heat racing, and the Arabian horse was legendary for its endurance, able to run through the desert lands for miles without rest or food. The Thoroughbred horse had been developed in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by breeding common English mares to so-called “Oriental” stallions imported from the Near East. Richards believed that he could increase the stamina of American Thoroughbreds by a new infusion of Arabian blood. To achieve this, he made two trips to the Near East in 1851-53 and 1856-57, venturing into the Arabian desert to bargain directly with the Bedouin tribes for their finest pure-bred horses. He imported several outstanding Arabian mares and stallions, and also imported some of the best English Thoroughbreds for his breeding program. His experiment was interrupted by the Civil War before he had made much progress, and ultimately was judged a failure.

The first paragraph of page 99 reflects this judgement in the words of John Wallace, one of the leading equine historians of the late nineteenth century. In my second paragraph, I note some of the chronological errors made by Wallace without disagreement as to his overall assessment. The third and final paragraph presents a good summary of Richards’s breeding hypothesis and his determination to import the best Arabian stock. Although his thesis is more fully explained in the introduction to the book, a reader would be hard pressed to find any single page other than 99 that so well presents the theme of the book.

[Note: The Page 99 Test is not successful for my previous book, Bluegrass Paradise: Royal Spring and the Birth of Georgetown, Kentucky (2023).]

Visit Gary A. O'Dell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary Anne Trasciatti's "Elizabeth Gurley Flynn"

Mary Anne Trasciatti is a professor of rhetoric and the director of labor studies at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. She coedited the collections Where Are the Workers?: Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites and Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Trasciatti applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution, and reported the following:

Page 99 explores post-World War I militancy among Black working-class Americans and the violence such militancy engendered from whites. During the war, more than 350,000 Black soldiers served in the military, many with distinction. Their hopes that service would win them social acceptance from white Americans were largely unrealized as the system of racial segregation that defined and structured American civil society reproduced itself in the military. Black soldiers served in segregated units in which commanding officers were typically white, and the implicit and explicit racism they endured undermined morale. Those who opposed the war were unmoved by appeals to save democracy in Europe when it had yet to be realized at home for Black Americans.

The war and the migration of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans from the South to the North “inspired a level of activism unequaled until the modern civil rights period.” Frustrated by their wartime experience, in and outside the military, Blacks fought against physical violence and other forms of mistreatment at the hands of whites in several cities and towns during what has come to be known as the “Red Summer” of 1919. The longest and bloodiest riot was in Chicago, which lasted for thirteen days and left almost forty people dead, over half of whom were Black, over five hundred injured, and destroyed hundreds of Black homes and businesses. In rural Elaine, Arkansas, somewhere between one hundred and two hundred Blacks and five whites were killed during a riot that erupted when Black sharecroppers tried to organize a union. There were 26 different riots in 1919. Rather than address the true underlying causes of the violence (high unemployment and low wages, especially for Black workers, job discrimination, racism, etc.), law enforcement typically blamed “Black Communists” for fomenting discontent.

Page 99 does not give readers a clear sense of what my book is about. It addresses topics that are central to the book - working class organizing, social and economic inequality, political repression, anti-radicalism – but it does so within a very specific historical/political context (i.e. post-World War I labor activism and militancy among working-class Black Americans). The scope of the book is broader. Most important, the subject of the book – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn – is not once mentioned! From reading page 99 alone, no one would know that the book is a biography of an Irish American labor organizer and free speech activist.

Although page 99 does not give a clear sense of the book, I believe it reveals what Ford Madox Ford called “the quality of the whole” [emphasis mine]. Although my book is a biography, it centers on Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s political activism. Flynn spent most of her adult life fighting for and alongside workers, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality. religion, etc., as they struggled for better wages, safer working conditions, respect, and the right to organize. She deplored red baiting and often spoke out against racial discrimination and in favor of solidarity between Black and white workers when few other white labor organizers did. (In fact, she helped raise money for the Black victims of the Elaine Massacre, which is mentioned on page 99.) Thus, although page 99 is not about Flynn, it presents events and people of the kind that mattered greatly to her, it shows how red baiting was used to explain away workers’ real grievances, and it places Black workers and their issues squarely within working-class history where Flynn believed they belong.

Learn more about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Parr's "Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation"

Tom Parr is a Reader in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. He has held previous positions at the University of Essex, Graz University, Princeton University, and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is Editor-in-Chief of Law, Ethics and Philosophy.

Parr applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation: Social Justice, Technology, and the Future of Work, with the following results:

Page 99 of Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation introduces a moral objection to the structure of contemporary labour markets, which I call the illegitimacy objection. It is an objection to the fact that employers “typically exercise considerable discretionary authority over their staff,” illustrated by the harsh reality for many workers of having to “spend their days subserviently following the commands of their bosses, with little or no say over the nature or order of the tasks that they must carry out.” This objection does not target the specific ways in which such authority is exercised. It is more fundamental than this: it challenges the moral right of employers to tell their employees what to do in the first place, alleging that such workplace authority is illegitimate in much the same way that the political power exercised by undemocratic regimes is illegitimate.

Does page 99 reflect the book as a whole?

Browsers who read only page 99 will, I think, get a relatively accurate sense of what I try to achieve in this book, namely systematically to analyse various moral objections to the structure of contemporary labour markets. What is more, one of my guiding commitments is to present those ideas in the clearest terms, without obfuscation, so that we are better placed to assess their force and implications. In these respects, the text that appears on this page is representative of the broader project.

However, in one way, page 99 gives a misleading impression of the book as a whole, since the objection that I introduce is not one that I endorse. In the pages that follow, I distance myself from this outlook, which seems to overlook the way in which employers’ authority is limited by various laws. Instead, I have come to prefer an alternative approach to theorizing about these matters that focuses on the distribution of bargaining power between workers and firms. I set out that argument in Chapter 1, which is the philosophical heart of the book, and then explore the implications of that approach in the book’s second half.

Perhaps it is a stretch, but I can see one further respect in which this passage does indeed reflect the book as a whole. In particular, it introduces the reader to a novel idea that has become somewhat fashionable these days, at least among a certain category of philosophers, but one that I do not find persuasive because its foundations are too shaky. Conclusions of this kind are ones that recur throughout the entire text, which instead aims to show that more familiar moral objections to the structure of contemporary labour markets are more resilient than often assumed, and that these have more appealing implications than is generally recognized.

Visit Tom Parr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthea Kraut's "Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies"

Anthea Kraut is Professor in the Department of Dance at UC Riverside, where she teaches courses in critical dance studies. Her research focuses on the racial and gender politics of U.S. dance. She is the author of Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston and Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance, as well as the past recipient of an ACLS fellowship, an NEH fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Kraut applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies reads:

It’s February 2019, and I’m at the Jerome Robbins Division of the New York Public Library, paging through an entire folder of clippings and notes devoted to Marie Bryant. The folder is part of the research files of D’Lana Lockett, who, according to the archive catalog, “was a tap dancer, dance instructor, and dance researcher who began research on a book on African American female tap dancers.” Lockett, a Black woman, died in 2006 at age forty-four; these files are what remain of the book that she never got to write. Thanks to Lockett, Bryant’s presence in the archives here, in contrast to the USC film records, is substantive and purposeful. Learning about Lockett through Bryant, and learning about Bryant through Lockett, it is clear that Bryant was never a lost subject waiting to be recovered. It is clear, too, that my own output, like that of the white women stars I’ve been analyzing, exists in a symbiotic but asymmetrical relationship with the labor of a Black woman whose shortened life surely cannot be disentangled from structural racism and racialized health disparities. In tracing Bryant’s flight, I too re­trace the steps and stand in the place of a Black woman before me, and I too participate in a loop that is always in part indexing and in part obscuring its sources and debts.

Page 99 is, on the one hand, a departure from the bulk of Hollywood Dance-ins and, on the other, a kind of X-ray of the book as a whole. The last page of Chapter 2, the passage on page 99 forms a bookend to the opening of the chapter, which narrates my discovery of the African American dancer Marie Bryant’s mis-spelled name in the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library, which first alerted me to her thirteen-second appearance in the 1949 film On the Town. In contrast to page 99’s first-person narration, the majority of the book tells the stories of dance-ins – dancers who took the place of stars prior to filming and often served as choreographers’ assistants – whose labor supported some of the most iconic stars of midcentury film musicals in the United States between the 1940s and early 1960s.

At the same time, page 99’s single paragraph encapsulates multiple strands of the book’s methodological, historical, and theoretical arguments. The passage references the racialized power imbalances that govern the archives and evokes the methodological tensions involved in researching the off-screen reproductive labor of dancers, especially dancers of color in white Hollywood, whose influence was both everywhere and invisible. Page 99 also reflects the book’s centering of Bryant, an exceptionally talented jazz and tap dancer (pictured on the book’s cover) who was never officially hired as a dance-in, but whose importance to a history of mid-century Hollywood musicals is hard to overstate. And finally, in its allusions to interdependent but asymmetrical cross-racial relationships and to the ability of bodies to simultaneously index and conceal their debts to others, page 99 hints at the book’s theorization of dance-ins as uniquely situated to expose the reproductions, substitutions, and displacements that have helped uphold “the body” as a racialized and gendered site of power in the U.S.

Learn more about Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andreas Elpidorou's "The Anatomy of Boredom"

Andreas Elpidorou is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. His work focuses on the philosophical study of human emotions, with a particular emphasis on boredom. He has published extensively on the subject and developed a novel theoretical model of boredom that sheds light on its complicated nature and diverse psychological, behavioral, and social effects. In his written work, he explores the function, value, and dangers of boredom and strives to offer clear, precise, and critical explications of aspects of our mental lives that often remain hidden from us. He is the author of Propelled: How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Lead Us to the Good Life (2020) and numerous other publications.

Elpidorou applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Anatomy of Boredom, and shared the following:

If a reader were to open The Anatomy of Boredom to page 99, they would be cognitively disoriented—perhaps even lost. Isolated from its context, page 99 offers little insight into either the book’s objectives or its subject matter. The page appears in section 2 of Chapter 3, which belongs in Part I of the book. In this part, the book makes a sustained case—one that unfolds in three chapters—that boredom is, in some crucial sense, a unitary phenomenon. What boredom is, the book argues, is its function: the role that it occupies in our mental, behavioral, and social economy; that is, the ways in which it affects our minds and bodies and drives our actions and opinions. There are many things we have called, and continue to call, “boredom.” As long as they share the same functional core, they count as boredom—even if their psychological, physical, or social expressions differ.

Page 99 is concerned with one of many arguments advanced in this part of the book. It addresses a worry that has been raised by recent psychological studies. Psychologists have observed that the experience of boredom is often associated with different bodily states and levels of arousal. Does this suggest that there are distinct kinds of boredom—perhaps a low-arousal, apathetic type and a high-arousal, agitated type? This section argues that there is no need to divide boredom into distinct affective states on the basis of their associated arousal. Differences in arousal reflect physiological or contextual contingencies, not conceptual or essential distinctions. Boredom’s identity is linked not to its effects on our bodies but to its functional role in our cognitive and behavioral economy. As such, there is unity in boredom despite variation in its somatic expression.

I am not sure there’s a perfect page—one that, if opened at random, would provide not just a concise summary of the main arguments of the book but also a clear view of its methodological commitments. But even if such a page does exist, it isn’t page 99. What page 99 does well is to attune the reader to the level of conceptual and empirical detail that is necessary in order to engage with a phenomenon as complicated and elusive as boredom. This value, however, comes with a cost. The page dwells in the particulars but fails to reveal the bigger picture—page 99 is just one very small part of the fascinating complexities that constitute boredom. It isn’t even a tree, but a bush—perhaps a single flower—in the forest of boredom.

Visit Andreas Elpidorou's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruno J. Strasser and Thomas Schlich's "The Mask"

Bruno J. Strasser is a historian, a full professor at the University of Geneva, and an affiliate of History of Medicine at Yale University. Thomas Schlich is the James McGill Professor in the History of Medicine at McGill University, and a former practicing physician.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air, with the following results:

Page 99 reflects quite well the tone and content of the book!

This chapter—“Fog, Fumes, and Fashion”—explores the use of masks against urban pollution in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the late 19th century, such masks became popular in large British cities like London, Manchester, and Leeds. People sought to avoid breathing the mix of coal fumes, industrial vapors, and cold, damp air that made up the winter “fogs.”

Page 99 examines how French physicians reacted to what they thought was the British craze for masks. They were unanimous in condemning the practice. They found it “ridiculous”—and the fact that it was British didn’t help. Some feared that one day “entire families might be seen masked in the streets.” Masks, they thought, were useless, a symbol of the excesses of the hygienic movement. One physician even warned that if masks ever became mandatory, it would mean “the end of the kiss.”

The chapter then shifts to the Great Smog of London in 1952, during which over ten thousand people died from air pollution. Once again, many people—especially the police—wore masks. Churchill’s health minister, a chain smoker himself, didn’t believe masks could protect citizens from the smog. But facing mounting public anger, he gave in and recommended their use to save his political career.

Page 99, like the rest of the book, shows that masks have always been controversial. Masks were often seen as a convenient “technological fix” for complex medical and environmental challenges, but not everybody agreed on this kind of quick fix. In the book, we tell these stories to help us think about what kinds of environments we all want to live and breathe in.

Visit Bruno Strasser's website and Thomas Schlich's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Moritz Föllmer's "The Quest for Individual Freedom"

Moritz Föllmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He has particular interests in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and concepts of individuality and urbanity in twentieth-century Europe. His publications include Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (2013), Culture in the Third Reich (2020), and, as co-editor, Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany (2022).

Föllmer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book I characterize a “major development in Europe’s political history,” namely, “the dual adoption and expansion of liberalism by social democrats.” By this I mean that important protagonists of European social democracy, from the 1900s to the 1970s, argued that an active state was necessary to liberate working-class people from the dependencies created by capitalism and authoritarianism. In their view, widening educational access and housing provision amounted to widening choices. Hence, these social democrats adopted key tenets of liberal thought. They did so in a way that took working-class realities into account while also appealing to progressive members of the middle class. What I label “social democratic liberty” was a remarkably successful project, but it was also vulnerable to attacks. After all, it required taxation and standardization, which made it easy to accuse it of reducing choices and stifling citizens. While this critique spanned the entire twentieth century, in the 1970s it was shared by left-wing protesters, cultural conservatives, and market liberals. By the end of the Cold War, the project of social democratic liberty seemed exhausted.

Page 99 summarizes one of fifteen sections and thus one of a range of specific arguments. Yet it reflects my book’s broader thesis. Europe’s twentieth century was marked by a quest for individual freedom that assumed different shapes and meanings. In their nineteenth-century heyday, liberals might have been able to define individual freedom and impose their definition on others. But they lost this authority in the decades around 1900, and no new consensus formed thereafter. The quest for individual freedom was composed of a variety of claims and occurred in fits and starts. Still, it became so widespread that it even those who were skeptical about individual freedom (as were many socialists) or outright contemptuous of it (as were most communists) had to accommodate it to some extent.

That said, the impression conveyed on page 99 is necessarily one-sided. It privileges political history, whereas my book gives ample space to the quest for individual freedom as it played out in factories and homes, in experiments with drugs as well as discussions of morality. It also focuses on Europe proper, whereas I devote an entire chapter to how individual freedom was defined in relation to the United States and to colonies in Africa and Asia. And it happens to be the conclusion of a chapter and is thus more systematic than the bulk of the book, which pays much attention to ordinary or not-so-ordinary people’s experiences and efforts – including the working-class people who changed jobs to escape the control of a powerful factory owner or made use of what Sweden’s social democratic government had to offer while also insisting on their own choices.

Ultimately, my book is a twentieth-century European history – of the quest for individual freedom but also, even more ambitiously, through this crucial prism. It treats a variety of political currents and systems and offers many glimpses into European lives under often adverse conditions. It is this richness that motivated me to write the book and that I hope to convey to its readers.

Learn more about The Quest for Individual Freedom at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Rooney's "The Big Hop"

David Rooney is a historian and curator specializing in transport, technology, and engineering, and the author of About Time and The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future. For almost twenty years he worked at the London Science Museum, which houses the 1919 airplane first flown across the Atlantic. He lives in London.

Rooney applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Big Hop and shared the following:

It is Sunday, March 30th, 1919. We join page 99 of The Big Hop just as an aeroplane, carried aboard the Atlantic steamship Digby, has just arrived at the railway station of St. John’s, Newfoundland, after being diverted by an impenetrable pack of ice off the island’s Avalon peninsula that’s so bad nobody has seen the like in decades:

…encountered on the Newfoundland route. But this was the worst the coast had experienced for sixty years. Nothing could get through. The Sopwith aeroplane had been packed into two large wooden crates, each the size and shape of a railway carriage. They were thirty feet long and weighed over five tons apiece. Between them, they held the fuselage, wings, engine, undercarriage, and fittings. Several smaller cases stored in the ship’s hold carried parts, tools, petrol, engine oil, and other provisions. It should have been a relatively straightforward offloading job onto the dockside at St. John’s. Instead, Digby was forced by the ice field to divert to Placentia Bay, off the peninsula’s western coast. There, in the middle of the bay, it drew up alongside the postal steamer Portia, and the entire Sopwith consignment, as well as the men themselves, were transferred from one ship to the other. Then Portia steamed up the bay to the town of Placentia, where its precious cargo of crates and passengers was delivered, leaving Digby to continue on its way. The next stage of the Sopwith saga was a sixty-mile rail journey across the peninsula. The two giant crates were loaded onto flat railcars, and…

The Page 99 Test works perfectly. The Big Hop recounts the story of one of the greatest journeys of the modern age—the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. But it was a journey that started long before the aviators Jack Alcock and Ted Brown made it successfully across the ocean in an epoch-marking sixteen hours in the middle of June, 1919. Moreover, the contest involved a cast of characters far wider than Alcock and Brown. Sopwith was fielding a rival team: an Australian aviator, Harry Hawker, and his avuncular navigator, Mac Grieve.

This is why page 99 is such a great representation of the wider story. It describes, in its single paragraph, a journey that was remarkable in its own right: a perilous ship-to-ship transfer of men and a machine in the cold waters off Newfoundland. Will they reach their destination? It acts as the perfect prefiguring of the aerial journey ahead.

Page 99 also shows us just how long ago the first transatlantic flight took place. On the previous page, we meet a young man named Joey Smallwood, who is waiting at St. John’s station to meet the aeroplane and its airmen off the train. In 1949, Smallwood would become the premier of Newfoundland when the dominion joined the Canadian federation. In 1919, he was an eighteen-year-old cub reporter on the island’s Evening Telegram newspaper. None of the other journalists seemed to care that St. John’s was to become the location of the world’s most thrilling race. One of them reported the passengers due off Digby that day. After naming a few notable St. John’s politicians who had been on the ship, the writer added, “and a couple of airmen to fly across the Atlantic.” As if it was no big deal.

Would the Sopwith team arriving at Newfoundland succeed in flying all the way to Ireland? Or would they be beaten by rival contestants? On page 99 of The Big Hop, all this is yet to come; an unknowable future. Suffice to say—the ice field off St. John’s would prove to be the least of the airmen’s troubles…

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--Marshal Zeringue