Adam Y. Liu's "Authoritarian Markets"

Adam Y. Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China's Banking Explosion, with the following results:

Page 99 sits in Chapter 4, “Glorious Market Yang,” in the section “Six National Surveys Before 2012.” There I test whether bank competition actually helps firms. Across six national firm surveys, I find that in five of the six years, greater local bank competition reduced the probability that private-firm managers reported unmet capital needs, and reduced their reliance on the informal financial market. Then comes the anomaly: 2009. The “magic” of competition disappears—because that is the year the state launched its post-crisis stimulus. Beijing issued campaign-style directives ordering banks to lend to the real economy, fast-tracked a wave of local- government projects, and, tellingly, firms whose owners were Party members—especially those sitting on the local People’s Congress—were far less likely to report credit constraints. The page closes by turning to a 2017 survey (Table 4.2) in which I asked firm owners directly whether their borrowing had truly hardened.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Better than I would have guessed. Page 99 does not announce my thesis—for that a browser would want the introduction—but it stages the book’s central drama in miniature. The whole book is about two faces of the Chinese market: the “yang” of genuine competition that lowers borrowing costs and frees private firms, and the authoritarian hand that can override that competition at will. Page 99 catches both in one motion—competition working for five years, then dissolving the instant the state mobilized its banks in campaign style and political connection, not market merit, decided who got credit. A browser landing here would correctly infer that this is a book about how Chinese markets are made, and unmade, by politics—and would even meet two of my recurring devices: the firm survey and the telltale weight of political connection.

What the page cannot show is the puzzle that drives the book. China built the world’s largest banking system—from a handful of state banks to more than four thousand—without secure property rights or limited government. Authoritarian Markets argues the market grew not in spite of authoritarian rule but because of it: elite bargaining and political competition, not institutional constraints, drove banks to multiply and compete. Such “authoritarian markets” run on three properties—rationed entry, reflective competition, and rigged regulation—and the same politics that fueled three decades of growth also seeded the financial risks China confronts today. Page 99 is one beat in that larger story: the moment the market’s promise meets the state’s grip.

Learn more about Authoritarian Markets at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Kalpakian's "Undesirable"

Laura Kalpakian is the author of Memory into Memoir: A Writer’s Handbook, a memoir, sixteen novels, and five prize-winning collections of short fiction. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Kalpakian applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father's Battle for Justice, and shared the following:

Page 99 is taken from Chapter 10, “My Boy Must Be Saved” of Undesirable, a book created from letters that chronicle my father’s struggle on behalf of my brother Doug Johnson (1950–2021) who went to Vietnam at the age of nineteen in 1969 and paid for it with the rest of his life.

Page 99 offers portions of letters both to and from my father, Bill Johnson, when Doug was still in a military hospital in Japan suffering from hepatitis. Doug had been airlifted to Japan from Long Binh Jail in Vietnam where he was imprisoned in December 1969 following a court-martial for AWOL and drug possession.

Page 99 also offers bits and pieces of letters from and to Army personnel, chaplains, senators, congressmen, up to and including President Richard Nixon.

Page 99 is indeed a sort of microcosm of Undesirable. “My Boy Must Be Saved” was my father’s mantra for three years as he besieged various entities on Doug’s behalf.

Here on page 99 his efforts were aimed at getting Doug removed from combat after the hospital. Later, in the summer of 1970, my dad’s approach would evolve into attack as he desperately cage-rattled politicos, chaplains, and the Army in an effort to discover Doug’s whereabouts after he went AWOL in Cambodia. In late August 1970, Doug Johnson left the Army with an Undesirable Discharge and shattered health. His father was there to meet him on the tarmac at McChord AFB. From October 1970 to 1972, Bill Johnson assailed (in turn) the Army’s Inspector-General’s office, the Army Medical Department, the Army Discharge Review Board, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records. My father created and dispersed documents—thousands of words of testimony—in support of his conviction that the Undesirable discharge was not only undeserved, it was unjust. In response, he collected replies from uniformed brass (all of which he kept, all of which I found in the safe fifty years after these events) telling him: No, Mr. Johnson, you may not have our cooperation. Indeed, you can only have our obstruction, a brick wall of No.

So, imaginatively speaking, take these few replies (or lack thereof) from page 99 and multiply them by the hundreds. Then, dear reader: consider what that avalanche of persistent rejection, deflection, defeat, and denial would do to the psyche. My father despaired, but he did not give up. Such was his dedication to his son that through all the dismissals, the kiss-offs cast in Officialese, the paragraphs of stale BS that the Army swathed all over their responses, he persisted. In December 1972, the Army offered a compromise, a General Discharge Under Honorable Circumstances. My book argues that this was a cover-up. Did my father know this? I have no way of knowing. In any event, he and Doug accepted it. But his boy was not saved. Thirty years of addiction, PTSD, mental illness, and heartbreak lay ahead.

Visit Laura Kalpakian's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc A. VanOverbeke "Playing the Game"

Marc A. VanOverbeke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He explores the history of education and education policy, and specifically examines the history of educational access and opportunity. His first book, The Standardization of American Schooling, considered the interconnectedness of secondary and higher education at the turn of the twentieth century and the ways in which those connections influenced access to college.

VanOverbeke applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Playing the Game: How State Colleges Used Athletics to Expand Educational Opportunity, and reported the following:

Playing the Game explores the period between World War II and 1970, when state colleges expanded rapidly from normal schools or vocational institutes into four-year colleges and when some first opened as new campuses. Administrators and students fully embraced athletics as key to this expansion and to the state college mission to be open and accessible. Page 99 falls in the middle of a short introduction to the second period in the postwar development of state colleges (and to the last half of the book). A few of the passages relevant to an understanding of the whole book are the following sentences from page 99:

…The activism around and through sport reflected the central role that sport had assumed on these campuses and its significance to collegiate life. Athletics was both the target of activism and a means of broader protest, and it proved to be a powerful tool for protesting students who expected their institutions to live up to a mission of openness and accessibility.

What came in this second period was a more full-throated defense—driven largely by this student activism—of equality of access, of making college readily available to greater numbers, and of arguing that colleges had an obligation to develop the means for students to overcome any challenges that they had in accessing college and succeeding there.

From 1954 to 1962, state college enrollments doubled to nearly 1 million students and then to 2.3 million in 1970.

A reader opening to this page will find information on the dramatic growth in enrollment at state colleges, as well as a sense of how student protests in and through athletics shaped state colleges between 1962 and 1970. What the reader will not get from this page is any definition or context for state colleges and their mission of accessibility and opportunity. Still, I am pleased that the page provides a reasonable overview of the pages to come, while also showing how the second half builds on the first part.

As detailed in the first part of the book (but not on page 99), administrators embraced athletics to build public support for their institutions, rebrand from normal schools to “real” colleges, recruit students, and create a sense of loyalty among players, students, and community members. The second half of the book, which picks up after page 99, continues to explore athletics as key to state college growth and shows how students turned to athletics to promote their goals, dreams, hopes, and wishes. Students used the same athletic playbook that administrators had adopted in the first period but did so to pressure their colleges to truly become accessible institutions. Athletics and sports have been fundamental to state colleges. Page 99 may not provide a full sense of this role or of the book, but it does highlight the significance of athletics to the development of state colleges and to the expansion of higher education to greater numbers of students.

Learn more about Playing the Game at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock's "Stories of Raising Boys"

Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock is Professor of Communication and Performance Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is the author of Embodied Performance as Applied Research, Art and Pedagogy, which was awarded the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies by the National Communication Association.

Scott-Pollock applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Stories of Raising Boys: Masculinity, Disability, Gender Expansiveness, and Anxiety, with the following results:

From page 99:

…costume for Theo, and luckily, he loves it. Vinny walks tall and regal. Nico holds my hand tightly, careful as he looks up at me with big, dark eyes.

“You’re so beautiful, Nico.”

He looks away with a smile, and I think about how his gender-expansive swim differs from Vinny’s, which carefully and strategically chooses exclusively feminine strokes. Nico seems to have inherited my anxiety, according to our pediatrician, and treads water carefully between binary gender streams even though he seems to be the happiest in ultrafeminine attire. The next chapter is the story of our second gender-expansive boy’s anxious swim.

Page 99 ends chapter 3, so there isn’t a whole page of text. Still, it gives the reader a glimpse into my book. It mentions three of my boys and draws on the metaphor of swimming through the ocean that I use to explain what it means to navigate the world as parents of boys that are both privileged by being born into a white, middle-class family, with engaged, educated parents who advocate for them, and who are marginalized because of their disability, gender identity, and/or anxiety in an ableist, patriarchal culture. It also reveals the book's overall structure, which is organized so that each child has their own chapter.

I would be disappointed if a reader only opened to this page because they can’t know the context of Theo, Vinny, and Nico having makeovers at the Bibbity Bobbity Boutique on a Disney Cruise a few pages earlier and how their Fairy Godfather explained that Disney knows that being a princess is an aura and mindset that has nothing to do with being a boy or a girl. A reader might think the entire book is about gender-expansive sons because most of the central characters are missing. Theo, one of my two conventionally masculine sons, is only mentioned in a fragment of a sentence. My big, powerful, and emotionally exhausted oldest son, Tony, who has frequent, uncontrolled seizures, and their baby sister Rosalie are also not on page 99. From just this section, readers also wouldn’t know that I am physically disabled, and know social stigma in ways their dad, who has always been an athletic, smart, tall, conventionally attractive man, cannot quite access, despite his empathetic and protective spirit.

I worry that, based on just page 99, readers would not realize this book is not a memoir. It is an autoethnography that examines the power structures of society through the stories we choose to tell from the cultural locations we occupy and the bodies we’re in. From just this page, readers won’t know that my stories of raising boys are approved by them and deepened through interweaving interviews with adults who also live with seizures, are gender expansive, and/or are diagnosed with anxiety. Page 99 does not reveal that this book is a story of raising boys at the cultural intersections of masculinity and an analysis that offers hope for inclusive, safe swims for all bodies through culture.

Learn more about Stories of Raising Boys at the Temple University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph Turow's "The Problem with Personalization"

Joseph Turow is the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems & Industries Emeritus in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of thirteen books and the editor of five, including The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet; The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power; and The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth.

Turow applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age, and shared the following:

As it happens, page 99 of The Problem with Personalization marks the beginning of chapter 4 of 8 chapters. In that sense, it lies squarely in the middle of the book, and of my argument. The book’s subtitle is “How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Time to the AI Age.” Chapters 1-3 tackle the pre-internet versions of personalization, from street hawkers and peddlers of centuries past to the rise of direct mail and direct marketing in the 20th century. Those chapters demolish the widespread notion that personalization in advertising is a product of the 21st century; far from it. Chapter 4 pivots to our current century. It and the ones that follow show how advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization. But advertisers of today do that using artificial intelligence and the internet. They weaponize data in unprecedented ways that drive mono-segmentation and, over the next decades, the disappearance of shared reality and community.

Chapter 4 is called “Cookies, Barcodes, Smartphones, and Location Targeting: The Internet Takes the Direct Marketing Crown.” Here is how it begins on page 99:

In 1994 Lou Montulli worked for Netscape Communications, a company that made the Netscape Navigator World Wide Web browser. His bosses asked him to address a difficulty bedeviling companies trying to sell things in the new web world. There was no way to keep track of an individual’s visits to or clicks on a website. Online stores could therefore sell only one item at a time. If you wanted to buy something on a store’s site, you would click to place it in the website’s “shopping cart” and then you would have to check out right at that moment. You could not leave it in the cart and look again on the site for something to buy because you’d lose the first item. The website had no way to know if the same visitor was coming back to the cart. To grease the wheels of browser commerce, Montulli was, in essence, charged with creating a persistent identity tracker for an individual’s presence where others at Netscape had tried and failed.

This, page 100 points out, was the beginning of the cookie. The cookie was crucial to making direct marketing the mainstream model for audience construction in the internet era. It caused marketers to continually search for ways to splinter their profiles of consumers and then target them using those hypersegmented, even individualized, understandings. Chapters 4 through 8 cover how that process evolved into a new era of predictive and generative artificial intelligence—and what it means for individuals and the larger society.

A person reading page 99 alone would probably not get a good idea of the entire work because the Montulli anecdote, not the book’s theme, takes center stage. The chapter title may offer a hint of the prior and forthcoming topics, but certainly not in an explicit way. Nevertheless, a reader of the book will find page 99 as a crucial pivot in the book’s trajectory. At this point the story is moving from the “mass” oriented analog and early digital-media environment of the late twentieth century (think cable TV, CDs, and early PCs) to our era where artificial intelligence technologies linked to increasingly personalized digital platforms are transforming our lives fundamentally. Chapter 5 is called “Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Identity Resolution: AI and The Data Deluge.” Charter 6's title is “Dynamic Personalizations, Unprecedented Permutations, Virtual Influencers: Enter Gen. A.” Chapter 7 deals with “Consumer Data and the Law Governments Pushback, Marketers Push Forward,” and Chapter 8 confronts the basic question “Why Don't People Revolt?”

So, while page 99 doesn’t presage all this, it serves as the key entry point for it. Perhaps that’s a useful variation on the Ford Madox Ford quote.

Stepping back to focus on the book’s theme, I ought to say that concerns, including in my own work, about marketers’ data-hoovering activities typically focus on privacy. But I have come to believe that companies’ frenetic drives toward AI-created personalization is leading to an even costlier predicament: It is making it impossible to sustain the kind of healthy media system required to cultivate a healthy society. That is why I wrote The Problem of Personalization. The book makes its argument by telling stories that put the personalization problem into historical, technological, legal and social perspectives. I hope this discussion of page 99 makes you want to explore the book as a whole.

Learn more about The Problem with Personalization at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Xian Aubin Wang's "Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan"

Xian Aubin Wang is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024, and reported the following:

Page 99 sets the stage by comparing the oral history testimonies of a Muslim villager with the official accounts of the conflicts that developed between the Shadian Muslim militia and the Maoist revolutionary People’s Militia. Unlike the narratives of the Maoist work teams that blame the Muslim villagers as a “chaos-making mob,” the oral testimony indicates that the Muslim villagers established their own militia because they felt threatened by the aggression of the weaponized Maoist revolutionary militia, from whom the villagers attempted to seize guns. The antagonism between the two groups intensified, and members of both sides engaged in armed conflict. The page concludes by stressing that the official narratives “offer little information about how a series of conflicts between the Shadian Muslim militia and the People’s Militia unfolded, leading to the Party Center’s direct intervention and the eventual negotiations between Muslim representatives and top CCP leaders in Beijing.”

The Page 99 Test works surprisingly well because it introduces a crucial point that the book makes to readers. That is, besides official documents, Muslim villagers’ written materials and oral testimonies are vital sources that allow us to more comprehensively understand the religious motives and agency of individuals who resisted Maoist work teams and the PLA in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, the voices of the Muslim villagers are integral to the book as a whole.

The page begins with the term “religious traitor[s],” who are nowhere to be mentioned in the official documents. Nonetheless, the Muslim villagers’ oral testimonies revealed that these “religious traitors”, identified as local CCP Muslim leaders, cooperated with Maoist work teams to ban Islamic practice, close mosques, and blaspheme Islam. In other words, the Maoist work teams cultivated a patron-client relationship between Maoist revolutionaries and local CCP Muslim cadres, through which the secular state power was able to infiltrate into the religious communities, further escalating the tensions between the atheist revolutionary state, Muslim collaborators, and the ordinary Muslim villagers. Without oral history interviews, such important local dynamics would have been neglected as we interpret how conflict between the Muslim villagers and the party-state originated, developed, and escalated to the point of antagonism.

As the first study investigating how and why conflicts between the Chinese Communist Party authorities and southern Yunnan Muslims, beginning in the early 1950s, culminated in the 1975 massacre, this book suggests a new methodological approach to understanding the development of conflicts between state power and religious communities in borderland regions by emphasizing the importance of connecting elite politics and statecraft to local dynamics and experiences.

Learn more about Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Grace Newman's "The Future in Their Hands"

Rachel Grace Newman is a historian of modern Mexico with particular interests in migration, family, and social inequality. She is an Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University. At Colgate, she teaches on these themes and other topics in modern Latin American, global history, and historical methods.

Newman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico's Foreign-Educated Elite, with the following results:

What’s on page 99 of The Future in Their Hands:

This falls in the book’s fifth chapter, set in the mid-twentieth century. That chapter explores the political agenda of Mexican students studying abroad, mostly in the United States. This agenda, I argue, was not explicitly ideological and perhaps seems even apolitical: young, middle-class Mexicans sought to protect and uplift their social status by securing generous scholarships to support themselves and their families, expecting that their foreign degrees would ultimately shore up their future careers with prestige and good salaries.

On page 99, we find several stories relating to Mexican students’ family commitments both during and after their studies abroad. First, we encounter the end of the story of Concepción Reza Inclán, who studied economics at UCLA in 1952-1953. She sat for several interviews with a researcher during her time in Los Angeles, and she told the interviewer that she aspired to be both a professional economist and a wife, which the interviewer found hard to believe possible. On page 99, we learn that in 1959, several years after returning from UCLA, she was working as an economist for Nestlé México. I explain that we don’t know whether she also had formed her own family by that point. It is the case, though, that some US-educated Mexican women I interviewed ended up being very successful researchers and mothers, too.

In the mid-twentieth century, scholarship program officers (such as those working for the Rockefeller Foundation) saw women’s family commitments as impediments to their professional careers, and so they were generally unsupportive of women who married or worse, had children. However, as I explain on this page, the Rockefeller was also unsupportive of men who provided for family members other than their wives or children. Subscribing to a vision of a breadwinner for the nuclear family that presumed that young professional men did not need to take care of their own parents, siblings, or other relatives, Rockefeller officers were surprised to find that the Mexican students they invest in with scholarships had just these kinds of “other dependents.” As I explain on page 99, these commitments were common, but usually scholarship recipients were not given extra support from the Rockefeller to provide for these relatives. An exception was one young playwright, considered to be very promising, Jorge Ibargüengoitia—who did actually become famous several years later. Because he negotiated for it, he garnered an extra stipend of $80 monthly so that he could continue to support his widowed mother and his aunt back in Mexico while he was studying theater in the United States.

Does the Page 99 Test work for this book?

The sources I used to write page 99 are some of my favorites, so the test pinpointed a place where my personal scholarly predilections really come through. Indeed, this test works fairly well for my book, although the contents of page 99 might come as a surprise to the browser who opened up to this page after seeing the book cover. Invoking “foreign-educated Mexicans” (as in the book title) usually brings a very specific image to mind: US-trained technocrats who ushered Mexico into neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. But I’m interested in how Mexicans pursued foreign education, what scholarship programs aimed to do and how they worked, and how upwardly mobile youth’s ambitions and experiences abroad related to their social origins. That will be an unexpected turn for many readers, and page 99 indicates just how deep we venture into the social history of Mexico’s ordinary elite. In the book, I argue that social imperatives were just as important as intellectual (or political) motives for studying abroad because a foreign education both signified and enhanced Mexican social privilege. That privilege was conditioned by family responsibilities and gender norms, both points which come across on page 99.

Elsewhere in the book, we learn about the political history of their relationship with state institutions. The book’s main argument is that the Mexican state created cohorts of foreign-educated Mexicans through scholarship programs at the behest of ambitious elites themselves. The idea is that scholarship programs, whether yoked to discourses of nationalism, modernization, or development, have always obeyed a hidden agenda: opportunities for elites to shore up their own status with support from the state in the form of merit-based, selective benefits. The Mexican state is mostly absent on this page (though its first systematic scholarship program, run by the Banco de México, does get a mention, and it is featured elsewhere in the book). But page 99 is not quite misleading because my book is not only about the Mexican state, but about the forces outside of it in Mexican society and even beyond Mexico that shaped its policy. The Mexican state was never been the only source for funds to study abroad. Besides family-financed study, Mexican students have also had access to scholarships from foreign and international organizations, like the Rockefeller.

Visit Rachel Grace Newman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christian B. Miller's "The Honesty Crisis"

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is the author of over 130 articles as well as Moral Psychology (2021), Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). He is a contributor for Forbes, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Thanks to a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, he directed The Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty.

Miller applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Culture Building. The biggest influence on student cheating is what their peers are doing. So the appropriate counterbalance, it seems, is to build a culture of honesty and integrity in a school.

A centerpiece of such culture building is often an honor code. As one researcher defines it, “An honor code is a community code of conduct guided by ethical principles defining the expectations for students to act with honesty and integrity and acknowledging the shared responsibility of all members” (Tatum 2022: 33).

In my experience, such codes are pretty familiar in the U.S., but not nearly as much in other places around the world. So some examples might help. Here, for instance, is the honor code that students at my school have to affirm:

"Wake Forest University is an academic community that subscribes to an honor system. By accepting membership in this community, each student assumes the obligation to be trustworthy in all pursuits. I pledge that I have not given or received information concerning this exam."

The Page 99 Test works okay, but not great, I would say. Combined with the title of the book, The Honesty Crisis, the reader should get the impression from this page that one area of society that I am worried about when it comes to dishonesty is student cheating, and furthermore that I am offering some concrete recommendations on how to address that cheating. At the same time, the reader won't get an impression of what the five other honesty crises are that I address, as well as the chapters on what honesty is, how there is some good news coming from psychology, and why honesty is an important virtue which is worth preserving.

To give a little bit more of an introduction to the rest of the book, I define an honesty crisis as any situation in which dishonest behavior has become incentivized to a greater degree, and at the same time it has become harder to catch or detect. That's a bad combination. In addition to AI student cheating, I also discuss in detail online infidelity, deepfakes, sermon plagiarism, celebrity and dishonesty, and political misinformation. I also try to offer some practical suggestions for addressing these crises, where appropriate, in order to preserve what I argue is an incredibly important virtue.

Visit Christian B. Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig S. Simpson's "Television is Where You Find It"

Craig S. Simpson is the director of special collections and archives at San José State University. He is the coauthor of Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings, with Gregory S. Wilson, and Cinema Then and Now: James Naremore—Conversations with Craig S. Simpson.

Simpson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Television Is Where You Find It: A History of Feature Filmmakers in TV, and reported the following:

Readers flipping directly to page 99 would have their attention grabbed by the only f-bomb in the entire 201pp. book. It’s near the top of the page, in a quote by pioneering Black filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles: “We have this romantic idea that all blacks should be radicals. Get the fuck out of here!” It soon becomes clear that this quote concerns the very non-radical Bill Cosby, as he transitioned from standup comedy to being the first Black lead (or co-lead, with white actor Robert Culp) of a TV series, NBC’s I Spy (1965-1968). I note that I Spy’s “international locales took the series out of the racial turmoil of 1960s America,” and then I quote scholar Donald Bogle’s observation, “Consequently…it was felt that audiences would never question such matters as hotel accommodations in foreign lands.”

After I Spy, the page continues, Cosby created and starred in The Bill Cosby Show, which premiered on NBC in September 1969. (This series preceded the more famous The Cosby Show, a cultural phenomenon that aired on the same network from 1984-1992.) Compared to the other networks, NBC was ahead of the curve “for the equitable portrayal of minorities on TV.” The National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters “followed NBC’s example with its members pledging that ‘racial or nationality types shall not be shown on television in such matter as to ridicule the race or nationality.”

There’s a section break, followed by a discussion of the mixed-bag of opportunities afforded to Black creatives through the 1950s and 1960s—from the pernicious Beulah and Amos ‘n’ Andy to the more positive if politically skittish Julia (starring Diahann Carroll) and The Bill Cosby Show. The last paragraph on page 99 ends in media res with a description of how the premiere of Cosby’s new show “illustrates how Cosby’s modus operandi was to approach a relevant social issue only to gingerly sidestep it,” which continues on page 100.

Page 99 comes little more than a third of the way into the seventh chapter of a ten-chapter critical study, twelve counting the “Intro” and “Outro.” For readers who turned to it without context, the page would be misleading in terms of content but an accurate example of my overall approach. I should take pains to emphasize that Bill Cosby is not a major figure in the book, nor is he even the primary subject of the chapter. Chapter 7 concerns Melvin Van Peebles, and uses his episode for The Bill Cosby Show, “Really Cool,” as a case study for how he transitioned (briefly) to television in between a pair of significant motion pictures, Watermelon Man and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. My chapter posits that “Really Cool” serves as a bridge between the two films in terms of technique (blending the aesthetics of American sitcoms with the French New Wave [Van Peebles lived in France for several years prior to returning to the States]) and theme (the historical and political meanings of Melvin Donaldson’s “image of the ‘running black man’”). I discuss how Van Peebles undercuts Cosby’s persona throughout the episode. I also observe that Melvin Van Peebles and Orson Welles (the subject of Chapter 4) had more in common than one might think.

As I explain in the Intro, Television is Where You Find It “offers a tour through an earlier period of television, with ten feature filmmakers who made the transition to TV as our collective guide.” Spanning the years 1955-1990, my book begins with Alfred Hitchcock and ends with David Lynch, with (in addition to Van Peebles and Welles) Leo McCarey, Ida Lupino, Budd Boetticher, Michael Powell, George Cukor, and Martin Scorsese heading the chapters in between. Also from my Intro: “Each chapter blends critical analysis of the particular episode in question with broader context pertaining to the overall series, comparisons to other programs, the body of work of each filmmaker, and the wider culture of the era, using archival resources when available. Each case study gets woven into the whole.” Page 99 offers a taste of that.

Television is Where You Find It was a rigorous yet fun book to research and write, and I hope readers will find its connections and discoveries surprising, absorbing, and illuminating.

Learn more about Television Is Where You Find It at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kieran J. O'Keefe's "Suffering for the Crown"

Kieran J. O'Keefe is Assistant Professor of History at Lyon College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Suffering for the Crown: The Hudson Valley Loyalists and the Violence of Revolution, with the following results:

From page 99:

Although some of this violence was opportunistic freebooting, much of it was driven by a desire for revenge. In November 1777, soldiers under William Tryon’s command had burned homes on Philipsburg Manor. Continental general Samuel Holden Parsons wrote to Tryon, criticizing his attack, saying that there was “no benefit” whatsoever for burning the homes, and that it had been done solely to be cruel. He also chastised Tryon for stripping “women and children of necessary apparel to cover them from the severity of a cold night.” Parsons warned that he did not want to conduct war in this cruel manner, but that he would retaliate in kind if necessary. Tryon replied by reminding Parsons that Patriots had burned New York City in 1776 (as Tryon believed), leaving many more people exposed to a cold night than he had done in this attack. Because Tryon felt that Revolutionaries had refused to conduct the war in an honorable manner, he would not cease his aggressive tactics. Tryon added that he would “burn every Committee Man’s house within my reach” and that he was willing to offer a reward of twenty-five dollars for each committeeman brought to British lines.

This text explains some of the violence in Westchester County, New York, during the American Revolutionary War. Perhaps no county anywhere in the United States was more ravaged by the conflict than Westchester. The northern section of the county was controlled by the American Revolutionaries, the southern portion by the British, while the area in between was the "neutral ground," or really a violent no-man's land. The back-and-forth violence in Westchester County led to many retaliatory raids, including the one undertaken by Royal Governor William Tryon on page 99. In particular, Tryon vented his anger at members of committees of safety, which were revolutionary bodies overseeing the war effort on the local level, and which were generally responsible for suppressing Loyalist activity.

I think this excerpt gives readers a decent idea of what part of the book is about. Chapters two and three (this passage is from chapter three) look at the Revolution as a civil war in the Hudson Valley, which highlights the struggle between Patriots and Loyalists. But the remainder of the book goes in a different direction. Chapter four explores Loyalist reintegration after the war, while chapters five and six look at the experiences of Loyalists who went into exile, primarily in what is now Canada. Indeed, a major goal of the book is to see how a violent civil war shaped the Loyalists of the Hudson Valley down the road, which is not apparent in the excerpt. So, page 99 gives readers a flavor of the book without revealing its whole scope.

Learn more about Suffering for the Crown at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue