Sarah M. S. Pearsall's "Freedom Round the Globe"

Sarah M. S. Pearsall is an award-winning historian with degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge, where she taught for nearly a decade. She is a professor in, and soon to be Chair of, the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. She wrote her new book, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution, as both a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and Distinguished Fellow in the American Revolution at the British Library.

Pearsall applied the “Page 99 Test” to Freedom Round the Globe and reported the following:

Page 99 of Freedom Round the Globe focuses on the strategies of the royal governor of Virginia, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore to win popularity in the 1770s. Dunmore had few supporters in Virginia in 1774, given that he represented the British crown in a period of rising protests and that he was a member of a detested minority (Scots), to boot. In a bid to increase his popularity, he brought his wife and children to join him: a time-honored strategy to humanize politicians. He also started a war against Indigenous Americans, notably Shawnees, in order to placate settlers eager to move west into Indigenous homelands. This dark, not to say cynical, strategy resulted in Dunmore’s War in 1774, which even some Virginians at the time saw as a political ploy. Neither strategy worked for Dunmore, and the human costs were significant, especially for Native Americans.

Page 99 here is representative of the book in its linkages between events in the “thirteen colonies” and those in a wider world. Every chapter of the book starts outside the thirteen colonies in order to offer a new perspective on central ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. Page 99 is in Chapter 4, which begins in Edinburgh, Scotland, with an all-male debating society allowing women to join its audience to discuss happiness and other major topics. There is, then, a thread about Scotland and its connections with the American Revolution, shown here in the discussion of Dunmore. The book also considers consistently the fraught and often violent relations between settlers and Indigenous nations, as in this consideration of Dunmore’s War.

This section also sets up an examination (in the next chapter) of Lord Dunmore’s proclamation in November 1775, once fighting had begun. He offered freedom to enslaved men who fled their masters in order to take up arms for the British. In the eyes of Americans such as George Washington, such a move turned Dunmore from an unpopular governor into a villain. Virginia enslavers saw this decision as abject treachery, and it made some join the rebellion. It also meant that many more enslaved people fled to British lines to win freedom: an irony considering American Patriots considered themselves the defenders of liberty.

So, the Page 99 Test works here in showing global connections and in terms of setting up critical connections between the American Revolution, slavery, and settler violence.

Learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Polygamy: An Early American History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cameron Seglias's "Settling Debt"

Cameron Seglias is Assistant Professor of American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Settling Debt: Antislavery and Colonial Crisis, with the following results:

Page 99 analyzes several passages from the fascinating eighteenth-century Quaker Ralph Sandiford, an antislavery writer who is still not well known outside of specialist circles. In these passages, Sandiford reflects on the corruption of religious and political elites who profit from racialized slavery and the traffic in enslaved Africans. As I put it on page 99: “Sandiford’s point is that the ‘unrighteous’ enslaving ministers that ‘teach, or oversee, or discipline the Church...have lost their Savour of the Gospel.’ And as long as they continue to ‘preach to others, they...become Castaways, and draw their Flock with them to Perdition.’” In order to resist these enslavers, Sandiford felt that he must make his testimony public through printing his antislavery books. Like others before him (including John Milton), Sandiford believed in the centrality of press freedom for democracy and self-governance.

I still remember working on earlier drafts of what would eventually become page 99. There was something even then that made this page feel particularly dense to me. Perhaps this is because a number of central ideas of the book—especially around questions of religious and political authority—are knotted together in the material that is quoted and analyzed on this page. In other words, page 99 probably is not the best browser’s shortcut for my book, if only because too much context is needed to understand what is being said on it.

Even while I don’t think the Page 99 Test works for my book, the chapter of which page 99 is a part could serve as an entry into the book. The writer I focus on in that chapter (Ralph Sandiford) is a kind of key to unlocking the main arguments and themes of Settling Debt. It was while working on Sandiford’s writing that I figured out what my book is really about. I can sum this up in a quote from his work, in which he says that being involved with racialized slavery makes one a “Debtor and Oppressor in the Creation.”

Learn more about Settling Debt at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert K. Brigham's "This Is a True War Story"

Robert K. Brigham is the Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College. He is the author or coauthor of ten books, among them Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam.

Brigham applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam, and shared the following:

On page 99, my adopted sister and I are discussing our adoptive mother and her expectations that I make something of myself. She had a dim view toward men in general and she wanted me to be that rare exception...a good man.

Page 99 certainly deals with one of the many complicated relationships I had in my life as an adoptee, but it does not capture any of the major themes of the memoir. I would say that the Page 99 Test fails.

This memoir is about poverty, adoption, families, and war. It is about my lifelong search for my biological family, ending with the discovery that my biological father had been a major influence on my life without my knowing it.

Learn more about This Is a True War Story at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel N. Jones's "Falling Fast"

Daniel N. Jones is Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada Reno (UNR) and core faculty within the Interdisciplinary Social Psychology Program. His research explores the psychology of romantic attraction, deception, and personality--particularly emophilia and the Dark Triad traits--and how these forces shape behavior in contexts ranging from relationships to the workplace to cybersecurity. With a unique blend of scientific rigor and real-world relevance, Jones brings fresh insight into the emotional patterns that define how we love, trust, and connect.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Falling Fast: The Perils and Possibilities of Emophilia, and reported the following:

Page 99 defines emophilia again, which is the tendency to fall in love easily and often. Page 99 articulates how individuals high in emophilia are overly optimistic about how their relationships will turn out, making or loving unrealistic statements like “I will always be here for you.” The page further discusses how these statements are made in earnest and not manipulative. Even though individuals high in emophilia are often unfaithful, they care about their partner, they just find themselves torn between an old flame and a new passion. The chapter also differentiates emophilia (the tendency to fall in love easily and often), with polyamory. Polyamory is where someone maintains more than one love interest in several co-occurring relationships. It is possible that for a person in a polyamorous relationship, the simultaneous love interests may have taken a long time to form and this type of romantic attraction may not happen often. Individuals high in emophilia are beholden to their romantic emotions and often have a tough time deciding between multiple love interests and relationship options. They are in particular drawn to chance encounters and romantic narratives.

The Page 99 Test works reasonably well. I would say readers get a good idea of emophilia. They would get a basic and foundational idea of what emophilia is, an idea about what it is not, and see some unique features of this individual difference.

This page not only defines emophilia as the tendency to fall in love easily and often, it explains how they are unrealistic in their relationship perceptions. They believe they will love someone forever, when most evidence points to a pattern of frequently finding someone new. This unrealistic optimism about a relationship lasting forever is not manipulative, it is self-deceptive. The page also differentiates emophilia from relationship styles like polyamory. Someone can be high in emophilia and engage in polyamory. But someone may have only fallen in love twice, those love interests took a long time to develop, and they happen to have occurred at the same time in a polyamorous relationship. In such cases, the person may be polyamorous, but not high in emophilia. The page concludes with a statement about how romantic notions of “chance encounters” leading to love is popular with those high in emophilia as are the idea of “being there forever” for someone.

Visit Daniel N. Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Douglas's "Protecting Minds"

Thomas Douglas is Professor of Applied Philosophy and Director of Research at the Uehiro Oxford Institute, University of Oxford. He trained in clinical medicine (Otago) and philosophy (Oxford) and works chiefly in philosophical bioethics and neuroethics. His research has focussed especially on the ethics of using medical and neuroscientific technologies for non-therapeutic purposes, such as cognitive and moral enhancement, crime prevention, and infectious disease control. He is the author of over 130 academic articles or chapters and has led two major externally funded research projects: 'Neurointerventions in Crime Prevention: An Ethical Analysis' (Wellcome Trust, 2013-2019) and 'Protecting Minds: The Right to Mental Integrity and the Ethics of Arational Influence' (European Research Council, 2020-2025).

Douglas applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Protecting Minds: The Right Against Mental Interference, with the following results:

A reader who opened my book to page 99 would find themself in the midst of a discussion of what makes a mental state 'important'. The page starts with me suggesting that a mental state might be important because many other mental states depend on it. My belief that the scientific method is a reliable guide to the truth is an important mental state because of the pervasiveness of its effects on the rest of my mental life. But, I go on to suggest, a mental state can also be important because simply because I identify with it in some way, or ascribe it great importance. My attachment to a long deceased friend might be important because I regard it as such, even if it exerts very little influence on the rest of my mental life.

Why am I interested in the importance of mental states? Because my book examines the ethics of interfering with others' minds, and I think that the wrongness of a mental interference may depend on the magnitude of the interference, which may in turn depend on the importance of the interfered with mental-states (rather as the wrongness of a privacy breach might depend on the severity of the privacy breach, which might in turn depend on the sensitivity of the information that is revealed). In the second half of page 99, I turn to consider the question of whether, when assessing the magnitude and wrongness of a mental interference, we should take into account knock-on effects. Suppose you are feeling down, I slip a mood-boosting drug into your coffee, and you feel less gloomy as a result. Moreover, partly as a result of your diminished gloom over the coming days, you begin to develop a passion for model trains. On my view, the magnitude and wrongness of this interference will depend on how important your feeling of gloom was. But does it also depend on the importance of your passion, or lack of passion, for model trains? I am not sure, but that's the question I'm raising here.

Would a person who read only page 99 get a good taste of my book? Boringly, my answer is: in one way, 'yes', and in another way, 'no'. I am guessing a typical reader of this page might think something like: the questions here are interesting, but the style of the answer is dry and pedantic. That's probably a good reflection of the whole book--read it only if you like dry and pedantic! But the reader of page 99 finds themselves in the midst of a discussion that is in many ways a tangent, or at least, is not part of the main thread of the book's argument.

The book's main argument is for the view that all of us possess a right against interference with our minds--analogous to the better-accepted right against interference with our bodies--and for a particular account of the scope of this right. On the account I defend, we are wronged not only by drastic forms of mind-control, like the covert administration of mind-altering drugs, but also by some of the more familiar forms of influence or manipulation that we are repeatedly exposed to online.

Learn more about Protecting Minds at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amelia Frank-Vitale's "Leave If You Can"

Amelia Frank-Vitale is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Princeton University. An anthropologist of migration and violence in Central America and Mexico, Frank-Vitale has documented the dangers facing people migrating across Mexico and the strategies they develop – including coming together in caravans – to manage those risks and defy restrictions on movement. Her new book, Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds, examines how Honduran youth navigate life after deportation, illuminating the changing nature of deportation as a consequence of the externalization of borders and connecting regimes of mobility control - and the creative ways people challenge them - across scale and space.

Frank-Vitale applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds, and shared the following:

Page 99 includes this quote, first in Spanish, then in English:

Si a mí, un niño me dice, “Profe, yo me voy,” yo lo que puedo hacer es tomar su mano, si tengo dinero, dárselo, decirle que le vaya bien, que Espero que Dios lo cuide, lo guarde en ese camino, y que llegue. (If a child comes to me and says, “profe, I’m leaving,” all I can do is take their hand, if I have money, give it to the, wish them well, and say that I hope that God protects them and takes care of them on this journey and that they make it.)

The Profe here is a teacher at two elementary schools in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. He makes multiple appearances in the book, but the scene on this page is of a day I spent with him during which he was participating in a government-NGO pilot program to teach children about the dangers of migrating, aimed at reducing out-migration. Page 99 begins halfway into another lengthy quote in Spanish, but the English is there in full, telling me how he feels about having to participate in these activities:

“I’m giving this talk here, telling the youth not to go. But this is a hypocritical talk, I feel like a hypocrite… the government comes and says to me, give this talk so the children don’t migrate. But what opportunity does the state give to this child? There is no opportunity. I feel like a hypocrite…You can tell people that they are going to get taken by the Zetas. You tell them that they’ll fall from the train, that they’ll lose a leg. You tell them that in the United States they are going to be in prison… but the people say I prefer that to staying here… I go because in Honduras they chop people up, they leave them in sacks along the side of the road… How am I going to tell a young person not to migrate, with what moral authority?”

This quote, on this page, is a remarkably fitting condensation of the themes this book addresses: young people growing up in a Honduras surrounded by the ever-present possibility of extreme violence and a negligent, abandoning state; youth leaving Honduras, again and again, and knowing exactly why they are leaving without imagining that migration will be easy or safe; and, finally, that the punitive and violent immigration enforcement of the United States does not deter people from trying to get to the place where they feel like they’ll have a better chance of making the life they want for themselves. There are other dynamics also present in the book – the nature of border externalization, the history and impact of migrant caravans, the relationship that gangs have to neighborhood-by-neighborhood territorial control, the ordinary violence of mass deportations – but the core argument of the book is that deportation produces more movement, not less. Page 99 captures both that essential assertion and the way in which it is grounded throughout the book in the close up, fine grained ethnographic field work I did in San Pedro Sula.

Another aspect of the book that this page brings out: the interspersing of the original Spanish quotes followed by their English translation. Though this is not necessarily standard form for books like this, I wanted to retain the Spanish for two reasons. First, I think it’s a way of bringing more readers with varying degrees of bilingualism more directly into the social worlds depicted in the book. Then, while all the fieldwork for the book was conducted in Spanish, it is not my first language. I wanted to ensure that Spanish-speakers, especially Honduran Spanish-speakers, could access the words and stories in the language in which they were spoken as much as possible. We carry a lot of responsibility to tell the stories that are entrusted to us in the most responsible way possible; including the original words, as I did with the Profe on page 99, is one way I try to do that.

Visit Amelia Frank-Vitale's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gautham Rao's "White Power"

Gautham Rao is a historian of American law and politics, and an Associate Professor of History at American University in Washington, D.C.

His first book, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (2016), tells the story of how the Founders created the federal government after the American Revolution.

Rao applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, White Power: Policing American Slavery, and reported the following:

Page 99 takes us to the heart of chapter 5, "Nat Turner's America," with a brief discussion of Turner's religious motivation for attacking the enslavers in Southampton Country, Virginia; before then moving into a paragraph describing his planning, escape, and attack. The final paragraph on page 99 then addresses the enslavers response: to deputize whiteness by exhorting white men to take up arms, either via the militia or on their own.

With the description of enslaved rebellion and white deputization and policing, there's no page that better captures the essence of this book. The book builds an argument about how enslaved people's resistance and rebellion pushed white enslavers to create a policing system built around white vigilance, deputization and government institutions. On page 99 we see a transformative moment and each of the key elements in the story.

Who has the right to violence? The book takes us back to a world where whiteness was like an officer's badge, and in which the white population gave itself extraordinary policing powers over enslaved and free Black Americans. Enslavers were chiefly worried about rebellions, or what they called insurrections, that would lead to racial apocalypse. Over several centuries, they acted on their fears to build a sprawling police state consisting of empowered white vigilance and government forces like slave patrols and militias. The system survived the Civil War and Reconstruction, and only slowly gave way to the new racism of modernized policing by the end of the 19th century.

Visit Gautham Rao's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kira Ganga Kieffer's "Unvaccinated Under God"

Kira Ganga Kieffer is visiting assistant professor of religious studies at Fairfield University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America, with the following results:

From page 99:

Fear about girls’ sexuality, purity, and the sanctity of girlhood spread much further than it might have seemed from Gardasil’s media coverage during its first decade on the market. The fact that only two states mandated HPV vaccination for school attendance and that less than half of adolescent girls and boys completed the three-shot vaccination protocol were evidence of Gardasil’s fraught nature, even among doctors…New groups utilized Christian beliefs and rituals to express vaccine hesitancy, but the Gardasil case was not fundamentally more or differently religious than the prior cases in this book.

Page 99 concludes the chapter about Gardasil, the first vaccine marketed to consumers (adolescent girls), which prevented against strains of HPV. Of all the chapters in my book, this one is the least like the others! This is because it focuses on conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians who opposed the morality of this vaccine when it came out in 2006. These groups are traditionally religious and their opposition to Gardasil was driven by a desire to retain strict norms about gender and sexuality.

The majority of Unvaccinated Under God is about how Americans who have been vaccine hesitant have expressed themselves religiously in a very broad sense that is not specific to a well-recognized tradition. I would have to give the Page 99 Test a fail in terms of providing a representative window into my main arguments or evidence. I will say that the Gardasil case study is fascinating and contributes to the book’s thesis, which is that Americans use vaccines as a proxy for larger cultural and religious anxieties.

Visit Kira Ganga Kieffer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Hales's "Vital Ties"

Molly Hales is a medical anthropologist and physician at the University of Chicago. Her work centers on mediation, intimacy, and medicine.

Hales applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Vital Ties: Digitally Mediated Intimacies with the Dead, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Mapping the Dead

When we were together, Erin was constantly checking the GPS map on her smartphone to see where we were, to figure out what was nearby, to pull up directions, and to check the traffic on the bridges going into and out of San Francisco. Her sense of space seemed to be just as anchored to the two-dimensional location of the glowing blue dot on Google Maps as it was to the three-dimensional space we occupied. I was sympathetic, if occasionally annoyed. Although I had been a late adopter of mobile phones and an even later adopter of smartphones, I have since become utterly reliant on my phone’s GPS.

The way that smartphones track and display a user’s movements made them particularly appealing to Erin as a tool for registering her encounters with her mother. She told me,

A place will trigger an event, and there’s a part of me that’s like, “Oh I want to memorialize it, I want to plant a flag in my little app.” I mean it’s not a physical flag, in the world, but I want to plant a little flag that says, “My mom was here.” I mean I called them mom sightings! That’s how I’d use it in this geographical way, like I was hunting. And I was seeing her in the world. And that felt really important.

By recording where each of her sightings took place, the app created a cartography of memory. Erin even told me that she had been searching for a way to display her entries on a map, organized spatially rather than chronologically.

Erin was also careful to point out that this was an intersubjective cartography, charting out her mother’s location in relation to her own. She went on to say, “I wanted to plant little flags, for myself, but at the same time I also recognized, this is how I’m experiencing this space. It’s not necessarily a property of the space on its own, it’s a property of me in the space.” Her entries described her relationship to various places, experienced through her memories of her mother. But the entries also described her mother’s relationship to these same places, experienced through Erin. When Erin said, “I want to plant a little flag that says, ‘My mom was here,’” she was not describing places that her mother frequented while she was alive, but places where she encountered her mother after her death. Patricia had a relationship to these places by way of Erin’s own encounters with them.

Furthermore, Erin clarified that the term “mom sightings” was not meant to suggest that she was encountering an independent entity. She explained,

And so when something got triggered in the environment that gave me a memory of her, it was a “mom sighting,” but was it really her? It’s my memory of her, it’s how I relate to her. And so it’s more of a reflection of my relationship, and ... the interconnection between us.

Page 99 offers a glimpse into the text as a whole, though the argument itself is something of a tangent. The page begins with a fresh section of text, which makes page 99 feel less fragmented than I would have expected given the nature of the exercise. I’m not sure how to feel about that, since part of what I write about in the book is the promise of fragments and fragmentations. I want to suggest that fragments can anchor intimacies with the dead as well or better than cohesive identities, or the fullness of representation.

At any rate, this particular section hones in on the spatial aspects of haunting, showing how offline spaces are intertwined into digital practices of communication and communion between the living and the dead. The specific point that I’m making here about mapping the presence of the dead is not one of the key arguments of the book as a whole, but it does open out into many of the book’s key themes. The concept of an “intersubjective cartography” helps shift attention to the centrality of the relationship between Erin and her late mother. This is one way that I hope to conjure the dead throughout the book, by allowing them to live on through the relations that they sustain with others, rather than through digital tools or new technologies that promise to capture and preserve the deceased in perpetuity.

The page’s emphasis on place is also appropriate given that my initial idea was to study “online homes for the dead.” I thought of these as quasi-geographic sites that had been carved out for the dead to reside. There are examples in the book of people creating such “homes” for the dead using digital technologies, including a heavenly virtual reality island where a dead man awaits his adult son’s visits, and the online memorial where a young British woman spends time with her best friend, who died from breast cancer almost twenty years ago.

Most of all, I hope my readers come away with a sense of the richness of 21st- century ways of being with the dead, digital practices that co-exist with other types of practices that invigorate intimate relationships across deaths’ divide.

Learn more about Vital Ties at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roy A. Meals's "Ligaments"

Roy Meals, MD, is an orthopedic surgeon and a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of Bones: Inside and Out and Muscle: The Gripping Story of Strength and Movement.

Means applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Ligaments: Appreciating the Bands That Bind Us, and reported the following:

Ligaments has nine chapters, and the fifth one is titled Growth, Damage, Repair. It runs from page 90 to 102. On page 99 I describe phases two through four of wound healing, which is integral to understanding how nearly all tissues heal from injury. We have some intuitive understanding of the phases from watching skin abrasions, cuts, and incisions heal. Phase one (page 98) is where a blood clot forms to stop the bleeding and to initiate the chemical and cellular cascade that leads to phase two, inflammation, characterized by marked tenderness, swelling, warmth, and redness. Phase two may continue for 10 days and overlaps with phase three, repair, which lasts as long as three months. It begins by sealing the skin and continues with prolific scar formation causing the wounded area to become thickened and raised. Phase four, remodeling, overlaps with the third phase and lasts six to twelve months. During this time, the wound softens as the scar matures, the redness resolves, and near normalcy returns.

At the bottom of page 99 I write, “Nearly all ligaments heal by going through identical phases that I have described for skin where the process is easily visible. The same occurs unseen for muscle, intestine, liver, bladder, and every other tissue except bone.”

Hence, the material on page 99 is in the dead center of the book and is critical to understanding how ankle sprains and torn ligaments from head to toe heal. Leading up to this, Chapters One through Three provide the approach to this summit by describing ligaments’ discovery and their myriad functions. Chapter Four clarifies this key connective tissue’s molecular and cellular organization, which brings us to Chapter Five and the epitome on pages 98 and 99. Then on the “downslope,” Chapters Six and Seven describe common injuries, most notably ACL tears that plague many athletes, followed by other conditions, including hyperlaxity syndrome and cellulite. Chapter Eight covers ligament maladies in other animals, famously ACL tears in dogs and lameness in horses. Chapter Nine closes the book with discussions of extraordinary ligaments, such as those in contortionists, in individuals who have had artificial replacements, and exciting advances on the horizon.

Ligaments is for general readers who are curious about science and medicine--its history, present state, and future possibilities. It is intentionally non-technical and filled with case examples and analogies to make the learning palatable, even fun. So by no means is page 99 characteristic of the book’s overall light-hearted approach to the subject, yet the material it contains is critical to the overall understanding of these bands that bind us, and somebody has to do the heavy lifting. That’s page 99.

Visit Roy A. Meals's website.

--Marshal Zeringue