Paul Cartledge's "Pericles"

Paul Cartledge is the A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, University of Cambridge. His many books include Democracy: A Life and Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece.

Cartledge applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric, and reported the following:

It might be a little bit of an Odyssean exaggeration to claim or boast that page 99 is the very best single page to introduce a browser to the delights of my new book, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric. But it wouldn't be all that far off... The fourth line (second para) of the page launches into a detailed discussion of one of the most famous buildings not just in ancient Greece but in the world even today, the Parthenon (temple of Athena the Virgin, built between 447 and 432 BCE). The discussion comes in the book's fourth chapter, entitled 'Pericles the Builder'. Others are titled 'Pericles the Demagogue', 'Pericles in the Orbit of Love', 'The Intellectual Pericles', and 'The Fictional (Comic) Pericles'. Pericles was an elite Athenian born about 495 who died - of plague - in 429. His active adult life and career spanned a proverbial 'Golden Age' of visual art, philosophy, architecture, history-writing, and drama, all focused in democratic Athens. The issues raised by the Parthenon include discussion of its extraordinary aesthetic, its huge cost, and of its symbolic and practical significance, and they all revolve around the role played in its construction by statesman and demagogue (leader of the People) Pericles. It's often forgotten that someone had to make the proposal to build it, and to build it in the way it was, others had to make the money available and monitor the public expense, others again had to hand out the contracts for labour and materials. All that within the constitutional framework of a direct democracy, instantiating the power of the Athenian People. To leave you in suspense no longer, my argument is that, though Pericles did indeed have quite a hand in the Parthenon's construction, he was not its 'only begetter'. If you require a monument of Pericles' career as a builder, then you should look rather to the (sadly lost) Odeum (Concert Hall) or to one of the Long Walls (destroyed) linking the city of Athens strategically to its port of Peiraieus rather than to the Parthenon. A famous painting by Alma-Tadema shows Pericles inspecting the newly built Parthenon under the guidance of its Artistic Director, master-sculptor Pheidias. Shown alongside him is his partner in life, Aspasia, the intellectual Greek (but not Athenian) woman with whom he eccentrically fell passionately in love and chose to spend his last two decades.

Learn more about Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael T. Bernath's "In a Land of Strangers"

Michael T. Bernath is Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of American history at the University of Miami.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, In a Land of Strangers: Northern Teachers in the Slave South, with the following results:

At its core, In a Land of Strangers seeks to understand where the idea of the South came from, when it emerged, and what it contained, and, to do so, I focus on the thousands of northern women and men who worked in the South as teachers, tutors, and governesses throughout the antebellum period. Living withing slave-owning households, these northerners were simultaneously part of and apart from southern society, and they wrote home constantly about the profound differences they perceived. In so doing, they helped to construct the idea of southern distinctiveness and to substantiate a sectional narrative that led to civil war and still lingers to this day.

Page 99 falls near the beginning of Chapter 3, “Studying the South,” which explores the many differences these teachers identified between North and South and the larger significance they assigned to those differences. Away from home, many for the first time, these mostly young, middle-class northerners were eager to document what made the South so strange in their eyes. This page mainly deals with teachers’ reactions to the southern climate. The heat and humidity, of course, were what they expected, and dreaded, but they were much more surprised and troubled by the cold. During the winters, southerners kept their houses much colder than these northerners were accustomed to, and they suffered severely and complained vociferously as a result. The baffling but universal southern custom of leaving exterior doors wide open at all times of year was particularly blamed, often attributed to the constant in-and-out of enslaved attendants as well as bizarre southern notions about air circulation. Many northern teachers struggled to convince their southern employers that they really came from a much colder climate as they sat visibly shivering in southern classrooms and parlors.

Within the larger scheme of the book, this is a relatively minor point. But while the Page 99 Test does not capture the book’s broader focus or its larger arguments, it does showcase just a few of the many differences that for these northern teachers defined the South and differentiated it from the North. Embedded, opinionated, outside observers, these northerners watched closely and commented extensively on all aspects of southern culture, society, and especially slavery, and by doing so they articulated the South in ways and with an authority that few other 19th-Century Americans could.

Learn more about In a Land of Strangers at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Confederate Minds.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven B. Smith's "On Statesmanship"

Steven B. Smith is Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and co-director of Yale’s Center for the Study of Representative Institutions. His books include Political Philosophy, Modernity and Its Discontents, and Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes.

Smith applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, On Statesmanship, and shared the following:

Page 99 comes approximately midway through a chapter titled “The Art of the Statesman.” Here I discuss the importance of character (ethos) for the statesman and how character is important for establishing trust between a political leader and his/her followers. Page 99 contains a vivid illustration of this point by means of a humorous anecdote about George Washington at the Constitutional Convention. Readers will love this story!

I think the Page 99 Test gives some insight into the book as a whole. My most important point is that statesmen are the educators of their peoples. They are their nations’ philosopher-kings. They provide people with the language they need to imagine what they might become. When Lincoln spoke of “the better angels of our nature,” or when FDR implored “fear not,” when JFK said, “ask not,” or when Ronald Regan spoke of a “city on a hill,” they were finding a way to connect people to their pasts and offer a glimpse of the future.

My favorite part of the book deals with whether it is possible to educate statesmen. Great leaders have been great readers of their national traditions and some have written memorable histories and autobiographies. What should the statesmen of the future be reading and what should they know? I have some thoughts but I will leave it to readers to come up with their own suggestions.

Learn more about On Statesmanship at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Thompson's "After Belsen"

Robert Thompson is a historian and Deputy Director for Public Programmes at Westminster Abbey Institute.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, After Belsen: Christian Encounters with Holocaust Survivors, and reported the following:

Page 99 of After Belsen jumps into a discussion of the Christian motivations underpinning the operations of Quaker relief workers in the aftermath of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It quotes the General-Secretary of the Friends Relief Service, who, after the Second World War, summarised the theology that had inspired their work. It applies these comments to the words of relief workers at Belsen, who related the everyday examples of how their Christianity found expression in the midst of their relief work. Eryl Hall Williams described in his diary the daily meetings where the team would meet at 9 o'clock every evening for their silent service. Page 99 ends with his colleague Beth Clarkson's comment that she was so exhausted from a day's work at liberated Belsen that in these meetings she would often fall asleep.

The first sentence of page 99 of After Belsen suggests why the test is not completely helpful for this book: the use of an abbreviation which has been explained on a previous page! A reader picking up the book at this point would have to flick to earlier in this chapter to discover that "FRS" stands for the Friends Relief Service, the team under discussion on this page. Another potential stumbling block is that this page makes a simplified reference to a subject by their surname, when their full name has been introduced earlier. Page 99 can therefore raise further questions than answers.

However, from absorbing the detail of page 99 I think the reader would get a good sense of the book's broader themes. In discussing the Christian motivations of the FRS and how they materialised at liberated Belsen, it shines a light on one example of Christian action in the context of the Holocaust. After Belsen aims to uncover the personal stories of Christians who encountered survivors, and explore what motivates someone to act in the ways they do. Here on page 99 we find one such example.

Clarkson's final, very human comments about falling asleep in a Christian service illustrate further the multilayered ways in which these individuals began to respond to what they witnessed through their encounters with survivors after Belsen. Their responses were complex, surprising, and they speak of the realities of human interaction in the face of suffering. They often reveal further questions then they do simple answers. As a consequence, I hope a reader who turns to page 99 would be intrigued enough to start again from page 1.

Learn more about After Belsen at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cathryn J. Prince's "For the Love of Labor"

Cathryn J. Prince is an adjunct professor of journalism at Fordham University. Her books include Queen of the Mountaineers: The Trailblazing Life of Fanny Bullock Workman and American Daredevil: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Halliburton, the World’s First Celebrity Travel Writer.

Prince applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman, with the following results:

From page 99:

Newman’s portfolio continued expanding. By now she had been working as an inspector with New York’s Joint Board of Sanitary Control for four years. The work was demanding, she told her readers in “An Inspector’s Point of View”… It could be tiresome and tedious and of course Newman lacked legal power. She approached each visit with the eye of someone who knew what it was like to toil in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. She knew where to look for violations, whether it was the windows sealed shut or gas jets leaking (which impaired many people’s eyesight). She knew where to look for rodent droppings, which signified an infestation, and whether the washrooms were clean enough.

Were a reader to immediately open For the Love of Labor: the Life of Pauline Newman to page 99 they would find that while it might not be the best single page to introduce my book–(primarily because readers won’t have read the carefully laid out backstory of how Newman got to where she was by this point, from her arrival to the U.S. from Lithuania as a child, to becoming one of the youngest activists in U.S. history to her, to her great skill in uniting people across socio-economic and cultural lines) it does a very solid job of capturing it’s essence and giving an idea of what the book is about.

Nevertheless, it’s a deeply researched page chock full of details and atmosphere that would give someone a strong sense of who Pauline Newman was: someone who spoke from authority because of her experience as a child laborer working in a hairbrush factory, a cigar rolling factory, then a shirtwaist factory. They will see Newman’s grit and gumption and the way she understood that real change is incremental, hard-won, and collective. The page clearly shows Newman’s perseverance and dedication to improving the lives of others.

Visit Cathryn J. Prince's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Cathryn J. Prince & Hershey and Juno.

The Page 99 Test: Death in the Baltic.

The Page 99 Test: American Daredevil.

The Page 99 Test: Queen of the Mountaineers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexander Mikaberidze's "The Louisiana Purchase"

Alexander Mikaberidze is The Boyd Professor of History and Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University-Shreveport. He is an award-winning author and editor of over two dozen books that have appeared in over half a dozen languages. His books Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace (2022) and The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (2020) received critical acclaim and won the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Awards and the Gilder-Lehrman Military History Prize. He served as an editor for the multi-volume Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars (2023).

Mikaberidze applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds Louisiana in the uneasy aftermath of its transfer from France to Spain. Antonio de Ulloa, the colony’s first Spanish governor, arrived in 1766 hoping to manage that transition without unnecessarily antagonizing the French population. He avoided a formal handover, declined to raise the Spanish flag over the Place d’Armes, and retained French officials in positions of authority. Rather than smoothing the transition, however, this caution left a fundamental question of sovereignty (and identity) unresolved.

For my book, the Page 99 Test is somewhat successful. Although the page does not directly discuss the Louisiana Purchase itself, the uncertainty described on this page goes to the heart of the larger story I tell about Louisiana and, ultimately, the Louisiana Purchase. I am interested not simply in the diplomatic transactions by which Louisiana passed from one sovereign to another, but in what such transfers meant on the ground. Empires could exchange territories by treaty, but making those transfers real was another matter. Sovereignty depended upon institutions, commerce, local loyalties, and the willingness - or ability - of imperial governments to enforce their authority. That larger problem becomes especially visible in the second half of page 99. Ulloa attempted to impose Spain’s mercantilist regulations on a colony whose survival depended upon commercial connections extending far beyond official imperial boundaries. Louisiana merchants traded through a web of networks reaching across the Caribbean, linking French, British, and Spanish possessions. Spanish restrictions therefore threatened not merely profits but an established way of life. These tensions are crucial to understanding the Louisiana Purchase. Long before 1803, Louisiana occupied an ambiguous position between empires. Its inhabitants learned to navigate shifting sovereignties while maintaining economic and cultural connections that governments struggled to control. The Purchase was therefore not an isolated transaction suddenly conceived by Jefferson or Napoleon. It was another dramatic turn in a much longer contest over who would possess Louisiana, how that possession could be made effective, and why control of this enormous territory mattered within the interconnected worlds of North America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic.

Learn more about The Louisiana Purchase at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Earle's "He Has the People"

Jonathan Earle teaches history and politics at Louisiana State University, where he has been Dean of the Ogden Honors College since 2014.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works uncannily well in He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860. The book is intended to be a gripping narrative history for a general audience about a particularly consequential election – one that often gets short shrift in the numerous works about Lincoln, the sectional crisis, and the coming of the Civil War. The main reason, I argue, is the tendency to ignore historical contingency and present some outcomes as inevitable. Of course, that fully self-realized boy born in that Kentucky log cabin would make it to the White House during the nation’s severest crisis. Against considerable odds, he would prevail in a civil war and prevent government “of the people, by the people, for the people” from perishing from the earth.

But what if we took the contingency of the past more seriously? I hope the book makes a strong case for narrative history that restores human agency, chance and the very real sense that things could all have gone very, very differently.

A reader alighting on page 99 would be thrown into the excitement and chaos of the Chicago Republican convention that wound up nominating Lincoln, whose political resume to that point amounted to one single term in Congress in the 1840s and a spirited but losing Senatorial campaign in Illinois a decade later. The overwhelming frontrunner in the battle for the nomination was the venerable New York senator William Seward, whose campaign rolled into the city with trunkloads of money, powerful advocates, and promises to dole out to potential office-seekers. “The consensus remained that Seward’s best chance at the nomination was a clean win on the first ballot,” reads the first sentence on the page. On the other hand, “Lincoln and his managers were hoping that their candidate would clear 100 votes on that same ballot, which, with other ‘favorite son’ votes, would guarantee at least two rounds of balloting, denying Seward a quick victory.” Further down the page we see a Lincoln man, the German-born editor Gustave Koerner, pull a fast one on the Seward juggernaut by giving local spectators tickets for the convention floor before anyone else. “While the friends of the other candidates held processions and marched around, we had made arrangements that the Wigwam (the cavernous hall built for the convention] should be at the earliest opening every morning filled with Illinoisians” cheering for Lincoln.”

Learn more about He Has the People at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Gregory's "The Real Domestic Product"

Elizabeth Gregory directs the Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Houston, where she is a professor of English and the Taylor Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Apparition of Splendor and Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood. She writes for The Nation and other magazines.

Gregory applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Real Domestic Product: How Birth Control Built Equality (and Why the Future of the Economy and the Planet Depends on It), with the following results:

Yes! Page 99, at the book’s center, represents it well – props to Ford Madox Ford (the inspiration behind the Page 99 Test)!

Part of a chapter called “Accounting for Harm,” page 99 focuses on domestic violence during COVID. Two framing sentences provide context.

At the top:

Wage equity and a childcare infrastructure that allowed women to work and earn consistently could lower vulnerability and abuse.

At the bottom:

Whatever their social rank, women who depend on their spouse—for support, status, and other needs—are at risk.

In-between are quotes from interviews with women in a DV shelter, documenting how gendered pay inequities played out globally during the pandemic. Here’s one:

…she told of being locked in her apartment with her abuser and hearing her neighbors being beaten too: “It's like, everybody was having the same issues. And that was even more traumatizing. I would sometimes hear—‘cause there was one couple that lived right next door to me, and he would tell his wife that, ‘It’s a pandemic; the cops aren’t coming.’ And that, that's heartbreaking to hear.”

Women who can afford to leave abuse and keep their kids from homelessness are less vulnerable to it, because their partners know they can leave and because the partners are often less stressed too—since they aren’t the family’s sole provider.

Page 99 emblematizes the wider range of harms done to society overall by women’s economic dependency that this book argues Reliable Birth Control has begun to address—by enabling women and men to finish their educations and establish at work before starting their families. For ages prior, the need to feed unplanned babies would have pushed one or both into low-wage jobs, often for whole lifetimes, and the woman into a lifetime of unpaid care work producing the employees of the future, “for free.” Already, the class system is being transformed.

Earning their own wages has given women a new civic voice, and a platform for challenging regnant social and economic systems—by building a national care economy (yes, it involves taxes), that pays a fair wage for care and adds that value directly to GDP, so everyone benefits. Upsetting the status quo and spurring the current backlash. Women and their allies can use that voice in this use-it-or-lose it moment. The Real Domestic Product forwards that dialog.

Learn more about The Real Domestic Product at The MIT Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jehanne Dubrow's "Frivolity: A Defense"

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of over one dozen books, including The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma (2025). Her new book of creative nonfiction is Frivolity: A Defense. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including New England Review, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas.

Dubrow applied the “Page 99 Test” to Frivolity: A Defense and shared the following:

From page 99:

Despite the lightness of Le nozze di Figaro, I’ve always struggled with the end of the opera: that compulsory joy, the melody tripping over itself in a rush toward resolution. It’s hard for me to forget that the Countess must trap her husband. He begs her for forgiveness, perdono, perdono, he pleads, but only after being caught in near-adultery. The Countess must force his love to grow in her direction again, the way a gardener trains a vine with a trellis, the stem of the plant bound or clipped firmly in place. She is often played by some magnificent diva like Kiri Te Kanawa or Renée Fleming, and I hate that a woman with sublime timbre and technique is brought so low that she must trick her spouse back into devotion.

I think page 99 is characteristic of Frivolity. It's a book that slides between high culture and low, between lightness and heaviness, between joy and grief. Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro certainly embodies many of the qualities that make frivolity so difficult to understand and explain. Here is an opera that took enormous skill and sensitivity to craft. It's provocative and subversive. It ruffles feathers. But it also delights and entertains and offers listeners enormous pleasure.

In Frivolity, I explore a wide range of frivolous pursuits, objects, and even people. The trick in writing the book was to use a delicate touch; the prose couldn't be ponderous. The 101 sections of the book needed to flit from subject to subject, in a way that would mirror frivolity itself. Finding a voice and a form for engaging with the frivolous was perhaps the biggest challenge of writing Frivolity. I had to figure out how to treat the subject thoughtfully, all without sounding as if I were overly serious!

Visit Jehanne Dubrow's website.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (April 2010).

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (November 2012).

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow and Argos.

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow & Lola and Bandit.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (August 2022).

The Page 99 Test: Taste: A Book of Small Bites.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jack Dudley's "The New Believers"

Jack Dudley is Associate Professor of English at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he teaches and researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. His scholarship explores the intersections of religion and literature across genres and media, with a particular interest in visual culture and film. His teaching spans a broad range of modern and contemporary literatures—including British, American, Canadian, Irish, global, and postcolonial—and he is especially known for his popular course on horror, one of his longstanding personal interests. He also works extensively with students on their writing and creative projects.

Dudley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The New Believers: Religion and the Contemporary Novel, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The New Believers drops you into a sugarcane field, which is an easy place to get very lost in. It’s a few pages into the third chapter of the book, which examines the numinous powers in Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). On this page, I compare Díaz’s description of wind as a spiritual sign of rescue in a sugarcane field with similar imagery from the writer Jean Toomer (1894-1967) and his work Cane (1923). Both writers engage in what’s called religious syncretism, which is where different religious traditions are mixed together to produce new kinds of belief and new practices. Crucially, both Díaz and Toomer treat these spiritual powers as real rather than as metaphors or uncertainties.

This page captures the book’s whole argument: our leading contemporary novelists want to imagine how belief in spiritual powers can transform the way we care for others and the world. Page 99 describes in detail Oscar’s rescue from that cane field by a remarkable, talking, supernatural-seeming golden mongoose—and then by Clives, a good Samaritan who was passing by. I next take the reader through how the passage from Díaz blends religious traditions, mixing Western Christianity with Dominican obeah (also known as voodoo).

That represents another key claim of The New Believers: what we’re seeing in these writers isn’t an uncritical return to traditional forms of religion but a new willingness to mix among beliefs and practices. As they sort through religious ideas—and invent new ones—these writers are guided by what can best help us materially care for the world and other beings.

Page 99 ends by setting up a challenge to contemporary critical practices, such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, and now decolonial ways of thinking. These tend to overwhelmingly be negative modes of critiquing past and present cultural and political practices and their ways of making art, including the novel. Because they tend to focus less on their positive projects—that is, what they want to bring about and how they’ll do it—postmodernism, postcolonialism, and decolonialism have often lacked legitimation and had trouble motivating change. I call them “dismantling” projects in the book (99).

The top of page 100 outlines a claim about Díaz that applies to the whole book and that seeks to help empower these projects: believing in the reality of spiritual beings and forces can powerfully motivate what I call “projects of building and affirmation” (100), ones that can energize postmodern, postcolonial, and decolonial practices by providing them with a positive grounding in spirituality. These include better care for migrants, non-human animals, and other beings across differences.

That’s perhaps a surprising claim of The New Believers: that spiritual and religious practices and beliefs (which often get read as “conservative”) can be important sources of motivation, resilience, and community building for causes that are thought of as leftist and/or liberal.

Visit Jack Dudley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue