Lawrence Douglas's "The Criminal State"

Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College and a Guggenheim fellow. His many books include The Right Wrong Man and The Memory of Judgment. His writing has appeared in leading publications such as Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. He is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.

Douglas applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice, and shared the following:

I'm not sure I firmly believe in the Page 99 Test. For one thing, two of my favorite books, Kleist's Michael Kolhaas and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, would have a hard time passing, given that neither book has a page 99. As a second matter, I'm not a huge Ford Madox Ford fan. I've read The Good Soldier twice, and while I'm all for unreliable narrators, I just don't see all the fuss.

That said--and even accounting for grade inflation--I think my new book, The Criminal State, handsomely passes. The book offers what I hope readers will find a gripping and highly readable history of the effort to hold state officials criminally responsible for acts of war-making and atrocity. Page 99 comes in a chapter that discusses the drearily failed effort to prosecute Ottoman leaders for the mass killing of their Armenian subjects during the First World War. Still, I might have preferred if Ford Madox Ford had picked page 100 for his test, because that page permits me to punchily challenge the legal principle that all states enjoy equal international rights: "to paraphrase Orwell, it would be more accurate to say: All states are equal, but some states are more equal than others." In any case, I hope readers enjoy all 366 pages--not all of which are devoted to legal failures!

Learn more about The Criminal State at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc Stein's "Bicentennial"

Marc Stein is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of US History and Constitutional Law at San Francisco State University. He is the 2026–27 president of the Organization of American Historians and director of the OutHistory website. His books include City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, Sexual Injustice, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, The Stonewall Riots, and Queer Public History.

Stein applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes near the beginning of my fourth chapter, which is titled “Ford to Bicentennial City: Drop Dead” (a play on the famous newspaper headline addressing New York City’s potential bankruptcy). It’s August 1974 and Gerald Ford, our only non-elected U.S. president, has just replaced Richard Nixon. There’s some analysis of Ford’s first speeches as president, but my focus is primarily on what the presidential transition meant for the upcoming bicentennial. My first chapter had considered the “queer courtship” of Nixon (a Republican) and Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo (a Democrat), with Nixon receiving a valuable cross-party endorsement in his 1972 re-election campaign and Rizzo receiving presidential promises of generous federal funding for Philadelphia’s commemoration of the bicentennial. By 1974, that funding had not yet materialized, and so on page 99 I write: “Nixon’s replacement by Ford had extraordinary significance for the United States, but for Philadelphians, there were distinct implications for the bicentennial. On the one hand, Ford’s call for national reconciliation and his likely need for Pennsylvania’s votes in 1976 suggested that he might provide generous support for Philadelphia. On the other hand, his calls for reductions in government spending, his opposition to tax increases for the wealthy, and his objections to federal aid for cities hinted that he might not honor the Nixon administration’s promises.”

The Page 99 Test works and doesn’t work for my book. It works insofar as Bicentennial tells the story of the “official bicentennial” and does so with attention to relationships between U.S. presidents and Philadelphia mayors, situated in larger narratives of partisan realignment and the rise of the New Right in the 1970s. Page 99 considers a moment in that story. The test doesn’t work insofar as Bicentennial also addresses counter-bicentennial activism, as expressed by African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, women, and LGBTQ+ people and by coalitional groups such as the Peoples Bicentennial Commission and the July Fourth Coalition. One of the book’s main arguments is that the bicentennial was a key moment in the history of democracy. While bicentennial planners attempted to control the commemoration narrative, they were powerfully challenged by movements representing ethnic, indigenous, racial, and religious minorities; women; and LGBTQ people, many of whom came together in a series of counter-bicentennial protests. The largest of these, organized by the People’s Bicentennial Commission and the July Fourth Coalition, were supported by broad-based and multi-issue coalitions, belying the notion that the left collapsed and divided in the 1970s. Bicentennial follows their lead, presenting “a democratic history of a democratic bicentennial.” Counter-bicentennial activism, which took multiple shapes and forms, changed the way that we think about U.S. history and politics.

The bicentennial prompted an extraordinary set of national conversations about the history and politics of the United States. After Watergate and Vietnam, and in the midst of economic and energy crises, how could the United States celebrate national greatness? How could a nation with colonial attitudes and possessions celebrate the 200th birthday of its anti-colonial revolution? Should Native Americans participate in the commemoration of a national revolution that damaged and destroyed indigenous nations? What about the many Americans whose ancestors never consented to be governed by the United States and those consistently denied the freedom, liberty, equality, and justice promised by the Declaration of Independence? Would LGBTQ+ people, newly organized and mobilized in the 1970s, be invited to the national birthday party, and if not, would they try to crash the festivities?

Some of my favorite parts of the book address Roots, Rocky, Bicentennial Minutes, “Philadelphia Freedom,” and other examples of popular culture during the bicentennial. I also love the many examples of bicentennial humor, with countless references to the “buy-centennial” and the “sell-ebration.” But I think I’m most pleased with the extensive discussions of counter-bicentennial activism. This includes dramatic protests led by African Americans, beginning in the late 1960s; the media-savvy actions of the People’s Bicentennial Commission; the Native American Trail of Self-Determination, which followed the Wagon Trail Pilgrimage as it traveled across the country; the fiery fierceness of Philadelphia’s Chinatown-based Dragon Club; and Dykes for an American Revolution protests in support of the Lesbian Feminist Declaration of Independence. The largest protest was organized by the Puerto-Rican led July Fourth Coalition (J4C), which staged Independence Day marches and rallies in multiple cities, including a particularly large one in Philadelphia. J4C brought together liberals and leftists who were determined to challenge the official bicentennial. I find what they did profoundly inspirational, and completely at odds with common narratives of collapse, division, and fragmentation on the U.S. left in the 1970s. And while it’s common to think about the bicentennial with the wisdom of hindsight—and the knowledge that the Reagan Revolution was just a few years away--counter-bicentennial activism played a role in the country’s decision in 1976 to elect Jimmy Carter as U.S. president and declare (temporary) independence from the party of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Learn more about Bicentennial at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Doherty's "How Film Became History"

Thomas Doherty is professor of American studies at Brandeis University. His books include Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (2013); Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (2018); and Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century (2020).

Doherty applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America, with the following results:

Page 99 of How Film Became History discusses the censorship gauntlet run by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934). The film’s producer, an independent hustler named Samuel L. Cummins, had to negotiate with the New York State Censor Board to obtain a certificate of approval to exhibit the film in New York, a make-or-break market for a commercial release.

Serendipitously enough, page 99 is a good indicator of the rest of the book: a cultural-historical inquiry into a select inventory of foundational archival documentaries made in the 1930s. Like most of the films discussed in the other 266 pages, Hitler’s Reign of Terror is something of an obscurity, but an important one: it is the first feature-length anti-Nazi film in American history, and a well ahead of the curve provocation. (Not until 1939 would mainstream Hollywood attack Nazism in Warner Bros.’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the first major studio release to indict the Third Reich by name.) Vanderbilt Jr., scion of the robber barons, visited Nazi Germany soon after Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933. An amateur shutterbug, he took his home movie camera with him and captured some astonishing footage of the transformation of Germany into a gangster state—incessant military parades, menacing brownshirts, and naked antisemitism. He supplemented his own footage with material from the newsreels, notably of Hitler’s harangue at the Sports Palace on February 10, 1933 and the book burnings staged on May 10, 1933—both of which Vanderbilt claimed to have attended.

Vanderbilt’s film is among a select inventory of pioneering documentaries that established the template for the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that came to shape our memory of the past. Only in the 1930s had a sufficient backlog of motion pictures accumulated on studio shelves and newsreel libraries for filmmakers to be able to stitch together an entirely new film from the raw material of old films. At around the same time, sound was seamlessly integrated into the grammar of cinema and with it the arrival of the narrative voiceover, the omniscient lecturer who guides the viewer (and now listener) through the images from the past.

The other documentaries under the critical microscope are Truman Talley and Laurence Stallings’s The First World War (1934), J. Stuart Blackton’s The Film Parade (1933), Herman Axelbank and Max Eastman’s Tsar to Lenin (1937), and a sampling from the March of Time screen magazine (1935-1951). Overall, the films may seem to have been chosen out of a willful penchant for the obscure (“I’ve never even heard of Vanderbilt’s film and I’ve taught American film history for decades,” groused a colleague who read the manuscript), but they are all (I think) of singular importance in motion picture history.

Learn more about How Film Became History at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.

The Page 99 Test: Show Trial.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Robert Siegel's "Markets of Pain"

Benjamin Robert Siegel is an Associate Professor of History at Boston University. He is the author of Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India. A former journalist for Time in New Delhi and Hong Kong, his writing has been published in Vice, Public Books, American Heritage, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Siegel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Markets of Pain finds us in the laboratories of nineteenth-century Germany, where a remarkable industrial pivot is underway. Dye companies like Bayer — flush with profits from coloring the textiles of imperial Europe — are turning their chemical expertise to a new product: pharmaceuticals. German chemists, backed by enormous state investment in research, are isolating newly-discovered alkaloids like codeine, quinine, cocaine, and ephedrine, and transforming pharmacy from a speculative craft into something closer to a science. But even as they master laboratory synthesis, these firms remain dependent on a global supply of exotic plants: ipecacuanha from Brazil, cinchona bark and coca from Peru, and opium from wherever they can source it. The page closes on a small moment with large consequences: in 1898, Bayer's scientists discover how to transform morphine into a new compound. They call it heroin, and market it as a non-addictive substitute for morphine, particularly useful for coughs.

The Page 99 Test works, but only partly. A reader here would catch something essential about this book: that the power of modern pharmaceuticals was built by organizing raw organic materials from around the world into marketable commodities, along supply chains first forged under empire. They'd see the global reach of the story, and they'd meet one of its great ironies — a German firm introducing heroin as a cure for the addiction its own products had helped create.

What they'd miss is almost everything else. Markets of Pain is really a prehistory of the American opioid crisis — not the Sacklers, not Appalachia, but the longer global story of how opioids and pharmaceuticals helped build the power of modern states, and the United States in particular. Most of the book follows American firms in the twentieth century as they took these German methods and bore them down upon opium, reshaping the lives of farmers in Rajasthan and Anatolia, middlemen in Istanbul and New Delhi, and regulators in Washington. Page 99 shows the industry learning to reach across the world, and the rest of Markets of Pain is about what happened when it did.

Visit Benjamin R. Siegel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Randles's "Living Diaper to Diaper"

Jennifer Randles is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Fresno, and author of Proposing Prosperity? Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America and Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Living Diaper to Diaper: The Hidden Crisis of Poverty and Motherhood, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Mothers of color were particularly attuned to public perceptions of their children’s diapers and fears of involvement with the child welfare system due to inappropriate or insufficient diapers. ... [M]any mothers of color described rarely leaving their homes, missing work and medical appointments, and not going grocery shopping or to social events because of lack of diapers. Avoiding public places required fewer diapers, allowed children to stay close to personal restrooms for toilet training, and subjected mothers to less surveillance and scrutiny of their diapering habits. Diaper work required mothers to consider intersecting gender, class, and race stereotypes of parental fitness as mothers weighed risks of diaper need against potential consequences of their efforts to manage it.

In this case, the Page 99 Test cuts straight to chase. It takes readers directly to a description of many of the most devastating consequences of the problem at the heart of Living Diaper to Diaper. Nearly one in two families with young children in the United States struggle with diaper insecurity – limited or uncertain access to enough diapers to keep children dry, comfortable, and healthy.

Families of color, especially those headed by Black and Latina mothers living in poverty, are especially likely to experience diaper insecurity, a hidden, harmful, and common problem of poverty in the United States. They are also more likely to experience stigma and surveillance related to their parenting practices, including when they don’t have enough diapers. Despite diaper insecurity’s prevalence and consequences, diapers are not systematically covered by existing U.S. safety net programs when families cannot readily access or afford them.

This crucial page details some of the racialized components of what I call diaper work, the physical, emotional, and cognitive labor mothers do to manage diaper need and related social isolation, stress, and stigma. Beyond the work of buying, changing, and disposing of diapers, diaper work involves the creative strategies mothers devise and the many sacrifices they make to secure basic necessities for their children. Page 99 is part of a window onto the proactive carework poor mothers perform to protect their children's well-being and humanity despite severe economic constraints and inadequate social safety nets.

Learn more about Living Diaper to Diaper at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

George G. Szpiro's "Ignorance"

George G. Szpiro is an author and journalist who was a longtime correspondent for the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His books include Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty: Three Centuries of Economic Decision-Making (2020) and Perplexing Paradoxes: Unraveling Enigmas in the World Around Us (2024). Szpiro was on the faculty at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ignorance: What We Do Not Know, Cannot Know, Must Not Know, and Refuse to Know, with the following results:

If you open Ignorance on page 99 you would get a good sense of what the book is about—especially if you simultaneously look at the illustration on page 98. The case turns on a specific form of ignorance: computers rely on sequences of random numbers whose outcomes we cannot predict, even though they are generated by strict rules. It shows how such managed ignorance allows random numbers to be used to solve problems that would otherwise be intractable.

The underlying tension is that computers produce these numbers deterministically from preceding values. In that sense, they are only quasi-random, not truly random. For practical purposes, however, we must remain ignorant of how each number is produced; otherwise, the sequence would lose its usefulness as a stand-in for genuine randomness. The discussion harkens back to my recent book Random Numbers Unveiled: The Secrets of Numbers That You Can’t Predict but Can Rely On (Taylor & Francis, 2026). Even though the computer follows strict rules, one remains ignorant of the next number in the sequence—an ignorance that is not a defect but a feature.

My book examines ignorance across a range of disciplines in sixty short chapters, organized around four categories: what we do not know—say, in mathematics, in law, in philosophy; what we cannot know—like the length of the coast of Britain, the precise location and speed of a particle, or the nature of God; what we must not know—like the costs already sunk in a project, insider information in financial market, the secrets of Kabbalah if you’re under 40; and what one refuses to know—like whether a diamond is real or fake, or—if you are defense lawyer—whether the accused actually committed the crime so as to maintain plausible deniability. Most chapters treat such themes through more familiar and accessible examples; the computational case on page 99 is among the more technical instances.

Across these domains, ignorance emerges not merely as a lack of knowledge but as an organizing principle that structures inquiry, guides decision-making, and conditions belief. At times it is deliberately preserved to enable progress; at others, it marks the limits of cognition or the boundaries imposed by social norms. Rather than standing in opposition to knowledge, ignorance often functions as one of its necessary preconditions.

Visit George G. Szpiro's website.

The Page 99 Test: Perplexing Paradoxes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm's "The Genealogy of Genealogy"

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and chair of science and technology studies at Williams College. He is the author of Metamodernism: The Future of Theory and The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History, and shared the following:

From page 99:

The three essays that make up Genealogy are perhaps, in terms of expression, purpose, and the art of surprise, the most uncanny thing that has ever been written. Dionysus, as is known, is also the god of darkness.
----FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Ecce Homo

In philosophical pedigrees, Friedrich Nietzsche regularly appears as the primeval progenitor or shadowy chimera beyond whom genealogy's history is irrelevant or perhaps vanishes into myth. But, as I demonstrate in this chapter, genealogy was not actually a central term in Nietzsche's work. To be fair, when Nietzsche published Zur Genealogie der Moral in 1887, the word Genealogie (genealogy) was not exactly in common usage in German, either. Nevertheless, genealogy was already interwoven with existing discourses in Germany at the time of Nietzsche's writing.

Addressing these discourses will help us contextualize Nietzsche's usage and provide clues about how he came to the term. It will turn out that Nietzsche's status as founder of a new historical methodology is misguided. Indeed, I will argue that, if we refuse Nietzsche the status of originator, if instead we trace the term back, if we explore the historical vicissitudes that accompany its usage, it will permit us to expose its primordial roots, lowly beginnings, and dangerous inheritance.

Page 99 turns out to be the very first page of my third chapter “Nietzsche as Progenitor.” It is both representative and, in a couple of ways, a little atypical of the book.

What is most representative about it is that in the book as a whole I’m turning the genealogical method—that is, a mode of critical, historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is actually contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—back on itself. I am offering, in other words, a critical history of critical history: one meant to expose its blind spots, to see where it fissures and breaks, and where it might yet be remade.

What makes the selection somewhat less representative is that it might give the impression that the book is only engaged with a few philosophical big names. And yes, I do have chapters on Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze. But much of the book is really about the history of history and philosophy as academic disciplines: including their entanglements with eugenics, racial essentialism, and power. In that respect, it blends intellectual history with philosophical analysis. And though much of the book is quite dark, it ends on a constructive note. More than a critical project, the monograph aims to be a philosophical reckoning with the limits of historiography itself. In so doing, I’m trying to open a path toward alternative historiographies, to invite scholars to imagine new ways of doing history and philosophy.

Learn more about The Genealogy of Genealogy at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Myth of Disenchantment.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dan Turello's "Connection"

Dan Turello is a writer, photographer, and cultural historian, and a Technology and Humanity Fellow at the Center for Future of Mind, AI & Society at Florida Atlantic University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans, and reported the following:

From page 99:

How the costs required to consume and produce are measured is important, both aesthetically, in terms of how effort and striving are portrayed, as well as philosophically, because how energy expenditures are measured and accounted for influences perceptions of value, sacrifice, and perceived trade-offs. The strands of these debates, at least in the Western world where our current neoliberal ideas about markets developed, can be traced to debates that took shape during the Renaissance, and the three characters I have mentioned provide an excellent entry point.

Page 99 is remarkably representative: it sets a tone and direction for the next pages of Renaissance art and environmental history. The book, however, is not primarily a history, and this too, I hope, is evident from that paragraph—the history shows up in service of gaining our bearings philosophically and existentially, in the present moment.

The “three characters” I refer to had appeared a few pages earlier: “A German engineer, a Florentine Sculptor, and a courtier from Urbino” who, at the start of Chapter 5 (Insatiable Artists: Technology and Consumer Identity in the Renaissance) I had imagined walking into a proverbial bar. Though Benvenuto Cellini (the Italian sculptor), Georgius Agricola (the German engineer, and Baldassar Castiglione (the courtier from Urbino) never knew each other in real life, the strands of their thinking and writing reverberate down through to our time, when discussions around awareness of environmental costs, effort, labor, sustainability, and so on, have become even more important.

What page 99 does not capture quite as well is the breadth of sources I draw from throughout the book: poetry, lyric, autobiography, Medieval and Renaissance history, but also classical and contemporary philosophy, and film (a dialogue from Pulp Fiction appears just a few pages later, while The Matrix had informed an earlier chapter). All of these strands serve to give context and texture to contemporary debates around our fraught, yet ongoing and vital relationship with technology in all its forms.

Visit Dan Turello's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Nicole Henley's "Inquisition for Blood"

Lauren Nicole Henley is an assistant professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin.

Henley applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South, with the following results:

There’s a lot packed into page 99. First is the speculation of serial murder in the rice belt region of the United States. Second is law enforcement’s theory that the crimes were religiously motivated. Third is Black communities’ recognition that the weapon of choice—an ax—linked the killings in brutal ways. Toward the end of the page, I write: “For all intents and purposes, then, that meant any Black family living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad could be axed to death. No one was safe.” Indeed, the terror of living amidst an unknown serial killer for years on end is well captured on this page.

The Page 99 Test does a surprisingly good job of reflecting the intricate tensions of my book, but fails to tease out a key contribution: a young Black woman named Clementine Barnabet confessed to many of the murders. Although Clementine’s name appears on the page, it is in reference to her first confession as opposed to her second. It was this second confession that thrust her into the limelight as speculation of a supposed Black female serial killer traveled across the United States and beyond.

In fact, when Clementine confessed to murdering 17 people in April 1912, it was frontpage news from New York to Los Angeles. Only the sinking of the Titanic a few weeks later supplanted coverage of her crimes. That a Black female serial killer—whether real or imagined—captured America’s attention in the early twentieth century speaks volumes about who can (and cannot) get away with murder.

Learn more about Inquisition for Blood at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Sharples's "The Long Death of Adolf Hitler"

Caroline Sharples is senior lecturer in history at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of West Germans and the Nazi Legacy and Postwar Germany and the Holocaust, the latter of which was nominated for the 2017 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Studies.

Sharples applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book finds us in Chapter 4: ‘Celebrations and Condolences’ which is an exploration of how audiences outside of Germany responded to the breaking news of Adolf Hitler’s death in spring 1945. (German reactions to his demise are explored in a standalone chapter of the book.) Page 99 drops us straight into quirky anecdotes (coal miners downing tools and giving themselves an impromptu day off in jubilation) and various statements from journalists, politicians and the proverbial ‘person on the street’. A range of emotional behaviours are documented here, from cries of relief, through to disappointment that Hitler had not been captured and made to suffer for his crimes.

In some ways, the Page 99 Test works really well because it immediately highlights two distinctive features in my approach to Hitler’s death. First, it reflects my efforts to reposition Hitler’s death story within the realms of cultural and emotional history. It moves away from the conventional, top-down approach of previous literature that has fixated on the military and political collapse of the Third Reich, and/or the resulting intelligence rivalries and Cold War tensions that obfuscated investigations into Hitler’s fate after the war. Instead, as page 99 illustrates, this book puts the thoughts and feelings of ‘ordinary’ civilians centre stage and traces the meanings that Hitler’s demise has held for different audiences. Second, as the stories presented on page 99 traverse public reactions in Australia, the UK, the United States and Nicaragua, they underscore the book’s unique transnational framework. Hitler’s demise was not only newsworthy for Germans, or even Europeans; but resonated around the globe.

In addition, the material presented on page 99 hints at some of the challenges yet to come. The Times newspaper, for instance, treated Hitler’s passing in the same way as it might report on the death of any other head of state, penning a formal, five column obituary. Other newspapers, however, suggested that the Nazi leader had forsaken all right to such a dignified treatment. The question of how to handle Hitler’s death would spill over, just days later, into a sensational controversy over whether neutral nations should follow diplomatic protocol and extend formal condolences to Germany on the death of its leader.

There is no doubt that page 99 captures the central theme of the book: the passionate, public discourse that sprang up around the fate of the Nazi dictator. Yet in giving us a snapshot of opinion in May 1945, the test actually misses the significant chronological scope of my work. Hitler’s death had been anticipated throughout the war years, imagined within visual propaganda, songs, jokes and even military fundraising activities. Then, the years after 1945 witnessed a protracted search for definitive proof of his suicide; various representations of his fate within popular literature, film and museum displays; and enduring questions as to how to prevent the formation of a heroic legend. In these ways, as my book argues, Hitler experienced a peculiarly long death, one that stretched far beyond those excitable scenes of spring 1945.

Learn more about The Long Death of Adolf Hitler at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue