Lytton N. McDonnell's "Counterpoints of Ecstasy"

Lytton N. McDonnell is Associate Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, University of Victoria.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Counterpoints of Ecstasy: Music, Mysticism, and the Enchantment of Modern America, and reported the following:

Page 99 appears just before the conclusion of Chapter 2, “The Naturalization of Numen.” It describes how certain nineteenth-century musical cultures promoted disciplined self-restraint as the proper expression of ecstatic experience. The page focuses on Theodore Thomas, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who modeled and enforced strict standards of decorum for both orchestra and audience, including synchronized bowing of instruments, prohibitions against talking or moving chairs, and carefully controlled bodily comportment.

This ethos of self-control also extended across the Atlantic. The American journalist George Gladden, for example, praised European audiences for their absolute silence during Wagner opera performances: no applause, no cheers, no visible emotional display, even when a singer delivered a deeply moving performance or “poured his whole soul into the darkness.” When audiences did become noisy or expressive, Gladden condemned them as “savage,” “diabolical,” and violent. In this way, musical elites—conductors, critics, performers, moralists, and audiences alike—framed silence, self-restraint, and internalized experience as virtuous markers of refinement and as the proper form of self-transcendence in the concert hall.

If readers open the book to page 99, they would gain a strong sense of one of its central arguments: that certain nineteenth-century cultural authorities redefined musical ecstasy not as visible excess or collective frenzy, but as disciplined interiority. The page also illustrates the book’s broader concern with how musical experience was reshaped, regulated, and naturalized within modern institutions, including the concert hall. Gladden’s quotations reinforce this point, employing moralizing language that highlights the book’s recurring attention to the ways ecstasy became entangled with hierarchies of class, race, and cultural authority.

However, page 99 offers only a partial—and potentially misleading—impression of the whole. Its emphasis on elite European art music and cultivated restraint might lead readers to assume the book focuses primarily on concert etiquette or bourgeois moral order. What the page does not reveal is the book’s wider comparative scope, which encompasses forms of ecstatic expression in contexts as varied as religious revivals, racialized performance traditions, psychological discourse, and the popular entertainment industry. Here, ecstatic experience often diverged from the ethos of self-restraint, embracing physicality, improvisation, and collective participation. Nor does the page foreground one of the book’s more distinctive contributions: its exploration of how ambivalence, contradiction, and countercurrents shaped—and at times destabilized—interpretations of ecstatic experience.

To encounter these other dimensions, readers might turn ahead a further 99 pages to the introduction of Chapter 6, which opens with a first-person account by Gustav Kuhl, a German writer describing his overwhelming reaction to a ragtime performance in Georgia in 1903:

“Suddenly I discovered that my legs were in a condition of great excitement. They twitched as though charged with electricity and betrayed a considerable and rather dangerous desire to jerk me from my seat. The rhythm of the music, which had seemed so unnatural at first, was beginning to exert its influence over me.”

This example is just one of dozens of historical accounts of intense subjective musical experience examined throughout the book. Together, they create the foundation of Counterpoints of Ecstasy and illuminate its central concern with the shifting interpretations of musical transcendence in America.

Learn more about Counterpoints of Ecstasy at the State University of New York Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick J. Connolly's "Newton's Metaphysics of Substance"

Patrick J. Connolly is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on issues at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences in the early modern period. Connolly has published a number of papers on John Locke, Isaac Newton, and related figures. He earned a PhD at the University of North Carolina and has previously held positions at Iowa State University, Lehigh University, Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Connolly applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Newton's Metaphysics of Substance: God, Bodies, Minds, with the following results:

If you flip to page 99 of Newton's Metaphysics of Substance, you’ll be plunged into my analysis of a dispute between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. These are both towering figures in seventeenth-century mathematics and physics. But the argument I’m adjudicating on page 99 is about something more fundamental: metaphysics. Specifically, Newton is responding to some of Leibniz’s criticisms of his theory of gravitation. And Newton is suggesting that there is a way of thinking about gravitation that makes it not much more mysterious than solidity. For him, these can both be understood by appeal to God’s immense power and providential design of the world.

Does page 99 give a good sense for the work as a whole? While no book can be captured in a single page, I’m inclined to say that page 99 is representative of much of what is on offer in my book. Let me give just a few of the reasons for that claim.

First, some of the most fundamental issues in Newton’s metaphysics are foregrounded here. What, at the most basic level, are bodies? How should we understand their features? And how should we think about bodies in relation to God, as things created by and depending on God? These are absolutely essential questions in my exploration of Newton’s larger metaphysical system, and much of the book is an effort to answer them.

Second, page 99 is focused on an effort to find continuity between De gravitatione and other claims Newton makes. De gravitatione is a fascinating, unfinished, and unpublished manuscript essay written by Newton. Lost for centuries, it was only rediscovered and published in the 1960s. I see it as offering the basic framework for Newton’s metaphysical thinking. So this page in my book can be seen as a microcosm of my larger effort to make sense of many of Newton’s otherwise confusing claims by leveraging the more systematic perspective on offer in De gravitatione.

Finally, one of the goals of the book is to present Newton as a systematic metaphysical thinker. Page 99 shows him considering and responding—I argue in a principled way—to the claims of another systematic metaphysical thinker. This showcases something important about the book. I argue that Newton can rightly be placed alongside figures like Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz as an important early modern philosopher. Accordingly, the book seeks to put him in dialogue with those three thinkers as well as with others. And page 99 is one instance of the book doing this.

Learn more about Newton's Metaphysics of Substance at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Casey Tieken's "Educated Out"

Mara Casey Tieken is professor of education at Bates College. She is the author of Why Rural Schools Matter.

Tieken applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges-And What It Costs Them, and shared the following:

The 99th page comes midway through the book, which follows nine rural, first-generation-to-college students as they enter and navigate an elite college that I call Hilltop. In a passage entitled “Access…” the page outlines the many opportunities and resources that Hilltop has: renowned professors, state-of-the-art science labs, an observatory, a new boathouse a few miles from campus. And it explains how the nine students take advantage of many of them, joining clubs, taking compelling classes, and competing on varsity teams.

The main point of the passage—and much of the book—comes a few pages later, though, in a section called “… with Limits.” As I write, “… the students work hard to capitalize on every opportunity, but oftentimes, their ‘Hilltop experience’ isn’t the same as their classmates’.”

Ultimately, the students find that their access to Hilltop’s numerous opportunities is quite limited; the resources exist, but many—the unpaid job shadows, the study abroad programs, the pricey textbooks—remain out of reach. And, as I describe in detail in the book, the students are navigating a world remarkably different from home. Home, with its different politics and different culture and different values, doesn’t feel very welcome at Hilltop.

So, the 99th page reflects part of the book’s core argument well: elite education is a thing of abundance. But these rural, first-generation students are only near that abundance. They remain on the outside, looking in, and that proximity likely makes the exclusion even harder.

Despite their limited access, these rural, first-generation students do well at Hilltop: they all graduate, some with honors and double majors. But, as they watch their wealthier, more urban classmates leverage connections to find jobs and apartments in large cities—where most jobs for college graduates are located—they realize that an elite degree may not open the doors they’d hoped.

These students were pushed to college by their parents, who understood the weakening rural economy and wanted them to have the stability and mobility they never did. An elite education should just raise their children’s chances of getting “a good job,” they reasoned. They knew that college would likely mean that their children would live adult lives far from home, and these parents made that sacrifice. So much hope and expectation rides on this college degree—and it’s not clear if the cost is worth it.

I bookend Educated Out with the current debate about college: is it worth it? Watching these students navigate Hilltop, I found my own faith in college waning. But when I asked the students, “Should everyone go to college?” they told me plainly that that’s the wrong question. “The controversy should be whether everyone has access to it or not, not whether everybody should go,” one said. “That is the issue we should be focused on: giving access to education—a good education.”

And right now, rural students don’t yet enjoy that kind of access.

Learn more about Educated Out at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert D. Priest's "Oberammergau"

Robert D. Priest is Associate Professor of Modern European History, Royal Holloway, University of London. He studied at University College London and Oxford, and was then a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is the author of various studies in nineteenth-century European culture and ideas, including The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France.

Priest applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Oberammergau: The Passion Play and Its Audiences from the Enlightenment to the Nazis, and reported the following:

On page 99 we find ourselves in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau in 1871, immediately after the Kingdom of Bavaria has fought alongside other German armies in the Franco-Prussian War that ended with the creation of a unified German nation-state. At the outbreak of war in 1870, the village’s long-running passion play had been interrupted so that its performers could fight in the war. Given Bavaria’s strong regional identity and the village’s Catholic history, Protestant Germans from the North arrived at the resumed season of performances in 1871 expecting a degree of hostility and alienation from the local population. Page 99 presents the surprise of northern Protestant journalists when they discover the opposite: the Oberammergauers seem to be sincerely invested in German nationalism. The local politician is a pro-German Liberal, apparently elected by unanimous vote of the village. He hangs a portrait of the Kaiser in his study alongside his bust of the Bavarian King Ludwig II, and bursts into tears recalling the opening of the Reichstag. A chauvinistic poet who sees Germany’s war victory as a triumph over the Catholic spirit even celebrates the play as ‘purely Protestant’ in its meaning.

The Page 99 Test works remarkably well for Oberammergau. One of the major arguments of my book is that the passion play attracted an increasingly and remarkably wide range of audiences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crucial was the play’s capacity to attract from across Germany’s sectarian divide and to present itself as a site of national significance, rather than Catholic and Bavarian. The 1870-1 season is the culmination of the first part of the book, ‘Making the German Passion Play’, and page 99 presents some of the strongest language from Protestant admirers. My book also seeks to focus on interaction between the local community and its audiences, which is directly represented by their encounters with journalists on the page.

While Oberammergau passes the Page 99 Test, of course it only tells part of the story. The final two-thirds of the book explore Oberammergau’s development of an international audience, the debates they had over the passion play on issues ranging from commercialisation to antisemitism, and the ultimate sponsorship of the play by the Nazi government at its tercentenary performance in 1934. The path from 1871 to the end of the book is indirect, but without Oberammergau’s successful presentation of the passion play as a national site, as described on page 99, it is impossible to imagine the paths that follow out from there into the twentieth century.

Learn more about Oberammergau at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Soucek's "The Opinionated University"

Brian Soucek is a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis. A scholar of free speech and equality law, Soucek has shaped national policy on academic freedom, nondiscrimination, and campus speech through his work with the American Association of University Professors’ “Committee A” on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the University of California’s Academic Senate.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Opinionated University is unusual, because most of it is consumed by the longest block-quote in the book: a statement my chancellor at UC Davis released in 2019, after I’d pushed him to recognize that the campus blood drives he so often publicized discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation and gender. In his statement, which I quote almost in full, the chancellor recognized the importance of blood donations, explained the history of the FDA’s ban on blood from men who’d had sex with another man in the previous year, decried discrimination, and called for “evidence- based policies” that would stop unnecessarily depriving members of our community from “joining in this important and generous community effort.”

Unusual as the page might be (since most of the writing there is attributed to someone else), page 99 actually encapsulates my book perfectly. Instead of stating the book’s central arguments—that institutional neutrality at our universities is an illusion, that taking sides on political issues is often unavoidable, and that well-chosen institutional statements can alleviate some of the harms our universities sometimes cause—page 99 exemplifies those claims.

For years, as a gay man, I’d experienced announcements of our campus blood drives as a slap in the face. I didn’t think we should abandon them, even though they violated our non-discrimination policies. But sometimes universities choose, or our forced, to do things that harm part of their community. (Think for example of the hate speech public universities are forced to allow on campus.) Even if choice might be the right one, that doesn’t make the harm they cause any less real. If the institution can alleviate some of that harm by speaking out, I think they have a duty to do so.

Doing so, however, flies in the face of the neutrality pledges that universities have increasingly made, or been forced to adopt, within the past couple years. Following the University of Chicago’s famous Kalven Report of 1967, as many as 150 schools have recently agreed to stay silent on political and social controversies. Most of my book is spent showing that, whatever they might pledge, universities often can’t avoid taking politically fraught positions in everything from their diversity and campus speech policies to the names on their buildings and the art on their walls.

Page 99 does something different: countering a widespread feeling that institutional speech just isn’t worth the trouble, Page 99 offers an example of a time it mattered. The statement mattered not because it led the FDA to change its policies (as it eventually did), but because it educated people about those policies and, for the first time, allowed those of us affected by them to feel that we were fully part of our institution too.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen M. Morin's "Cattle Trails and Animal Lives"

Karen M. Morin is Presidential Professor of Geography Emerita at Bucknell University and adjunct professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University (Toronto). She is the author of Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals; Civic Discipline: Geography in America, 1860–1890; and Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-Century American West; and coeditor, with Dominique Moran, of Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past and, with Jeanne Kay Guelke, of Women, Religion, and Space: Global Perspectives on Gender and Faith.

Morin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Cattle Trails and Animal Lives: The Founding of an American Carceral Archipelago, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Cowboy life on the cattle trail was challenging, difficult, and poorly paid— and, in fact, not paid until the cowboys reached the terminus of the trail in the cow town—in short, it was a job or experience that drew men with few other employment opportunities in the colonial (and colonizing) West. Following Coulter (2015), I surmise that despite the emotional care work involved, most of these were men with few other options and who aspired to ‘become their own boss’ as farmers or ranchers following the cattle drive and, hence, fully supported its carceral logic and structure as one with a personal promising future.

Animality, Agency, and Resistance

All of this being said, to what extent did cowboys and cows resist and challenge the conditions of their work on the cattle trails, if at all? Cowboys have often been portrayed as preferring the ‘independence’ of range labor to the grind of urban wage labor (Johnson 1996; Walker 1981; Tompkins 1992; Russell 1993). Stillman (2008) argues that both groups of workers are a kind of alienated labor often treated a lot like animals (and are similarly romanticized and objectified). The everyday life of the cowboy on the trail was one where the power relations with his trail boss and their differential social status often-times came into conflict. Cowboys’ ‘resistance’ to the work of the cattle drive typically manifested as challenges to trail bosses’ decisions and complaints about the type or amount of food and the harsh physical and environmental conditions, as well as other hardships such as sleeplessness and low wages (Sherow 2018: 135–136). One cowboy wrote of needing to put tobacco in his eyes to stay awake (Hunter 1924: 147).

Questions of agency and resistance to carceral conditions should also be posed with respect to how bovines experienced their labor on the cattle trails. Blattner, Coulter, and Kymlicka (2020) observe the long history of those who have no trouble seeing animal labor instrumentally, with animals as supposed willing participants in factory farms, labs, and circuses (cf. Fudge 2017: 270–271). Yet it would be hard to make the case that bovine animals would willingly work to collaborate in their own exploitation and eventual death via the cattle drive and other sites along the carceral archipelago. The cattle drive and cow towns were institutions of confinement where we find animal labor both producing and being produced as commodities; these are sites of animals working to transform their own bodies into commodities. Western films notably presented images of creatures who were without doubt willing participants in this enterprise and not resistant agents. But there is more to their personal stories.

Scholars notably have different ways of conceptualizing animal agency.

This book combines insights from carceral geography, historical animal studies, and material culture to understand the lived experiences of cows as they transitioned from being free-roaming animals to captives within the carceral infrastructures, technologies, and practices of the early American beef industry. ‘Carceral’ refers here to prison-like, whether direct infrastructural captivity or those instruments and tools that were aimed to achieve and maintain confinement, discipline, and control. The carceral ‘archipelago’ I study includes the western open range, ranch, cattle drive, and cattle town. The work offers a new type of ‘origin story’ of the early beef industry, that is, from the point of view of animal experiences within these carceral spaces, and how attention to these animal experiences challenge ‘re-narrations’ of the heroic taming of the West via the cattle industry in museums and other living history sites by arguing that what is actually being celebrated is the carceral.

Scholarly interventions and activist movements in the latter 20 th century radically changed humans’ understanding of how animals should be considered in their own right – as beings with interests, knowledges, cognition, sentience, subjectivity, and agency of their own and apart from but also in relationship with humans. In that sense page 99 – from a chapter about cattle drives from Texas to their termini in small Kansas cow towns from where the animals would be transported to slaughterhouses in Chicago and beyond by railroad – points to a theme throughout the book, that cattle did exercise agency and resist their captivity and forced movement. Elsewhere I discuss how this resistance took shape – for example by mother cows protecting and hiding their offspring from carceral structures and practices; by cows trying to throw their captors off theirs scents; by voicing their opposition to carceral practices through sounds and bellows; and even by attempting suicide to escape the carceral. At the same time what was likely experienced as ordinary daily life for the animals within carceral spaces is also important to recognize; their experiences were not just of pain and suffering but also caring, playfulness, fighting, the pleasures of grazing, and rest. It may be that subjects might not be aware of their own confinement, they may think of them as ‘normal’ and thus not resist them.

One of my favorite chapters of the book to write was one on mid 20 th -century Hollywood western films about cattle drives (and there are many), focusing on the mutual ‘work’ on the cattle trails by cowboys and cattle together. These films helped promote and entice an American post-war public towards beef eating, and images of carceral practices portrayed in them neutralized and normalized the carceral such that audiences came to not only accept but enjoy images of the carceral.

Learn more about Cattle Trails and Animal Lives at the University of Georgia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jordan B. Smith's "The Invention of Rum"

Jordan B. Smith is Associate Professor of History at Widener University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Invention of Rum falls on a part opener, which introduces the second section of the book: “Extraction.” This is a major theme of the book. To make rum required the extraction of labor from coerced and free laborers. It demanded natural resources including soil nutrients sapped through sugarcane cultivation and wood consumed by heating rum stills and crafting barrels to contain it. The newfound ability to turn rather cheap ingredients into a highly desired spirit allowed the makers and movers of rum to trade an eminently consumable good for more durable things including furs, land, and even people. Extraction in all of its forms is integral to the book’s broader argument that the invention of rum introduced the world to a new type of commodity defined by how it treated nearly everything as transmutable, and thus replaceable.

The only tick stopping page 99 from acing the test, is that this single word might underplay how central human behaviors are to these dynamics. Titles of the other sections—“creation” and “connection and conflict”—are good reminders that commodity histories are, at their core, histories of human decisions and actions.

If you think that relying on one word is too much of a stretch, we can turn to page 101 where readers will encounter the opening of my fourth chapter, “Slavery and the Work of Making Rum.” Each chapter begins with an examination of an uncommon source—usually an item of visual or material culture. Here I analyze prints of the interior and exterior of a plantation rum distillery published in William Clark’s Ten Views in the Island of Antigua. These are imperfect illustrations of historical processes because they present the distillery as more orderly and safer than Caribbean plantations usually were. But Clark captured the vast amount of work completed by nearly two dozen people, mostly men of African descent held in slavery.

The Invention of Rum connects the production, trade, and consumption of rum in the Caribbean, North America, Britain, and West Africa. No single page can encompass this geographical and topical breadth. But page 101 is an exemplar of the expansiveness of the evidence I assembled and the care with which I approached analyzing it. Like much of the rest of the book, the focus here remains on the people making, trading, and drinking rum.

Learn more about The Invention of Rum at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alice Echols's "Black Power, White Heat"

Alice Echols is Professor Emerita in the Departments of History & Gender Studies, Dana & David Dornsife College at the University of Southern California. She is the author of numerous books, including Daring to Be Bad, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture.

Echols applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, with the following results:

From page 99:

physically connected, and in ways that were new and profound. However, SNCC was a much less forgiving environment; its emotional economy was not fully reciprocal. Whites and Blacks forged intense bonds in SNCC. But the need for affection and approval characterized whites’ relationships with Blacks more than Blacks’ relations with whites, and in ways that felt oppressive to some Blacks.

Carmichael and Lester’s characterization of white activists as moved more by self-interest than by the struggle for racial justice might be a fair description of some. However, it did not characterize the behavior of SNCC’s veteran white staff or that of some of the newcomers. It also misrepresented white-on- white antiracist organizing as easily achievable in the American South, something that civil rights activists knew was untrue. Bob Zellner’s experience of trying to organize whites in 1961 led him to ask if it was possible to work with white Southerners “without them stringing you up?”

Despite the odds they faced, some whites in SNCC kept trying, at least for a while. The White Folks Project, initiated in 1964, quickly abandoned its original goal of mobilizing moderate white liberals to counteract the influence of the KKK and the White Citizens’ Councils. Instead, it turned its attention to trying to reach the white working class. The Project put 25 people to work in Biloxi, Mississippi, where they hoped to establish a “beachhead” for the movement among whites. What little headway they made was undone by a malicious rumor that the group was there to help Blacks, not whites, get jobs. Evicted from their office, the staffers were forced to leave town. White SNCC worker Emmie Schrader Adams spent part of the summer of 1964 in a more rural part of the state trying to organize poor whites. Any progress the staffers made came to an abrupt halt when locals discovered they were civil rights workers, “race mixers.” They felt the young activists had hoodwinked them. “They hated us, they felt angry and betrayed,” and they refused to open their doors. In some cases, “they went for their guns or the telephone.”

Organizing poor white people, especially to forestall a backlash against the civil rights movement made sense . . . in theory. However, as Bob Moses had argued in that contentious November 1963 meeting, “It’s not true that whites can go into the white community.” As soon as white organizers tipped their hand and “broke the rules of the racial caste system,” they became the enemy. In 1963, Carmichael laughed with white SNCC staffer Theresa Del Pozzo about the “clear absurdity” that she could “organize” the white toughs in her Atlanta neighborhood who were attacking Black people. Luke (Bob) Block, a white activist involved in SCLC’s voter registration project of 1965, tried...

The Page 99 Test does not quite work for my book. Page 99 of Black Power, White Heat might encourage readers to think that the book as a whole is a defense of white Sixties activists and a critique of those Black activists who challenged whites’ seriousness and sincerity. That would be a shame because the book offers a complex portrait of cross-racial solidarity, one that abjures the vilification and romanticization of activists that sometimes characterizes histories of the Sixties.

Page 99 plunges the reader into the chapter that deals with how Black Power played out in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a Black-led, militant group formed in 1960. For context: in its early years “black and white together” was central to SNCC’s identity, only to become its albatross four years later. This happened for a complex set of reasons. But the upshot was that many Black SNCC workers believed the group should be all-Black, and that whites should leave it to fight racism in their own communities.

Page 99 begins with the tail end of my discussion of Black staffers’ frustrations with those white colleagues for whom Black Power was primarily about their own rejection. I emphasize that within SNCC whites often had a greater emotional investment in interracialism, and that their need for Black colleagues’ approval, even gratitude, proved deeply alienating to many Blacks.

However, most of page 99 is not focused on Black staffers’ understandable frustrations, but rather on the charges that some Black staffers leveled at their white co-workers. Stokely Carmichael and Julius Lester caricatured whites as less interested in Black liberation than in whining about their feelings of exclusion. But as I show on this page, some whites listened to their Black critics and set about organizing in Southern white communities. This is page 99’s takeaway: there were whites in SNCC who attempted to fight racism among whites, though it proved to be impossible. This story is important because too often people imagine that racial solidarity failed in the Sixties, and that its failure was entirely attributable to the unreliability or cowardice of white allies. Neither is true.

Learn more about Black Power, White Heat at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David A. Crockett's "Winning It Back"

David A. Crockett is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Trinity University. He is the author of The Opposition Presidency and Running Against the Grain.

Crockett applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Winning It Back: Restoration Presidents and the Cycle of American Politics, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Another example of Nixon’s “Republican New Dealer” methods can be seen in his economic policy. Declaring he was “now a Keynesian in economics,” Nixon instituted a ninety-day freeze on wages, prices, and rents in August 1971. He ended the gold standard, allowing the dollar to float with other currencies. The addition of new tax cuts and tax credits led to increased deficit spending. Historian Alonzo Hamby calls Nixon’s efforts “an almost unimaginable heresy,” a charge that can only be true for someone seeking a new conservative regime….

….Rather than seek to undermine the Great Society, Nixon added to it. Some referred to Nixon “out-Democrating” the Democrats, while Barry Goldwater criticized him for doing “nothing to block enlargement of the federal establishment.” In fact, Nixon operated on a continuum with Kennedy and Johnson. He allowed at least forty new regulatory programs to exist without a veto, and he presided over the expansion of Social Security through indexing benefits and increasing the benefit base.

Nixon’s heresies continued in the area of foreign policy. The fierce anticommunist forged arms deals with the Soviet Union, visiting Moscow in 1972 to sign the SALT I arms limitation treaty. He redefined containment by embracing détente—hardly the liberation strategy long prized by conservatives. He also reversed decades of American foreign policy by visiting China, sacrificing Taiwan’s seat in the United Nations in the process. National Review called Nixon’s policies an “approximation of the Liberal Left,” while the New York Times saw Nixon as abandoning “outmoded conservative doctrine.”

Page 99 comes toward the conclusion of chapter 5, “New Deal Restoration Politics.” The Page 99 Test does a pretty good job highlighting the major approach of the book, which is an attempt to locate American presidents in their larger historical context, situated in partisan eras that favor one party over the other. In this case, Republican Richard Nixon took office in the Democratic Party-dominated New Deal era, serving as an “opposition president” in that period. Unlike some opposition presidents, however, who launched a full-frontal assault against the governing party, Nixon chose to accommodate many aspects of the New Deal system – hence the “Republican New Dealer” label. Alas, however, Nixon’s clandestine assault on the New Deal order, popularly known as “Watergate,” led to the implosion of his presidency. Page 99 emphasizes Nixon’s rejection of a staunch conservative counter-revolution when the New Deal was weakened following Lyndon Johnson, choosing instead a more cautious center-left approach.

What the Page 99 Test misses is the interplay between these opposition presidents – not just Nixon, but also the Whigs, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, and Bill Clinton – with their governing party successors (Polk, Pierce, Harrison, McKinley, Harding, Kennedy, Carter, and the younger Bush). Each chapter in the book focuses on a specific era in American politics and demonstrates that these opposition presidency interludes frustrate the normally governing party. When the governing party retakes control of the White House, the new “restoration president” attempts to “restore” the political universe to its proper shape. In this case, page 99 is followed immediately by page 100, which briefly addresses Jimmy Carter’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to “restore” the New Deal system, paving the way for the more consequential 1980 election and the rise of a conservative era in American politics. We can see a similar dynamic playing out in our current politics, in the oscillation between Clinton-Bush- Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump. Page 99 captures well one part of that roller coaster journey.

Learn more about Winning It Back at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aaron Coy Moulton's "Caribbean Blood Pacts"

Aaron Coy Moulton is Associate Professor of Latin American History at Stephen F. Austin State University. His research has been published in various outlets including the Journal of Latin American Studies, The Americas, and Cold War History.

Moulton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Cold War Struggle for Freedom, and reported the following:

Opening my new book Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Cold War Struggle for Freedom to page 99, the reader finds that a coalition of Caribbean and Central American dictators had decided to halt a 1948 border invasion plot by Guatemalan reactionary Manuel Melgar designed to overthrow Guatemala’s revolutionary, democratically-elected government. Next, that coalition was joined by the neighboring Salvadoran regime to consider a new conspiracy spearheaded by Colonel Arturo Ramírez, another reactionary.

A new section then begins that notes that these dictators and regimes’ various plots were escalating political tensions across Guatemalan politics. This dynamic was directly shaping Guatemala’s 1950 presidential election. Readers are also introduced to the then-unknown reactionary Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas who would be behind the 1950 Base Militar uprising.

As for the Page 99 Test, I would have to say this page only offers a sliver of my book’s whole.

On one hand, this page does provide an important idea at the heart of Caribbean Blood Pacts. In a literature that has focused on the U.S. government’s role in the downfall of the 1944-1954 Guatemalan Revolution, this page highlights how actors outside the United States cooperated to destroy Guatemala’s democratic experiment. Exiles long opposed to Caribbean Basin dictators tapped into the Second World War’s antifascism and launched a new era of antidictatorial activism. This led many of them to Guatemala. There, they expanded their democratic alliances, organized a massive though abortive Cuban adventure against a Dominican dictator, and helped win Costa Rica’s 1948 Civil War. It was this transnational threat that brought dictators together against Guatemala’s governments. Before the U.S. government’s infamous operations in the early 1950s, these dictators spent the better part of a decade sharing intelligence, sponsoring antigovernment reactionaries, and financing numerous conspiracies, including air-bombing plots. Their efforts not only caused political divisions inside Guatemala; this network of dictators, regimes, and reactionaries became central components of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation PBFORTUNE and Operation PBSUCCESS.

On the other hand, Caribbean Blood Pacts also uncovers the parts played by the United Fruit Company and the British government. As had those dictators and regimes, these entities opposed the Guatemalan Revolution for propelling the nation’s economic reforms and anticolonial ideals. United Fruit lobbied the U.S. Congress, British intelligence financed antigovernment students, and both disseminated anticommunist propaganda. Again, such forces were pivotal in causing political divisions inside Guatemala and influencing the U.S. government’s operations. In fact, when the U.S. government approved its first interventionist policy, United Fruit and British officials felt the policy was weak and insufficient. The Guatemalan Revolution’s tragic end ultimately was the product of myriad agents, ranging from dictators to Mexican anticommunists.

Caribbean Blood Pacts is the product of research throughout European, Caribbean, Central American, Mexican, and U.S. collections. Descendants of exiles generously shared their histories with me, and I benefitted immensely from supportive institutions, colleagues, and archivists. I do hope my book inspires others to consider how democratic aspirations can reverberate far beyond physical borders and artificial boundaries.

Learn more about Caribbean Blood Pacts at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue