Thomas Douglas's "Protecting Minds"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Amelia Frank-Vitale's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gautham Rao's "White Power"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Gautham Rao's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kira Ganga Kieffer's "Unvaccinated Under God"

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

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

From page 99:

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

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

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

Visit Kira Ganga Kieffer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Hales's "Vital Ties"

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

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

From page 99:

Mapping the Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Roy A. Meals's "Ligaments"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Roy A. Meals's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom French's "The Gap Years"

Tom French is a lifelong mountaineer, cross-country skier, and lover of the outdoors. A senior partner emeritus of McKinsey & Company, he is currently board chair of the Trustees of Reservations, a director of Corning Incorporated, and serves on several other nonprofit boards. He lives in Massachusetts, with his wife, Jill.

French applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Gap Years: Climbing, Skiing, and the Journey Back, his first non-business book, with the following results:

From page 99:

Meanwhile, I had been fine-tuning other aspects of my health preparations. Ever since returning from Aconcagua, I had wondered why, after performing strongly lower on the mountain, I had been so acutely affected by the altitude on summit day. This prompted a memory from years earlier on Denali, when our team had passed through the fourteen-thousand-foot camp on the West Buttress the day after summiting via the West Rib. A high-altitude research team, set up in a park rangers’ tent, had asked to measure our blood oxygen levels, starting with the team member who had dealt best with the altitude up high. I was flagged as that person. Yet, when our oxygen levels were compared, mine was by far the lowest. It was a curiosity that I didn’t dwell on at the time. Now, preparing to head to Everest, where performance at extreme high altitude would be crucial, I tried to connect some dots.

When I first heard about the Page 99 Test, I was excited at the prospect of applying it to The Gap Years. When I flipped to the page to see what awaited me, I was disappointed to find it less representative of the book than hoped. The page describes dealing with various personal health issues as I prepare for the first of two attempts to climb Mount Everest. One of these is trying to obtain a Covid vaccination before departure, just as the vaccine is becoming available to the general public. Another is reconciling my blood oxygen levels at various altitudes with my actual performance at those altitudes. The majority of the book contains accounts of expedition travel, cross-country ski racing, and mountaineering worldwide, interspersed with reflections on spiritual fulfillment found in the outdoors and contemplation of the pursuit of life meaning. Page 99 is far less lyrical. Just practical details. Not the book’s best foot forward.

That said, page 99 has its place in the book, and it is indicative of an important sub-theme of The Gap Years: the interplay between physicality and spirituality. The book describes journeys to the summits of the world’s highest mountains, in a quest to embrace spirits rarely encountered. These outward journeys are powered by inward journeys of preparation, to restore a sixty-year-old body to top physical condition, and to prepare for extreme athletic challenge. The physical journeys are not only practical, but also in their own way spiritual. For someone whose youth was defined by endurance training, returning to it was a voyage of rediscovery and deep meaning. As meaningful in many ways as the summits themselves.

Some of my favorite passages in the book describe the interplay between physical activity and the natural world: the “Zen-like exchange of moist breath and frigid air” while ice climbing, or, while cross-country skiing, “feeling the freedom of moving swiftly through crystalline winter beauty, of pride in one’s body, of sharing the experience with close friends." These moments, verging on spiritual, depended on my body being able to perform at an extremely high level; something that can’t be taken for granted in one’s sixties. Climbing high mountains at this age also has unique risks. Death rates on Everest increase markedly for climbers over sixty. There were many reasons why getting practical health details sorted out was important.

In summary, page 99 of The Gap Years is not particularly gripping, and is not indicative of much of the broader focus of the book. But it refers to some practical details that really mattered, and it hints at an inward journey that is central to it.

Visit Tom French's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sally Shuttleworth's "In Quest of a Cure"

Sally Shuttleworth CBE, FBA, is Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, and the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division. She has also taught at the universities of Princeton, Leeds, and Sheffield. She has published extensively on literature, science, and medicine: previous books include The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (2010, winner of the British Society for Literature and Science Prize), and the co-authored work Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019).

Shuttleworth applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort, and shared the following:

On page 99 we encounter Robert Louis Stevenson as a young man – an aspiring writer, but in ill- health. He was delighted when he was ordered by his doctor to spend the winter in Menton on the French Riviera, and explicitly without his over-anxious parents. On arrival, his elation turns to despair as his body refuses to obey his commands – he fears he may be dying. On moving hotels, however, his spirits lift when he meets a Russian child, ‘a little polyglot button of a three year old’ who initially pronounces him to be a mädchen (or girl) due to his long hair. He is soon spending all his time with her and her family, playing games, and at one point spending an entire afternoon ‘washing Nellie’s dolls with her’.

Stevenson’s ‘delight in children – their joy in life, their creativity and imaginative seriousness – which emerges in much of his later work stems from this period. Later that year he publishes ‘Notes on the Movements of Young Children’ which uses Nellie’s dancing to analyze why we find the somewhat graceless movements of young children so lovable. The attraction, he suggests, is in sympathy, as you ‘see her struggling to find expression for the beauty that was in her against the inefficacy of the dull, half-informed body’. Stevenson is fascinated by what he sees as ‘this war of intelligence against the unwilling body’. He aligns the position of the child, struggling to express herself, with that of the invalid, and also the artist. The page concludes: ‘The child is thus a figure for both the invalid and the artist, and in her sheer joy in life, and determination to overcome the limitations of her body, she clearly became for Stevenson a model for how to transcend the confinement of an invalid identity.’

I was delighted to find that page 99 is an excellent entry point for the book. In Quest of a Cure pursues the lives and writings of various invalids sent into medical exile in Europe by their doctors, roughly in the period 1860-1930, and this example illustrates how closely medical experience and literary writing were intertwined. The findings were often unexpected – in this case, Stevenson’s alignment of the young child, artist, and invalid. Much of the book looks at a period before sanatoria emerged, when invalids lived largely in hotels, and moved around freely; they also often brought their families with them. One theme that emerged during the writing of the book was the position of children in these resorts, accompanying their parents, or indeed suffering themselves. Such strange lives they lived: joyful, and cosmopolitan, as we saw on page 99, but also framed by the presence of disease and death.

Stevenson is one of the various invalids I look at who visited both Menton, and its subsequent, snowy, counterpart, Davos, in the Swiss Alps, where walks on the beaches and into the hills were replaced by vigorous skating and tobogganing, which Stevenson adored. When he arrived in Davos, he was accompanied by his new wife, Fanny, and stepson Lloyd. Lloyd later recalled that he had enjoyed his time in Davos ‘the tobogganing, the skating, the snow-balling’, yet it was a place where ‘half the population … were coughing away the remnants of life’. Stevenson himself became almost as famous for being an itinerant invalid as for his writings, as this 1955 advert for Guinness suggests:

The book follows Stevenson from Menton and Davos, to Bournemouth, and Saranac Lake in NY State, before his subsequent voyages to the South Seas and Samoa (accompanied by his family and redoubtable, widowed mother).

Stevenson is only one of many travellers for health in the book. Others include John Addington Symonds (who made full use of the sexual freedom afforded by his move to Davos), the artist Aubrey Beardsley, and in the twentieth century, Katherine Mansfield and Thomas and Katia Mann. By focusing on two resorts, Menton and Davos, I am able to explore the intersections of lives in these self-declared ‘English Colonies’; the changing patterns of treatment, from balmy seaside to snowy Alps, and from hotels to sanatoria; and the highs and lows of medical exile, for patients, their carers, and their families.

Learn more about In Quest of a Cure at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Bryce's "Grounds for Exclusion"

Benjamin Bryce is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches courses on Latin American and global history.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Grounds for Exclusion: Race, Health, and Disability in Argentine Immigration Policy, 1876–1932, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds itself early in the section "Calculated Risk in a Racialized World." It examines the Punjabi labourers who arrived in Argentina in 1912, arguing that their journeys were the product of a mix of poor information and calculated risk regarding racism and economic prospects across the receiving societies. The page draws on memoirs (Totaram Sanadhya's account of a group of 46 Punjabis in Fiji trying to reach Argentina), interviews in the Buenos Aires Herald, and consular correspondence to show migrants paying their own fares, following kin, demanding protection from the imperial state, and acting on information that travelled by letter from a small group of Punjabi agricultural workers in northern Argentina.

The Page 99 Test works pretty well. Chapter 5, in which page 99 sits, is a microhistory of the 1912 Punjabi arrivals, set against the broader economic and diplomatic entanglement of Argentina and Britain on the eve of the First World War. The chapter argues that both worker agency and state efforts to halt mobility shaped this episode. A browser landing on page 99 catches the chapter’s broader focus on migrants as decision-makers weighing race, empire, and economic opportunity. What the reader would miss is the architecture around this microhistory: the book examines South Asians alongside Chinese, Japanese, Roma, Ottoman subjects, and eastern European Jews, and traces health and disability exclusions as well.

Grounds for Exclusion challenges the long-standing image of Argentina as a nation of open-door immigration. Between 1876 and 1932, Argentine officials built a long list of formal and informal grounds for refusing entry — based on race, health, and disability — that deterred many from ever boarding a ship. The inclusion of millions of Europeans was predicated on the exclusion of others.

Visit Benjamin Bryce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Quigley's "The Man Behind the Cane"

Paul Quigley is the James I. Robertson, Jr. Associate Professor of Civil War History at Virginia Tech, where he also serves as Director of the Center for Humanities and Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. He is author of the award-winning Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-65 (2011).

Quigley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War, with the following results:

The Man Behind the Cane tells the story of Preston Brooks, the South Carolina congressman who infamously caned Senator Charles Sumner in the US Senate chamber in 1856. Brooks’s bloody attack came in response to Sumner’s speech criticizing slavery and insulting one of Brooks’s relatives.

Page 99 comes partway through a section exploring the aftermath of the caning. It begins with a Senate speech delivered by South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler, the relative whose honor Brooks was trying to defend when he assaulted Charles Sumner. Butler defended Brooks, as one would expect. Yet, interestingly, he did so with some equivocation, describing his younger kinsman as being “quick to resentment.”

The page then discusses various incidents showing that Brooks was “still spoiling for a fight” after the caning. For example, when he encountered Massachusetts Congressman Calvin Chaffee in a Washington hotel, he threatened to “whip him on suspicion of his having denounced his conduct … he wanted to whip a few more of the Mass. Men.” Around the same time, Brooks was writing letters to other northern politicians who had condemned the caning, strongly hinting that he would be willing to engage in duels with anyone who decried his bloody assault on Sumner.

The Page 99 Test does indeed reveal some of the major themes of the book. It features our protagonist, the man behind the cane, at his fieriest—demonstrating that the caning was no aberration in his life. Readers will also find on page 99 backward glances to the caning itself, which is of course the centerpiece of the whole book. On this page I note that as Andrew Butler delivered his speech, in the same room as the assault, listeners were undoubtedly thinking of the earlier attack. I speculate that “perhaps splashes of blood remained there, camouflaged by the crimson red carpet of the Senate chamber.”

In discussing Brooks’s willingness to engage in duels with his critics, the page also invokes something explored at length in the chapters on his early life: the fact that Brooks felt an obligation to follow the strictures of the slaveholding South’s culture of honor and manhood, even though his efforts to do so were often incomplete, or misguided, or in some way dissatisfying.

Finally, in touching on Brooks’s post-caning conflicts with northern politicians, page 99 gestures toward the broader political ramifications of the caning, which I emphasize in the latter part of the book. Not only did the caning nudge Americans one step closer to the Civil War, it also catalyzed a transformative public debate about free speech and political violence.

Of course, readers must read the whole book to properly understand Brooks’s motivations for the caning, which stemmed in large part from his frustrating experiences with violence as a young man, including his failed attempt to fight in the Mexican War. They must also read the rest of the book to appreciate the far-reaching impact of the caning on nationwide debates around slavery, free speech, and the rightful relationship between rhetorical and physical violence. But for just one page, page 99 actually does a pretty good job of introducing the main themes and characters of the book!

Learn more about The Man Behind the Cane at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue