Emily G. Shanahan's "Penelope and Her Maids"

Emily G. Shanahan holds a PhD in Classics from Cornell University. She is currently a Solmsen Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Penelope and Her Maids, and shared the following:

From page 99:

On the other hand, the stranger, regardless of whether he is or is not Odysseus, will hear her criticism of their behavior and hopefully understand that she is not fond of these men. Some scholars argue that Penelope’s trick will be obvious to Odysseus, if he gave Penelope no such instruction to get remarried once Telemachus was of age—which would explain why Penelope has never mentioned any such instruction from him before this moment (Büchner 1940, 141; Winkler 1990, 147). Finally, given his own tendency to deceive others, Odysseus ought to respect the trick and appreciate the material gain from it: a woman after his own heart. Odysseus reacts positively to her scheme (18.281–83):

ὣς φάτο· γήθησεν δὲ πολύτλας δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς,
οὕνεκα τῶν μὲν δῶρα παρέλκετο, θέλγε δὲ θυμόν
μειλιχίοις ἐπέεσσι, νόος δέ οἱ ἄλλα μενοίνα.

So she spoke, and much suffering, godlike Odysseus smiled,
Because she drew gifts from them, and charmed their heart
With sweet words, but her mind wanted other things.

What a riddling passage, decontextualized! Page 99 is the second-to-last page of Chapter 4, “Penelope’s Suspicion,” and contains analysis of a scene quoted just prior. In this passage, I follow in the work of scholars such as Philip Harsh (1950) and John Winkler (1990) in theorizing that Penelope may suspect that the mysterious stranger who has just arrived at the palace could be her own husband in disguise. She speaks in a code she trusts him to understand—which he does, based on his positive reaction in the lines quoted above. I think the Page 99 Test would likely lead a reader of the book astray, both because we are forced to interpret Odysseus’ reaction to an unknown event (who are “these men,” and what was “Penelope’s trick”?), and because this analysis speaks to the innovations of others more than my own. My main argument, that Penelope is often reacting to the latent threat of gendered violence and maintains constant risk-mitigation strategies against her aggressive suitors, does not appear here.

There is one way in which this page is, however, representative of the wider book. I work very closely with the text of the Odyssey, quoting, translating, and analyzing approximately 750 lines of the original Greek. These passages are treated in order, so we can see all of Penelope’s statements and decisions in the context of what came before, almost like a running commentary. To me, this seems like the most natural way to assess character and motivation, but it is not, in fact, how previous works tend to be organized; see for example the works of Nancy Felson (1994), Marilyn Katz (1991), and Ioanna Papadopoulou-Belmehdi (1994). My hope, though, is that readers will be able to enjoy the excitement and buildup of the Odyssey’s narrative progression as they ponder questions of psychological motivation, social dynamics, and Homeric scholarship itself.

Learn more about Penelope and Her Maids at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek A. Ide's "Ghosts of Bandung"

Derek A. Ide is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Grand Valley State University and a historian of the Cold War, the Global South, and anticolonialism.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Ghosts of Bandung: Black Power and Palestine in the Global Cold War, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Whatever the flaws in his account, this description was an accurate reflection of CONEFO and its objectives. Sukarno, Aidit, and the PRC’s leaders all envisioned CONEFO as a viable alternative to the United Nations. All anti-imperialist forces, from “fellow travelers” to progressive friends in the First World, would find a home there. It goes without saying that the Palestine Liberation Organization, and its composite parties that emerged in succeed­ing years, would have been represented. And certainly, organizations like the Black Panther Party in the US—founded just months after CONEFO’s inaugural session scheduled in August 1966—would have been given space at CONEFO.

But these grandiose visions of a Third World competitor to the UN were crushed under Suharto’s military boot. Burgeoning national liberation movements, especially emergent but geographically diffuse movements like Black Power and the Palestinian revolution, had lost what had promised to be a vital political and institutional home. While the Panthers and Palestinians would, at various junctures, attempt to use the United Nations as a tool to further their objectives, the limitations of the UN—the same institution that sanctioned the Nakba in 1948—became clearer by the day.

This selection, found on page 99 of Ghosts of Bandung, captures the heart and essence of my book. When, as a young graduate student, I set out to write a book tracing the histories that bound Black Power and the Palestinian Revolution, I had no idea I would one day be writing about Indonesia. I had no idea that “Bandung” would appear in the title, nor that Sukarno’s countenance would grace the front cover.

But as I researched this book – my first academic work – it became clear to me that the timelines of Black Power and Palestine were too closely synchronized. While other scholars had demonstrated that both movements shared a verbiage and vision, the rise of fall of these movements in constellation suggested far more was at play. I had yet to discover the missing piece of that puzzle. The archives led me, by happenstance, to the Conference of the New Emerging Forces (CONEFO). And boy what a missing piece of the puzzle it turned out to be!

CONEFO, in all its forgotten glory, completed the story I set out to tell. Indonesian president Sukarno declared 1964 the “Year of Living Dangerously.” A year before that, in 1963, he had launched his alternative to the Olympics, the “Games of the New Emerging Forces,” or GANEFO. And in January of 1965 he withdrew Indonesia as a member of the United Nations. It was the first – and last – time that a nation has willingly withdrawn from the UN. He planned his own United Nations – CONEFO -- based in Jakarta and emanating in the Global South. It is my contention that had CONEFO not been violently destroyed in the U.S.-backed military coup of October 1965, we would be living in the very different world today.

The book, ultimately, it about that lost future. I hope Ghosts of Bandung will resuscitate this buried past not only for what might have been, but what might yet still be.

Learn more about Ghosts of Bandung at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

danah boyd's "Data Are Made, Not Found"

danah boyd is the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University, where she works on topics at the intersection of technology and society. She is also the founder of the research institute Data & Society and the author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.

boyd applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census, with the following results:

Flip to page 99 and you’re immediately greeted with a battle at the heart of the book. The first two sentences remind you of the high stakes surrounding the census - and why President Trump was determined to ensure that the Census Bureau delivered the data on the statutory deadline, despite the massive disruptions introduced by the Covid-19 pandemic. “If the data were delivered on December 31, he would be president, regardless of whether or not he was reelected. But if Trump lost his bid for reelection— and census data were not delivered until after inauguration day in January 2021— he would not be in control of apportionment.”

As the page unfolds, many key characters who appear throughout the book make an appearance, vocalizing their struggle to deliver on the President’s requirements. We get to hear from the man in charge of the 2020 census - Al Fontenot - as he delivers the orders to his team. He is quoted as saying “We don’t have an option now. We were told to put together a plan that would allow us to finish on time.” And then we get to dive into the headspace of the group as a whole, pulled from multiple interviews. “Despite their misgivings, the team took their orders and started to pivot accordingly.”

The last paragraph on the page provides insight into the importance of the earlier dialogue and documented decision-making - as well as the civil servants’ commitment to doing “the impossible,” which is a theme throughout the book. “Time is not nearly as malleable as politicians seemed to believe. Fontenot’s team delivered an August replan, but not without serious doubt.”

Page 99 reflects the ethnographic detail, rich storytelling, and analysis that is woven throughout Data Are Made, Not Found. It also showcases one of the book’s core arguments. The book argues that politicians are playing a game of “Jenga politics,” taking out wooden pieces of the administrative state and adding pressure on top. Unlike the playful version, where everyone laughs when the tower collapses, the consequences of Jenga politics are the collapse of our democracy. Civil servants try to prevent the Jenga tower from falling, but they are struggling to protect democracy’s data. Page 99 is a great example of how civil servants at the Census Bureau are pushed into a corner to appease partisan interests, Constitutional requirements be damned.

Visit danah boyd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Marsh's "Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race"

Sarah Marsh is Associate Professor of English at Seton Hill University. A scholar of anglophone literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, she focuses on the western Atlantic histories of race, slavery, and antislavery. Her work explores how eighteenth-century writing confronted the moral, spiritual, and political crises of human slavery, and how literary forms helped shape emerging ideas about freedom, equality, personhood, and human flourishing.

Marsh applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race: A Literary and Legal History of Slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1688-1818, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race opens a section titled “The Interesting Narrative and the Rise of Transatlantic Abolition,” which sets the scene for Olaudah Equiano’s appeal to the British Crown for the abolition of slavery. It begins:

When Equiano was writing in the late 1780s, the British public’s serious engagement with Parliament on the question of Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave system was still less than a decade old. As Christopher Leslie Brown has shown, the first known petition to Parliament on the question of the slave trade was submitted in June of 1783, signed by 273 Quakers. The Quakers found it their “religious duty to lay the suffering situation” of enslaved Africans before the House of Commons “as a subject loudly calling for the humane interposition of the Legislature.” The Quakers continued by voicing their “regret, that a nation professing the Christian faith, should so far counteract the principles of humanity and justice, as by cruel treatment of this oppressed race, to fill their minds with prejudices against the mild and beneficent doctrines of the Gospel.” The Commons, which in the previous century had appealed to ideals of Christian benevolence and generosity to fence in the royal prerogative of the Stuarts, were now appealed to by members of the British public to curb the absolute power of colonial slaveholders.

This page passes the Page 99 Test with something like flying colors. The last sentence of the paragraph above is a solid recapitulation of the book's central finding: Novel Constitutions argues that racial slavery in the English Atlantic, and the concept of race itself, grew out of seventeenth-century England’s great constitutional struggle between the divine right of kings and the immemorial liberties of the English people's ancient constitution. In the colonies, English slaveholders claimed over other human beings the absolute power that people and Parliament had refused to the Stuart kings. By 1783, Britons had begun to ask Parliament to fence in slaveholding planters and slave traders as it had once fenced in the Crown.

This page also pretty well encapsulates the book’s methodology of reading literary and legal texts together: page 99 of Novel Constitutions includes a Quaker petition, a treaty, and a reference to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, whose title character goes outside of royal power to become a slaveholder in his own right. Further, the Quaker petition on page 99 conceives of human slavery as not only a crime against humanity, but a crime against God; in this way, the page points toward Novel Constitution's larger project of explaining why we call racial slavery the "original sin" of the American republic.

Learn more about Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael B. Cosmopoulos's "Rediscovering Homer"

Michael B. Cosmopoulos is the Hellenic Government-Karakas Foundation Professor in Greek Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada, he is the author of numerous books on the archaeology and history of ancient Greece, most recently the award-winning The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Greek Epic Poetry.

Cosmopoulos applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rediscovering Homer: The Human Experience in the Odyssey and the Iliad, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Rediscovering Homer falls in Chapter 4, “War and Violence,” in a section devoted to violence and trauma and presents two particularly powerful scenes from the Iliad. In the first, the Greek and Trojan armies clash in battle, their collision compared by Homer to two mountain torrents crashing together, and a warrior is killed when a spear pierces his forehead. In the second, warriors struggle over the corpse of Sarpedon, their weapons clashing amid blood and dust. Homer compares them to flies swarming around pails of milk, an image that strips the battle of any semblance of heroic glory.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

The Page 99 Test works well for this book, although the page represents only one aspect of its broader subject. One of my principal arguments is that the Iliad and the Odyssey are much more than stories of heroic adventures, because they preserve universal and profoundly human experiences: the experiences of people who lived through war, violence, loss, displacement, and the difficult process of rebuilding their lives.

We tend to associate Homer with heroic ideals, courage, honor, and military glory, but the reality is that the poems also present a different picture, one of suffering, grief, fear, and the devastating consequences of violence. Page 99 captures precisely this tension between the traditional glorification of war and the harsh realities of human experience.

This perspective is also deeply personal. My parents lived through the devastation of World War II and the Greek Civil War, and their experiences shaped my understanding of the lasting effects of violence and loss.

The book explores the full range of human experience, from family relationships and social bonds to political power, economic struggles, religion, and the choices we make in the face of adversity. At the heart of the book is the journey through life, with all its challenges, losses, and uncertainties, a journey embodied by Odysseus, whose story connects the two epics.

The Iliad portrays the devastation of war and its consequences for individuals and communities, while the Odyssey turns to the equally difficult struggle to survive, return home, and rebuild a life after loss. Together, the poems speak to experiences that remain fundamental to the human condition, which is why they continue to resonate with us nearly three thousand years after they began to take shape.

Visit Michael B. Cosmopoulos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bryant Simon's "For Customers Only"

Bryant Simon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of History and the academic chair of the honors program at Temple University. He is the author of The Hamlet Fire: The Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, as well as Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. He is a regular guest on the History Channel and a contributor to outlets like the New York Daily News, Washington Post, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Simon applied the Ford Madox Ford-inspired "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality, with the following results:

Page 99 of my new book, For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality, lands readers right smack in the middle of the murder investigation of Edgar L. Eckert, an assistant treasurer for a high-end men’s clothing story in mid-town Manhattan.

And it lands them right smack in the middle of a key transition in the book’s trajectory.

On a cool mid-May night in1936, after dinner with a colleague, Eckert, fifty-fours years old, married, and wearing a tailored suit, a gold ring and gold watch, walked towards Times Square. By then, the Bronx resident had lived in the city for almost four decades.

Still, he asked a trio of men how to get to the well-marked subway station a block or two away. They pointed him in the right direction and then followed him into the station, down onto the platform, and then up to a mezzanine and what was later described as an “out of the way” public bathroom.

Just after 2AM, a janitor found Eckert slumped on the bathroom floor, unable to speak and barely conscious. He died a few minutes later.

The police launched a manhunt for the killers and puzzled over Eckert’s movements. That’s what I wrote about on page 99. New York City detectives knew right away that this was a robbery. Eckert’s ring, watch, and wallet were gone, but they also wondered about the “queer” dimensions of the crime. Were the three men hustlers? Had Eckert lured them into a public bathroom for a quick sexual encounter before heading back to his modest outer borough home?

From the time that the first public bathrooms opened in New York in the late 19th Century, men seeking sex with other men (and male presenting people) met at the sinks and in the stalls. The police were alarmed and tried to better surveille these places. Along with allies on the city council, they put laws on the book that outlawed oral sex. But still men engaged in sexual encounters with other men in the city’s public bathrooms and this private act in public disturbed authorities.

After Ecket was killed, New York decided on a new tactic. City officials closed the out-of-the-way bathroom where Eckert was slain and a few others. The idea was to eliminate this place for illicit sex, to take it off the map, and to do what surveillance and arrests could not do, disappear those interested in sex in public from view.

This official move represented a massive change in bathroom governance. The initial public bathrooms were opened to expand the public sphere, to make the city bigger and more accessible to more people. From the 1930s forward, local leaders shifted gears and tried to narrow the public by closing public bathrooms – this happened after segregation broke down, this happened when homelessness came into view, and this is happening now to disappear trans and gender queer people, and this is the action unfolding on page 99 of my book.

Ford Madox Ford was right!

Learn more about For Customers Only at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Caplan's "When Healing Harms"

Eric Caplan is author of Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy and recipient of the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial―and the Case That Shook Psychiatry, and shared the following:

Page 99 of When Healing Harms finds Dr. Raphael Osheroff trying to reclaim the life he had left behind ten months earlier. Once a prosperous physician who owned and operated a thriving dialysis practice, Osheroff had spent seven months at Chestnut Lodge, a prestigious psychiatric hospital outside Washington, D.C., where his doctors treated his severe depression with intensive psychotherapy alone. They documented his physical and emotional deterioration in painstaking detail (the relentless pacing, the forty-pound weight loss, the blackened toes) yet refused to prescribe antidepressant medication that might relieve his suffering. He then spent three months at Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut, where medication and supportive psychotherapy began lifting his depression within weeks.

But his homecoming came with no yellow ribbon tied around an old oak tree. What he returned to was not only an empty house, stripped of its furniture and even its grand piano, but a collapsing marriage and a court order denying him the right to visit his two older sons. Worse still, Dr. Robert Greenspan, his trusted associate and friend, “the brother I never had,” as Osheroff called him, had promised to preserve and protect his medical practice during his hospitalization but had been surreptitiously maneuvering to take it from him. When Osheroff returned to the dialysis center, Greenspan and another colleague refused even to speak with him. Having survived a devastating psychiatric illness, he now faced the loss of the professional life he had spent years building.

The Ford Madox Ford-inspired Page 99 Test works remarkably well for this book, although perhaps not for the most obvious reasons.

When Healing Harms recounts a landmark malpractice case that exposed a profound division within American psychiatry over the treatment of depression. Osheroff’s lawsuit against Chestnut Lodge became a cause célèbre, widely understood as a contest between psychoanalysis and biological psychiatry. At its heart, though, was a simpler question: whether a desperately ill patient had received the standard of care. Its consequences reached far beyond the hearing room, accelerating changes already underway in how America treats mental illness.

The case also raises a question psychiatry has yet to answer. The profession has long held unearned confidence in its theories of both mind and brain. It has given us the Oedipus complex and the chemical imbalance, but not yet the mechanisms that would confirm either. We keep substituting metaphor for mechanism. That need not harm patients, since treatments can work even when we cannot fully explain why. That said, uncertainty is no license to persist in a course of treatment that worsens, rather than relieves, a patient’s suffering. Osheroff’s doctors were so sure of their theory that they interpreted his deterioration as evidence that the treatment was working: he had to get worse before he could get better. When theory becomes dogma, the patient becomes collateral damage.

But the book is also about something more intimate: the distance between medical recovery and personal restoration.

Osheroff eventually prevailed in his legal battle, but vindication was not restoration. His victory could not repair his marriage, restore his bond with his sons, or return the years he believed had been stolen from him. His case became a defining episode in the history of American psychiatry, even as the man at its center struggled to rebuild his life.

Page 99 captures that paradox. Osheroff had recovered from his depression. What he had not recovered was the world he had lost.

Readers can follow each of the book’s notes to the underlying primary sources, wherever the law allows, at whhsources.org.

Visit Eric Caplan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Young Welke's "Writing with Fire"

Barbara Young Welke is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of history and law at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States and Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life, and reported the following:

From page 99:

On Sunday, April 8, 1945, a double headline spanned the columns of page 1 of the Washington, DC, Times-Herald: “Patton Seizes Nazi Gold Hoard” and “Yanks Smash Japs Naval Power.” But just beneath these headlines, in columns 2 and 3, was an investigative report by Times-Herald reporters Roland Nicholson and Spence Drummond: “D.C. Parents Warned: Inflammable Cowboy Suits Kill One Child Here, Burn 7” and “Fuzzy ‘Chaps’ Flare Like Torches; Stores Are Notified, Probe Launched.” Here was what for so long had been lacking: a story clearly identifying the danger.

Here’s what I like about the Page 99 Test for Writing with Fire: it lands in a chapter about the cowboy suit tragedy. At mid-century, children across the United States suffered burns when their highly inflammable Gene Autry cowboy playsuits caught fire, Americans’ first reckoning with “flammable fabrics.” The history of this tragedy is the heart of the book. One of the questions that troubled me from the start in working on this project was why it had taken so long—close to three years of children across the United States being burned, many dying—before the hazard began to be known for what it was. The Page 99 Test lands in the chapter focused on the role of the press in reinforcing the common-sense narrative that this is what happens when children play with fire, situates readers in the broader World War II context in which this tragedy unfolded; and, just so happens to be the page on which I introduce news stories from DC that identified the dangerously inflammable character of the fuzzy fabric on the chaps of the Gene Autry cowboy suit as the cause of deaths and injuries. As readers later learn, this coverage was key to the first lawsuits brought against Autry and others involved in producing and selling the cowboy suits.

But the test is also misleading. Although the news broke in DC, it did not break elsewhere with the result that children continued to be burned and die. But it’s also misleading because this tragedy is only one of three strands in this braided narrative. Intertwined with the cowboy suit tragedy is a history of the curriculum vitae, the form at the center of academic life. That sounds dry, unrelated, and certainly unexpected. It’s none of these things. It’s here because a traumatic loss in my life—the sudden death of my teenage daughter—led me to question how the CV, as it is colloquially called, claims to represent a life, and yet excludes so much of what gives life meaning, reinforcing norms that ask scholars to distance themselves from their emotions and personal experience in the writing of history and other disciplines. Braided between the two historical strands are letters I wrote my daughter in the year and a half after her death. Together this braided narrative invites readers to think deeply about history and the course of a life.

Learn more about Writing with Fire at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Livia K. Stone's "Without Masters"

Livia K. Stone is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Illinois State University and author of Atenco Lives!: Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Without Masters: Autogestión, Anarchist Ethics, and Mexico City Punk, with the following results:

Page 99 of Without Masters: Autogestión, Anarchist Ethics, and Mexico City Punk does provide an interesting insight into the book as a whole. It describes a pivotal moment in the recent history of the concept of autogestión (often translated as self-management, or non-hierarchical organization) that the book describes.

From page 99:

The early 1990s saw a proliferation of both anarcho-punk zines and autogestión discourse. The year 1992 was the five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus's initial (Spain funded) voyage to the Americas, and it spurred a political response across the rapidly increasing number of zines and their increasingly articulate politics that were disgusted by the official events celebrating the anniversary rather than condemning it. While Contraviolencia and Carmelo were early innovators of anarcho-punk zines, after 1992, it would have been difficult to find a punk zine that didn't mix its interviews with bands and concerts announcements with anarchist political essays.

The page goes on to describe that part of the politicization of the punk scene was happening because punks were increasingly hanging out and making their zines at Mexico City’s anarchist library, founded by a man named Ricardo Mestre, who was an exile from the Spanish Civil War earlier in the century. They were becoming acquainted with classical anarchist texts there, but also the library was becoming a social center for producing anarcho-punk publications, including a wealth of zines that formed the basis of this part of the book.

Without Masters overall uses the recent history of autogestión as a window through which to explore some large issues at the intersections of activism and scholarship, including how academics can appropriate activist ideas and how activists can deploy academic ideas. It is a fascinating story of cultural change through time. Although I believe the story of autogestión is a thrilling one in its own right, I think even readers not particularly interested in anarchism, punk, or even Mexico, will find it a compelling story of cultural and political movement through many of the major political moments of the twentieth century: African independence movements of the early 1960s when autogestión emerged, the countercultural and student movements of the late 1960s and 1970s where it was used as a slogan, punk in the 1970s and 1980s when it transformed meanings, Zapatismo and the anti-neoliberal movements of the 1990s that popularized the term and attached it to indigenous organizing, and the turn towards ideas of the local and sustainable in the 2000s where it became a foundational principle for small collectives.

Learn more about Without Masters at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin Waite's "The Boundless Biddy Mason"

Kevin Waite is Anne Stark Watson and Chester Watson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. His first book, West of Slavery, won the 2022 Wiley-Silver Prize and was shortlisted for three other awards, including the Lincoln Prize. His writing appears in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Slate, National Geographic, and The New Republic. Waite moonlights in the TV and film industry, most recently as the writer and producer of a six-episode docuseries on the American Revolution for National Geographic and Disney+.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West, and shared the following:

Oh great. This section. That’s what I thought as I cracked open my book to page 99 and confronted a particularly stubborn passage. There weren’t many, if any, sections that I rewrote as many times as I did this one. It describes the various tasks that Biddy Mason performed as an enslaved woman on a remote ranch outside San Bernardino, California in the early 1850s.

Mason had been hauled across the continent on a series of forced migrations – from Georgia to Mississippi to Utah and finally to California – over the preceding years. Although California had technically outlawed slavery in its state constitution, Mason and her daughters continued to labor in bondage for about five years after their arrival in 1851. Her owner, Robert Smith, was by this point the largest slaveholder in the American Far West, with Mason and thirteen others under his control.

What did slavery look like in the free state of California? That’s what this passage attempts to describe. Wheat and dairy, rather than cotton and sugar, dictated the rhythms of the day for enslaved people on Smith’s ranch. Mason probably spent a portion of her day with Smith’s herd of livestock, when she wasn’t otherwise harvesting his fields, cleaning his home, or delivering his neighbors' children. (She was a skilled midwife on top of it all.)

What made this passage particularly difficult to write also makes it representative and illuminating. Mason left no records in her own hand, aside from a few legal documents marked with an “X.” Her story, therefore, must be reconstructed from a fragmentary archival base, often the records of those who viewed her as property, not a person. To avoid scrutiny in an ostensibly free state, California slaveholders rarely described their Black laborers in any detail. This passage, then, is stitched together from the observations of others – often hastily rendered in letters or diaries – as well as the tithing records of Robert Smith, a member of the LDS Church.

The aim of this passage is to render visible what others sought to hide. And that, in effect, is the aim of the book as a whole: to illuminate the life of a remarkable woman, who survived a 3,000-mile forced migration, helped launch the largest freedom suit in the history of the American West, and eventually built an empire in Los Angeles real estate that made her the 19th-century equivalent of a multi-millionaire.

Learn more about The Boundless Biddy Mason at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue