Scot McFarlane's "The River That Made Texas"

Scot McFarlane is a river historian and founder of the Oxbow History Company.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The River That Made Texas: A Forgotten History of the Trinity, and reported the following:

From page 99:

A map made by Riché in 1899 highlights the unique emphasis placed on Trinity navigation across Texas (fig. 8.6). Riché created it for a different, smaller Texas river survey of the San Bernard River that he submitted to Congress. In the catalog description of the New York Public Library where this map is now archived, there is no mention of the Trinity, but it stands out nonetheless. The map shows all the Texas rivers that flow into the Gulf of Mexico. The rivers are color coded, with blue indicating existing opportunities to navigate and red for river sections where proposed improvements could make the river navigable. Along the coast, most waterways have a mix of red and blue. The Trinity is coded as already navigable up to Liberty, and then from there to Dallas it is colored red. Riché marked no other rivers in this manner, and the result makes the map appear as though a blood-colored gash runs across the state—as if the blood from Fort Worth’s slaughterhouses dyed the Trinity.

Also included on page 99 is an image of the river with this caption: "This image from the 1899 Army Corps of Engineers survey captures three of the key challenges of navigation: low water, snags, and a logjam."

Before I started writing The River That Made Texas, my friend and mentor Matt Klingle had told me about the 99 page test, so I actually began writing the book in the middle with this very test in mind, though where I began writing does not overlap perfectly with page 99 in the final published version.

This excerpt highlights the Trinity River's unique place in Texas history as the state's most navigable river and the one that boosters and engineers dreamed of making even more navigable all the way to Dallas and Fort Worth. This section of the book explains how men like Riché overlooked the communities that already called the river home downstream of Dallas. Essentially they treated it as a wilderness in need of development when in fact it was a vital home. Though this particular section does not share the story of the Trinity River's people, its themes and symbolism are at the core of the book when I wrote how Trinity's representation on the map makes it look "as though a blood-colored gash runs across the state." Funny enough, the book's blurb from Karl Jacoby echoes this line perfectly: "Scot McFarlane shows how the Trinity River cuts like a knife through the heart of Texas history."

Visit Scot McFarlane's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samantha Barbas's "Hate Speech"

Samantha Barbas is a legal and cultural historian and the author of several books on media history and legal history topics, with a focus on journalism, privacy, defamation, and the First Amendment.

She is a Professor of Law at the University at Iowa, and has a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award.

Barbas applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Hate Speech: The Legal and Cultural History of an American Dilemma, with the following results:

Page 99 describes the case of Kunz v. New York, from 1951. The case involved a Baptist minister who made speeches containing vile invective against Catholics and Jews and was convicted for making a speech on the streets of New York without a permit. Kunz had been denied a permit because of a flood of complaints to authorities about his speeches. The Supreme Court struck down the city ordinance, stating that it violated the First Amendment because it gave authorities the power to control, in advance, the ability to speak freely on religious subjects.

Justice Robert Jackson fired off an indignant dissent. He characterized the minister’s hateful statements – especially in light of the Holocaust – as fighting words, akin to physical blows. He believed that a discretionary permit system like New York’s could protect a city against “fanatics who take possession of its streets to hurl into its crowds defamatory epithets that hurt like rocks.”

Page 99 captures the tension at the heart of the book. For over a hundred years, Americans have been torn between the importance of protecting against the violence and inequality that can stem from hate speech, and, at the same time, upholding the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. By the early 1950s, the Supreme Court was moving in a speech-protective direction, issuing rulings that cast doubt on the validity of restrictions on hate speech. In Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), the Court struck down Chicago’s breach-of-the-peace conviction of an antisemitic speaker. Justice Jackson – who had returned to the Court after serving as lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials – warned in dissent that the Court had overlooked the connections between hate speech and totalitarian takeover and was turning the Bill of Rights into a “suicide pact.”

Jackson lost the fight, and over the next two decades, the Court created a First Amendment jurisprudence that essentially negated the possibility of hate speech laws. Today, there are no “hate speech laws” in America, of the kind that exist in most other countries; hate speech is generally protected by the First Amendment. Although Jackson’s position lost at the Supreme Court, he won in the court of public opinion—he received fan mail and accolades for his “suicide pact” statement.

This dynamic remains: while most Americans support free speech generally, they draw the line at protecting hate speech. There is no more contested free speech idea than “freedom for the thought that we hate.”

Visit Samantha Barbas's website.

The Page 99 Test: Laws of Image.

The Page 99 Test: Newsworthy.

The Page 99 Test: The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade.

The Page 99 Test: Actual Malice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Alan Dugatkin's "Nary a Horse Left Standing"

Lee Dugatkin is Professor of Biology at the University of Louisville. The author of How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog), Power in the Wild, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, and Principles of Animal Behavior, among other books, he is a fellow in the Animal Behavior Society and has lectured at over 200 universities and museums across the globe. He is a contributor to Scientific American, Psychology Today, and New Scientist.

Dugatkin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City, and shared the following:

From page 99 of Nary a Horse Left Standing:

In [Henry] Bergh’s speech to the ASPCA in which he invoked “the tribunal of Eternal Justice” for acts of cruelty against animals, he also tells his fellow members to ask themselves this: “Why should a man . . . who without the least remorse torments and destroys other creatures, hesitate to do the same, after such an apprenticeship, to any human being that happens to stand in the way of his caprices or ambition?” Bergh was convinced such a man would not hesitate and was “persuaded that the obduracy of heart and unrelenting disposition which we discover in some men, is owing in a great measure to the early indulgence of such a disposition towards the inferior animals.

The Page 99 Test for Nary a Horse Left Standing works respectably well for one thread in the book: how a massive 1872 outbreak of horse flu that paralyzed almost every major urban center in North America ushered in a revolution in animal rights, led by Henry Bergh and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

That massive outbreak of horse flu soon was dubbed The Great Epizootic, the animal equivalent of a pandemic. In the fall of 1872, horses were the lifeblood of every metropolis across North America. New York City alone had 38,000, who were the living, breathing engines that powered the city. At least half, and likely more, of those horses were laid up for weeks at a time during The Great Epizootic. Suddenly, the power sources driving fire carts, garbage trucks, hearses and delivery carts that stocked the shelves of everything from thousands of mom and pop stores to the new department stores, were convalescing in stables.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Before The Great Epizootic, each day more than 300,000 tickets were sold to ride on streetcars powered by horses. Each of these streetcars transported one or two dozen people to work, to shop or to cultural venues like the newly opened Metropolitan Museum of Art and The American Museum of Natural History.

During The Great Epizootic the number of streetcars riding the inlaid rails of Gotham plummeted. This was in part due to all the sick horses in streetcar company stables, but it was also due to Henry Burgh and the ASPCA’s work to make sure that when avarice owners of these companies tried to force clearly sick horses to work nonetheless, they failed at the opportunity to line their pockets at the expense of those animals.

The goings on of October 30, 1872 provide a snapshot of what became a daily occurrence. That day, in the heat of The Great Epizootic, Bergh and a team from the ASPCA stationed themselves near a switch that allowed streetcars from the Third Avenue streetcar line to move from uptown to downtown tracks. Two policemen stood by to keep order. When a Third Avenue streetcar came along, Bergh and his team forced it to stop and inspected the horses. “Mr. Bergh pointed to the yellow looking noses of the horses,” reported the New York Herald, a paper that had already dubbed Bergh “the great philohippic.” “These animals are too sick to work,” the Herald wrote, quoting Bergh, “take the other track and go back to the stables.”

The next day Bergh was back on the streets, this time where the Bleecker Street streetcar line ran, to inspect more horses. So it went every day during The Great Epizootic, when nary a horse was left standing.

Visit Lee Alan Dugatkin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Power in the Wild.

The Page 99 Test: Dr. Calhoun's Mousery.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leah C. Stokes's "The Carbon Wave"

Leah C. Stokes is Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at UC Santa Barbara. As a leading climate advocate, she has championed climate policy in the United States at all levels of government and was selected for Time Magazine’s Time100 Next list and Business Insider’s top 30 global climate leaders. A recipient of a Harvard University Radcliffe Fellowship, she is the author of the award-winning Short Circuiting Policy, which was listed as one of the top 5 climate books in 2020 by The New York Times.

Stokes applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The combination of Gina’s bad quote and the delayed bipartisan infrastructure package caused a bunch of senators to begin speaking up more forcefully. Senator Smith stayed on message, arguing her clean electricity program was key. Senator Heinrich said he wouldn’t vote for a package without climate in it, and Senator Wyden agreed. But the idea really caught fire when Senator Markey told The New York Times that he wouldn’t support an infrastructure deal without climate at its center, saying: “No climate, no deal.” Across the climate movement, folks seized on this phrase, making it our rallying cry. We repeated it again and again, putting it on websites, banners, and tweets.”

Page 99 of The Carbon Wave gives the reader a look at one snippet of the long, tumultuous journey that gave way to the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest federal climate package in American history. This moment comes in the Spring of 2021, when President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Schumer are trying to build support for a climate bill–particularly from moderate Senator Joe Manchin–as a bipartisan infrastructure package is simultaneously being negotiated. I’d say this page is largely representative of the broader story for a couple of reasons.

This moment captures one of the book’s central themes, which is that advocacy is a lot like jazz: it’s highly improvisational and unpredictable, and the fight for the IRA was no different. When unexpected challenges or windows of opportunities arose, we pivoted, focusing on how to capitalize on new openings and make progress. If Gina McCarthy (President Biden’s National Climate Advisor) hadn’t had that accidental slip-up, “No Climate, No Deal” would never have taken hold, pressuring the administration and Senate negotiators to continue prioritizing the climate law alongside the bipartisan infrastructure deal.

This passage also highlights how delicate policy making can be: leaders have different priorities and perceptions of what’s important, and seemingly minor errors or misunderstandings can derail the entire process. Exposing readers to tense political moments like this one helps people understand how bills actually become laws, which is often more coordinated and complicated than the Schoolhouse Rock jingle suggests. In reality, government leaders, policy wonks, outside advocates, and everyday people all form an intricate network to set policy goals, maintain public pressure, and negotiate to get a bill across the finish line.

Visit Leah C. Stokes's website.

The Page 99 Test: Short Circuiting Policy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Hines's "Forms of Suffering"

Jessica Hines is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine where she specializes in Medieval literature and culture. She has a particular interest in the intersection of sexuality, religion, and race, as well as medieval and classical theories of ethics and the emotions.

Hines applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Forms of Suffering: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Chaucerian Pity, with the following results:

Page 99 is part of the introduction to my third chapter, "Pitous Need: Women's Thralldom and Christian Victorie in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale." The page sets up a particular oddity in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale, one of the Canterbury Tales by the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer. The central conceit of the Canterbury Tales is that a group of travelers and pilgrims hold a storytelling competition to entertain themselves on their journey from London to Canterbury. The teller of this tale, a lawyer, opens by misrepresenting how a theological treatise that was hugely popular in the Middle Ages, Innocent III's On the Misery of the Human Condition (De miseria humanae conditionis), describes the pain of poverty. The Man of Law uses lines from Innocent to argue that it is terrible to be poor and wonderful to be a wealthy merchant; in contrast, Innocent argues that rich and poor alike suffer and that every person should feel compassion and anxiety for the suffering of others. The Man of Law then tells a strange story with little obvious connection to merchants or poverty: Custance, a Roman emperor's daughter, is married off to a Syrian sultan and then repeatedly set adrift at sea. Page 99 lays out this textual oddity and begins to explain it: Chaucer uses the tale to explore a medieval cultural anxiety about how to read accurately the signs of another person's need and then how best to respond to that need—emotionally, spiritually, and materially.

The Page 99 Test doesn't work particularly well for my book. If you looked only at page 99, you'd come away thinking the book is a dry account of everything Chaucer read, or of how scholars have historically tried to make sense of this strange tale and its seemingly mismatched teller. You wouldn't get a sense of the stakes of my argument—why anyone should care how the Man of Law talks about a (now obscure) medieval theological text.

What's interesting about looking at my page 99 is that it gives a sense of how I tend to tackle interpretative challenges: something odd is going on in one of Chaucer’s poems—why is it happening? Forms of Suffering contends that Chaucer reformulated a wide range of European discourses about pity and its practices for an English audience and, in the process, made pity into a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature. For medieval readers, pity was closer to what we would call compassion, and it carried a sense of duty to care for those who suffer. And Chaucer brought to the fore pity's capacity to challenge—even overturn—unjust power structures such as those associated with class, gender, and race. Critically, however, he also explored pity's precarity: the ways it could easily slide from transformative justice into a weapon of oppression. Each chapter first identifies something strange in Chaucer's treatment of pity, then gives the historical context that helps explain that strangeness, and finally unpacks how Chaucer explores the ethical stakes of medieval ideas about pity. In this chapter, that context includes Innocent III and medieval debates over charitable aid to the poor, which worried about how to tell true need from feigned need. The stakes lie in how the tale's heroine, Custance, effectively uses rhetorical signs of pity to navigate her own experience of being rendered terribly needy and vulnerable. Page 99 sits at the transition from describing the oddity to unpacking the historical context.

Visit Jessica Hines's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Thorson's "The Walden Experiments"

Robert M. Thorson is professor of Earth sciences at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth Century Science, The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, and The Guide to Walden Pond.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Walden Experiments: The Science of Henry David Thoreau, and shared the following:

Page 99 begins with "...of antibiotics, corporate monopolies, and farms the size of townships." The first part of the sentence on page 98 critiqued the "horror show" of the U.S. farm economy. It continues on to embrace the work of the late Wendell Berry, a devotee of Thoreau who "may be the most well-known of those seeing a saner course" for agriculture, in this case regenerative agriculture. Page 99 ends midway through a quote from Walden that illustrates Thoreau's precedent as an activist against what was called scientific farming in his age, but which is now much of its "soul-shattering" economy. This quote is within Chapter 7 - The Bean Field, which describes Thoreau's successful experiment in regenerative agriculture.

Yes, you can get a good sense of the book on page 99, it being a critique of a modern problem followed by Walden's prophetic words about that problem that still apply today, justifying Bill McKibben's blurb quote: "Thoreau was not just ahead of his time but of our time too." Though page 99 is about regenerative agriculture, other pages do the same for extinction, AI, climate change, pollution, evolution, war, and other problems facing the world today.

The book is a logical successor to a series of my three previous books, because it highlights Thoreau's relevance to modern society. With respect to the environmental and sustainability movements, it offers a benchmark or anchor in time for the ideas we need to live sustainably on planet earth. The book also includes many small personal anecdotes of my own life --some of which are funny-- to keep the relationship between author and reader human and personal.

Visit Robert Thorson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark B. Kelley's "Crimes Against Feeling"

Mark B. Kelley is associate professor of English at Florida International University and former managing editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. His work has appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers; American Literary Realism; and the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association; as well as in the essay collection, India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s, edited by Rajender Kaur and Anupama Arora.

Kelley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crimes Against Feeling: Piracy, Sympathy, and Ocean Politics in Antebellum American Legal Culture, and reported the following:

From page 99:

[Uncle Tom’s Cabin] does not call for civil disobedience in the name of natural law in the way that [Ralph Waldo] Emerson or [Frederick] Douglass had proposed. It also lacks the dripping resentment of her brother Charles Beecher's abolitionist legal tract The Duty of Disobedience to Wicked Laws (1851). For him, the Piracy Act of 1820 reflected the “deep instinct of every heart.” It affirmed the "intuitive sense of right our fathers felt" that they nonetheless ignored in acts of legal appeasement. Abolitionists who “resist unto blood, striving against sin," Beecher concluded, must break national law in order to protect natural law. Harriet Beecher Stowe likewise recalled the law's moral limits. But her response in Uncle Tom's Cabin squarely places the enslaved on the rack operated by piratical enslavers and calls upon her readers to watch.

Page 99 provides a generally accurate if slightly narrow account of literary piracy, deep-sea enslavement, and international law in the decades prior to the U.S. Civil War. Specifically, it recounts the publication history of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854) and considers her moral resentment towards slavery relative to her contemporaries. It occurs in the heart of the book, nearly at the median of its second chapter. Its focus on the most visible antebellum woman novelist may entice readers to discover the book’s other central women (who it must be said were equally famous in their time, if not ours).

As Charles Beecher’s appeal to the “deep instinct of every heart” affirms, complicated legal theories often retained an emotional core. The passage is just one example of piracy’s contested definition as a singular moral injury whose legal character could be proven by narrations of alleged pirates’ offenses against blameless families (the “crimes against feeling” of the title). The Piracy Act of 1820 he references is the book’s central legal text, as it was the first American law to declare the deep-sea slave trade piracy (although, tellingly, no one was executed for the crime until 1862). Each of the chapters consider how authors across a political spectrum treated the law as either a first step towards piratical enslavement’s universal abolition or as itself an act of piracy against enslavers’ property rights. Stowe represented a moderate position in this debate, but I am careful not to oversimplify her (or anyone’s) politics. My brief discussion of Stowe v. Thomas (1854) on page 99, in which the author unsuccessfully sued against the published of an unauthorized German-language edition of the novel, gives us a hint that piracy of all sorts often went unpunished. Such legal defeats led Stowe and others to platform if not prescribe abolitionist violence in the years that followed. Like each of the book’s central figures, neither Beecher nor Stowe could prevent an internecine war that resulted from disputes on piracy’s legal definition and the nation’s emotional core.

Visit Mark B. Kelley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Vincenzi's "Echoes of a Distant Republic"

Anna Vincenzi is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Hillsdale College.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Echoes of a Distant Republic: Italian Perspectives on the American and French Revolutions, with the following results:

The Page 99 Test works great for this book! Page 99 happens to center on one of the book’s central ideas: that of “constitutional pluralism.” By this I mean the idea that no particular form of government is, in itself, necessarily good or best. In the classical formulation, government by one, by the few, or by the many could all serve the common good—or, on the contrary, could become tyrannical and serve exclusively the interests of the faction in power, whether that faction was one, few, or many. Page 99 focuses on a Neapolitan Enlightenment thinker, Gaetano Filangieri, author of the then-famous The Science of Legislation. I argue that Filangieri, like many thinkers before him—from Aristotle through medieval Scholastic and Renaissance authors to William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, whom Filangieri greatly admired—was a “constitutional pluralist,” rather than an advocate of democratic republicanism, as historians have often interpreted him.

This is an important part of the book’s broader argument. Echoes of a Distant Republic explores how people in the Italian states interpreted the American Revolution, and how those interpretations changed in response to the French Revolution. It focuses on Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples between 1765 and 1799. The book argues that the American Revolution was initially not understood as a “revolution” in the modern sense of the term. Rather, it was generally seen as part of an Age of Reform: an attempt to correct abuses, rather than a radical break with the Old Regime. Nor was it generally understood in Italy—or, arguably, in Europe—as a call for antimonarchical revolution. The French Revolution changed this. As the French Revolution unfolded, earlier interpretations of the American Revolution were transformed as well. The American events came to be understood as the “mother” of the French Revolution and, increasingly, as the beginning of a global movement against the injustices and hierarchies of monarchical regimes. Page 99 captures one small but important piece of that larger transformation.

Learn more about Echoes of a Distant Republic at the University of Virginia Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly M. Brookfield's "Watching the Girls Go By"

Molly M. Brookfield is assistant professor of history and women’s and gender studies at The University of the South.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my new book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States, is only half text. The top half of the page features an image taken from a travel brochure that the U.S. Navy distributed to seamen on leave in San Diego during World War II. The image is a cartoon depicting a sailor playing checkers with an older woman in old-fashioned clothes. The sailor has whipped his head around, mid-turn, to watch as a younger woman in a shorter skirt and high heels walks by. The caption reads, “In a travel guide for enlisted men on leave in San Diego, illustrations like this one suggested that sailors would encounter young women throughout the city and might ogle them as part of their leisure activities.” You can view the cartoon in its original form in the digitized pamphlet.

The bottom half of the page includes some of the larger context that helps readers understand the significance of the image. It reads:

…troops as no different from the average, virile white American male in their sexual appetites and exemplified the military’s expectation for a certain amount of sexual boisterousness and eagerness among enlisted men. As Marilyn Hegarty has argued, the armed forces harbored a quiet but ‘official acceptance of . . . men’s need for sex’ and hoped to control and direct that need rather than suppress it altogether. A doctor tasked with evaluating the military’s recreation programs espoused this belief when he insisted on men’s ‘normal desire for feminine companionship.’ The doctor worried that recreation programs that employed older women as motherly figures for homesick troops would not fulfill servicemen’s needs. If the military did not put enlisted men in contact with young, attractive women, the doctor warned, servicemen might seek such…

You could do worse than land on this page using the Page 99 Test. For one, analysis of images and popular culture is a big part of Watching the Girls Go By. In the larger book, I focus a lot on how humorous depictions of white men ogling, catcalling, and otherwise accosting women in public space normalized these behaviors as harmless and even desirable. So, the image analysis on page 99 gives readers a sense of one of the key methods I use to show that pop culture helped convince Americans that it was normal and funny for white male strangers to intrude on women’s time, attention, and bodies in public space.

The text on page 99 is less representative of the whole book. On the plus side, it describes part of an important hinge point in the history of street harassment in the United States. During World War II, the U.S. military was instrumental in normalizing behaviors like catcalling and ogling as natural for white men. Military personnel, who worried about troops contracting sexually transmitted infections, warned servicemen to avoid sexual intercourse with women as much as possible. At the same time, higher-ups also feared servicemen turning inward and engaging in same-sex sex with other troops. With these dual fears in mind, military brass encouraged flirtation, ogling, even catcalling amongst servicemen, as a kind of non-physical way of letting off steam and satisfying sexual urges. All kinds of military propaganda and media—including the pamphlet featured on page 99—promoted humorous depictions of servicemen engaging in intrusive behaviors with women. The message: better to catcall and ogle a passing woman than engage in what the military perceived as risky sexual behaviors.

You might get some of this from the text on page 99, but not the whole story. And even this hinge point is just one small part of the over-100-year story I am telling in the book. Still, the Page 99 Test gives a glimpse into what to expect from the tone and methodology of Watching the Girls Go By, and I hope anyone flipping to page 99 will be curious to read more.

Visit Molly M. Brookfield's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Warner Osborn's "Night Hawk"

Matthew Warner Osborn is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. He is the author of Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture reproduces a print titled Philadelphia Taste Displayed, or Bon-Ton Below Stairs by James Aiken, circa 1830. The print is a color lithograph in which a group of drunk and sloppy white men gather around a table of oysters. To the left is a bar with large decanters of wine and a sign that reads, “City privilege, sell without a license.” The bibulous group are being waited on by two Black men: a waiter, who stands in the foreground with bare feet and a smiling bartender who surveys the scene. The clock is close to midnight. The white men are obviously drunk and dressed in ridiculously foppish clothes, except for one who is dressed in olive drab. He wears a broad, brimmed hat, and knickers, which were decidedly old fashioned in 1830. At the time, this man’s dress would have marked him as a caricature of a Quaker. Aiken was a popular engraver who produced works of political satire, and Philadelphia Taste Displayed was one of his most memorable prints.

Aiken’s lithograph is one of the most compelling pieces of historical evidence in Night Hawk, and thus I do believe it reveals the “quality of the whole.” That said, if this was the only page a reader saw, they would be quite confused, as there is no superhero in the picture nor anything that indicates “mass culture.” At the time I first encountered Aiken’s print, I did not recognize the Quaker, and it took me years to figure out that it was intended to memorialize “The Night-Hawk, No. 53,” which was his most famous column.

My book tells the never-before-told two-hundred-year-old story of a flying, sometimes invisible superhero, whose adventures appeared on the front page of the first radical socialist newspaper in American history. Between July 5, 1828, and July 3, 1830, the weekly Mechanics’ Free Press published sixty-one Night Hawk episodes. Each running around 1,000 words long, they describe the nocturnal adventures of a superhuman vigilante fighting for justice on city streets. The anonymously authored Night Hawk was the public champion of the nation’s first successful labor party.

Oyster cellars were one of the Night Hawk’s favorite haunts. In Philadelphia, African Americans had long held a monopoly on the business of selling oysters from carts on street corners. By the 1820s, Black entrepreneurs were able to rent out permanent locations, usually in basements. While enormously popular among white working-class residents, oyster cellars also caused controversy. Taverns had to pay a hefty fee to the city for the right to sell alcohol. Oyster cellars circumvented the law by increasing the price of the oysters and providing liquor for free. This outraged the city’s temperance society, which was largely bankrolled by Philadelphia’s wealthy business class. The pervasive and virulent racism of the time heightened temperance activists’ fears about these Black-owned businesses.

The Night Hawk became a hero to working men by calling out the hypocrisy of the city’s wealthiest residents, or “the fashionable,” as he called them. In No. 53, the Night Hawk revealed, in a long and comical soliloquy, that young Quakers could be commonly found in the city’s oyster cellars. In 1830, the wealthy Quaker Roberts Vaux was the president of the city’s temperance society. So, the Night Hawk was mocking him by revealing that his children could be found quaffing oysters and liquor in cellars run by Black men. Aiken’s print preserved this joke in the city’s memory. The print is direct evidence of the Night Hawk’s popularity in 1830 but also his enduring influence. This same scene shows up fifteen years later in George Lippard’s novel Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845), which quickly became the biggest best seller yet published in the United States. The novel opens in an oyster cellar, and Lippard references Aiken’s print in two passages. So, this image is also compelling evidence that one of the most influential American novels of the nineteenth century took important inspiration from the radical socialist Night Hawk.

Learn more about Night Hawk at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue