Bianca J. Baldridge's "Laboring in the Shadows"

Bianca J. Baldridge is Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University. She is the author of Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youthwork (2019).

Baldridge applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work, and reported the following:

On page 99, you’ll find the beginning of Chapter Four, titled “Protecting Youth, Protecting Ourselves.” I begin the chapter with two quotes. The first is from the extraordinary feminist scholar, activist, and poet, Audre Lorde. The second is from Chris, a youth worker from the Midwest and an interview participant in my book. Like Lorde, he’s a poet and activist. He’s also dedicated his life to working with youth in community-based educational spaces.

I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference . . . Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
–Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays

We have to take care of ourselves, take care of each other, honor memories, and honor legacies that just don’t exist in the same way for other people.
–Chris, youth worker

I began this chapter with these two quotes because they speak to the struggle to be well and to care for the self amid struggle, pain, and structural harm, while also trying to care for others. The opening paragraph describes an experience Chris had while giving a guest lecture at a local university, where he wanted to protect himself and to honor and respect the memory of a former student he lost to gun violence.

This test works for part of the book but not for the entire book. But it does capture a very important part! That is, how do community-based youth workers—professionals in youth organizations who educate, nurture, and guide young people through many forms of development—take care of themselves in a loosely organized field that can be quite precarious due to low wages, high turnover, housing and food insecurity, etc., while also taking care of young people as they cope with structural harm. I believe that page 99 will give readers a sense of how skilled youth workers are at managing the nuances that arise in their work.

In my book, I argue that because youth workers, particularly in nonprofits, are situated as care and education workers, their work is typically viewed as “noble,” which ultimately furthers their exploitation. For Black youth workers, I make the case that this precarity is exacerbated by racial discrimination and racial microaggressions. Despite the challenges I raise, my book also shares their visions for the future and how joy serves as a tool of resistance and protection for youth workers and the young people they work with. Laboring in the Shadows highlights precarity and invisibility while demonstrating the power and promise of youth work as a sustaining and necessary force in Black educational and social life.

Visit Bianca J. Baldridge's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan Seale-Feldman's "The Work of Disaster"

Aidan Seale-Feldman is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and a research associate at the Centre d’anthropologie culturelle (CANTHEL) at the Université Paris Cité in France.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Work of Disaster tells a story called “Vishal’s Medicine.” Vishal was a man I met in an earthquake-affected village in rural Nepal who received psychosocial counseling and medication after the disaster. He was one of many people who discovered such treatments because of the seismic rupture and the post-earthquake humanitarian psychosocial interventions that followed. Around the time of the earthquakes, Vishal had been suffering from troubling episodes of incoherent wandering in the forest which he described as jangali, wildness. The story on page 99 takes place three years after the post-disaster mental health program phased out, during a follow-up trip I made back to Nepal to explore the afterlives of humanitarian intervention.

I think readers opening the book to page 99 would get a clear idea of some of the core issues I address in the work as a whole. In fact, I used to give talks that would start with a photograph of Vishal’s medicine: three blister packs of pills–red, blue, and green–on a plastic shopping bag laid out on a patch of Himalayan earth [image left]. I felt this image and the story that accompanied it cut to the heart of the key question that I raise in the book: What are the consequences of transient care, in a world of cascading disasters?

Vishal’s story is exemplary for multiple reasons. Like many of the clients treated by the post- disaster psychosocial program, Vishal did not conform to humanitarian assumptions of the “earthquake victim.” Vishal’s suffering began before the earthquakes, and he was prescribed antipsychotic and antidepressant medication by an NGO because he happened to live in the disaster zone. When humanitarians deemed the “crisis” of mental health in Nepal to be over, Vishal was once again left to manage his affliction on his own in a region with minimal access to psychopharmaceuticals. The temporary prescription of psychiatric drugs in the earthquake- affected districts is one of the most troubling aspects of the story of disaster and mental health in Nepal.

At the same time, Vishal’s story confounds our (now well established) anthropological expectations that humanitarian interventions are solely a form of violence, or that global mental health is simply a mode of medical imperialism. Despite the obstacles of access, after the program phased out Vishal chose to continue taking the medication he discovered through the work of disaster, whatever the cost. Vishal continued his treatment because it made him feel better and allowed him to return to health, which he defined as being able to care for his children, his animals, and to work the land. Ultimately Vishal’s challenge was one of chronicity. When I met him years later, he was strong and had just come from planting rice, but he was also ambivalent about the efficacy of his treatment. He worried that he might have to take psychiatric drugs for life. The story of Vishal’s medicine not only raises questions regarding the ethics of brief humanitarian psychosocial interventions but it is also an example of what disaster generates, and the limits and possibilities of transient care.

Visit Aidan Seale-Feldman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan VanGorder's "A Mother’s Work"

Megan VanGorder is assistant professor of history at Illinois State University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Mother's Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War–Era Nurse, and shared the following:

The top half of Page 99 of A Mother’s Work is occupied by an image of a large building, the Illinois Soldier’s Orphan’s Home, which was officially opened to occupants in August 1867 in Normal, Illinois. In front of the building, the reader can discern a row of children. They are dwarfed by the grandeur of the building, but they stand out because they all dressed in white and neatly assembled. These children are presumably the orphans or half-orphans of Illinois Civil War soldiers who occupy the home.

The remaining text on page 99 states:

[Mary Bickerdyke] also inserted herself into traditionally male-dominated aspects of organizational development, influencing fundraising efforts, teacher and matron assignments, and even decisions about the home’s location.

Publicly, the creation of the Illinois Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home was the province of powerful Illinois men eager to publicly demonstrate their dedication to fallen soldiers and their families. Even before the guns fell silent, state leaders began to anticipate the social and financial responsibilities that would accompany peace. As the Civil War was still being waged across the South, the Illinois General Assembly recommended a “tax for destitute families of soldiers, schools for soldier’s [sic] orphans, and a state sanitary bureau” to prepare for the postwar reality in early 1865. Governor Richard Yates entreated the state’s citizens to support the measure and invoked their patriotism and collective obligation to the general welfare of their neighbors: “No State is worthy of its sovereignty, and no government the respect of its people, who will not protect and nurture the children of its soldiers...”

The Page 99 Test hints at the major themes of the book and works reasonably well as a way to understand how Mary Bickerdyke consistently worked to “insert herself into traditionally male-dominated” spaces. However, the page only contains a single example of that lifelong journey. From page 99 alone, a reader might reasonably assume the book is primarily about the founding of the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home or about state-level policy formation. In reality, the institutional story is one strand within a broader exploration of how one woman leveraged Civil War service to reimagine authority, obligation, and maternal citizenship in the nineteenth century.

The image of the Illinois Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home visually signals that this book is not simply a wartime narrative, but a study of how wartime service translated into long-term structures of veteran and dependent care. The accompanying text underscores one of the book’s core arguments that Bickerdyke did not merely operate within accepted feminine spheres of professionalism but took direct action to influence institutions pertaining to soldier or veteran care. The page also situates this example of her work within the broader political culture, showing how male state leaders publicly claimed authority over commemorative and welfare efforts while women like Bickerdyke exerted influence in ways that were less visible but no less consequential.

A Mother’s Work spans four decades of Mary Bickerdyke’s tireless efforts to legitimize herself as a professional caregiver and the ways in which she utilized her reputation as “Mother” to effectively accomplish those goals.

Visit Megan VanGorder's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Adrienne A. Winans's "Moving Mountains"

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is Chancellor’s Professor of the Departments of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she also serves as an associate dean in the School of Humanities and faculty director of the Humanities Center. She is coauthor of Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress. Adrienne A. Winans is an independent scholar.

Wu applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Moving Mountains: Asian American and Pacific Islander Feminisms and the 1977 National Women's Conference, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my co-authored book, Moving Mountains: Asian American and Pacific Islander Feminisms and the 1977 National Women’s Conference, does give readers a good sense of the overall book. On that page, I highlight Rita Fujiki Elway. A multi-racial Japanese American from the state of Washington. Rita was the youngest and only Asian American member of the National Commission that organized the 1977 National Women’s Conference at the time of the Houston gathering. This historic event was the first and only time the U.S. Congress authorized funding to support the creation of a national women’s agenda. The national conference was preceded by 56 pre-conferences, held in every state and six territories. As a National Commissioner, Elway had access to resources and information, which she shared with other Asian American and Pacific Islander women as well as a broader network of women of color and allied women, like Gloria Steinem. Nevertheless, Elway felt like a “token” who “wasn’t supposed to speak up.” In an interview, she shares her conflicting roles a token symbol of inclusion and a dedicated organizer. Elway’s status reveals how Asian American and Pacific Islander women, often relegated to marginalized roles as racialized immigrants and colonized Indigenous people, nevertheless invited themselves to the National Women’s Conference in order to advocate for the needs of their communities.

Learn more about Moving Mountains the University of Washington Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Fierce and Fearless.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sonia Hazard's "Empire of Print"

Sonia Hazard is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media, with the following results:

Page 99 is the first page of chapter three, titled “Distance and Distribution’s Exclusions in the West.” It consists of the chapter’s opening paragraphs, which introduce Ornan Eastman’s 1828 appointment as the first “General Agent of the West” for the New York-based American Tract Society, and his sharp criticism that the organization had long neglected areas of the US beyond the Allegheny Mountains. His comments mark the first public acknowledgment that the publisher’s tract distribution efforts were falling short.

The page also explains how ATS leaders viewed the West not only as a geographic area outside the Northeast but as a spiritually deficient missionary field populated by poor, churchless settlers. Many of them were Catholic immigrants, whom they considered vulnerable to superstition and religious error (“the victims of a superannuated and rotten superstition,” “bound hand and foot” by priests!).

The Page 99 Test is not a perfect shortcut. Page 99 introduces the American Tract Society’s distribution struggles, and it captures several of the book’s concerns: the difficulties of national distribution, the vastness of American space, and the chauvinistic assumptions embedded in evangelical publishing. However, it doesn’t capture much about the central argument of the book, which is that the ATS built a “media infrastructure” to distribute evangelical media over distances, and to make that media compelling to readers. The book further posits that media infrastructure was a pervasive but overlooked form of evangelical power in the nineteenth century. The two paragraphs on page 99 are setting up the problem of distance, but do not yet describe the solutions that are the heart of the book. Page 101, which describes some of the ATS’s distribution systems, would be a better shortcut.

I want to say a little more about what the book is about. Nineteenth-century evangelicals believed that print media like tracts and newspapers could change minds and save souls, and they often described that power as an “influence,” something vague and mysterious. I was motivated to write this book because I wanted to explain that mystery. How does print work? How can a printed text change someone's mind? And, moreover, how does it do it over the vast distances that characterized the period’s imperialism?

The book argues that evangelical power lay less in the content of the messages than in the infrastructures that shaped how texts were made, circulated, and read. Writing this book was my effort to explain those mechanics and to rethink the power of texts and religion in the nineteenth-century US.

Learn more about Empire of Print at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuel D. Anderson's "The French Médersa"

Samuel D. Anderson is a history teacher at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa, and shared the following:

Page 99 recounts a debate between two French colonial administrators concerning the fate of a school in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in 1919. The school was a médersa, a colonial invention that combined both French and Islamic curricula; this one had been controversial since it opened in 1908. The page begins by describing a proposal from Charles Mercier, the new director of the school, to reorient its structure and goals to be more in line with similar schools in Algeria, where the médersa system originated in 1850. Mercier had just arrived in Senegal from Algeria, and thought that this Algerian model would transform the Senegalese médersa from an “excellent primary school” into something akin to a “Muslim university,” which would better serve the colonial goal of training a Muslim elite to work with the French colonial administration. The second half of the page is devoted to a long and indignant retort from Mercier’s predecessor at the médersa, another administrator named Jules Salenc. Salenc rejected all of Mercier’s proposals, arguing that Algeria and Senegal were fundamentally different. He wrote: “Any less superficial study of Black Islam [l’islam en pays noir] would have shown him the problems with the ideas he proposed: excellent, perhaps, in Algeria, but completely useless and even dangerous in Senegal.” The page concludes with a coda: Salenc ultimately won the argument, Mercier left his position the next year, and the médersa closed shortly after that.

This page is more of an argumentative stepping stone than an encapsulation of the whole book. It highlights two of the book’s core themes, namely that these médersas linked North and West Africa in new ways under French colonial rule, and that ideas about race shaped their development. It shows that this linking was controversial. Some administrators believed that the two regions should be considered a single area, with Islam a major unifying factor, and others believed that they were fully separate, divided racially into Black and “white” Arab or Amazigh (or “Berber”) zones. These competing interpretations are central to the book’s third chapter, where this page appears, and which recounts the expansion of the médersa system from Algeria to West Africa. This page suggests—and the next pages demonstrate—that Salenc’s idea of a racial division won out, and the médersas in what the French considered “Black Africa” were closed shortly thereafter. In that sense, this page fits within a common interpretation of these schools—the idea that the West African médersas had a relatively short lifespan and thus a minor impact on the colonial history of Senegal or West Africa more broadly.

Reading past page 99, however, would help the reader understand the counterargument I make in the rest of the chapter and in the book as a whole. I argue that historians who address Franco-Muslim education, and who address the broader colonial history of northwest Africa, have been limited by the “Saharan Divide” that separates North and West Africa into distinct spheres of historiography. The specific dispute between Salenc and Mercier discussed on page 99 highlights the controversial comparison with Algeria, but it does not show how, beyond that specific case, Franco-Muslim education became an idea that linked North and West Africa for the century between 1850 and 1951.

A core theme in the book is that Franco-Muslim education was a “hyphen” that linked disparate ideas, especially those about the relationship between France and Islam under colonial rule, about tradition and modernity in Islamic education, and about North and West Africa. I draw the “hyphen” terminology directly from archival materials. Though neither of the documents discussed on page 99 use that term explicitly, the page clearly highlights how controversial the idea was. These were some of the first archival sources I read while researching this project, and they piqued my interest in learning more about this controversial trans-Saharan connection. I hope that a reader who opened the book to page 99 would feel the same way, and would want to read on.

Learn more about The French Médersa at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric C. Smith's "Between Worlds"

Eric C. Smith is associate professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of John Leland: A Jeffersonian Baptist in Early America.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Between Worlds: John A. Broadus, the Southern Baptist Seminary, and the Prospects of the New South, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Between Worlds is also the opening page of chapter 6, the critical transition in the life of my subject. The Civil War has ended and Reconstruction has begun in John A. Broadus’s South Carolina. He has plummeted from his antebellum success and prosperity into poverty and humiliation. The southern institutions he labored to build—most notably the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—now teeter on the brink of collapse. This page features one of, if not the single most important moment of his life. As his fellow faculty members at the seminary consider shutting school down for good in the wake of Confederate defeat, Broadus makes a famous and well-documented vow: “Let us all quietly agree that the seminary may die, but we’ll die first.” He spends the rest of his life struggling to keep that commitment.

In fact, the Page 99 Test applies remarkably well to Between Worlds, because it falls exactly at the pivotal moment of John A. Broadus’s life and career. it is difficult for me to imagine another single page in the volume that so succinctly captures the crux of this story. Remarkable!

My book is the first critical biography of John A. Broadus, a highly influential Southern Baptist preacher, educator, and cultural influencer in the late nineteenth century. The book focuses on his unique ability to navigate “between worlds,” in order to keep alive the southern institutions, religious and otherwise, in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the pivotal moment documented on page 99, the rest of the book chronicles Broadus’s herculean efforts to recover his personal position and to re-establish the seminary and other southern institutions he loved in what to him in the strange new world of Reconstruction and Gilded Age America.

Learn more about Between Worlds at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenneth W. Noe's "Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend"

Kenneth W. Noe is the Draughon Professor of Southern History Emeritus at Auburn University. He is most recently the author of The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War.

Noe applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief, with the following results:

Page 99 begins at the end of April 1863 with Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s army on the move against the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg. Once across the Mississippi River below the city, Grant decided to ignore Abraham Lincoln’s wishes that he cooperate with Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks’s army in Louisiana. Instead, Grant marched away from Banks, drove deep into central Mississippi, approached Vicksburg from the east, and eventually besieged the city after two failed assaults in mid-May. After the defeat of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s army at Chancellorsville, Virginia, in early May, and with it the resulting resurgence of antiwar Democrats, Lincoln dreaded the political effects of a time-consuming siege. He needed a victory. Affairs were no better in Virginia, where Lincoln considered replacing Hooker as the general’s subordinates turned against him. Gen. Robert E. Lee then marched his army around Hooker and headed north with an eye on Pennsylvania, leaving Hooker grasping for a response. The already bad situation had become much worse for Lincoln.

The Page 99 Test yields disappointing results for Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend. It does touch upon an important theme of the first half of the book, Lincoln’s struggles to convince his generals to fight the Civil War in the direct way that he preferred: “hard, tough fighting that will hurt somebody” rather than elaborate turning movements and sieges as epitomized previously by Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan in Virginia and now Grant in Mississippi. What page 99 does not do is reveal the larger thrust of the book, the origins and evolution of what I call the “heroic legend.” Taken from my readings of folklore studies, this is my shorthand for the now-common idea in Civil War literature that Lincoln was a self-taught military genius who was a wiser and more modern military thinker than his generals. Today, most Civil War historians will argue that he displayed his brilliance from the beginning of the war, or else that he grew as a military thinker through deep study and in tandem with Grant once that general came east in 1864. The heroic legend, I maintain, began with Lincoln himself. From the very beginning of his presidency, he behaved as if he thought he was smarter than the brass. His loyal inner circle later argued that assertion in print, but for decades they failed to convince readers. The heroic legend instead required a long historiographical gestation, facing indifference until it reemerged in Great Britain after World War I and finally found acceptance as canon in Cold War America. The development of this historical construct from Lincoln’s death to the 1950s is the subject of the book’s second half, something that a reader would never guess from page 99. If anything, Grant’s decision to reject the president’s advice seemingly runs counter to the overall notion of Lincoln’s far-seeing strategic and operational wisdom. The president later confessed to the general after the fall of Vicksburg that his ideas had been faulty, and that Grant’s response was better.

Ultimately, page 99 is an important block in the book’s foundation that nonetheless does not suggest the appearance of the complete structure.

Visit Kenneth W. Noe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carl F. Cranor's "Vital Lives"

Carl F. Cranor, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside (after 53 years) has published widely on risks, medicine and the law to protect the public's health. His research has been supported by The National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Yale Law School, and the University of California. He served on California science advisory panels: Proposition 65; Electric and Magnetic Fields; Nanotechnology; and Biomonitoring, along with Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences Committees. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Collegium Ramazzini, a Congressional Fellow, the National Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Professor in Philosophy for 2014-2015, "Educator of the Year,” National Pollution Prevention Roundtable, 2022 and Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor, 2025-2026.

Cranor applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Vital Lives: Social Responsibility and the Battle Against Chronic Disease, and shared the following:

From page 99 (and the end of page 98); footnotes omitted:

The world is awash in toxicants to which millions are exposed, including mothers, developing children, and newborns (Chapter 5). Women, pregnant or not, may have from 43 to 200 toxicants in their bodies and with possible additional contributions from their local environment or living conditions. Data reveal newborns with many toxicants in their umbilical cords. 1 Minority women and their youngsters are among the most contaminated and most susceptible subpopulations.

Puberty is a notable susceptibility period for teenage women and perhaps to a lesser extent for men. Are teenage men and women alerted to possible toxic exposures during this life-stage? Recall that young women have enhanced risks of breast cancer when exposed to some toxicants at this time (Chapter 3).

While white women have risks of breast cancer, Black women have two- or three-times greater risks, with Asian American women having lesser risks. Additionally, if women have some chronic diseases or are obese, they are likely to have greater breast cancer risks from toxicants. Prediabetic adults with exposures to perfluorinated compounds are twice as likely as unexposed individuals to have elevated cholesterol and blood sugars, conditions that could foster diabetes.

However, decisions beyond the previous points may not be easy to make because of social circumstances in which one lives.

The influence of the Social Determinants of Disease

How do social and economic conditions shape lifestyle choices? Do public health officials, WHO and CDC inadvertently assume favorable social and economic circumstances in which persons could influence their health; to choose to smoke or not, drink to excess or not, or pay little attention to fat-enhancing foods or not? Certainly, socially advantaged and educated people with decent incomes, might better appreciate the importance of healthy choices and their consequences, and more plausibly could choose to avoid risky courses of action that invite diseases.

Less specific contributions to chronic illnesses have been identified by sociologists and epidemiologists. These are called the “social determinants of disease.” [These may create risks of disease, set the stage for chronic disease or foster behaviors that reduce them.]

Page 99, in Ch. 4, partially provides clues of some major ideas from the book. Chronic diseases are biological conditions (Ch. 2), but they can be limited or accelerated by personal habits (Ch.4), life stages (Ch. 3), referenced here, involuntary toxic exposures (Ch. 5), also referenced here, or substandard living conditions [social determinants of disease] (aspects of Ch. 4 & 6). This is one of the earliest references to the social determinants of disease. Page 99 first calls attention to the downside of toxic exposures during the puberty life stage, and toward the end hints at influences from the social determinants of diseases. While this page is not critical, it points to three features of life circumstances that may enhance chronic afflictions (life stages, toxic exposures, and substandard poor living conditions). Page 99 is not the best single page for introducing the book’s ideas, but it provides references of themes that are developed elsewhere and hints at their significance. Page 99 in this book might whet a reader’s appetite to discover more about chronic maladies and what contributes to them and what can be done about them.

Readers opening this book to page 99 would get some clues of the broader work. By suggesting more major ideas, this page hints at connections between those themes. As a “test” of a browser’s shortcut, this page may whet an appetite for the larger themes broached elsewhere.

Learn more about Vital Lives at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Legally Poisoned.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christophe Wall-Romana's "Black Light"

Christophe Wall-Romana is professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry and Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy, and translator of Jean Epstein’s The Intelligence of a Machine as well as Gilbert Simondon’s Imagination and Invention.

Wall-Romana applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Black Light: Revealing the Hidden History of Photography and Cinema, and reported the following:

In Black Light, page 99 acts as a hinge between two sections of Chapter 2. These sections are titled “Herschelian Cosmology and the Chrono-Imaging Equation,” (94) and “Animating History: Astronomical Culture and the Specter of Slavery,” on 99. These somewhat technical titles address two central components of the overall argument of the book. That argument is the following: “astronomical and cosmological visualization within the purview of natural history—together with the accounts of racial differentiation and Blackness that linked Earth to the cosmos, as well as photochemistry to skin color—were integral to the new models of imaging that progressively shaped the matrix of photocinema from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries” (24). In other words, in the history of technical images that led to photography and cinema, I argue that modeling the cosmos and modeling race were key imperatives that predated the goal of simply reproducing visual reality.

The first section ending on 99 explains the dynamic cosmology of William Herschel, a German musician who migrated to England and became passionate for astronomy. Herschel is famous for being the first (identified) person to discover a new planet in the solar system in 1783: Uranus. But in the history of astronomy, he played a more crucial role: he was the first to propose a general theory of the formation of all objects in the cosmos, from planetary systems to galaxies, based on actual data. His driving insight came out of the patient cataloguing of star clusters which he conducted with his sister Caroline—the first woman scientist to receive a state salary from in 1785 (at her insistence!). With their thousands of sketches of variegated star groupings, they realized that a single dynamic process could account for all of them. That process is the opposite tug of gravity condensing them and centrifugal force giving them an ellipsoid form (like the spiral Andromeda galaxy). For media studies what is noteworthy is that William expressly pointed out that the thousands of still sketches they amassed amounted to freeze frames within a single dynamic process, a single ‘film’ as it were. That is exactly how cinema emerged from the work of photographers in the 1860s and 70s who decided to ‘animate’ the sequential shots (chronophotographs) that they took when studying motion. Cosmology thus ‘invented’ the idea of animating still images.

The page 99 section titled “Animating History: Astronomical Culture and the Specter of Slavery,” goes on to link Herschel’s dynamic cosmology with a late 18th-century view of human history as equally cinematic. While cosmic objects evolve from physical forces alone—a radically atheistic notion!—Enlightenment thinkers puzzled over what propelled human history. Their answer was civilizational progress. And the only measure of it for Europe’s white intelligentsia was cultural comparison, which was at that time inherently racial and overwhelmingly racist. It was indeed an astronomer, Condorcet, who first posited progress explicitly on the model of cosmological dynamism. Condorcet was an abolitionist, largely because slavery was obviously an inhumane and backward practice. This section shows that astronomical culture tended to reject slavery also on optical grounds, knowing that Black skin is a simple matter of light reflectance rather than physiological difference. This goes a long way towards explaining why 19th century antislavery legislation was spearheaded in England and France by two actors trained in photochemistry: Henry Brougham and François Arago.

Page 99 provides a very solid preview of the book as a whole which endeavors to rethink media history through astronomy, slavery, and anti-Blackness. Of course there are important aspects missing. For instance, the ‘multiple word hypothesis’, which was taken for granted in the 18th century, limned out rational grounds for thinking that all planets of the solar system were inhabited. This turns out to be a pivotal component for linking astronomy and race since extra-terrestrials were invariably envisioned through racial and racist lenses. It’s also vital to know that philosopher Immanuel Kant, who penned an original dynamic cosmology that likely inspired Herschel, considered that the decomposition of white light into spectral colors ultimately presages the racial superiority of whiteness.

The Page 99 Test is thus rather successful here. Pages 97 and 98, as well as 100 and 101—to sample a few neighbors—would certainly not give as full an idea of the book’s main argument as 99. Of course, there is a substantial element of probability in choosing 99. The first 20 to 30 pages are obviously selected out from the test since their introductory bent might serve to illustrate the book too well. A later page, say 140 or 160, might either not be present in a shorter book or veer towards concluding matters. So, the test applies realistically to a span of pages ranging, let’s say, from page 40 to 120. Is 99 better than all or even most of these? I’m a bit skeptical... On the other hand, my book shows that European ideas about race and especially Blackness were based on just the kind of magical thinking as the Page 99 Test—only, with devastating consequences for millions of people, to this day. I do believe some magical thinking can be benign, even beneficent. I know the sun isn’t rising and setting: Earth is just rotating. But the sun remains the extraordinary agent in my experience of sunrise and sunset. The Page 99 Test for me is about wonder as a guide in life and thought. And wonder is exactly what I felt when I cracked up my freshly printed book to its fated page 99!

Learn more about Black Light at the University of Minnesota Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue