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

Misty L. Heggeness's "Swiftynomics"

Misty L. Heggeness is co-director of the Kansas Population Center, Associate Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the University of Kansas, and former Principal Economist and Senior Advisor at the US Census Bureau. She is also creator of The Care Board, a dashboard of economic statistics built by and for caregivers that brings their economic contributions into the fold.

Heggeness applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy, with the following results:

Page 99 does a surprisingly good job of setting the stage for Swiftynomics because it situates Taylor Swift within a longer lineage of women who reshaped pop culture—and the economics of the music industry—by refusing to accept the constraints placed on them. This section focuses primarily on Madonna, tracing the ways her career mirrors and anticipates Swift’s success: the intense connection between artist and fans, the persistent underestimation of women’s intelligence and ambition, the policing of their visibility, and the outsized scrutiny of their personal lives.

The page concludes:

Taylor Swift is similar to Madonna. Madonna oversees her music, writing her own lyrics, and tied her own growth and experiences growing up female into the type of artist she would become. She championed for young women’s voices and experiences to be heard in art and advocated for the LGBTQ+ community. Madonna’s Blonde Ambition Tour of the 1990s was in many respects the original Eras Tour. It focused on the various eras or ‘worlds’ of Madonna’s music career. It became not only a concert, but an immersive theatrical experience.

Swiftynomics is not intended to be a biography of Taylor Swift, and page 99 captures the book’s core method and ambition. A browser opening to this page would quickly grasp that the book uses pop culture case studies to illuminate much larger economic ideas about labor, power, gender, and value. It shows how women’s creative, cultural, and economic contributions are routinely trivialized—even as they generate extraordinary returns.

By not focusing exclusively on Taylor Swift, the page also makes clear that Swift’s career, while phenomenal, is not an isolated story. It is part of a continuous history of women who have had to break new ground in order to build something new.

Finally, this page reflects how I draw on my dual expertise as a labor economist and a serious pop music fan to do this work—and to invite more women to see themselves as economists or economic agents. By placing Madonna, Taylor Swift, and artists like Beyoncé in conversation with economic theory, Swiftynomics argues that cultural phenomena often dismissed as frivolous are, in fact, powerful data sources for understanding how markets reward—or fail to reward—women’s work. Ultimately, this page makes clear that Swiftynomics is about far more than one superstar. It is about how women, across industries, learn to mastermind their own futures in systems not built for them.

Visit Misty L. Heggeness's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter D. McDonald's "The Impossible Reversal"

Peter D. McDonald is associate professor of design, informal, and creative education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play, and shared the following:

From page 99:

If a closet is deep and open, then a child can get lost inside of it, allowing the darkness and fabrics to become a doorway to elsewhere. A well-stocked closet visited as a chore, however, fails to enchant, because “there is nothing indeterminate; everything belongs to someone.” Some locations cannot cultivate secrets because they are so communal that they are fixed in place; in that case the cupboard “refuses to ‘play along.’ We don’t expect anything from this cupboard. It will remain merely itself. Just look at it. How it stands there: heavy, dense, unmovable.” Hidden spaces are labile and overflowing with potential transformations precisely because no one knows what they hold, not even one’s parents. The magic of secret spaces opens onto fantastic voyages and secret gardens, a liminal transition often captured in children’s literature. Secret spaces allow a child to recuperate from the demands of the social world and extricate a sense of individuality from family relations.

On page 99 of The Impossible Reversal, we are in the midst of trying to understand an avant-garde version of hide-and-seek invented by the artist Yoko Ono. In the instructions for the game, she tells us to “hide until everybody forgets about you” and “hide until everybody dies.” It is a violent request, and at first glance it doesn’t feel very playful at all. But if we look closely at what it’s like to play ordinary hide-and-seek, with all the desires and fears that children invest in the game, we can start to see how it is also invested in moments where the player is solitary, lost, and secret. The passage above is drawing on children’s experiences of secret spaces, especially attics and cupboards, to reignite those feelings.

So, in one way, page 99 isn’t a very good overview of The Impossible Reversal, which is a book about major historical changes to the theories and practices of playfulness in the United States. We are lost in the weeds, unpicking the specific details of one artist’s work. Yet, this page is also a perfect encapsulation of the spirit of the book, which is all about the experience of playfulness. I want to show that playfulness is many different things, some of which are more dangerous, or boring, or fleeting than we would normally admit. I want people to look closer at the subtleties of play, to slow down and explore its meanings. I can’t think of a better passage to show that exploration in action.

Learn more about The Impossible Reversal at the University of Minnesota Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Angela Simms's "Fighting for a Foothold"

Angela Simms is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard College-Columbia University. She examines the political economy of United States metropolitan areas through the lens of suburban Black middle-class jurisdictions’ capacity to garner sufficient tax revenue for maintaining high-quality public goods and services.

Prior to academia, Simms served in the federal government for seven years as a Presidential Management Fellow and legislative analyst at the Office of Management and Budget during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Texas-Austin, and a bachelor’s degree in government from William and Mary.

Simms applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book compares state and local investment patterns in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to a county it borders—Montgomery County, Maryland. Both of these counties also share a political boundary line with Washington, D.C. I explain that in the 1970s Prince George’s was on the path to shift from a majority-White and working-class county to a majority-Black and middle-class county, while Montgomery County has remained majority- or plurality-White and middle- and upper middle-class. Maryland infrastructure and other policies combined with local policies in both counties, such as zoning laws for apartments, lead to Prince George’s County having more affordable apartments along its border with D.C. than Montgomery County. More affordable housing in Prince George’s is one of the reasons the county is responsible for a disproportionate share of the D.C. region’s economically constrained households. This responsibility puts greater pressure on Prince George’s County’s budget as it seeks to serve high-needs residents, while the county also has fewer of the conditions for a growing tax base.

Yes, amazingly, the Page 99 Test works! It’s an insightful window into core arguments in the book regarding political and economic dynamics shaping local jurisdictions’ tax revenue generation.

Fighting for a Foothold explains how current federal, state, and local government policies and market practices combine with the historical legacies of White domination and anti-Blackness, to create new mechanisms for White Americans to hoard material resources. I argue that local jurisdiction boundaries—those between cities and counties—create a mechanism for White Americans to cordon off their household-level incomes and wealth in ways that enable majority-White counties to experience growing tax bases. Consequently, these counties can consistently fund high-quality public goods and services—from schools and health services, to roads and bridges—to a greater degree than majority-Black counties.

Majority-Black jurisdictions endure the cumulative effects of underinvestment in and extraction from Black people and Black spaces, including, among other things: during the Jim Crow segregation period Black people paying local and state taxes, while receiving no or lower quality public goods and services, which meant Black Americans effectively invested in White Americans’ material wellbeing; Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance policy that did not insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods, which meant Black people had less opportunity to accrue wealth through home buying; and banks’ predatory lending practices in Black neighborhoods (most recently, this occurred in the lead-up to the Great Recession of 2009-2011 when mortgage lenders blanketed Black communities with non-standard mortgages and refinancing options). Overall, Fighting for a Foothold reveals the extent to which Black middle-class people, and jurisdictions serving them, can attain the same financial returns for the same inputs as their White counterparts. I contend that not only do middle-class Black Americans not gain the same rewards, but they subsidize White wealth accumulation.

I conclude my book with policy recommendations: (1) increased federal and state taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations, which will enhance the capacity for government to distribute and redistribute material resources equitably; (2) increased state-level funding of public goods and services, which would decrease local jurisdiction reliance on locally-generated tax revenue; (3) regional tax and cost sharing arrangements, which will ease competition between local jurisdictions in regions; (4) higher penalties and stronger accountability for market actors who enact racial discrimination; and (5) reparations, or equity funds, that seek to repair harms Black Americans have endured across levels of social organization—household, neighborhood, and local jurisdiction.

Visit Angela Simms's website.

--Marshal Zeringue