Joseph Turow's "The Problem with Personalization"

Joseph Turow is the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems & Industries Emeritus in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of thirteen books and the editor of five, including The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet; The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power; and The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth.

Turow applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age, and shared the following:

As it happens, page 99 of The Problem with Personalization marks the beginning of chapter 4 of 8 chapters. In that sense, it lies squarely in the middle of the book, and of my argument. The book’s subtitle is “How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Time to the AI Age.” Chapters 1-3 tackle the pre-internet versions of personalization, from street hawkers and peddlers of centuries past to the rise of direct mail and direct marketing in the 20th century. Those chapters demolish the widespread notion that personalization in advertising is a product of the 21st century; far from it. Chapter 4 pivots to our current century. It and the ones that follow show how advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization. But advertisers of today do that using artificial intelligence and the internet. They weaponize data in unprecedented ways that drive mono-segmentation and, over the next decades, the disappearance of shared reality and community.

Chapter 4 is called “Cookies, Barcodes, Smartphones, and Location Targeting: The Internet Takes the Direct Marketing Crown.” Here is how it begins on page 99:

In 1994 Lou Montulli worked for Netscape Communications, a company that made the Netscape Navigator World Wide Web browser. His bosses asked him to address a difficulty bedeviling companies trying to sell things in the new web world. There was no way to keep track of an individual’s visits to or clicks on a website. Online stores could therefore sell only one item at a time. If you wanted to buy something on a store’s site, you would click to place it in the website’s “shopping cart” and then you would have to check out right at that moment. You could not leave it in the cart and look again on the site for something to buy because you’d lose the first item. The website had no way to know if the same visitor was coming back to the cart. To grease the wheels of browser commerce, Montulli was, in essence, charged with creating a persistent identity tracker for an individual’s presence where others at Netscape had tried and failed.

This, page 100 points out, was the beginning of the cookie. The cookie was crucial to making direct marketing the mainstream model for audience construction in the internet era. It caused marketers to continually search for ways to splinter their profiles of consumers and then target them using those hypersegmented, even individualized, understandings. Chapters 4 through 8 cover how that process evolved into a new era of predictive and generative artificial intelligence—and what it means for individuals and the larger society.

A person reading page 99 alone would probably not get a good idea of the entire work because the Montulli anecdote, not the book’s theme, takes center stage. The chapter title may offer a hint of the prior and forthcoming topics, but certainly not in an explicit way. Nevertheless, a reader of the book will find page 99 as a crucial pivot in the book’s trajectory. At this point the story is moving from the “mass” oriented analog and early digital-media environment of the late twentieth century (think cable TV, CDs, and early PCs) to our era where artificial intelligence technologies linked to increasingly personalized digital platforms are transforming our lives fundamentally. Chapter 5 is called “Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Identity Resolution: AI and The Data Deluge.” Charter 6's title is “Dynamic Personalizations, Unprecedented Permutations, Virtual Influencers: Enter Gen. A.” Chapter 7 deals with “Consumer Data and the Law Governments Pushback, Marketers Push Forward,” and Chapter 8 confronts the basic question “Why Don't People Revolt?”

So, while page 99 doesn’t presage all this, it serves as the key entry point for it. Perhaps that’s a useful variation on the Ford Madox Ford quote.

Stepping back to focus on the book’s theme, I ought to say that concerns, including in my own work, about marketers’ data-hoovering activities typically focus on privacy. But I have come to believe that companies’ frenetic drives toward AI-created personalization is leading to an even costlier predicament: It is making it impossible to sustain the kind of healthy media system required to cultivate a healthy society. That is why I wrote The Problem of Personalization. The book makes its argument by telling stories that put the personalization problem into historical, technological, legal and social perspectives. I hope this discussion of page 99 makes you want to explore the book as a whole.

Learn more about The Problem with Personalization at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Xian Aubin Wang's "Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan"

Xian Aubin Wang is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024, and reported the following:

Page 99 sets the stage by comparing the oral history testimonies of a Muslim villager with the official accounts of the conflicts that developed between the Shadian Muslim militia and the Maoist revolutionary People’s Militia. Unlike the narratives of the Maoist work teams that blame the Muslim villagers as a “chaos-making mob,” the oral testimony indicates that the Muslim villagers established their own militia because they felt threatened by the aggression of the weaponized Maoist revolutionary militia, from whom the villagers attempted to seize guns. The antagonism between the two groups intensified, and members of both sides engaged in armed conflict. The page concludes by stressing that the official narratives “offer little information about how a series of conflicts between the Shadian Muslim militia and the People’s Militia unfolded, leading to the Party Center’s direct intervention and the eventual negotiations between Muslim representatives and top CCP leaders in Beijing.”

The Page 99 Test works surprisingly well because it introduces a crucial point that the book makes to readers. That is, besides official documents, Muslim villagers’ written materials and oral testimonies are vital sources that allow us to more comprehensively understand the religious motives and agency of individuals who resisted Maoist work teams and the PLA in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, the voices of the Muslim villagers are integral to the book as a whole.

The page begins with the term “religious traitor[s],” who are nowhere to be mentioned in the official documents. Nonetheless, the Muslim villagers’ oral testimonies revealed that these “religious traitors”, identified as local CCP Muslim leaders, cooperated with Maoist work teams to ban Islamic practice, close mosques, and blaspheme Islam. In other words, the Maoist work teams cultivated a patron-client relationship between Maoist revolutionaries and local CCP Muslim cadres, through which the secular state power was able to infiltrate into the religious communities, further escalating the tensions between the atheist revolutionary state, Muslim collaborators, and the ordinary Muslim villagers. Without oral history interviews, such important local dynamics would have been neglected as we interpret how conflict between the Muslim villagers and the party-state originated, developed, and escalated to the point of antagonism.

As the first study investigating how and why conflicts between the Chinese Communist Party authorities and southern Yunnan Muslims, beginning in the early 1950s, culminated in the 1975 massacre, this book suggests a new methodological approach to understanding the development of conflicts between state power and religious communities in borderland regions by emphasizing the importance of connecting elite politics and statecraft to local dynamics and experiences.

Learn more about Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Grace Newman's "The Future in Their Hands"

Rachel Grace Newman is a historian of modern Mexico with particular interests in migration, family, and social inequality. She is an Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University. At Colgate, she teaches on these themes and other topics in modern Latin American, global history, and historical methods.

Newman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico's Foreign-Educated Elite, with the following results:

What’s on page 99 of The Future in Their Hands:

This falls in the book’s fifth chapter, set in the mid-twentieth century. That chapter explores the political agenda of Mexican students studying abroad, mostly in the United States. This agenda, I argue, was not explicitly ideological and perhaps seems even apolitical: young, middle-class Mexicans sought to protect and uplift their social status by securing generous scholarships to support themselves and their families, expecting that their foreign degrees would ultimately shore up their future careers with prestige and good salaries.

On page 99, we find several stories relating to Mexican students’ family commitments both during and after their studies abroad. First, we encounter the end of the story of Concepción Reza Inclán, who studied economics at UCLA in 1952-1953. She sat for several interviews with a researcher during her time in Los Angeles, and she told the interviewer that she aspired to be both a professional economist and a wife, which the interviewer found hard to believe possible. On page 99, we learn that in 1959, several years after returning from UCLA, she was working as an economist for Nestlé México. I explain that we don’t know whether she also had formed her own family by that point. It is the case, though, that some US-educated Mexican women I interviewed ended up being very successful researchers and mothers, too.

In the mid-twentieth century, scholarship program officers (such as those working for the Rockefeller Foundation) saw women’s family commitments as impediments to their professional careers, and so they were generally unsupportive of women who married or worse, had children. However, as I explain on this page, the Rockefeller was also unsupportive of men who provided for family members other than their wives or children. Subscribing to a vision of a breadwinner for the nuclear family that presumed that young professional men did not need to take care of their own parents, siblings, or other relatives, Rockefeller officers were surprised to find that the Mexican students they invest in with scholarships had just these kinds of “other dependents.” As I explain on page 99, these commitments were common, but usually scholarship recipients were not given extra support from the Rockefeller to provide for these relatives. An exception was one young playwright, considered to be very promising, Jorge Ibargüengoitia—who did actually become famous several years later. Because he negotiated for it, he garnered an extra stipend of $80 monthly so that he could continue to support his widowed mother and his aunt back in Mexico while he was studying theater in the United States.

Does the Page 99 Test work for this book?

The sources I used to write page 99 are some of my favorites, so the test pinpointed a place where my personal scholarly predilections really come through. Indeed, this test works fairly well for my book, although the contents of page 99 might come as a surprise to the browser who opened up to this page after seeing the book cover. Invoking “foreign-educated Mexicans” (as in the book title) usually brings a very specific image to mind: US-trained technocrats who ushered Mexico into neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. But I’m interested in how Mexicans pursued foreign education, what scholarship programs aimed to do and how they worked, and how upwardly mobile youth’s ambitions and experiences abroad related to their social origins. That will be an unexpected turn for many readers, and page 99 indicates just how deep we venture into the social history of Mexico’s ordinary elite. In the book, I argue that social imperatives were just as important as intellectual (or political) motives for studying abroad because a foreign education both signified and enhanced Mexican social privilege. That privilege was conditioned by family responsibilities and gender norms, both points which come across on page 99.

Elsewhere in the book, we learn about the political history of their relationship with state institutions. The book’s main argument is that the Mexican state created cohorts of foreign-educated Mexicans through scholarship programs at the behest of ambitious elites themselves. The idea is that scholarship programs, whether yoked to discourses of nationalism, modernization, or development, have always obeyed a hidden agenda: opportunities for elites to shore up their own status with support from the state in the form of merit-based, selective benefits. The Mexican state is mostly absent on this page (though its first systematic scholarship program, run by the Banco de México, does get a mention, and it is featured elsewhere in the book). But page 99 is not quite misleading because my book is not only about the Mexican state, but about the forces outside of it in Mexican society and even beyond Mexico that shaped its policy. The Mexican state was never been the only source for funds to study abroad. Besides family-financed study, Mexican students have also had access to scholarships from foreign and international organizations, like the Rockefeller.

Visit Rachel Grace Newman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christian B. Miller's "The Honesty Crisis"

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is the author of over 130 articles as well as Moral Psychology (2021), Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). He is a contributor for Forbes, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Thanks to a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, he directed The Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty.

Miller applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Culture Building. The biggest influence on student cheating is what their peers are doing. So the appropriate counterbalance, it seems, is to build a culture of honesty and integrity in a school.

A centerpiece of such culture building is often an honor code. As one researcher defines it, “An honor code is a community code of conduct guided by ethical principles defining the expectations for students to act with honesty and integrity and acknowledging the shared responsibility of all members” (Tatum 2022: 33).

In my experience, such codes are pretty familiar in the U.S., but not nearly as much in other places around the world. So some examples might help. Here, for instance, is the honor code that students at my school have to affirm:

"Wake Forest University is an academic community that subscribes to an honor system. By accepting membership in this community, each student assumes the obligation to be trustworthy in all pursuits. I pledge that I have not given or received information concerning this exam."

The Page 99 Test works okay, but not great, I would say. Combined with the title of the book, The Honesty Crisis, the reader should get the impression from this page that one area of society that I am worried about when it comes to dishonesty is student cheating, and furthermore that I am offering some concrete recommendations on how to address that cheating. At the same time, the reader won't get an impression of what the five other honesty crises are that I address, as well as the chapters on what honesty is, how there is some good news coming from psychology, and why honesty is an important virtue which is worth preserving.

To give a little bit more of an introduction to the rest of the book, I define an honesty crisis as any situation in which dishonest behavior has become incentivized to a greater degree, and at the same time it has become harder to catch or detect. That's a bad combination. In addition to AI student cheating, I also discuss in detail online infidelity, deepfakes, sermon plagiarism, celebrity and dishonesty, and political misinformation. I also try to offer some practical suggestions for addressing these crises, where appropriate, in order to preserve what I argue is an incredibly important virtue.

Visit Christian B. Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig S. Simpson's "Television is Where You Find It"

Craig S. Simpson is the director of special collections and archives at San José State University. He is the coauthor of Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings, with Gregory S. Wilson, and Cinema Then and Now: James Naremore—Conversations with Craig S. Simpson.

Simpson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Television Is Where You Find It: A History of Feature Filmmakers in TV, and reported the following:

Readers flipping directly to page 99 would have their attention grabbed by the only f-bomb in the entire 201pp. book. It’s near the top of the page, in a quote by pioneering Black filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles: “We have this romantic idea that all blacks should be radicals. Get the fuck out of here!” It soon becomes clear that this quote concerns the very non-radical Bill Cosby, as he transitioned from standup comedy to being the first Black lead (or co-lead, with white actor Robert Culp) of a TV series, NBC’s I Spy (1965-1968). I note that I Spy’s “international locales took the series out of the racial turmoil of 1960s America,” and then I quote scholar Donald Bogle’s observation, “Consequently…it was felt that audiences would never question such matters as hotel accommodations in foreign lands.”

After I Spy, the page continues, Cosby created and starred in The Bill Cosby Show, which premiered on NBC in September 1969. (This series preceded the more famous The Cosby Show, a cultural phenomenon that aired on the same network from 1984-1992.) Compared to the other networks, NBC was ahead of the curve “for the equitable portrayal of minorities on TV.” The National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters “followed NBC’s example with its members pledging that ‘racial or nationality types shall not be shown on television in such matter as to ridicule the race or nationality.”

There’s a section break, followed by a discussion of the mixed-bag of opportunities afforded to Black creatives through the 1950s and 1960s—from the pernicious Beulah and Amos ‘n’ Andy to the more positive if politically skittish Julia (starring Diahann Carroll) and The Bill Cosby Show. The last paragraph on page 99 ends in media res with a description of how the premiere of Cosby’s new show “illustrates how Cosby’s modus operandi was to approach a relevant social issue only to gingerly sidestep it,” which continues on page 100.

Page 99 comes little more than a third of the way into the seventh chapter of a ten-chapter critical study, twelve counting the “Intro” and “Outro.” For readers who turned to it without context, the page would be misleading in terms of content but an accurate example of my overall approach. I should take pains to emphasize that Bill Cosby is not a major figure in the book, nor is he even the primary subject of the chapter. Chapter 7 concerns Melvin Van Peebles, and uses his episode for The Bill Cosby Show, “Really Cool,” as a case study for how he transitioned (briefly) to television in between a pair of significant motion pictures, Watermelon Man and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. My chapter posits that “Really Cool” serves as a bridge between the two films in terms of technique (blending the aesthetics of American sitcoms with the French New Wave [Van Peebles lived in France for several years prior to returning to the States]) and theme (the historical and political meanings of Melvin Donaldson’s “image of the ‘running black man’”). I discuss how Van Peebles undercuts Cosby’s persona throughout the episode. I also observe that Melvin Van Peebles and Orson Welles (the subject of Chapter 4) had more in common than one might think.

As I explain in the Intro, Television is Where You Find It “offers a tour through an earlier period of television, with ten feature filmmakers who made the transition to TV as our collective guide.” Spanning the years 1955-1990, my book begins with Alfred Hitchcock and ends with David Lynch, with (in addition to Van Peebles and Welles) Leo McCarey, Ida Lupino, Budd Boetticher, Michael Powell, George Cukor, and Martin Scorsese heading the chapters in between. Also from my Intro: “Each chapter blends critical analysis of the particular episode in question with broader context pertaining to the overall series, comparisons to other programs, the body of work of each filmmaker, and the wider culture of the era, using archival resources when available. Each case study gets woven into the whole.” Page 99 offers a taste of that.

Television is Where You Find It was a rigorous yet fun book to research and write, and I hope readers will find its connections and discoveries surprising, absorbing, and illuminating.

Learn more about Television Is Where You Find It at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kieran J. O'Keefe's "Suffering for the Crown"

Kieran J. O'Keefe is Assistant Professor of History at Lyon College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Suffering for the Crown: The Hudson Valley Loyalists and the Violence of Revolution, with the following results:

From page 99:

Although some of this violence was opportunistic freebooting, much of it was driven by a desire for revenge. In November 1777, soldiers under William Tryon’s command had burned homes on Philipsburg Manor. Continental general Samuel Holden Parsons wrote to Tryon, criticizing his attack, saying that there was “no benefit” whatsoever for burning the homes, and that it had been done solely to be cruel. He also chastised Tryon for stripping “women and children of necessary apparel to cover them from the severity of a cold night.” Parsons warned that he did not want to conduct war in this cruel manner, but that he would retaliate in kind if necessary. Tryon replied by reminding Parsons that Patriots had burned New York City in 1776 (as Tryon believed), leaving many more people exposed to a cold night than he had done in this attack. Because Tryon felt that Revolutionaries had refused to conduct the war in an honorable manner, he would not cease his aggressive tactics. Tryon added that he would “burn every Committee Man’s house within my reach” and that he was willing to offer a reward of twenty-five dollars for each committeeman brought to British lines.

This text explains some of the violence in Westchester County, New York, during the American Revolutionary War. Perhaps no county anywhere in the United States was more ravaged by the conflict than Westchester. The northern section of the county was controlled by the American Revolutionaries, the southern portion by the British, while the area in between was the "neutral ground," or really a violent no-man's land. The back-and-forth violence in Westchester County led to many retaliatory raids, including the one undertaken by Royal Governor William Tryon on page 99. In particular, Tryon vented his anger at members of committees of safety, which were revolutionary bodies overseeing the war effort on the local level, and which were generally responsible for suppressing Loyalist activity.

I think this excerpt gives readers a decent idea of what part of the book is about. Chapters two and three (this passage is from chapter three) look at the Revolution as a civil war in the Hudson Valley, which highlights the struggle between Patriots and Loyalists. But the remainder of the book goes in a different direction. Chapter four explores Loyalist reintegration after the war, while chapters five and six look at the experiences of Loyalists who went into exile, primarily in what is now Canada. Indeed, a major goal of the book is to see how a violent civil war shaped the Loyalists of the Hudson Valley down the road, which is not apparent in the excerpt. So, page 99 gives readers a flavor of the book without revealing its whole scope.

Learn more about Suffering for the Crown at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chloe Chapin's "Suitable"

Chloe Chapin holds a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University and master's degrees in fashion and textile studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology and costume design from the Yale School of Drama. She has taught fashion history, costume design, gender studies, and anthropology. As a costume designer for over twenty years, her credits include Broadway musicals, opera, and Shakespeare.

Chapin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men, and shared the following:

If you open Suitable to page 99, you will find yourself smack in the middle of a discussion about the historical evolution of the engineering of crotches of men’s trousers. The page details the nineteenth-century transition from tight, light-colored breeches and pantaloons (which proudly displayed men’s calves and genitals) to the roomier, darker trousers we recognize today. I note that as the construction of pants shifted, "a man was now forced to pick one leg-tube or the other for his genitals to occupy." This anatomical reality required bespoke tailors to ask clients which side they "dressed on" (left or right) so the pattern could be skillfully cut to accommodate them.

I laughed out loud when I turned to page 99. Readers opening to this page would get a fantastic—if perhaps unexpectedly intimate—idea of the whole book. While a reader might be momentarily caught off guard by the focus on male genitalia, this page does perfectly encapsulate the book's central thesis: the modern male suit is not a natural or neutral garment, but a highly engineered piece of technology designed to reshape and conceal the male body. The test works brilliantly here as a browser's shortcut to the book's core themes.

Suitable traces the "Sartorial Revolution" from the late eighteenth through the mid- nineteenth centuries, exploring how and why white men abandoned the colorful, decorative fashions of the aristocracy in favor of the plain, dark uniform of the modern suit (a shift I call “peacocks to penguins.”) Page 99 shows how this physical transformation happened on the body. By shrouding the legs and obscuring the groin with dark wool, the suit hid both physical vulnerability and overt sexuality. In its place, the suit projected an image of rational, democratic, and disembodied authority. The book argues that this shift wasn't just a matter of changing aesthetic tastes; it was a powerful political maneuver. The dark suit became a visual shorthand for civic virtue, helping to naturalize white male power by making it look inherently stable, unremarkable, and "plain."

Page 99 is also a good demonstration of my overall methodological approach. By combining my two decades of experience as a theatrical costume designer with traditional historical archives, I wanted to uncover the material reality of how these clothes actually fit, felt, and functioned. The page proves that the ubiquitous black suit was actually a radical, highly constructed political tool, built stitch by stitch and seam by seam.

Visit Chloe Chapin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah M. S. Pearsall's "Freedom Round the Globe"

Sarah M. S. Pearsall is an award-winning historian with degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge, where she taught for nearly a decade. She is a professor in, and soon to be Chair of, the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. She wrote her new book, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution, as both a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and Distinguished Fellow in the American Revolution at the British Library.

Pearsall applied the “Page 99 Test” to Freedom Round the Globe and reported the following:

Page 99 of Freedom Round the Globe focuses on the strategies of the royal governor of Virginia, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore to win popularity in the 1770s. Dunmore had few supporters in Virginia in 1774, given that he represented the British crown in a period of rising protests and that he was a member of a detested minority (Scots), to boot. In a bid to increase his popularity, he brought his wife and children to join him: a time-honored strategy to humanize politicians. He also started a war against Indigenous Americans, notably Shawnees, in order to placate settlers eager to move west into Indigenous homelands. This dark, not to say cynical, strategy resulted in Dunmore’s War in 1774, which even some Virginians at the time saw as a political ploy. Neither strategy worked for Dunmore, and the human costs were significant, especially for Native Americans.

Page 99 here is representative of the book in its linkages between events in the “thirteen colonies” and those in a wider world. Every chapter of the book starts outside the thirteen colonies in order to offer a new perspective on central ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. Page 99 is in Chapter 4, which begins in Edinburgh, Scotland, with an all-male debating society allowing women to join its audience to discuss happiness and other major topics. There is, then, a thread about Scotland and its connections with the American Revolution, shown here in the discussion of Dunmore. The book also considers consistently the fraught and often violent relations between settlers and Indigenous nations, as in this consideration of Dunmore’s War.

This section also sets up an examination (in the next chapter) of Lord Dunmore’s proclamation in November 1775, once fighting had begun. He offered freedom to enslaved men who fled their masters in order to take up arms for the British. In the eyes of Americans such as George Washington, such a move turned Dunmore from an unpopular governor into a villain. Virginia enslavers saw this decision as abject treachery, and it made some join the rebellion. It also meant that many more enslaved people fled to British lines to win freedom: an irony considering American Patriots considered themselves the defenders of liberty.

So, the Page 99 Test works here in showing global connections and in terms of setting up critical connections between the American Revolution, slavery, and settler violence.

Learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Polygamy: An Early American History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cameron Seglias's "Settling Debt"

Cameron Seglias is Assistant Professor of American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Settling Debt: Antislavery and Colonial Crisis, with the following results:

Page 99 analyzes several passages from the fascinating eighteenth-century Quaker Ralph Sandiford, an antislavery writer who is still not well known outside of specialist circles. In these passages, Sandiford reflects on the corruption of religious and political elites who profit from racialized slavery and the traffic in enslaved Africans. As I put it on page 99: “Sandiford’s point is that the ‘unrighteous’ enslaving ministers that ‘teach, or oversee, or discipline the Church...have lost their Savour of the Gospel.’ And as long as they continue to ‘preach to others, they...become Castaways, and draw their Flock with them to Perdition.’” In order to resist these enslavers, Sandiford felt that he must make his testimony public through printing his antislavery books. Like others before him (including John Milton), Sandiford believed in the centrality of press freedom for democracy and self-governance.

I still remember working on earlier drafts of what would eventually become page 99. There was something even then that made this page feel particularly dense to me. Perhaps this is because a number of central ideas of the book—especially around questions of religious and political authority—are knotted together in the material that is quoted and analyzed on this page. In other words, page 99 probably is not the best browser’s shortcut for my book, if only because too much context is needed to understand what is being said on it.

Even while I don’t think the Page 99 Test works for my book, the chapter of which page 99 is a part could serve as an entry into the book. The writer I focus on in that chapter (Ralph Sandiford) is a kind of key to unlocking the main arguments and themes of Settling Debt. It was while working on Sandiford’s writing that I figured out what my book is really about. I can sum this up in a quote from his work, in which he says that being involved with racialized slavery makes one a “Debtor and Oppressor in the Creation.”

Learn more about Settling Debt at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert K. Brigham's "This Is a True War Story"

Robert K. Brigham is the Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College. He is the author or coauthor of ten books, among them Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam.

Brigham applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam, and shared the following:

On page 99, my adopted sister and I are discussing our adoptive mother and her expectations that I make something of myself. She had a dim view toward men in general and she wanted me to be that rare exception...a good man.

Page 99 certainly deals with one of the many complicated relationships I had in my life as an adoptee, but it does not capture any of the major themes of the memoir. I would say that the Page 99 Test fails.

This memoir is about poverty, adoption, families, and war. It is about my lifelong search for my biological family, ending with the discovery that my biological father had been a major influence on my life without my knowing it.

Learn more about This Is a True War Story at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue