Ricky W. Law's "Transnational Nazism"

Ricky W. Law is Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania. He has received grants and fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the Royster Society of Fellows. In 2013, he received the Dean's Distinguished Dissertation Award at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where he earned his Ph.D., and the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize of the Friends of the German Historical Institute.

Law applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919-1936, and reported the following:

From page 99:

… Japan’s perception of Germany. What a people invests in the human resources, time, and money to render from a foreign language says a lot about what it prioritizes as worthwhile from another nation. So the aggregate of translated works is one civilization’s evaluation of another. Seen from this perspective, interwar Japan esteemed Germany highly and broadly. It even imported works on obscure topics such as procedures for transporting corpses by rail or regulations governing horseracing. Where appropriate, this chapter analyzes translated volumes collectively as a gauge of what information from Germany piqued Japanese interest.

The chapter concentrates primarily on the few score books on current affairs, politics, culture, economy, and contemporary history. Their genres include monographs, biographies, travelogues, memoirs, and encyclopedic anthologies. Like pamphlets and lectures, these works purported to relay facts. Unlike speeches and booklets, nonfiction did not operate within such thin profit margins or tight publication schedules. The quick turnaround of pamphlets enabled, even demanded, responses to breaking news, such as the commentaries chiming in within days of the Anti-Comintern Pact. But book authors and editors could use the extra time and pages to incorporate in-depth analyses and wider contexts. The more generous profit and time margins also allowed books to indulge in themes deemed less pressing or practical than those in pamphlets. Information in books was meant to last far longer, like the paper it was printed on. Hardcovers were sold with a sturdy sheath for preserving the volume inside for years and even decades. Book writers should have felt less pressure than pamphleteers to sensationalize issues because their readers were probably more educated and committed in time and money than consumers of pulpy booklets. Whereas many pamphlets were adorned with graphics and slogans to boost sales, most books, especially hardcovers with a brown cardboard shell, were designed to be judged not by their covers but their contents.

The depictions of Germany in interwar Japanese nonfiction fall into two phases. In the first, spanning the 1920s, authors and translators explored a wide range of topics that reflected the relatively open, liberal Weimar and Taisho zeitgeists. Early publications dwelling on the postwar gloom soon gave way to those that marveled at Germany’s recovery in the mid-decade, though opinion makers could not agree what a resurgent Germany should look like. But just as the revival was accepted as a…

Page 99 gives a useful snapshot of the scope of the book, especially the first half, on the interwar Japanese media’s reception of Germany. Because of the distance between the two countries, Japanese and Germans learned about each other mostly through the mass media rather than experiences. The book analyzes German-Japanese mutual depictions in the media to explain the cultural context of Tokyo and Berlin’s political rapprochement in 1936. It argues that in the early 1930s an ideological outlook, transnational Nazism, enticed some Japanese to support Hitler and Nazism, and convinced some Germans to accommodate Japan in the Nazi worldview.

The page belongs to the beginning of Chapter 3, on Germany in Japanese nonfiction publications. It describes how they differed from other media categories and how their characteristics influenced or were influenced by transnational Nazism. Interwar Japan eagerly imported knowledge from Germany in translations and books written by Japanese authors. In the 1920s, such works tended to be apolitical and aimed to acquaint readers with a Germany transformed by World War I and revolution. But with the rise of Hitler and his movement in the early 1930s, Japanese nonfiction on Germany took on a partisan tone. Several writers emerged to praise Nazism and to advocate Japan approaching the Third Reich. The first Hitler biography – with several to follow – was published in this period. Transnational Nazism even affected the visual appearance of books: pro-Nazi works in Japan often stood out for their graphic, colorful covers and easy, simplistic language. Beyond nonfiction, similar transformations took place among Japanese newspapers, lectures and pamphlets, and language textbooks.

Learn more about Transnational Nazism at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Sherman's "The Bells of Old Tokyo"

Anna Sherman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied Greek and Latin at Wellesley College and at Lincoln College, Oxford. Sherman worked as an editor at Millennium Journal of International Studies, Financial Times Energy, and then, after moving to Asia in 2001, for Hong Kong University Press and other imprints in Hong Kong and Tokyo.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Bells of Old Tokyo, her first book, and reported the following:

The Bells of Old Tokyo evolved as voices in a labyrinth. Each speaker connects the reader to the city’s past and its future. Page 99 is an interview with Yamamoto Makoto, who rings the Bell of Time in Ueno Park, as his grandfather and then his mother had before him.

With a few brief words, Yamamoto sketches the history of time-keeping through the twentieth-century and the twenty-first: its evolution from radio announcements to television broadcasts to satellite signals beamed to mobile phones. How did anyone know what time it was before those modern technologies existed? I asked Yamamoto. Before the modern era, no one really cared about being so precise, he answered. ‘But now it’s the Digital Age, and things are different.’

I came away from the interview profoundly moved by Yamamoto’s fidelity to an ancient concept in a city famous for its cutting-edge technologies; also how lonely it is, ringing that bell every single day at 6AM and 6PM. (Yamamoto’s wife rings it at noon, when he is at work.) When Yamamoto retires, someone else will take over: his children will give up the house and the position. I asked Yamamoto if he himself, as a child, wanted to become the bell-ringer. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said, somber. ‘I wanted what everyone wants. I wanted the life other people had. When you’re the bell-ringer, you can never go away on holiday. You can never take time off to be sick…’

It’s eerie: page 99 is the crossroads of The Bells of Old Tokyo; its heart. The passage follows the book’s two great narrative fractures – the first is a break in Tokyo’s own history: the last shogun has just departed the city, after which Tokyo became the capital, and Japan began modernizing at breakneck speed. The second fracture happened in my own life: I left Tokyo after the 2011 tsunami and the Fukushima reactors exploded. Page 100 marks my return, but on page 99 I’m still outside Tokyo: an exile.

Page 99 is very characteristic of the book: I take the reader inside a private space, one out-of-bounds to most people living in the city. While writing Bells, I often visited hidden, forgotten places and sometimes forbidden ones: the inner sancta of temples; laboratories where physicists build atomic clocks tiny as rice grains; memorials to war victims in softly-lit chambers inside the earth; artists’ workshops. Places anyone can visit and others where you have to beg your way in. Yamamoto’s house and its bell tower were places I begged my way in, but once there, found richness – Yamamoto's family memories, the bonds that tie him to place, and the great bell itself.

Visit Anna Sherman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frank O. Bowman III's "High Crimes and Misdemeanors"

Frank O. Bowman III is a law professor, legal historian, and former federal and state prosecutor. He has written extensively on impeachment in legal journals and the popular press, including the New York Times, Politico, and Slate, where he is regular contributor. He has provided testimony to both Houses of Congress on multiple subjects including the meaning of 'high crimes and misdemeanors' during the Clinton impeachment crisis.

Bowman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump, and reported the following:

Interesting premise, this “page 99 test.” Can’t say it works perfectly for my book, but reading page 99 does land the reader at a kind of hinge in the argument and therefore hints at one important theme.

Page 99 falls in the middle of the explanation of how the Framers of the American constitution meant impeachment to fit into its system of checks and balances. It follows the account of how, in the summer of 1787, George Mason, James Madison, and the rest decided to include the impeachment power in their constitution, and why they settled on “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” as the definition of impeachable conduct. “High crimes and misdemeanors” was a phrase used by the British parliament since 1386 to describe conduct by ministers of the crown (and others) that parliament found to be impeachable. The question asked on page 99 is whether the American Framers intended these enigmatic words to mean much the same thing they had meant in England.

I argue that the answer is yes, and that this has at least three important implications:

First, the Framers adopted the British view that impeachment is an essential tool with which the legislative branch combats the tendency in hereditary or elected executives to autocracy and resistance to the rule of law.

Second, the Framers had a good understanding of the "high crimes and misdemeanors" for which parliament impeached royal officers: serious ordinary crimes, corruption, betrayal of the country’s foreign policy interests, gross incompetence or maladministration of office, and subversion of the constitution. They intended such behavior by American officials to be impeachable. They also intended Congress to have the same power as had parliament to decide that bad official behavior was impeachable even if not criminal in the legal sense.

Third, the Framers placed the power to impeach in the legislature, and adopted the ancient, and flexible, standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors” because they intended impeachment to be a political process in the large sense of a mechanism for defending constitutional order.

The Framers nonetheless made impeachment hard by adopting a 2/3 requirement for conviction in the Senate because they didn't want Congress throwing out presidents in partisan hissy fits. Still, the Framers meant it to be used if, somehow, a manifestly unfit person were to become president and endanger the constitutional order they so carefully constructed.

Most of the book examines the relatively few cases of American impeachment – Senator William Blount (1797), Justice Samuel Chase (1805) and other judges, Secretary of War William Belknap (1876), and Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton – for lessons on how the impeachment power should properly be employed. It closes by asking whether Donald Trump is the contingency for which the Framers gave us the weapon of impeachment, and, if so, whether our politics is so broken that we can no longer wield it.

Learn more about High Crimes and Misdemeanors at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Guy Ortolano's "Thatcher's Progress"

Guy Ortolano is an Associate Professor of History at New York University. He serves as an editor of Twentieth Century British History, and is also the author of The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (2009).

Ortolano applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thatcher's Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Thatcher’s Progress, the reader meets the American futurologist, Melvin Webber. It is 1968, and the British state is building a city for 250,000 people, from scratch, between Oxford and Cambridge. Planning for a world that does not yet exist, they enlist Webber to figure out what’s coming. He forecasts a fantastical world of nuclear power, limitless prosperity, and lifetimes spent in leisure. That leisure, however, will bring challenges of its own, as technological developments compel “enforced leisure” – that is, unemployment – that could exacerbate racial tensions. Fortunately, medical advances will enable societies to call upon the services of their greatest statesmen – the future equivalents of Aneurin Bevan and Winston Churchill – for up to 100 years.

Page 99 conveys several key aspects of Thatcher’s Progress. The book narrates the building of the new town of Milton Keynes, today a punchline in British culture. Fifty years after its founding, this suburban city is often seen as drab, disorienting, anti-urban, and un-English. But when Webber arrives from Berkeley, bringing tales of automotive bliss, readers can begin to understand how this peculiar place came to be. Webber’s vision of a world in which limits to prosperity, leisure, and even lifespans have been lifted helps to convey the thrill of MK’s founding. Sometimes his premonitions hit their mark, as when he warned that diversity could foster resentments no less than tolerance; but other times he misfired, as when he predicted that rising incomes would enable grateful wives to leave the workforce and return home.

What a single page cannot convey is the direction of this history. Subtitled “From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town,” Thatcher’s Progress follows this massive infrastructure project on either side of market liberalism’s ascendance. By contrast with more schematic accounts, which make “neoliberalism” seem inevitable, the building of a city illuminates the halting, contested, partial nature of that process. Rather than supposing that social democracy collapsed in the face of economic and political challenges, the daily work of social democratic actors shows them responding creatively to trying times. But the terms of political life did come to change, and seeing how these figures navigated that transition reveals how tactical adaptations helped entrench a politics contrary to their own.

We now inhabit the future that these characters on page 99 were straining to perceive. Charged with building a better world, they hoped to learn from us. Today our charge is not so different – can we learn from them?

Learn more about Thatcher's Progress at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexander L. Fattal's "Guerrilla Marketing"

Alexander L. Fattal is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is also a filmmaker. His research and creative work focus on questions of representation in Colombia’s armed conflict.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia, and reported the following:

From page 99:

As the concert began, the minister of defense boarded a helicopter to La Gabarra to deliver the symbolic humanitarian aid. Citing lack of space in the helicopter, Marcela explained to the journalists that only one photographer could travel with him. The flood assistance was reduced to a photo op, raising the question: who is assisting whom in this “humanitarian” exchange? The more substantive exchange during the minister’s brief appearance in La Gabarra was of bullets. As his helicopter elevated to return to Tibú, the local police station took fire from the FARC’s Thirty-Third Front. Nobody was injured, but the skirmish left a few more pockmarks in the building’s facade. The FARC was sending its own message.

Marcel Mauss’s classic book on the gift and the literature it has spawned have provided anthropologists with an analytic framework for understanding humanitarian aid as an expression of power relations. In this line of critique, gifts given in the wake of an emergency or during or after a military confrontation assert a soft form domination over the receiver of the aid (be it a person, organization, or institution). Such a critique could be applied to the military’s distribution of token flood relief kits. The act places the military in the position of ameliorating the effects of recent inundations of roadways that have left the residents cut off from critical markets and struggling to access basic provisions. By showing its disposition to combat natural disaster, the military seeks to articulate its primary war-waging function with its ancillary role as an armed relief agency. One logical conclusion of this armed humanitarianism is that the FARC is but another disaster and the local population, which is receiving the ministry’s flood-relief kits, is symbolically subordinated to the military and interpellated as military collaborators.

As it so happens this page makes two key points in Guerrilla Marketing: first, massive media spectacles and military interventions are increasingly intertwined; and second, this convergence is often intended to represent militaries as humanitarian actors. Page 99 engages with the anthropological literature on “the gift” of humanitarian aid, which has argued that such assistance is often an expression of power relations. Elsewhere on page 99, I describe the hollowness of this particularly utilitarian gift exchange and question its efficacy.

Page 99 comes from Chapter 2, Operation Christmas, a pivotal chapter in the book. Operation Christmas was the name that a marketing firm that has stewarded the brands of Mazda and RedBull in Colombia gave its campaign to demobilize FARC and ELN guerrilla fighters during the holiday season. The idea was to “attack the heart” of guerrillas when they might be missing loved ones back home. This is a theme throughout the book — intimacy as a battleground, both in the media war and the physical war, two realms that I insist cannot be neatly separated. In fact, one of the big takeaways from the book is that we need to think about propaganda as something that is the centerpiece of warfare in the twenty-first century.

We see this in Colombia time and again. The cover of the book comes from the 2013 version of the Christmas campaign. That year the military-marketing partnership came up with the slogan, “Before being a guerrilla, you are my child.” The campaign featured photographs culled from the archives of guerrillas’ mothers that showed their sons and daughters as babies. In all of the efforts to “attack the heart,” this assault was the most direct.

At the other end of the binding, the book’s epilogue focuses on the FARC doing some marketing of its own at a giant conference/party in which it tried to rebrand itself as a political party in anticipation of the changes set up by the 2016 peace accord. Those who are following news out of Colombia know the conflict [and the “brand warfare” that goes along with it (see pages 11–23)] continues even as the country has been struggling to implement the historic agreement. Unfortunately, Guerrilla Marketing remains highly relevant to post-peace accord Colombia. Further afield, I hope that the case study will help shed light on the murky realm of propaganda in the early twenty-first century.

Learn more about Guerrilla Marketing at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hugo Cerón-Anaya's "Privilege at Play"

Hugo Cerón-Anaya is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies Program at Lehigh University. His work focuses on social hierarchies, inequalities, and privilege, examining how class, race, and gender inform the behavior and perceptions of affluent people. He is particularly interested in the wide array of ordinary and everyday practices that reproduce privilege.

Cerón-Anaya applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Privilege at Play: Class, Race, Gender, and Golf in Mexico, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Privilege at Play reads:

…asked for my ID and then talked to the tournament organizers through a walkie-talkie to confirm I was an expected guest. Once he had confirmed my status, the guard politely gave me instructions to meet up with the organizing team by walking along the outside perimeter of the clubhouse, even though there was a shorter route through the building. Once I reached the organizing team, the manager welcomed me kindly but then quickly excused himself and apologized for not being able to talk at the moment because he was frantically supervising several groups of people who were making last-minute preparations, including hanging banners with the names of tournament sponsors, erecting large tents in the middle of the course, setting up the registration stand, and directing the arriving golfers to the continental breakfast being served in the bar.

Another member of the team suggested that I should go to the bar and have breakfast with the participating golfers. As in all the other clubs I visited, the 19th hole (the bar) was a spacious room with lots of tables and plenty of comfortable chairs. One wall was filled with large windows, offering patrons a nice view of the golf course. The organization of space inside the bar on that day, however, did not follow the pattern I observed in other clubs. The bar was divided into two sections. On one side, several tables were set up in an “L” shape near two walls. The tables were covered with platters full of fruit, bread, and individual servings of assorted cereals as well as large urns of coffee and tea. In the narrow space between the tables and the walls, harried workers moved swiftly, refilling food platters, picking up used plates and cups, and cleaning up spills. In the other section of the room, there were several large round tables where about 30 people sat in groups. Unlike the workers bustling behind the food service tables, those seated at the round tables were unhurried as they chatted with each other, read the newspaper, looked at their phones, or enjoyed breakfast by themselves. As I hung my jacket and a small bag on a chair at one of the round tables, I noticed that most of the people who were sitting by themselves at the table were staring at me. I smiled at them and then noticed that some of the people sitting in groups had also begun to stare. Many of the golfers continued to watch me closely as I walked over to the food service tables. Their curiosity waned when I grabbed a cup of coffee, filled two plates with fruit and bread, and asked one of the servers for help bringing my food to the table. Most of the golfers ignored me for the next half hour as I ate and read.

I grabbed the newspaper at the center of the table and began to skim it. One section was entitled “Con Clase [With Class].” The front-page article…

This page offers an accurate sample of my book’s writing style, providing a glimpse into how privilege manifests through everyday interactions in Mexico—the central theme of the book. Page 99 vividly describes a scene that took place in one of the most prestigious golf clubs outside of Mexico City, right before the starting of a prominent amateur golf tournament. The passage contrasts golfers' relaxed and unhurried behavior with workers’ subservient and expeditious attitudes. The book includes multiple descriptions of similar events that demonstrate that privilege is not a possession, but rather a set of social relations that generate feelings of social superiority. Page 99 does provide an excellent short cut into one of the central arguments of my work.

The last sentences of page 99 and the following paragraphs introduce the argument that class privilege and racial ideas cannot be disentangled in Mexico. The section explains that people can modify how others perceive their race based on economic resources. Unlike other studies arguing a similar idea, my book demonstrates that all Mexicans do not see race in the same "flexible" way. People located in the lower and middle classes possess more fluid views. In contrast, the upper-middle and the upper classes possess more rigid notions on the topic. This change creates an invisible but firm class and racial barrier between lower and middle classes, on the one hand, and the upper-middle and the upper classes, on the other. The book illuminates the argument by analyzing the relationship between golfers and caddies (the workers who assist players on the course). Privilege at Play also examines the paradoxical situation that affluent women face in these clubs. Based on their economic position, female club members are highly privileged, like any other golfer in this country. However, traditional gender roles relegate women to a second class status inside these sites—remarkably, the limited research on the topic in the United States points out a similar finding. In short, this book offers a compelling and multifaceted analysis of how privilege is lived and experienced in Mexico.

Learn more about Privilege at Play at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert N. Spengler III's "Fruit from the Sands"

Robert N. Spengler III is the director of the Paleoethnobotany Laboratories at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. He is a former Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World through New York University and a Volkswagen and Mellon Foundations Fellow.

Spengler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Dioscoredes mentions making bread from rice flour (2000 [A.D. 64]) and Pliny the Elder is also familiar with rice, mentioning it several times in the Natural Histories (1855 [A.D. 77-79]). Archaeobotanical remains of rice from the second century A.D. (n=33 grains) were recovered from the Roman trading port of Quseir al-Qadim in Egypt and a few additional grains were recovered from excavations at the Roman trading center of Berenike. In both cases, the grains were found in very low overall abundance and interpreted as in imported good; interestingly, at both sites they remain in low abundance right through the Islamic period.

According to the Records of the Great Historian, The Shiji (1993 [91-109 B.C.], Book 123), the Han traveler, Zhang Qian, reported that rice was cultivated in the land of Dayuan. Most scholars agree that Zhang Qian was referring to Fergana of modern day Uzbekistan. Among other aspects of the local culture, the military ambassador recorded the main grains of a new region when he visited it, taking special care to observe whether rice was cultivated. He also noted that wheat fields and grape vineyards were abundant in Fergana. In book 123 of The Shiji, it is recorded that Zhang Qian claims that rice was being grown in Parthia and Chaldea. Although, many scholars have pointed out that these latter accounts are from word-of-mouth and not firsthand observations. It is not clear how reliable any of these accounts are, but the written accounts of the Great Historian take a central role in the core doctrine of early Chinese historical scholarship.

Archaeobotanical studies in Central Asia, have not recovered solid evidence for rice; although, these data are highly limited, especially for agriculturally rich regions like Fergana. There is a published claim from a 1970s Soviet excavation that a large quantity of rice grains were recovered from one site in a cluster of sites in the Nos 28, 29, and 61 group in the Ferghana valley of Uzbekistan, dating to the early first millennium A.D., but this claim has not been properly verified. Although, the claim may be supported by a second report from the 1980s of rice grains recovered from mudbrick fragments at the fifth to seventh century A.D. site of Munchak Tepe in the Osh Region of Kyrgystan near the town of Kerkidon. Today, rice is grown in parts of the Zerafshan valley in Uzbekistan and in some particularly humid river valleys as far north as southern Semirech’ye, but it is unlikely that rice was grown in most of this area in the past.

You have heard the phrase “as American as apple pie,” you know the Big Apple and who Johnnie Apple Seed was, and you are probably aware of the cultural significance of cider in southern England. However, it may shock you to learn that the apple originated in the southern corner of Kazakhstan, in the Tian Shan Mountains and that it was domesticated as it moved along the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road. In this book, I lay out the stories behind many of the grains, fruits, nuts, and spices in your kitchens today, summarizing significant discoveries in archaeobotany. I attempt to take the reader along a culinary journey from the ancient dynastic capital at Xian in central China, along the mountain foothills of the Pamir and through the Kyzyl Kum and Kara Kum deserts. I explore the lasting legacy of these ancient trade routes, and I step even further back in time to prehistoric cultural dispersals. I look at the East Asian origins of peaches and apricots and how they ended up in ancient Rome, and how grapes and the technology of wine productions spread across Eurasia.

Page 99 of the book opens halfway through the story of rice, looking at some of the early historical accounts of its spread out of East Asia and towards Europe. Rice is an integral component of the culinary traditions across West Asia today; it is hard to imagine Turkic food without pilaf or a plate of rice fried in animal fat. On page 99, I pull out some early references from Classical European texts that mention rice over two millennia ago. However, rice originated in what is now eastern China. The story of how rice crossed two continents by this time is still largely shrouded in history, but discoveries and more archaeobotanical research in Central Asia are clarifying aspects of the story. Despite the knowledge of rice in ancient Europe, this crop does not appear to have become prominent outside East Asia until the later medieval period. Advances in irrigation technology and greater public works projects were likely required to make this water-demanding crop suitable for the arid regions of West Asia. Ultimately, page 99 is not representative of the book at large, but it does provide an excellent excerpt from a case study that feeds into the bigger narrative presented in the book.

Visit Robert N. Spengler III's website and learn more about Fruit from the Sands at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr.'s "Marketing the Blue and Gray"

Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. is an associate professor at Stillman College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Marketing the Blue and Gray: Newspaper Advertising and the American Civil War, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book is an analysis of how an old newspaper notice helped to change northern attitudes toward the recruitment of black men during the Civil War. In 1863, there was considerable backlash among many white civilians and soldiers over the expansion of the Union’s war effort to include the destruction of slavery. In his book on the attitudes of the Founding Fathers toward “Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens and as Soldiers,” published that same year, historian George Livermore reprinted a runaway notice for a “Molatto Fellow” that had run in a Boston newspaper in the late 1750s. Crispus Attucks was never apprehended and, when he next appeared in the newspapers after the Boston Massacre, it was as a martyr for the American cause. Livermore reminded his readers that, through the shedding of his “precious blood,” Attucks had demonstrated that black men were willing to fight and, if need be, die for their country. The fugitive notice helped to swing northern opinion toward the enlistment of black soldiers, with reviewers mentioning its emotional impact. Livermore was so persuasive in arguing for the enlistment of black soldiers that Abraham Lincoln reportedly gave him the pen he had used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. The ninety-ninth page concludes with: “Had the runaway notice for Attucks not gone unmet, the flow of the nation’s history might have taken a different course by 1863.”

Arguing that a newspaper notice influenced the bloodiest war in American history is, perhaps, as much of stretch as when Lincoln supposedly remarked, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that she was the “little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” But perhaps not. Newspapers were widely circulated during the mid-nineteenth century, and advertisers poured money into them. They attempted to sell everything from biographies on political and military leaders to patent medicines that promised to cure almost any battlefield wound. Splashed across even the front pages, the sale columns drew readers’ attention. Contemporary observers described the notices as the “pulse and commerce of universal activity” and the “most suggestive and interesting portion of a daily newspaper.”

Like Livermore, I use the Union and Confederate advertisements for their historical value and, in that way, page 99 is an excellent representation of the book. Merchants commercialized the war, by offering their readers a sense of turning an everyday purchase into a political activity. A customer might strike a blow for the war effort without ever leaving the storefront. And, lest we, in the modern-day, fall into the historical sop about the past as a more simple time, some of the gimmicks were totally over the top. “Richmond Captured” and “No Compromise with Anti-Slavery” drew the eye of many northern and southern families, before leading into a sales pitch for dry goods and other material wares. Yet, by studying advertising in its early days, Marketing the Blue and Gray argues that shopping had become its own form of patriotism, one of the Civil War’s more enduring legacies.

Learn more about Marketing the Blue and Gray at the Louisiana State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

E. Tory Higgins's "Shared Reality"

E. Tory Higgins is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology, Professor of Business, and Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is the author of Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works (2012). He has received the Distinguished Scientist Award (the Society of Experimental Social Psychology), the Anneliese Maier Research Award (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), the William James Fellow Award for Distinguished Achievements in Psychological Science (the American Psychological Society), and the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions. He is also a recipient of Columbia University's Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching and the Ambady Award for Mentoring Excellence (Society for Personality and Social Psychology).

Higgins applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Shared Reality: What Makes Us Strong and Tears Us Apart, and reported the following:

From page 99:

We have all heard about “horse whisperers.” We recognize that they have a special gift. What is this gift? It is the gift of listening to the inner state of the horse, by carefully studying its expressions and movements (the body language), and responding appropriately. Horse whisperers signal to the horse that what matters to the horse also matters to them. And over time this builds trust. The horse and the whisperer become partners.

Creating a relationship with an animal as a “whisperer” is not restricted to horses as partners. It can be done with many other animals. Dogs are an obvious example because dogs are highly responsive to human social cues. Although most humans who have pet dogs love and care for their dog, this does not make them dog whisperers. Indeed, even among professional dog trainers who know much more than most of us about how to train dogs, only some are dog whisperers. Among dog trainers, the highest level of human-dog relationship is called an “adult-adult relationship.” This is when both the dog and the trainer behave as adult individuals, in contrast to having an adult-child relationship where the trainer takes on the adult role and the dog is given the child role.

What does this adult-adult relationship between dog and trainer look like? A dog and its trainer approach another dog. The trainer’s dog wants to play with this other dog. But it first looks at the trainer to check how the trainer is reacting to this other dog. Is my trainer, my partner, having a positive or a negative reaction to this other dog? If positive, then approach. If negative, then avoid. Importantly, the reverse situation also occurs: where the trainer checks the reaction of his or her dog to a new dog that is approaching them. Is my dog, my partner, having a positive or a negative reaction to this other dog? If positive, then approach. If negative, then avoid. This is an equal, adult-adult relationship where the trainer and the dog as partners learn from each other how to react to a third party. They may not begin with the same emotional reaction to the third party, but they share the relevance of the third party from the beginning. And, then, they converge on how to react to the third party.

This is an example of a dog whisperer. It illustrates how shared relevance can be created with an animal that builds connectedness and trust. For example, if your dog stops and looks at something or sniffs at something, and then checks back with you, you can make eye contact and then pay attention to what he or she is looking at or sniffing at. You can signal that what your dog is treating as being worthy of attention is worthy of your attention too. You create a moment of shared relevance with your dog. It is these moments of shared relevance that we need to experience with other animals. We need to reconnect with them in this way for their sake…and our own sake. We need to overcome the downside of domestication that came with civilization.

If browsers opened my book to page 99 [plus the sentence before and the sentence after], they would get a pretty good idea of a major takeaway message of my book on shared reality: it begins with shared relevance. To connect to other animals and one another, we need to share what matters in the world, what is worthy of our attention. This is what connects us to others. The phenomena of “horse whisperers” and “dog whisperers” illustrate how this works. A human and an animal truly connect when they signal to one another that what you take seriously, I also take seriously. The next step is signaling that how you feel about it, I also feel about it. Page 99 also states the importance of humans reconnecting to other animals by sharing what matters in the world.

These themes in page 99 relate to two important issues that are central to the book. First, in our current world of social bubbles, with each bubble having alternative facts, we need to connect to one another by recognizing that we often have shared relevance—we agree that health matters, education matters, jobs matter, and peace matters. By having this shared reality, we can begin a conversation. Second, the shared reality that produced civilization as a benefit also produced domestication of animals and domestication of ourselves that had downsides as well. We lost the ability to relate to other animals that we had as hunter-gatherers. Learning again how to be “whisperers” can be a very good thing for our relations to other animals, and benefit our own well-being. The upsides and downsides of civilization highlight how our human motivation to create shared reality is central to what makes us human—the best of us and the worst of us.

Learn more about Shared Reality at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ethan Schrum's "The Instrumental University"

Ethan Schrum is Associate Professor of History at Azusa Pacific University, and an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II, and reported the following:

Page 99 is about the search that led to the appointment of G. Holmes Perkins as dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts (today known as the Stuart Weitzman School of Design) in 1951. Penn president Harold Stassen created a search committee mostly of professionals from outside the university, including Ralph Walker, president of the American Institute of Architects. Chaired by Penn alum James Kellum Smith of the celebrated architecture firm McKim, Mead, and White, the committee gave Stassen three finalists. Stassen selected Perkins, who was chair of Harvard’s Department of Regional Planning and editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Planners. At Harvard, he had collaborated with famed German émigré Walter Gropius, a pioneer of modernist architecture. Previously, Perkins had worked for the federal government as part of the National Housing Agency and Housing and Home Finance Agency. Perkins accepted the deanship only on the condition that Penn create a city planning program, which led to the establishment of the Department of Land and City Planning (today known as the Department of City and Regional Planning).

The Instrumental University explains how elite research universities reconceived their missions after World War II, reconfiguring themselves in order to stimulate economic growth and solve social problems. The search that produced G. Holmes Perkins’s deanship is not central to this explanation, but the description of the search on page 99 illustrates key points about the book’s message and craftsmanship. Readers opening The Instrumental University to page 99 thus would not immediately grasp the book’s main theme, but the material on page 99 would lead them there. Because the account on page 99 is drawn largely from Stassen’s correspondence, the page exemplifies the craftsmanship of the book, which is based on detailed research in university archives, particularly in the papers of presidents of key institutions.

Penn’s hiring of Perkins as Fine Arts dean is important to the larger story of postwar research universities because it led to perhaps the most influential institutionalization of city planning, a young academic field that exercised outsize influence on those universities. Under Perkins’ deanship, Penn’s city planning program quickly became the country’s largest and most prestigious, attracting celebrated faculty such as Robert Mitchell, William Wheaton, and Martin Meyerson (who would later become Penn’s president). They contributed to the physical transformation of Penn’s campus and its relationship to its Philadelphia surroundings. This transformation included the creation of the West Philadelphia Corporation and the University City Science Center, which embodied new modes of American universities’ relationship with the larger society.

Perkins remained dean for 20 years and exemplified the ethos of the instrumental university in several aspects of his work: his career illustrated the widespread cross-currents between institutions of the New Deal state and universities; he created an organized research unit, the Institute for Urban Studies, intended to promote economic development and tackle social problems such as housing; he solicited patronage for the Institute from government and industry; and he participated in the widespread project of overseas institution building by helping to create the Middle East Technical University of Architecture and City Planning in Turkey. Consequently, page 99, by introducing Perkins, begins to lead the reader to an understanding of some key features of the postwar research university and its role in American life.

Learn more about The Instrumental University at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue