He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization, reported the following:
On page 99, the reader will be plunged deep into the details of U.S. passport policy in the 1940s, particularly the ways in which U.S. passport practice deviated from international standards being debated at United Nations conferences which sought to liberalize, if not eliminate, travel documents in the postwar world. They will learn, for instance, how much more expensive U.S. passports were than passports issued by Switzerland or Portugal, how this made money for the U.S. government, and how the U.S. lied about these facts when reporting to the UN.Learn more about A Righteous Smokescreen at the University of Chicago Press website.
Readers seeking to apply the page 99 test will therefore get a good flavor of the approach and style of the book, which is very interested in bureaucratic politics, and in tracing out how U.S. attitudes to the international exchange of ideas have been shaped by self-interested and frequently hypocritical positions articulated by particular sectors of the U.S. state. They will get a sense, too, of the method of the book, which is based on deep research in bureaucratic and diplomatic archives.
But they will get no sense of the stakes of these questions, nor will they have any reason to care about these details. That is unsurprising. Page 99 falls two-thirds of the way through the third of the five chapters of the book. In fact it falls pretty smack in the middle of the 195 pages of this deliberately short book.
To understand why it is worth zooming in on such apparently mundane details, readers will need to read what comes before and after it. Both in the chapter, which reveals the place that travel documents played in the international liberal imaginary, and then shows how obscure bureaucracies like the Passport Division sought to preserve control over the American border with consequences that last today. And in the book as a whole, which shows how paying attention to things like passport regulations – what I call “quotidian world ordering” – reveals a great deal about America’s vision of global liberalism after World War II, and then helped render the U.S. curiously isolated from foreign influences and networks in the 1950s, when visas and passports were denied to those espousing “un-American” ideas.
That strikes me as a pretty happy outcome for the test. My favorite works of history draw connections between seemingly unrelated topics, contextualize obscure details within broader developments, and thus rethink the grand themes of history. To do so, they need time to take you into the weeds, and the time to bring you back up. It would be a pretty boring book that, like a candidate running for office, hit its talking points on every page.
--Marshal Zeringue
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