Casey Michel's "Foreign Agents"

Casey Michel is the Director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, as well as a writer, analyst, and investigative journalist working on topics ranging from kleptocracy, illicit finance, dark money, foreign lobbying, and foreign interference to the legacies of Russian and Soviet colonialism.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, and reported the following:

The premise of page 99 is simple: Moscow has, for decades, attempted to interfere in the highest ranks of American politics, and attempted to aid specific American presidential candidates wherever and however it can. From Josef Stalin's efforts to launch Henry Wallace to the presidency in 1948 to Moscow's efforts to support Adlai Stevenson in 1960 and beyond, the Kremlin's efforts to steer American politics long predates its interference and influence operations in 2016. But there is one clear difference: before 2016, every major American candidate the Kremlin attempted to cultivate previously had turned them down. And then Donald Trump came along, and opened the doors to as much Kremlin aid as he could.

And that, in a sense, summarizes what much of Foreign Agents is about: foreign regimes have tried for decades—in some cases centuries—to access leading American politicians, and to lobby and influence them for specific policy outcomes. In the process, they've built the foreign lobbying industry into the multi-billion-dollar behemoth it now is. But it is only in recent years—and thanks especially to America's most prominent politicians, such as Trump—that these regimes have achieved a level of success they've only dreamed of, injecting themselves directly into the White House in ways we're only just now learning about.

All of this is why I wrote Foreign Agents: to reveal what the foreign lobbying industry once was, and what it's since become, and how it's become so wildly, devastatingly successful. Because it's no longer just traditional lobbyists themselves who are helping these regimes. It's now PR agents and law firms, consultancies and former congressional officials, even think tanks and universities who've transformed into vehicles of influence for foreign regimes. In the process, they've opened untold doors to the most kleptocratic regimes on the planet—all of whom are bent on tilting American policy, remaining in power, and pillaging their populations as long as they possibly can.

It's not a new effort, as page 99 of Foreign Agents makes clear. But it's one that's found unmitigated success—and one that would make figures like Stalin green with envy.

Visit Casey Michel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Edward Green's "Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God"

Jeffrey Edward Green is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Shadow of Unfairness and The Eyes of the People.

Green applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God, and reported the following:

From page 99 [footnotes omitted]:

…Whitman answers the child by treating the grass as the “flag of my disposition,” a mirror of Whitman’s own selfhood and, in keeping with the Emersonian tradition, what is reflected in this mirror is imbued with a quasi-divinity, pointing to the elevation and ennoblement of the self: “hopeful green stuff,” “the hand- kerchief of the lord,” “a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,” a “produced babe,” “a uniform hieroglyphic.” Even the darkest rendering is still affirmative: “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” In Dylan’s poem, a child, in contemplating the grass and through the grass himself, savagely rips grass out of the ground, remorsefully acknowledges yet also interrogates his guilt (asking “How can this bother me?”), and then likens himself to “a frightened fox” and “a demon child.” This is but one example of how Dylan departs from Emerson and Thoreau, the latter of whom, for instance, concludes and counterbalances his grim castigation of his fellow citizens for their insufficient outrage against slavery in “Slavery in Massachusetts” by finding promise of redemption in a white water lily: “What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower!”

While Dylan does think that local improvements in specific social contexts can be made—at least his own episodic political efforts imply as much—he rejects providentialism, contemplating that the arc of the moral universe either does not exist or bends toward permanent injustice. Even if Dylan is less forthcoming than Emerson and Thoreau in expounding this competing, more pessimistic vision, his reticence in this respect itself has theoretical implications insofar as it leads him to refrain from the metaphysical excesses of Emerson and Thoreau when they imagine a divine spark existing within each human being, when they find moral reassurance in natural beauty, and when they postulate a divine energy working for the ultimate good of the world. Dylan’s conception of self-reliance, and of the problem of a self-reliant individual turning away from the fight against injustice, is simply not buttressed by these speculative, self-congratulating logics. The question at stake is not simply whether, in the abstract, people should be optimistic or pessimistic about the direction of the world, but for whom such dispositions are relatively more appropriate. Hope…

In this case, the Page 99 Test would be partially vindicated. Page 99 has a lot to say about a significant element of Part I one of my book—the part in which I argue that Dylan is almost unique in the history of political thought in publicly disclaiming his willingness to commit himself to a social justice cause he has helped to lead (the civil rights movement) because he has come to believe that the commitment to social justice conflicts with his commitment to being a self-reliant, free individual. The only other thinkers I know of who do something roughly similar are Emerson and Thoreau. Yet as much as Dylan belongs in their tradition, he is also importantly distinct. He is less self-satisfied in his self-reliance than are Emerson and Thoreau. There are numerous features of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s self-satisfaction, and of Dylan’s contrasting lack of self-satisfaction. One key issue—the issue discussed on page 99—has to do with providentialism. Emerson and Thoreau would have agreed with what Theodore Parker and later Martin Luther King Jr. said: “that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.” Dylan, however, disagrees. When he practices self-reliance, he does so with the expectation that there is no arc to moral universe, or that it tends toward injustice. Part of their disagreement concerns nature. Whereas Emerson and Thoreau—and poets inspired by them such as Whitman—could find evidence of providentialism in nature, Dylan, in such works as his “Poem to Joanie,” refuses to find in nature a source of moral comfort. Dylan perhaps agrees with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman that nature is a mirror of humanity, but what this mirror reflects is something far from comforting. If anything, when Dylan treats nature as a mirror, what it reflects back is the human being as a dangerous and unreliable being.

But there are more reasons Dylan rejects providentialism than what is discussed on page 99. There are also more bases on which to compare and contrast Dylan to the nineteenth century tradition of self-reliance besides providentialism. Further, there are more features of my argument that Dylan—almost unique within the history of political thought—testifies to the collision between freedom and justice besides his relationship to the nineteenth century tradition of self-reliance. And, in the broadest sense of the message of my book, my book is concerned with tracing three sets of conflicts Dylan testifies to (and the ethical implications that follow from these conflicts): not just the conflict between freedom and justice, but also the conflict between freedom and God as well as between God and justice. Put differently, the book is not just concerned with Dylan’s remarkable withdrawal from the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but—among other topics—his conversion to evangelical Christianity in the late 1970s and its aftermath as well as his longstanding pessimism about politics and the possibility of achieving peace and justice in the world. So page 99 gives a part of a part of a part of a part—I hope an interesting and illuminating part, but still a fragment.

Learn more about Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Eyes of the People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniela R. P. Weiner's "Teaching a Dark Chapter"

Daniela Weiner is a Lecturer in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education at Stanford University. She has published in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, and Journal of Contemporary History.

Weiner applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Teaching a Dark Chapter: History Books and the Holocaust in Italy and the Germanys, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book discusses some tactics that East German school history textbooks in the early 1960s used to deflect complicity and how those tactics mirrored or diverged from those employed by West German schoolbooks.

Page 99 is an important part of my analysis. It points to one of the main thrusts of my book’s argument— that I isolate the early 1960s as a critical moment in the development of educational narratives about the Nazi/Fascist past and the Holocaust. However, if a reader were to open to the book to page 99 and read only it, the reader might come away with the erroneous impression that my book is first and foremost about East German textbooks (perhaps in relation to West German textbooks). Page 99 fails to reflect the transnational comparison between Italy, East Germany, and West German textbooks that is at the heart of my study and that differentiates my book from much previous historical work.

Indeed, the inclusion of Italy is fundamental to my book’s premise. As I explain in the introduction to my book, while there are some other comparative studies that address East German and West German methods of coming to terms with the past using educational materials, Italy is usually left out of this analysis. But including Italy is quite important; Italy serves as an essential comparative partner to the Germanys when understanding the post-fascist educational experience. Italy had a history of fascism a decade before Hitler ever came to governmental power in Germany. Furthermore, Allied occupying forces saw the textbook revision process in Italy (deFascistization) and in Germany (deNazification) as closely interconnected. So, it’s a shame that a browser’s test that opened to only page 99 would fail to include Italy.

Learn more about Teaching a Dark Chapter at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan Forth's "Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement"

Aidan Forth is an associate professor of British, imperial, and global history at MacEwan University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement, and reported the following:

Camps: A Global History examines mass confinement across a broad historical canvas. Early chapters explore workhouses, labor colonies, slave plantations, and the many camps of the colonial world. Later chapters turn to Guantanamo Bay, the mass internment of China’s Uyghurs, and the detention of Palestinian refugees. A central challenge—and central payoff—of a book of this nature is to recognize diversity while highlighting patterns and practices that have recurred across multiple historical contexts. Page 99, near the beginning of chapter 4, sees this process in action. The focus is an infamous site of mass confinement: the Soviet gulag. As a short, synthetic work, Camps cannot possibly offer a thorough or definitive history of this richly studied topic. Instead, the goal is to draw connections and comparisons with other times and places—and in the process, to shed new light on a familiar subject.

Following a brief consideration of the gulag’s pre-history, including penal exile in Tsarist Siberia and Civil War counterinsurgencies against guerrilla rebels, page 99 examines Soviet collectivization in the 1930s. Rarely discussed in scholarship framed by national rather than global history, military and colonial dynamics were crucial to the gulag’s development. Class warfare was more than metaphorical, page 99 argues, as Bolsheviks approached the Soviet countryside like “a foreign country to be invaded, occupied, and conquered.” As Jozef Stalin noted, western countries had funded industrialization through the “‘merciless exploitation’ of colonial peoples.” Yet, with “no (overseas) colonies ‘to plunder’,” the Soviet Union “squeezed its own peasantry”—conceived with dehumanizing, often colonial tropes—in a campaign more violent “than nineteenth-century enclosure or the concomitant consolidation of colonial holdings.” Such practices generated resistance from Ukrainian partisans, Islamic Basmachi militants, and land-holding kulaks, who were incarcerated, en masse, as “an act of virtual war.” In this way, at least, the gulag resembled “the colonial camps of Cuba and South Africa (chapter 3)…[and] the ‘strategic hamlets’ and ‘new villages’…[of] Malaya and Vietnam (chapter 7).” And yet, the chapter cautions, the gulag increasingly functioned in a “world of…paranoid conspiracies rather than real insurgencies.” As such, a revolutionary “plot mentality,” inherited from the French Revolution, along with tactics of authoritarian rule shared with Nazi Germany and Communist China, complemented structures of colonial and military occupation in the Soviet countryside.

Learn more about Camps at the University of Toronto Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Barbed-Wire Imperialism.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. L. Schellenberg's "What God Would Have Known"

J. L. Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University. He is the author of ten books and 70 published articles. His first book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, introduced a new argument against theism that remains the subject of much discussion. Also influential is a trilogy from Cornell and several subsequent volumes on a sceptical form of religion compatible with the denial of theism. These latter ideas are placed into an evolutionary context and made generally accessible in a short work from Oxford called Evolutionary Religion.

Schellenberg applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, What God Would Have Known: How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian Doctrine, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book gives part of my argument for supposing that what I call “the Big Narrative” – the story embedded in the Bible of God’s dealings with human beings across many centuries – is false. Here is close to 99% of what appears on that page:

Why should we not endorse [the Big Narrative]? Suppose we ignore the somewhat unsavoury part about God’s jealousness with regard to worship, focusing on social injustice when considering what according to the story has gone wrong, and set aside the fact that doing good for its own sake rather than for reward or to avoid punishment appears to be insufficiently emphasized. Even so, two major points cry out for attention.

First, notice how instead of social and psychological complexity, the gift of biological and cultural evolution subtly intertwined, we have an oversimple portrayal of ‘good guys and bad guys.’ On one side are the righteous, on the other the wicked, easily identified and distinguished, with the wicked quite able to be righteous instead if only they tried or, if regarded as incorrigible, entirely to blame for being in this condition. An analogy comes from the movies: think of 1950s Westerns. Even if today’s movies involving crime and bad behaviour are themselves criticizable in many ways, they do convey the complexity of human motives and social interactions more faithfully than did most of those Westerns. Likewise, what we have learned from various religious and philosophical traditions and from science about the subtleties of human nature and its relation to other wider facts has shown the shortcomings of the repeated raw contrasts in the Big Narrative between good and evil. There is no room here for sincerely held alternative religious beliefs or the cultural factors that might have produced them, for mixed motives, for the influence on behaviour of unconscious factors or of abuse in childhood, for addiction, for poor mental health and disorders such as sociopathy, for systemic factors traceable to the advent of agriculture and stratified societies, or, in the background, for biological evolution.

Second, there is the mistaken assumption, on the part of anyone who acquiesces in the Big Narrative, that even their creator, who knows all the relevant causal factors and lovingly numbers all the hairs on their heads, will justly respond to the bad behaviour of the ‘wicked’ with violent punishment and, in the end, complete destruction. God, in other words, is seen as exhibiting and sanctioning behaviour we have learned signals emotional or moral immaturity as well as a poor success rate when it comes to improving behaviour and contributing to long-term human flourishing (here it is worth contemplating why we see less today in the way of corporal punishment and more in the way of prison reform). Would an unsurpassably great personal being suffer from such immaturity?

So would someone who turns to page 99 in my book, reading what you’ve just read, get a good idea of what the whole work is about? Well, it would be nice to be able to ask you what you think it’s about after reading this excerpt. Since I can’t do that, let me guess – and I’ll include the assumption that you know and have thought about the work’s title and subtitle and have figured out that “the Big Narrative” refers to biblical content. Putting 2 and 2 together, I imagine you may hit on the thought that, given what goes into the concept of God, including omniscience, any God there may be would have to have known way back then, when the Big Narrative was formed, all manner of things that intellectual and moral development have made clear to us only much more recently. Probably you’ll also pick up on the fact that I think this is some kind of problem for the Big Narrative, and by extension for the religious views that require it to be true.

If you got this much from the Page 99 Test, you would grasp a central idea of the book, but you would still be mostly in the dark about how I develop and apply it in the book. You would see that, unlike many other critics of classical Christian doctrine, I take human cultural progress to reveal how much God (if there were a God) would have known way back when rather than revealing an ignorant and obtuse deity – a quite contemptible figure, in the view of Richard Dawkins. The key is not to let what the biblical writers say about God determine what goes into our idea of God. If God is by definition omniscient then God would have to know everything we know! But the Page 99 Test will leave you wondering why I think this matters, in relation to the truth of Christian doctrine. It won’t even tell you which Christian doctrine is at stake in the chapter to which page 99 belongs.

So let me tell you. It’s the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus. This doctrine, as I argue in Chapter 5, is in effect an extension of the Big Narrative. And the main idea of the chapter (very roughly) is that the followers of Jesus could have been correct in elevating him to divinity and placing him into the Big Narrative in the way they did only if they were following in thought what God had already done; only if God too were operating within the thought world of the Big Narrative. But if the Big Narrative is false, a picture not just peripherally but in its central features unworthy of God, then we must say that God – any real God there may be – would not be associated with the Big Narrative in this way. By identifying with Jesus in the manner required by the divinity doctrine, which according to Christians involved raising Jesus from the dead, God would indeed be confirming something, as has often been said. But this thought should be worrisome instead of deemed helpful, because what God would be confirming is a picture that centrally features an oversimplified understanding of human psychology, an inappropriate response to wrongdoing, and the condoning of violence – a false picture.

That’s a summary of what I call the Big Narrative Argument, which is then developed in Chapter 5 in four more specific ways which – so I argue – show how human intellectual and moral development can be used to undermine the doctrine of a divine Jesus. The other chapters of the book address other doctrines, also on the basis of “what God would have known,” until, by the end, we have twenty new arguments against Christianity’s central classical claims about reality. Only one has to be right for Christian doctrine to be false. If you read the book, let me know which argument you think has the best chance of being right!

Visit J. L. Schellenberg's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Will to Imagine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Bartlett's "History in Flames"

Robert Bartlett is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews. His books include The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350, which won the Wolfson Literary Prize for History. He has written and presented three television series for the BBC, Inside the Medieval Mind (2008), The Normans (2010), and The Plantagenets (2014).

Bartlett applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts, and reported the following:

Page 99 of History in Flames is deep in the build-up to the Irish civil war of 1922, when those fighting for Irish independence had to decide whether to accept a half-way house or not. The half-way house on offer was (1) a partitioned Ireland and (2) a "Free State" that recognized the British monarch as its head of state. The two sides on this issue began fighting and one consequence was the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland and the incineration of 800 years of Irish historical records.

This is what the book is about - the loss of written records of the medieval past, not though flood, mice or accidental fires, but though human violence. It begins with discussion of how a manuscript culture works - everything is hand written and hence precarious, and we wonder how can we know what has been lost, what can be saved.

Theere are five case studies, from Strasbourg in 1870 to Chartres in 1944. And a conclusion "we make the past but can also lose it".

Learn more about History in Flames at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages.

The Page 99 Test: Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Freeman's "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground"

Andrea Freeman, a pioneer in the field of food politics, is a professor at Southwestern Law School. A Fulbright scholar and author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, Freeman has published and appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, The Takeaway, Here & Now, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Black Agenda Report, and more. She lives in Los Angeles.

Freeman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ruin Their Crops on the Ground comes near the beginning of the chapter titled The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk. It describes the government’s struggle to store the big orange blocks of American cheese that the USDA had to buy because of subsidies in the Farm Bill that support dairy farmers. The USDA filled all the cold storages in the U.S. with cheese then rented a half-acre cave in Kansas and piled cheese blocks from floor to ceiling. But it still had too much cheese on its hands. The agency created a public-school milk program to try to get rid of some of the unwanted beverage. As the school milk program grew over the decades, public school students became less and less white.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book. This page introduces the reader to different ways the government has approached the challenge of supporting an industry whose product is undesirable to most of the population because they experience lactose intolerance or other harmful effects of consuming milk. The last sentence foreshadows the link between dairy policy and racism.

If page 99 piques the reader’s interest, they can continue reading the chapter to discover the different ways that milk and white supremacy have interacted over time. They will meet USDA milk marketing superstar White Gold, a fabulous rock opera star who reminds his Black back-up singers The Calcium Twins how he told them that milk would make their time of the month – a ride down the red river – easier for them and him. They will learn that public school students who want an alternative to cow’s milk have to go to a doctor for a diagnosis that they have a disability. This rule helps dispose of a subsidized commodity by giving it to people who get sick from it - just to boost corporate profits.

Learn more about Ruin Their Crops on the Ground at the Metropolitan Books website.

The Page 99 Test: Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice.

--Marshal Zeringue

William A. Everett's "The Year that Made the Musical"

William A. Everett is Curators' Distinguished Professor of Musicology Emeritus at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is contributing co-editor to The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (with Paul R. Laird, 3rd edition, 2017) and currently edits the series Cambridge Elements in Musical Theatre.

Everett applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre, and reported the following:

Page 99 forms part of the discussion on the musical comedy Sitting Pretty, which in 1924 reunited the writing team of Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse, who had achieved tremendous fame during the previous decade with their series of so-called “Princess Theatre Musicals.” Sitting Pretty exemplifies one of the book’s main through-lines: creators and stars of the past were returning to Broadway and West End musical stages, as well as those in continental Europe, in an effort to rekindle their earlier successes.

In addition to such re-appearances from past celebrities (and continuations of long, unbroken careers of others), a new generation of creators and performers were cementing their collective and individual star status in 1924, such as the siblings George and Ira Gershwin (1924’s Lady, Be Good! was the first show for which the brothers wrote the complete score). In addition to this dovetailing of the remembered and the yet-to-be-remembered, musical theatre in 1924 was very much a transnational enterprise. Different English-language versions of the Berlin blockbuster Madame Pompadour were playing in London (huge hit) and New York (massive flop) that year, in addition to an Italian-language version that opened in Milan. Zarzuelas that opened in Madrid transferred to Buenos Aires, and an English-language revision of a well-known zarzuela opened in London as The First Kiss. New management at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna ushered in Emmerich Kálmán’s Gräfin Mariza (Countess Maritza), with productions taking place later that year in Berlin, Warsaw, Venice, Budapest, and elsewhere. Confluences of the past and the present were thus coupled with all sorts of geographical mobilities, not to mention the continued permeability and osmosis between genres such as operetta, revue, and musical comedy. The overall result was a highly variated tapestry held together through an innate sense of glamour. Page 99 of The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre, which explores Sitting Pretty, provides a closer look at one of these threads.

Learn more about The Year that Made the Musical at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Tibble's "Crusader Criminals"

Steve Tibble is a graduate of Cambridge and London Universities, and is a research associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is one of the foremost academics currently working in the field of the crusades, and is the author of the warfare and strategy chapters in both The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades and The Cambridge History of the Crusades (2023).

Tibble's publications have been critically acclaimed and include The Crusader Armies (2018) and The Crusader Strategy (2020), short-listed for the Duke of Wellington's Military History Prize), and Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain (2023).

Tibble applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a microcosm of the central thesis of Crusader Criminals - the idea that the medieval Middle East became a 200-year long demographic vortex, pulling in 'the usual suspects' from across most of the known world, into a dystopian blood-fest that was as much about criminality as it was about warfare. It looks at the example of the Turkic entrants into the arena, but the book as a whole looks at all the cultures, ethnicities and religions involved. Here goes with a cut down version of the page:

Crusaders visiting the area might have been unruly; but the situation was, if anything, even worse with the Turks called in to help their Muslim neighbours. At best, these were men to be tolerated and treated with suspicion, rather than wholeheartedly welcomed. At worst, the local Arab population saw them as little better than the enemies they were brought in to fight...

Steppe mercenaries were, in many ways, a general’s dream. Granted, discipline might be a problem; but these were hard men and, with the right leadership, they could be almost seamlessly turned into a voracious and formidable military machine... What the vast majority had in common, however, was that they, like so many of the soldiers fighting in the period of the crusades, were young foreigners. Even when fully employed, they were hard to handle. But they were always borderline criminals – men who were armed, drifting and looking for any opportunity they could grasp.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the real problem of the crusades was not religion.

It was young men. Dislocated. Disinhibited. And in disturbingly large numbers. They were the propellant that stoked two centuries of unceasing warfare and shocking levels of criminality. The reason they caused such problems was not that they might be over-entitled, over-sexed or over-opinionated about religion – though they were often all of those things. The ultimate cause, and the ultimate reason why these men were the driver of the chaos that engulfed the medieval Middle East, was far more basic – and it was demographic and anthropological, rather than theological.

Criminality was rife in the medieval crusader states and their neighbours. It was fundamentally driven by two interconnected factors. One was the over-abundance of young (and often armed) men in the population. The other was the way in which these men were so strangely disengaged from the societies in which they found themselves.

But why was that? Why was there such a disproportionate level of testosterone in the air? After all, most medieval societies were at war for long periods of time – but very few experienced the levels of violence and criminality seen in the Middle East of the crusades. And why were these men so problematic? Unruly and underemployed soldiers were always disruptive, but rarely on such a scale. Clearly, something was very different. And for this difference to be sustained for two centuries, the reason had to be systemic, rather than anything more coincidental.

Above all, why were there so many young and dislocated men in the region?

The first trigger was climate change. Deteriorating weather conditions impacted upon the nomadic Turkic tribes of the western Eurasian steppes. And that caused the second problem: unco

ntrolled mass migration. The nomadic tribes entered the Middle East in force and all the local sedentary societies did their best to fight back.

An arms race had begun in earnest. In a pre-industrial age, that race inevitably found its pr

imary expression in the acquisition of warm bodies. Everyone made a dash to attract as many potential out-of-region recruits as possible – and that process ground on for two centuries.

As these were truly international wars, they drew in troops from absurd distances – European troops (including crusaders) from as far west as the Atlantic coast of Ireland; soldier-slaves from sub-Saharan Africa; or steppe cavalry from central Asia and the Silk Roads. All were welcome. All were useful. And all were grist to the unremitting mill of blood and violence.

The proportion of young, armed men in the region inevitably shot up – and that was doubly jarring, because the civil population had previously been so largely demilitarised. But these men were not just there in huge numbers: they were generally foreigners, with very different customs, and as such were culturally desensitised. These were men both simultaneously alienated and yet strangely liberated. With this new and unstable population in place, levels of violence soared and remained spectacularly high – even by the standards of a region noted for its enduring lawlessness.

A chaotic and supremely dangerous crime wave was coming into its own.

Visit Steve Tibble's website.

The Page 99 Test: Templars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oliver Rosales's "Civil Rights in Bakersfield"

Oliver A. Rosales is a professor of history at Bakersfield College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Shaw lamented. As administering the War on Poverty continued in Kern, dismantling the grassroots aspects of the antipoverty movement by delegating authority away from TAP, the CSO, and the neighborhood councils—the war grassroots organizations that had initiated the War on Poverty three years prior—became the de facto position of local government.

Anti-statist opposition toward the antipoverty movement continued well into the Reagan gubernatorial years of 1967-1975. The end result pitted Mexican Americans and African Americans against each other in competition for financial resources in the rural welfare state, much to the political benefit of anti-statist Republicans. The following chapter examines the emergence of the Chicana/o civil rights movement in the content of multiracial civil rights activism in greater Bakersfield. In many ways, the limits of the antipoverty movement encouraged civil rights activists to push for civil rights reforms in other venues.

This test is scary accurate! This excerpt comes from the end of the book’s third chapter, which covers the war on poverty in Bakersfield, California during the 1960s. At the conclusion of this chapter, I foreshadow the struggle African Americans and Mexican Americans in greater Bakersfield encountered as the war on poverty unfolded in the 1970s. Specifically, tensions within and among racial coalitions became divisive compared to the early war on poverty years when federal legislation passed in 1964 mandating “maximum feasible participation of the poor,” as well as the racial solidarity engendered by the Delano Grape Strike in 1965. The excerpt also foreshadows the role of the political right in mobilizing a counter movement to civil rights reform, first during the war on poverty by using the mechanisms of local government, and later in new ways as the civil rights movement continued.

As a whole, the Page 99 Test is accurate because it captures the fomenting of racial coalitions between Black and Brown activists and the issues that pulled these groups together across racial lines. The excerpt also highlights how backlash and counter mobilization stirred activists to press for reform in other venues as noted at the end of the page where the next chapter examines the Chicana/o student movement in Bakersfield. In brief, civil rights reform was messy in greater Bakersfield during the 1960s and 1970s. The story isn’t always linear, but reform was complicated and overlapped with other movements and activisms. The messiness of the story is important though because it showcases the breadth, scope, and diversity of civil rights reform beyond the farm worker movement, which heretofore has been much more well documented in American labor and civil rights historiography.

Learn more about Civil Rights in Bakersfield at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael P. M. Finch's "Making Makers"

Michael P. M. Finch is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Deakin University. Prior to this he was a Senior Lecturer at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, a Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King's College London, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of War at the University of Oxford. He is the author of A Progressive Occupation? The Gallieni-Lyautey Method and Colonial Pacification in Tonkin and Madagascar, 1885-1900 (2013).

Finch applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Making Makers: The Past, the Present, and the Study of War, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Making Makers marks the beginning of a new chapter. This is fortuitous. New chapters often bring changes in direction, but in this case the transition is useful as it marks the point at which the book at the centre of my book – Makers of Modern Strategy – starts to take on a life beyond its original conception. It explains how the book’s original editor, Edward Mead Earle, failed to follow through on his plan to revise it before to his death in 1954, and that subsequently others would attempt to revise it in the period prior to the appearance of a new version in 1986. In this way, this page situates the reader quite well in showing the transformations of a book across decades, and something of the personalities involved in that process – which is really the core of the book.

The page begins with a quotation from Theodore Ropp – a would-be editor of the book, whose unsuccessful project is the focus of the chapter in question. Characteristically, it is a somewhat oblique quote, however one thing it does is to emphasize the importance of the historical discipline. Ropp’s point is to stress the utility of history in the study of war, relative to emergent disciplines in the post-Second World War era which often seemed to promise firmer answers to pressing problems than the older, less decisive study of history. This too is a theme of the book, although in broader terms it is as much a study in the differences in approach amongst historians, rather than the distinctions between them and other disciplines.

One thing that stands out as unrepresentative in this selection is a reference to the role of Franklin publications in translating the original book into multiple languages in the 1950s. Whilst this development demonstrated the way in which Makers became enmeshed in the cultural Cold War, and so interesting in its own right, it is not a central feature of the history I attempt to present.

Learn more about Making Makers at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Waitman Wade Beorn's "Between the Wires"

Waitman Wade Beorn is an associate professor of history at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, UK. He is the author of Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus and The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution.

Beorn applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv, and reported the following:

From page 99:

transport of around five thousand people. Thus, when the train with “All Wheels Rolling for Victory” written on its side arrived on March 31, 1942, the night before Passover, everyone on board was murdered well before the Seder dinner would have started.104 Bełżec only killed by day, so late-arriving trains stood full of victims until the next morning. A month or so later, the camp ceased operations for six weeks while a larger concrete and brick building with six gas chambers was constructed.

Between March 17 and April 1, fifteen thousand Jews from Lviv were murdered in the first gas chamber at Bełżec. Their clothes, however, returned to Janowska. The disappearance of family members caused great worry in the ghetto. While Jerzy Chyrowski successfully hid, other members of his family were not so lucky and ended up on the trains. With a kind of detachment present in many survivors’ testimonies, Chyrowski simply said that “a part of my family lost their lives during the March Aktion.” Klara Szpilka found herself in the Janowska camp with her family during the roundup. She told authorities that there was a selection, and the rest of her testimony no longer mentions family.

Those left in the ghetto were unsure at first about the meanings of the deportations. Abraham Goldberg testified that “at the time of the March action, it was generally not known what Bełżec was and it was a called a resettlement action. One did not have a lot of illusions, but we did not know anything about an extermination camp.” Samuel Drix wrote that “when the old people were taken I was truly perplexed and believed this was really a resettlement. When I heard rumors of what had happened to them, I simply couldn’t believe it. I had not known or even heard rumors before this that the Germans were committing mass murders of people who could not possibly be a threat.” Rumors circulated in the ghetto. Rabbi Kahane heard that killing was done by electrocution, gas, or steam. Other rumors mentioned the creation of soap from the bodies. As late as 1944 after liberation, David Manusevich told the Soviets with some conviction that the Germans had created a soap factory in Bełżec where they “processed human bodies into soap.” This confusion is, of course, understandable. Lviv’s Jews had only an informal network of news to rely on, though it would become increasingly clear what Bełżec really was. Ironically, the outside world was better informed. The Polish underground government,

Page 99 of my book appears in chapter 4 “A Tragic Life” which deals with the history of the Lviv ghetto during the Holocaust. This page discusses the first major deportation of Lviv Jews to the Nazi extermination center of Bełżec. It focuses on the experience of people losing their members of their families during this March Aktion and briefly touches on how their possessions ended up in the Janowska forced labor camp (which the book focuses on). I also discuss the uncertainty that many in the ghetto felt about what had happened to those killed in this early deportation. Rumors flew throughout the ghetto about what had happened and even how people had been killed. This was, of course, understandable at this early stage.

The Page 99 Test mostly doesn’t work, at least not explicitly. My book is about the Janowska forced labor camp and most of the book obviously focuses on the detailed history of this place. However, in a more subtle way, the test might work in the sense that while the chapter was focused on the Lviv ghetto, Janowska shows up here as well because it played a role.

One of the things I do in the book is to show how the Janowska camp played several roles simultaneously: slave labor camp, transit camp, and extermination site. Page 99 highlights how the camp played its role as a transit camp. Many of those deported to Bełżec, like Klara Szpilka, were first sent to the camp before being loaded onto trains…and their belongings returned to the camp to be repaired and reused.

Between the Wires is an integrated history of the Holocaust using Janowska and Lviv as a vehicle. It includes the voices of survivors like those highlighted on page 99 as well those of perpetrators and bystanders. It also connects the story of the camp with the larger story of the Holocaust both in Lviv and surrounding areas and in Europe as a whole. In this way, I bring to light the history of the most important Holocaust site most have never heard of.

Visit Waitman Wade Beorn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Toni Alimi's "Slaves of God"

Toni Alimi is assistant professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes towards the end of my argument that Lactantius, a 3rd century North African Christian thinker, developed a novel theory of religion. This theory provided him with a framework for characterizing certain practices as “religions” and designating all religions as either true or false. Page 99 contrasts Lactantius’s account of religion with accounts offered by two earlier thinkers – Tertullian and Minucius Felix. I argue that Lactantius also thought that religion involves slavery to the object of one’s worship. True religion worships and is therefore slavery to the true God. False religions worship and therefore enslave people to false gods.

Page 99 wouldn’t give a browser a good sense of the book’s central argument. Indeed, it might give the impression that Lactantius is the book’s main character. He isn’t — that’s Augustine!

But there is a sense in which the test might give a browser a feel for the book. On page 99, I am trying to clarify Lactantius’s views by situating him in his intellectual context: identifying which ideas he may have borrowed from whom, and which ideas were “in the air.” Clarifying the intellectual milieu can help us determine more precisely what Lactantius’s innovations were. We can only know what changes he made to previous ways of thinking if we know how he was continuous with previous ways of thinking. This commitment – that we can only know what changed if we know what stayed the same – runs through the book. So page 99 does give a sense for the type of arguments the book makes.

Here's how page 99 fits in with the broader book. Augustine used Lactantius’s theory of religion to criticize Roman religion. He argued that ordinary Romans were slaves of false and abusive gods. Romans, who claimed to value liberty, should have liberated themselves from such gods. They failed to because they were superstitious.

He also argued that Roman elites treated the gods as their slaves, reversing the relationship between master and slave found in true religion. Elites did so because they were impious.

The true religion, Augustine thought, involves slavery to a benevolent God. However, this was also a crucial premise in his justification of chattel slavery. How? Read the book and find out.

Learn more about Slaves of God at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susanna Ashton's "A Plausible Man"

Susanna Ashton is a Professor of English at Clemson University, and her work has been profiled in the New York Times, CNN and dozens of other media outlets across the country.

She has authored, edited, or coauthored multiple titles on American literary and cultural history, including Collaborators in Literary America 1870-1920; “I Belong in South Carolina.” South Carolina Slave Narratives; (w/ Tom Lutz) These ‘Colored’ United States: African American Essays from the 1920s; (w/ Rhondda R. Thomas) The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought; (w/ Bill Hardwig) Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt. In addition to those book projects, she has published in many scholarly journals as well as popular newspapers and public-facing digital media. She has appeared in various media interviews and served as a featured expert in the documentary film, Gina’s Journey: The Search for William Grimes.

Ashton applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…she started writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that was to help instigate the most consequential social revolution of the modern world: the overthrow of modern slavery.

To understand what brought Jackson to this place and this moment, we have to view Jackson’s movement up to Brunswick, Portland, and elsewhere in Maine as a story of self-liberation. The danger was always his. The mistakes were his. The courage was his. The success was his. During this stage of his escape, he was assisted by courageous people, both Black and white. But that assistance was never assured and never secure. It was inconstant and always contingent on someone else’s moods, funds, or weather.

Each stop would have been tense. With hindsight, we might be tempted to think of his move through Maine toward Canada as triumphant; it was doubtless filled with some terror. Even with the optimism and tenacity that characterized his way of functioning in the world, he could not have known that he would succeed. After all, every step toward supposedly more assured freedom also took him further and further from everyone he knew and loved.

Jackson took whatever money he had saved and got out of town as fast as he could. Hitching rides on a wagon or simply hiking on the road would be wiser than a stage or train, even if he had money for tickets. Trains, although there were many leading north out of Massachusetts, could and often were inspected by conductors and government agents who could ask uncomfortable questions. There were plenty of rural roads wending their way north out of Salem, and it would have been quieter to endure the frozen and bumpy roads on a wagon when possible and by foot when not than to draw attention with other choices.

As Jackson probably saw it, another escape by ship would have been too risky. Everyone was now on alert for Black people scrambling to get north. Even a sympathetic captain or crew on a vessel heading north might encounter another ship, be boarded by officials, or be inspected upon arrival. He would be foolish to test his luck with another sea voyage. And so he went along the coast, probably directed and occasionally escorted to sympathetic households. While archival traces of his journey hint at or provide small details about his encounters with white people along the way, such meetings weren’t enough. He needed free Black people, people who looked like him.

A Plausible Man passes the Page 99 Test with surprisingly strong marks. The book tells of John Andrew Jackson, a runaway from South Carolina who, among his many adventures, meets up with Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, along his journey to Canada. Yet this book is also designed to showcase how documents and paperwork both reveal and hide the lives of people who weren’t understood as being in the mainstream of society. So, in each chapter, Jackson’s story is told through documents (a court case, a runaway advertisement, a letter, a receipt, census page), but I try to walk the reader through what those documents hide and how for the history of marginalized people, you have to read in the margins of the documents themselves. The section here on the Underground Railroad is a case in point where it doesn’t have a clean paper trail because it was an illegal movement. As a model for readers, we need to speculate, carefully and in an informed manner, how things unfolded.

Remarkedly, the first sentence on the page features what may be the thesis statement of my book, asserting that after Jackson visited Stowe, she started writing a novel that would change the world; it couldn’t have been a coincidence. That introductory section ends, and we move into the heart of the story…accompanying Jackson step-by-step through the very cold and difficult journey into Maine, where he and Stowe came together. I use this section to ready the audience for a story of the Underground Railroad and how it probably didn’t function the way myths would have it. It wasn’t always organized. Freedom seekers were often alone for long stretches of it. And while Jackson was fleeing from Salem, Massachusetts up to Canada, he was not on a well-planned and supported undertaking. He was making a lot of it up as he went along. This is important, too, because white Saviors weren’t the way the UGRR worked. Lots of people, for good and sometimes not so good reasons helped. And most important were usually the free black communities where fugitives could hide. Page 99 of A Plausible Man set up readers to understand the frightening nature of these journeys, even when one was traversing the supposedly friendly north.

Visit Susanna Ashton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan B. Losos's "The Cat's Meow"

Jonathan B. Losos is an evolutionary biologist at Washington University and the founding director of the Living Earth Collaborative, a unique biodiversity center and partnership between Washington University, the Saint Louis Zoo and the Missouri Botanical Garden. He was previously a professor of biology at Harvard and a curator at the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He has won awards from the National Academy of Sciences, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the American Society of Naturalists.

Losos applied the "Page 99 Test" to his most recent book, The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Cat’s Meow is a discussion of hybridization between domestic cats (Felis catus) and their ancestor, the wildcat (Felis silvestris). It starts with a discussion of whether the domestic cat should really be classified as Felis silvestris catus given their ability to interbreed with wildcats (note that “wildcat” is the name of a specific species, not a generic term for any non-domesticated feline). I concluded:

You say toe-may-toe, I say toe-mah-toe. Whether we call domestic cats Felis catus or Felis silvestris catus doesn’t really matter—the scientific reality is that the domestic cat and the wildcat are members of the same biological species: they interbreed readily and their hybrid offspring can be hard to distinguish from non-hybrid members of either species. This lack of differentiation highlights how little the domestication process has moved cats from their wildcat roots.

From that, I segue to the point that this is more than a semantic issue: the fact that domestic cats and wildcats interbreed makes it hard to study the evolution of the domestic cat. The reason is that we assume that the only traits that have evolved during domestication are those that differ between the two. But if the two interbreed, then changes that evolved in the domestic cat may be passed back to the wildcat. In other words, despite the great similarity of the domestic cat to the wildcat, the domestic cat may have evolved a lot during domestication, but most of those changes may now occur in the wildcat as well.

Page 99 is a very good representation of what The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa is all about. In a nutshell, the book considers the past, present and future of the domestic cat: where cats came from, why they do what they do, and what the future may hold. And, critically, it discusses how we know what we know, how the latest tools in science are combined with old-fashioned observations of cats going about their business to understand the lives of our household friends.

An important message of the book is that science is messy. On the one hand, we have amazing new tools—DNA sequencing, GPS tracking, isotopic analysis—that provide unprecedented precision and detail about the lives of animals. On the other hand, science is not a panacea. It’s not only hard work, but oftentimes the results are ambiguous. And sometimes nature confounds us. Understanding what happened in the past is particularly challenging. Until we invent time travel machines, our knowledge of the past is mostly based on inferences. History is like a murder mystery, trying to deduce what happened in the past, and sometimes there’s no smoking gun.

On the other hand, sometimes there are great discoveries. Who would have guessed that embedded in the purr of a hungry cat is the sound of a human baby crying? That’s right, cats are manipulating us—no surprise there—by tapping into our innate sensitivity to that particular sound. And did you know that researchers have been able to extract DNA from ancient cat mummies buried in temple catacombs deep underground, and that this DNA has shed light on the spread of cats through the world?

And, finally, there’s the cat of the future. Will we be able to find a way to cure cat allergies, a scourge that afflicts 15-20% of the world’s population? Gene editing might be the answer, or a vaccine shot given to cats, or maybe just a special dry kibble. And what about the feral cats now living on their own on every continent but Antarctica—will they eventually evolve into different species? But the question I’d really like the answer to is: why isn’t there a sabertoothed housecat?

Visit Jonathan B. Losos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Abigail G. Mullen's "To Fix a National Character"

Abigail G. Mullen is an assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, To Fix a National Character: The United States in the First Barbary War, 1800-1805, and reported the following:

Page 99 of To Fix a National Character comes right at the end of Chapter 4, which focuses on the events of the First Barbary War in 1803. This page covers a lot of ground! It addresses first how the United States formed a relationship with the French consul in Algiers in 1800, a relationship that bore fruit in 1803 when that relationship was critical for the United States. It also discusses the American relationship with Sir Thomas Trigge, the British lieutenant governor of Gibraltar, emphasizing that (for once) the British asked the Americans for a favor, not the other way around. But the United States did also need help from the British, specifically Bryan McDonogh, the British chargé d’affaires in Tripoli. And finally, this page addresses the decision-making of Commodore Edward Preble, who had to decide whether to be aggressive against Tripoli over the winter of 1803-1804 or to retreat as his predecessors had.

I would never have picked this page if you’d asked me to find a single page that summed up the themes of the book, but it is pretty perfect. The book is all about how the United States wanted to join the Mediterranean community of nations, and this page illustrates this theme well. Relationships are formed by daily interactions like the ones described on this page, and often, the American found themselves in the position of supplicant. On this page, there are two rare examples of the Americans being helpful to the other members of the community. But these examples also remind us that this war was not fought by heads of state making big policy decisions, but by individual people who held small but essential positions of power. The Americans had to deal with these individuals daily in order to make it possible for the United States to fight this war against Tripoli.

This page also doesn’t deal very much with the operations of the war—there’s no fighting. There’s only Commodore Preble deciding whether to maintain the blockade of Tripoli over the winter. The lack of operations was a key element of the war: for a war ostensibly against Tripoli, it’s remarkable how little time (up to this point) and how little manpower had been dedicated to that fight. Instead, the United States had spent a lot of its time focusing on other parts of the Mediterranean. This page marks (sort of) a turning point in that strategy. Though Preble still had to spend quite a lot of time dealing with the other Barbary states, he kept his focus much more on Tripoli than the two commodores before him had.

In short, good job, Page 99 Test—or maybe good job, me! Page 99 is almost exactly halfway through the book, and you can see on this page how the themes of the book have emerged in the first half and how they will change in the second half.

Visit Abby Mullen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Collier's "Left Behind"

Sir Paul Collier is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Professorial Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. From 1998–2003 he took a five-year Public Service leave during which he was Director of the Research Development Department of the World Bank. He is currently a Professeur invité at Sciences Po and a Director of the International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics. He has written for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Collier has authored numerous books, including The Bottom Billion (2007) which in 2008 won the Lionel Gelber, Arthur Ross and Corine prizes and in May 2009 was the joint winner of the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book prize.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places, and reported the following:

The page 99 test works pretty well for Left Behind. The page is in a chapter which gives examples of how good leadership can make a difference. The page starts with the remarkable and little-known story of Seretse Khama, the founding president of Botswana. His country, newly Independent, was an arid, landlocked little territory in southern Africa. Under his leadership, it became the fastest growing country in the world and is now the richest country in black Africa.

Page 99 then turns to Deng Xiaoping, and how he rescued China from the disasters of Mao by devolving decision-taking to the 40 regions. My editors regard the pages that run on from 99 as some of the most amazing revelations in the book.

But, of course, it’s a book, not just a few pages. I rewrote it many times to make it fun to read while offering an innovative new analysis of how places can fall badly behind, not just in Africa, but in many parts of America - the ‘flyover’ towns and cities.

This morning (August 3rd), Michael Sandel, whom I know and admire, sent me his new essay in the New York Times about this tragedy of America’s many left behind communities. He sees improving their fate as the central issue for winning the election. As he says, now is the perfect time for Left Behind to come out. It does not just draw attention to the problem, but sets out solutions with examples of how they have worked elsewhere.

Since Left Behind is only just published in the US, I haven’t had other American reactions yet. But another of this morning’s emails was from a Swiss reader who had seen the UK edition. Unlike Michael Sandel he isn’t famous, as he stresses, he is just an ordinary guy. But he took the trouble to send me a full page of thoughtful comments, and I’ll share the key ones. ‘I was impressed by its breadth of scope and depth of concepts on how to tackle the problems….. the pragmatic, solution-oriented approach that defines the book, at no time at the expense of scientific rigour. The book has certainly given me many hours of intense reflection and thinking, which is one of my favourite activities.’

The parts of the book which I think are most innovative effectively demolish Milton Friedman’s economic analysis of how cities hit by an adverse shock such as a factory closure would automatically recover. Friedman used the image of the plucked string of a harp to summarise a complex argument – the string would vibrate a bit but rapidly go back to where it was. I use a different image to explain why that has repeatedly turned out to be wrong: market forces amplify an adverse shock rather than cushion it. I’m particularly proud that my economics has been endorsed by both Ragu Rajan, professor at the Booth School in Chicago where Friedman taught, and by Rebecca Henderson of Harvard Business School. Friedman was doubly wrong because not only do market forces drag places further down, so does social psychology. In places that suffer a shock, people often start to blame each other.

But the part of the book that is most enjoyable – as that Swiss reader noticed – are the inspiring stories. They show how people in communities – in America, in Africa, and around the world - have often found a new common purpose in trying to renew they town or city to make it attractive for the next generation. Nor need it depend upon good political leadership – a key chapter shows that the process is sometimes driven not by leaders but by social movements;. Young people come together to bury differences of colour or party loyalties; unions and businesses come together to renew the city of which they are both proud.

Left Behind is a hopeful book, and unlike political charlatans, the hope it offers is solidly based on credible analysis. I have worked hard at it, learning from the thousands of emails sent by readers of my previous books. I look forward to hearing reactions from readers of this post – including the negative ones. I undertake to answer as many as possible.

Learn more about the book and author at Paul Collier's website.

Read J. Tyler Dickovick's interview with Collier about his award-winning book, The Bottom Billion.

The Page 99 Test: The Bottom Billion.

The Page 99 Test: The Plundered Planet.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Rondel's "A Danger Which We Do Not Know"

David Rondel is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Reno.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Danger Which We Do Not Know: A Philosophical Journey into Anxiety, and reported the following:

Page 99 turns out to be the first full page of chapter four. Readers are introduced to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and his unrivalled gloominess. Schopenhauer believed that suffering is both overwhelming and inescapable. The world bankrupt and irredeemable. Genuine happiness is a mirage, always just beyond our reach. The future is bleak. Life, even if it contains moments of joy and fulfillment, is probably not worth it in the end. “Despite this gloominess, or more likely because of it,” page 99 of the book begins, “Schopenhauer’s work is a treasure-trove of insight into the human condition. Schopenhauer did not have a great deal to say about anxiety as such. He was interested in ‘suffering’ more nebulously defined. Even so, there is much to be learned about the nature and meaning of anxiety from Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy. Or so I shall suggest in what follows.” Page 99 then goes on to offer a few biographical snippets about Schopenhauer, his parents, and the Prussian controlled city of Danzig (what is today Gdansk, in Poland) where Schopenhauer was born in 1788.

I think the Page 99 test works reasonably well in this case, providing an accurate snapshot of what A Danger Which We Do Not Know: A Philosophical Journey into Anxiety is all about. The book is made up of six vignette-like chapters, each one focusing on the work of a particular philosopher or philosophical tradition with an eye toward showing how their ideas help us better understand anxiety’s nature and meaning. In addition to the chapter on Schopenhauer, the book features discussions of philosophers Soren Kierkegaard, William James, Martin Heidegger, Iris Murdoch, and the Roman Stoics. There are also bits of memoir sprinkled throughout the text. Taken as an ensemble, the chapters in A Danger Which We Do Not Know tell a story about some of the many connections between philosophy and anxiety. No single page in the book could possibly tell this story on its own, but page 99 is probably as good (or at least no worse) than any other for giving the flavor of the book as a whole.

Visit David Rondel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary L. Shannon's "Billy Waters is Dancing"

Mary L. Shannon is a writer, broadcaster, and senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Roehampton, where her research focuses on nineteenth-century literature and culture. She is author of the award-winning Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street.

Shannon applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Billy Waters Is Dancing pitches the reader straight into the opening of the chapter called ‘Overboard’, about a third of the way into the book. It asks: ‘The gates of Haslar closed behind him: what would Waters do now?’. It’s only a short page of text because of the chapter title, but it gives some indication of the story being told, and the type of biography this is. A reader lighting on this page learns that we’re in the Regency period, that the setting is Britain although Waters was American, that he was in the British Navy but now has to leave because he has lost a leg, and that his pension was alright but not adequate for comfortable living on land. We also get a sense of the style of the book: a pacy life story of one man which also tells the story of the wider cultural history of the early-nineteenth century. What we don’t get, however, is any discussion of race on this page (Waters was Black). So the book’s investigation into the intersection of race, disability, and culture in the Regency era is hidden from the reader. There are also no pictures on this page, which for a book with 86 of them gives no sense of its visual richness.

That’s a real loss. First of all, it’s in paintings, caricatures, prints, and drawings made of Waters that memories of him mostly survived. Secondly, any reader might ask: did the problems Waters is clearly facing on page 99 affect him in particular ways given that he was a Black man? Thinking about how race and disability and poverty were inter-related challenges was crucial for me throughout my writing process, as I wanted to be sensitive to fact that in his lifetime and beyond the book’s protagonist was rarely in charge of his own image. Billy Waters Is Dancing uncovers the life and adventures of William ‘Billy’ Waters, once a famous Black busker in Regency London, born in America in the dying years of the eighteenth-century, but for all his fame now largely forgotten. Sailor, immigrant, father, lover, and extraordinary talent, exploring the life of Billy Waters allows us to celebrate his creativity and to understand a diverse transatlantic Regency world.

Waters had a hit song, a famous street performance, a well-known costume and was depicted in a play that toured Britain and America. He was a Black, disabled, poor man in an era when to be any of those things was at best challenging, and usually downright dangerous. Yet Waters shaped his life on his own terms as far as he could – he joined the British Navy, got promoted to a petty officer, turned the accident which disabled him into the start of new career as a performer, and fought hard to defend his family and his livelihood. Waters was a versatile and skilful man. Page 99 gives a sense that this is someone who has faced continuous challenges, but it doesn’t show the reader how Waters overcame any of them. It doesn’t show how his celebrity status first helped him, and then destroyed him. It doesn’t give any detailed backdrop to Waters’ life, or explain how his story helps us to rethink what we know of the Regency period. For that, a reader needs to begin with the Prologue: ‘Enter Billy Waters, dancing’.

Visit Mary L. Shannon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren D. Olsen's "Curricular Injustice"

Lauren D. Olsen is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology within the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical Schools Reproduce Inequalities, and reported the following:

From page 99:

made regarding curricular design. With independent courses, the average amount of time spent on social sciences within my sample of medical school curricula was just one week out of forty to forty-six weeks during which students take coursework, or just over 2 percent of curricular time in a given academic year. Thus, in many ways, the shoehorning of social sciences into one week appeared to render this material merely symbolic. But the curricular practices were quite productive and ideological. They did more than simply nothing because these decisions about curricular practices were not neutral. Johnson’s hypothetical case illustrates how these decisions contributed to the medical student’s epistemic socialization and reinforced white cisgender norms. Curricular designers thus contributed to the marginalization of social scientific content with their top-down decisions about where, when, and for how long the LCME standards were taught at their medical schools.

INCLUSION AS ADMISSIONS

Detailing the curricular designers’ decision making vis-à-vis the LCME standards and the social sciences was relatively straightforward in comparison to the other curricular decisions that clinical faculty members made. Another, more subtle way that the curricular designers included the social sciences was through admissions. They also did this with the humanities. Regarding the social sciences, inclusion-as-admissions came up through the clinical faculty members’ valuation of diversity for the POM small groups. Dr. Giannattasio, introduced earlier in this chapter, was going into more detail about how her school planned to engage in the instruction of social sciences in lieu of “formal instruction” that they would not have during those intersessions. She described the following exercise: “I mean we did one of these exercises where you like all stand up, and then you sit down after the certain qualifiers and you see who’s left standing.”

When a reader opens to page 99, they are brought to the close of the section detailing how medical educators make decisions about where, when, and for how long to include the social sciences into their curricular practices to meet the Liaison Committee on Medical Education’s standards, which are the definitive standards that U.S. medical schools must pass to maintain accreditation. As I describe, curricular designers decide to shoehorn in the social sciences, in ways that minimize their impact, marginalize their importance, and reify social inequalities. The readers then begin to see another way the curricular designers try to meet these standards — via inclusion-as-admissions. Here, readers are introduced to another way in which medical school leaders include the social sciences, by admitting students whose social identities will—in the eyes of the leaders—allow them to teach their peers and faculty members about the social sciences.

In terms of the Page 99 Test, I think it passes decently well—it illustrates some of core themes of the book, but not all of them. Most immediately, the examples on page 99 constitute curricular injustices, in that the pedagogical outcomes of devoting minimal time to racism or relying on students of color to teach about race reinforce to medical students that these topics do not matter as much material given more time and taught by clinical faculty. What is beyond the purview of page 99 is the reality that medical educators are by and large clinical (MD) faculty, why the structure of academic medical centers makes that the case, and how these clinical faculty make pivotal curricular decisions without the relevant expertise. Additionally, medical educators’ interpretations and incorporations of the humanities are missing from page 99. Ultimately, this book shows how medical educators make decisions that continue to uphold the white, elite status quo of their profession while dismissing, marginalizing, or problematizing the people and ideas that deviate from it.

Visit Lauren D. Olsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue