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.Visit Abby Mullen's website.
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.
--Marshal Zeringue
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