Erik Kenyon's "Philosophy at the Gymnasium"

Erik Kenyon received his PhD from Cornell University in classics. He is a philosopher, musician, and weightlifter, who teaches Latin and humanities at Friends Academy, Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He is the author of Augustine and the Dialogue and a coauthor of Ethics for the Very Young.

Kenyon applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Philosophy at the Gymnasium, and reported the following:

Page 99 starts, “and queens. Unlike most rulers, they will approach ruling as a burden in comparison to the delights of philosophy, yet one that they must shoulder for the sake of the city that raised them. While the masses will be left to chase shadows, people with a sense of how the world actually works will keep them in line as best they can. Having an army at their disposal will help. The goal is for the city as a whole to flourish.” This conclusion to a section ties together main ideas from Plato’s Republic: class distinctions between rulers, army and masses; educational requirements for rulers; real-world knowledge vs. “shadows” on the wall of Plato’s Cave. How this fits with the chapter title, “Women at the Gym,” is unclear.

A new section, “The Method of Hypothesis in Republic 1-7,” reminds readers of a philosophical method, explained in chapters on Plato’s Symposium, which “proceeds as investigators keep identifying the question behind the question until they arrive at a most basic question,” after which they try out hypothetical answers to all these questions. Using this methodology as a lens, the remainder of the page lays out core questions that drive Republic’s first seven books. This proceeds from “Is justice profitable?” to “What is justice?” and “What is good?” at breakneck speed.

Philosophy at the Gymnasium uses Greek philosophers as coaches for ‘wrestling with’ questions that are still timely today. Page 99’s emphasis on methodology captures this, as do its connections between education, politics and life. That said, this page concludes a discussion spanning four chapters and takes ideas, which are laid out more carefully above, ‘at a sprint.’ This missing puzzle piece, what any of this has to do with women at the gym, is that ancient gyms were both venues for nude athletics and schools for future citizens. The present chapter stresses that Republic’s forays into the nature of knowledge are introduced by the suggestion that women, as future rulers, “must strip naked and wear virtue instead of clothes.” This collision of body and soul, quirky and profound, captures the flavor of the book well.

Visit Erik Kenyon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Kornfield's "Invoking the Fathers"

Sarah Kornfield analyzes the public persuasion of sexism. A feminist rhetorical critic, Kornfield’s research explores the politics of gender within U.S. television, religion, and governance. She is an Associate Professor of Communication and Women's & Gender Studies at Hope College.

Kornfield applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Invoking the Fathers: Dangerous Metaphors and Founding Myths in Congressional Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Invoking the Fathers opens with two substantive quotes from U.S. senators, followed by my analysis of these speeches along with other senators’ speeches from the prior pages.

Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) celebrated Constitution Day by stating,

Two hundred thirty-two years ago, our Founding Fathers gathered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and signed a document that remains the supreme law of the land today. In those two hundred thirty-two years, the United States has become the most powerful, the most prosperous Nation in the history of the world, and that success has come as a result of the framework set by our Constitution. The genius of the Framers was their determination to maximize the freedom of the individual while recognizing the need for a central government limited in size by our Constitution.

Likewise, Senator James Lankford (R-OK) stated,

On September 17, 1787, this great experiment was finalized to try to form what they considered a more perfect Union, and the birth of our Constitution happened. This was a radical experiment in self-government, and most of the rest of the world at the time stared at those whom we now call our Founding Fathers and thought, that will never work.

These speeches focus on the past, on a specific moment of origin: September 17, 1787. Senator Daines (R-MT) calls attention to this origin moment by situating it in space—Independence Hall, Philadelphia—and situating it in time by repeating the phrase “two hundred thirty-two years.” Senator Ernst (R-IA) focuses on this origin moment by framing the Constitution as a material item, a “gift” bestowed on us by the “Founding Fathers.” This activates the inheritance framework so frequently used in congressional discourse. Senator Lankford (R-OK) personifies this sense of inheritance and lineage by describing the Constitution as birthed—by the fathers—on September 17, 1787.

These celebrations of Constitution Day engage in the typical veneration of the “Founding Fathers,” positioning them as exceptionally wise. Senator Ernst (R-IA) states that the founders had “incredible foresight”; Senator Daines (R-MT) applies the word “genius” to the founders; and Senator Lankford (R-OK) suggests they were so brilliant the rest of the world could not even conceive of how their plan might work.

How well does this page represent my book? Page 99 does a good job of showing readers what they can expect from Invoking the Fathers in terms of topic, evidence, and method! This book is an analysis of how contemporary congresspeople talk about the “Founding Fathers” and that comes across very well on page 99.

Page 99, however, does not give readers a clear sense of Invoking the Fathers’ overarching argument. It shows readers what I am analyzing and how I approach the topic, but does not zoom out to the book’s larger interpretive argument. Namely, it does not show how, by revering the founders as fathers, contemporary political discourse (1) constructs us-other binaries between real America and everyone else, (2) frames this real America as exceptional, (3) imagines a possessive relationship, in which the “Founding Fathers” belong to “us,” and “we” to them, (4) uses material appeals to frame this exceptional America as real, and (5) assumes that this real America is inherited by real Americans—the “us.” At every turn, the “realness” of the United States is defined by its lineage to the “Founding Fathers,” normalizing a sense of lineage in which some people—the founders’ supposed heirs—have greater claims to the country and its governance. Ultimately, this shapes what it means to govern in the name of “the people” and who can be “the people.”

Page 99 does, however, provide evidence for this argument by specifically pointing to the sense of lineage and inheritance in Senators Daines’ and Lankford’s speeches, and it speaks more broadly to the myth of American exceptionalism.

Page 99 is part of my favorite chapter in Invoking the Fathers. Reading through years of congressional speeches, I was shocked to find that congresspeople spend a lot of time on ceremonial speeches—for Constitution Day, National Bald Eagle Day, National Bible Week, and so on. I enjoyed writing this chapter so much, in part, because I was so surprised to find these ceremonial speeches in the Congressional Record. These speeches venerate the “Founding Fathers” and the founding era, drawing on and playing into the myth of American exceptionalism.

Learn more about Invoking the Fathers at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan A. Brewer's "The Best Land"

Susan A. Brewer was born in Oneida, New York, and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she taught the history of American foreign relations. She is the author of To Win the Peace and Why America Fights.

Brewer applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Best Land introduces two men, both in their twenties, who played a significant role in the early development of what would become my hometown, the city of Oneida in Madison County, New York. The first is Sidney Breese of New Jersey, a Yale graduate, lawyer, and employee of the Holland Land Company. The second is Angel Deferrier, the son of a poor French nobleman and the daughter of a colonial official who had made a fortune in Canada, was imprisoned in the Bastille for defrauding the state, and pardoned by Louis XV. Angel, who served Louis XVI as a royal bodyguard, fled during the French Revolution, contacted the Holland Land Company, and traveled from New York City to the frontier with Sidney in the 1790s.

At first, I thought that page 99 failed the test of revealing the whole book, but upon consideration I rather think that in some way it does. As was often the case in the local histories I have read, Natives are missing from this page. The only mention of Indigenous people concerns the image of two “savages” on the ancient coat of arms of Angel’s family. This symbolic, rather than actual, presence of Native people was a familiar one in my childhood. I had grown up in Oneida without realizing that Oneida Indians still lived on their ancestral lands. At school where we cheered on our team called “Oneida Indians,” the Oneidas, along with the rest of the Haudenosaunee or People of the Longhouse, had disappeared from our textbooks after the American Revolution.

As illustrated by Angel’s story, however, that was not true. When he came to Oneida territory, he followed in the footsteps of his forefathers by marrying a woman from a family of property and influence. In Angel’s case, he married Polly Denny, a Mohawk/Oneida woman. In contrast to Page 99, much of the rest of the book is about generations of Polly’s family. For over a century, Polly’s family lived on what would become my family’s farm, called “the best land” by my grandfather whose parents had bought it from Angel and Polly’s grandchildren.

Angel Deferrier and Sidney Breese, along with a multitude of land speculators, turnpike, canal, and railroad developers, settlers, and squatters, had come to Oneida territory in search of wealth, opportunity, a home. The Oneidas, including members of Polly’s family, tried strategy after strategy to hold on to land guaranteed by the United States that New York State acquired using deceit, corruption, and illegally made treaties. They initially secured help from Sidney and Angel, but both men eventually took an active part in the dispossession of the Oneidas. Remembered as gentlemen with elegant manners and gracious homes, Sidney and Angel built their prosperity on broken promises. Page 99 introduces these key characters in The Best Land, a history of settler colonialism and Indigenous perseverance filled with love and betrayal.

Learn more about The Best Land at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Why America Fights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brycchan Carey's "The Unnatural Trade"

Brycchan Carey is professor of literature, culture, and history at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published numerous books and articles on the cultural history of slavery and abolition.

Carey applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807, and reported the following:

The Unnatural Trade asks how late eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as a “dread perversion” of nature, charting that process across a century and a half of writing about African and Caribbean environments and people by British colonists and, later, abolitionists. In a book of around 220 pages, it should come as no surprise that page 99 describes an author and a moment around halfway through that process. The page is one of ten discussing the notorious historian and racial theorist Edward Long (1734–1813) and his infamous History of Jamaica, which was published in three volumes in 1774 and which compares Black people with orangutans. I go on to discuss those disturbing passages, for which Long has been dubbed “the father of English racism,” but on page 99 I show how in the History of Jamaica he moves from a highly aestheticized account of the Jamaican environment and its natural wonders to a more pragmatic call for its exploitation. Long’s parish tours, I argue, “reveal him an author with a keen eye for detail, a genuine appreciation of wildlife, landforms, and meteorology.” He is eager to emphasize the economic benefit of properly conducted natural history and he calls for more funding for top-quality scientific research into the Jamaican environment—while slamming amateur naturalists who he condemns as “the despicable tribe of insect-hunters, and collectors of gimcracks” who have brought the science of natural history into “contempt and ridicule.” Proper naturalists, he argues, understand that God has created Jamaica for the benefit of colonists and may “instruct us in the means by which our health may be preserved, our life prolonged, our agriculture improved, manufactures enlarged and multiplied, commerce and trade extended, and the public enriched.” For Long, I conclude, “the Caribbean environment is a resource supplied by God for the benefit of the British people and economy and natural history a tool in its exploitation.”

Reading page 99 in isolation would certainly give a reader an insight into some of the key themes of the book. It offers a reading of an important piece of environmental literature that was written in the service of the Caribbean plantocracy and it shows how one writer could use his Christian faith, his belief in European supremacy, and his desire for economic expansion to justify colonial expansion and exploitation. It also shows how natural history and agricultural writing are deeply entwined with colonial discourses in this period. But unlike much of the rest of the book, page 99 has little to say about enslaved people and nothing about the slave trade. It also discusses the writing of one who was an unambiguous advocate for plantation slavery and a notorious racist. Many of the earlier 98 pages of the book assess the writing of naturalists who were instead ambivalent about enslavement, or who at least questioned its humanity. Many of the following 123 pages discuss those like Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, and Thomas Clarkson who worked actively to abolish the slave trade, and implicitly enslavement itself. In this case, the Page 99 Test is partially successful in that it foregrounds the role of natural history in the history of colonial resource exploitation, but it is less successful in showing the part played by naturalists in recording the brutal realities of the slave trade and plantation slavery, and not at all successful in showing how abolitionists seized upon and deployed that literature.

I hope someone who read page 99 of The Unnatural Trade would be intrigued enough by its glimpse into this complex literature to go back to page 1 and read the book through. The book as a whole tells the story of the part played by environmental writing in the development of British attitudes toward the slave trade and colonial slavery in which colonists increasingly presented slavery as an unalterable part of the natural order, but abolitionists, and increasingly the British public, saw it instead as a “dread perversion” of nature that needed to end. The book guides the reader through the writings of colonists and slave traders, explorers and scientists, enslaved people and abolitionists, poets and novelists, across a century and half, and concludes by showing the influence this writing would have on the next century of resource imperialism in the nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa.” Page 99 is a good entry point, but The Unnatural Trade has a great deal more to offer.

Learn more about the book and author at Brycchan Carey's website.

The Page 99 Test: From Peace to Freedom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher R. Pearl's "Declarations of Independence"

Christopher R. Pearl is Associate Professor of History at Lycoming College and the author of Conceived in Crisis: The Revolutionary Creation of an American State.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Declarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution, and reported the following:

For Declarations of Independence, the Page 99 Test captures the essence of the book's central themes. On this page, colonial Pennsylvania and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) work intently to keep Lenape (Delaware) leader Teedyuscung from leaving the Northern Susquehanna River Valley for the Ohio region. Both Pennsylvania’s colonial government and the Haudenosaunee recognize Teedyuscung’s strategic importance as the leader of the Susquehanna Nations—a coalition of Indigenous nations whose presence stabilizes the Northern Susquehanna River Valley against Connecticut settlers’ encroachments—his influence could either uphold or fracture the region’s tenuous balance of power. The ambitions of these settlers challenge both the Haudenosaunee’s claims to the territory and the “unpurchased lands” that Pennsylvania’s Penn family considers within their purview. Meanwhile, Teedyuscung and the Susquehanna Nations also pursue their own independence, aiming to secure autonomy in the region from both the Haudenosaunee and encroaching British colonies.

On page 99, Teedyuscung ultimately agrees to stay in the Susquehanna Valley, but this does little to ease the fierce colonial rivalries that continually destabilize the frontier. The escalating tensions foreshadow a larger conflict that could endanger both local Indigenous autonomy and British colonial control.

This page exemplifies several key elements of Declarations of Independence: the relentless Indigenous efforts to defend their lands amidst rival colonial ambitions, and how these struggles create a volatile frontier that could dramatically shift power dynamics throughout the colonies and the British Empire. More importantly, page 99 underscores that the struggle for independence was far more complex than American colonists versus the British Empire. It was a layered fight, involving Indigenous nations and colonial players alike, all striving for sovereignty and survival.

Teedyuscung’s skillful negotiations and his unwavering defense of Indigenous sovereignty are also emblematic of the “declarations of independence” made by diverse peoples throughout the revolutionary era. His pursuit of autonomy for the Susquehanna Nations highlights a broader, multifaceted struggle for land and freedom that shaped this critical period—and, as the book argues, laid essential groundwork for what would become the United States. Page 99 is not just a snapshot of colonial rivalry but a pivotal moment that resonates throughout the broader narrative of America’s paths to independence.

Learn more about Declarations of Independence at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Messer-Kruse's "Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution"

Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University and author of The Patriots' Dilemma: White Abolition and Black Banishment in the Founding of the United States of America (2024).

Messer-Kruse applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution, and reported the following:

From page 99:

...several states, pointing to the British “carrying away” of people they had agreed to surrender, flouted their disregard of the treaty that held the peace by seizing loyalists’ properties and passing laws shielding their citizens from English debt collection…these problems plagued the “Critical Period” leading to the nation’s constitutional reorganization.

For more than a century historians have offered competing explanations for why the young American republic radically reordered its federal government. Many have attributed this extraordinary change to financial concerns: the federal government’s lack of an independent taxing authority or the state’s increasing bickering over tolls, tariffs, and international trade. Some have found novel causes. Charles Beard pointed out that many of the key delegates to the drafting convention were speculators in western lands that stood to be better protected under a stronger central government.

Many scholars have attempted to link the Constitution to a project of protecting slavery. Staughton Lynd in the 1960s pointed out the many disguised ways that the Constitution defended slavery and more recently Nicole Hannah-Jones in the New York Times’ 1619 Project implied the Constitution was written just for this purpose. However, while successfully showing that in the end the Constitution advanced the interests of enslavers, these accounts did not provide a compelling account of how slavery played a role in the movement to overthrow the Articles of Confederation and construct a new model of government in the first place.

Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution uncovers the missing link in the historical chain of events that connects slave interests to the Constitutional Convention. The road to Philadelphia begins with the mass escape of enslaved people during the revolutionary war and the British decision (similar to Lincoln’s) to provide sanctuary to them so as to recruit African American soldiers into their army and deny the patriots the enslaved labor their war effort depended on.

After the war, the Americans insisted that the British return these thousands of fugitives, most of whom had been evacuated to Nova Scotia or the Caribbean, in the treaty that recognized American independence. However, this agreement broke down as the English dragged their feet and American states responded by seizing Loyalist property and canceling debts owed to British merchants. Page 99 reprises the importance of this stand-off in a chapter that goes on to note that the failure of the states to uphold a treaty negotiated by the central government was one of the few issues that could not be compromised within the terms of the original confederation. Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution goes on to trace the direct connections between several of the key organizers of the Constitutional Convention and the controversy over the people the patriots’ euphemistically referred to as the “carried off.”

Learn more about Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph A. Seeley's "Border of Water and Ice"

Joseph A. Seeley is Assistant Professor in the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia. He specializes in the histories of Korea, the Japanese Empire, and East Asian environments and borderlands.

Seeley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria, and reported the following:

“By nature a Korean takes to smuggling like a duck to water.”

These harsh, discriminatory words and their historical context is examined in page 99 of my book, Border of Water and Ice. K-pop is undoubtedly more famous today than K-smuggling, but as my book shows, the fluid Yalu River between China and northern Korea has long seen a thriving underground trade. After Japanese imperialists colonized Korea in 1910, they encouraged Koreans to smuggle goods across the river in order to further expand Japan’s influence into China.

The quote at the beginning of this post is from Roy Maxwell Talbot, an American official working for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Talbot unfairly saw Korean participation in smuggling as a racial flaw. But as page 99 of my book states, “Blaming smuggling on Koreans’ ethnicity was easier than dealing with the systemic factors that fueled Korean participation in this illicit trade.” With few other economic options under Japanese rule, thousands of poor, marginalized Koreans along the border were drawn into the underground economy as a way to survive. Japanese merchants profited from their activities, and Japanese border police were very much complicit. As I note on the very bottom of page 99: “widespread Korean involvement in smuggling would have been unimaginable without the protection offered by Japanese police authorities.”

This page gives a taste of what my book is about: how Japanese colonialists tried to control and exploit border-crossers, like Korean smugglers, to further their goals. One key aspect of the book not covered in this specific page is how the Yalu River itself—with its seasonal floods, freezes, and thaws—shaped these underground economies and other aspects of border life. Smugglers knew that their success or failure depended on an intimate understanding of this protean border of water and ice.

Learn more about Border of Water and Ice at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Wright's "Unruly Labor"

Andrea Wright is the Class of 1952 Distinguished Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at William & Mary. She is the author of Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (2021).

Wright applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea, and reported the following:

Unruly Labor is a history of the oil industry in the Arabian Sea that centers the workers who built and maintained the industry. Looking at the 1930s through 1960s, each chapter of the book begins with strikes by both mobile and local workers and considers what factors influenced worker strikes and solidarities. Unruly Labor also examines how oil companies and governments responded to these strikes. This examination demonstrates how oil became increasingly connected to national security and how this connection between oil and national security negatively impacted workers’ ability to unionize and go on strike.

Page 99 of Unruly Labor is located in the middle of Chapter 4: “Shaping Nationalism Outside of the Nation-State.” This chapter examines a hunger strike that Indian workers who were building an oil refinery in Aden went on in the early 1950s. The page describes workers complaints of religious discrimination against Hindus by oil company managers, including allegations that Hindus were not hired to work at this project due to their religion. This page also discusses both oil companies’ and the Indian government’s response to these claims. The page begins:

Accusations of religious discrimination were effective in mobilizing action by the Indian government, and the government halted the recruitment of Indians for the Aden construction project based on these allegations. As government officials investigated claims of religious discrimination, Indian bureaucrats considered citizens not as a homogenous category, but within the specificity of India’s demography. Religion was a critical category for both oil companies and the Indian government, and government responses were informed by two seemingly competing views of India as a secular state and as a Hindu nation.

Regarding the Page 99 Test, this page provides a good introduction to the book, but it only partially conveys the book’s main ideas. It reflects the book’s focus on the interactions among oil companies, workers, and governments. In addition, this page highlights that citizenship is critical concept in the book, and the reader is introduced to the importance of citizenship in determining the efficacy of worker action. However, page 99 does not present some of the other key concepts in the book, and it does not reflect the book’s focus on how the racialized labor hierarchies of the Arabian Peninsula came into being.

Learn more about Unruly Labor at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jean-Philippe Belleau's "Killing the Elites"

Jean-Philippe Belleau is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Killing the Elites: Haiti, 1964, and reported the following:

Page 99 recounts one of the worst massacres in Caribbean history, which occurred on April 26, 1963 in Port-au-Prince.

From inception, there are modes of killings. Some victims are taken from their homes or arrested at road- blocks by soldiers or VSN, and then brought to Fort Dimanche (…) where they are executed the same day. Other victims are randomly killed right on the street or in their homes in broad daylight, in the Pacot and Turgeau areas, by roaming VSNs and Presidential Guard officers. Victims include lawyers, businessmen, engineers, a museum curator, lawyers—mostly men. Members of the same families are killed together; one example is a branch of the Tippenhauer family in which the father (a businessman) is killed with his two sons. Some of the murdered retired officers were known public figures. Col. Edouard Roy had been Chief of the Presidential House. Col. Roger Villedrouin is also executed. Jean Bouchereau, a retired army engineer arrested in a bookstore, pleaded for his life (“I have ten children!”) before being taken to the execution site at Fort Dimanche. Of the 120 active duty officers who were killed under Duvalier, almost half were killed on that day. (…)

The massacre convinced many of Haiti’s intellectual elites, irrespective of their racial identity, to flee the country. Leslie Manigat, a promising Haitian scholar, fled the country with his entire family. The flight of elites was hardly new in Haitian history, as Matthew Smith shows, but up to that point those who had gone into exile had been predominantly men. On April 26, “state terrorism applied to entire families,” and it caused a massive exodus on a scale not yet seen before in Haiti.

Page 99 partly passes the test. Uncannily, page 99 recounts the most under-researched massacres in Caribbean 20th century history, and for that matter one that targeted almost exclusively the elites. It also exemplifies the gratuitousness of state violence under Duvalier: people who were not known opponents were executed because of their social identity. The book recounts many episodes of anti-elite massacres, in Haiti and in other countries, in the 20th century and earlier. Page 99 also points at one of the most tragic consequences of anti-elite violence in Haiti: elite flight. Page 99 therefore gives an accurate impression (but an impression only). In addition, the victims mentioned on page 99 are represented on the book’s front cover (Col. Edouard Roy, Jean Bouchereau, the Tippenhauer, Col. Villedrouin). However, given that Killing the Elites compares anti-elite violence across space and time, and develops several theoretical arguments about mass violence, the book cannot be summarized in one page only.

Learn more about Killing the Elites at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elia Powers's "Performing the News"

Elia Powers is an associate professor of journalism at Towson University, Towson, Maryland. Formerly a news and feature writer, he is now a contributing editor and independent podcast producer/host.

Powers applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality, and reported the following:

Ever wonder why broadcast journalists tend to talk alike? Three pages into the sixth chapter of Performing the News, I explore the origins of news anchor voice. More specifically, I trace how General American, a supposedly “accentless” variety of American English, became the broadcast news standard. It’s one of the central themes of my book. The Page 99 Test strikes again. Here’s an excerpt:

General American is viewed as broadly palatable and unobjectionable… Many believe it is also the clearest and, to viewers, the most authoritative… Yet General American was not always the broadcast news standard. In radio’s early days, there was little standardization. Provided that journalists sounded well educated, regional dialects were permitted. That changed when stations sought to unite the country around a “correct” form of speech with uniform pronunciation standards. As a journal article from the 1930s explained, radio “offers a standardization which freely admits certain outstanding localisms and regionalisms, crystalizing some, absorbing others,” thus developing “distinctly American speech.”

In the early twentieth century, many public figures who lived on the East Coast spoke with the British-influenced transatlantic accent. While some viewed that accent as sophisticated, others thought it sounded “artificial and affected” and preferred “pure” Midwestern speech. Sounding vaguely Midwestern became the norm in broadcast news due largely to an influential pronunciation expert from Ohio. John Samuel Kenyon was not the first scholar to reference General American, but he was arguably the most prominent. Kenyon, a linguist and English professor, authored several guides to American English pronunciation. Acknowledging that no official standard existed, he implicitly endorsed how he and other northeast Ohioans spoke as the model. Some linguists, however, dispute that General American ever reflected how people in Ohio—or in any region—actually talked.

Broadcasting companies adopted Kenyon’s guidelines in their speech and language manuals, such as the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation. An NBC executive promoted the ideal as “decent American pronunciation, affected as little as possible by localisms.” Stations established diction and pronunciation courses for announcers and newscasters, sending some to the Midwest to eliminate unwanted regional accents. Radio broadcasters received awards for speech precision and exemplifying proper General American English. Efforts to promote uniformity in pronunciation were largely successful. Standardized speech became the norm on radio and eventually on television, which originally featured regional accents before becoming increasingly homogenized.

While some norms have changed, General American remains the gold standard in television news. There are practical reasons for this, as I explain in the book. Many on-air journalists begin in small television markets and work their way up. To achieve big-market ambitions, they must appeal to hiring managers and news audiences who live in different regions and have diverse tastes. Sounding geographically ambiguous—like you’re from “everywhere but nowhere,” as one interviewee put it—can be an asset.

General American has long been considered a neutral, accentless way of speaking. However, I argue that it is not neutral. What is considered neutral has historically reflected tastes of white male news managers and assumed tastes of predominantly white, middle- to upper-class audience members. Neutrality implies not taking sides or not having strongly marked characteristics or features. General American privileges ways of speaking associated with educated white Americans.

Audiences are conditioned to view familiar newscaster accents as natural and authoritative, and underrepresented ones as inferior and unprofessional. Yet nearly a century ago, as page 99 shows, new broadcast speech practices did not come naturally to most journalists. They had to learn them.

Visit Elia Powers's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Alan Dugatkin's "Dr. Calhoun's Mousery"

Lee Alan Dugatkin is an animal behaviorist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. He is the author of more than one hundred and fifty papers and the author or coauthor of many books, including The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness.

Dugatkin applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Dr. Calhoun's Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“These females simply piled the strips of paper in a heap,” Calhoun wrote, “sometimes trampling them into a pad that showed little sign of cup formation.” Worse yet, if they encountered another rat as they were gathering up nesting material, these females would simply drop the shredded paper and start interacting with the other rat. Some females in the crowded neighborhoods stopped building nests altogether and just gave birth in the sawdust that was at the bottom of the nest boxes, something that never happened in a dominant male’s far less crowded neighborhood.

Mothers in crowded neighborhoods nursed their pups less often than females in less crowded neighborhoods. These females also showed little of the defensive behavior that mother’s typically display. In the less crowded neighborhoods, “if any situation arose that a mother considered a danger to her pups,” Calhoun wrote, “she would pick up the young, one at a time and take them somewhere safer and nothing will distract her from this task until the entire litter has been moved.” If females in crowded neighborhoods picked up their pups to take them to safety—and many times they did not—they often dropped them on the way and left them on the floor. Such pups rarely, if ever, survived. In a dominant male’s neighborhood, where mothers built good nests and nursed and defended their pups, 50 percent of the pups survived: Calhoun called these neighborhoods “brood pens.” In the crowded neighborhoods, where pathological togetherness reigned, pup mortality reached as high as a devasting 96 percent, the result of a combination of poor nesting and mothering skills, as well physiological deformities of the mother’s uterus. Calhoun sent the bodies of eleven females that died in the crowded neighborhoods to a colleague, Katherine C. Snell at the National Cancer Institute. Snell’s necropsy report listed severe uterine problems, including endometritis, as well as inflammation of the kidneys, some of which may have been the result of very high levels of vitamin A in the rat chow that all the rats were eating.

I’d give this a grade of B on the Page 99 Ttest. It fares well enough in capturing a snapshot of the experimental work that the book’s main protagonist, Dr. John Calhoun, undertook, and it also touches in on some important findings he made.

Page 99 only hints at the important, but utterly bizarre, experiments John Calhoun did to understand overpopulation in mice and rats, and how to potentially defuse population bombs in rodents. But there is so much more to the story, captured succinctly in an opening statement Calhoun made when he was invited to present the results of his experiments to The Royal Society in London: “I shall largely speak of mice,” Calhoun began, “but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution.” In time, Calhoun came to think that his work might be used to help we humans from overpopulating ourselves to extinction. “Of course, we realize that rats are not men,” Calhoun once said, “but they do have remarkable similarities in both physiology and social relations.... [W]e can at least hope to develop ideas that will provide a spring forward for attaining insights into human social relations and the consequent state of mental health.” The media and more latched on to all this and turned Calhoun into a scientific pop icon. He was work covered, over in over, in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday and more. Page after page of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Pump House Gang spoke of Calhoun’s experiment. His work led one of the writers of Catwoman to introduce the character Ratcatcher, who speaks of Calhoun’s experiments to his legions of rat followers. The best-selling children’s book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH likely had its origin in a visit by the author, Robert Conly (who wrote under the pseudonym Robert C. O’Brien), to Calhoun’s lab at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Visit Lee Alan Dugatkin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Power in the Wild.

--Marshal Zeringue

Audrey Wu Clark's "Against Exclusion"

Audrey Wu Clark is an Associate Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. She is the author of The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Modernist Literature and Art (2015), Asian American Players: Masculinity, Literature, and the Anxieties of War (2023), and Against Exclusion: Disrupting Anti-Chinese Violence in the Nineteenth Century (2024). She teaches literary theory and Asian American Literature at USNA. In her research, she is interested in Asian American intellectual history and wellness. She is currently the Book Reviews Editor of the Society for US Intellectual History. She has also published articles in Amerasia, The Asian American Literary Review, and Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies.

Clark applied the "Page 99 Test" to Against Exclusion and reported the following:

Page 99 of Against Exclusion uncannily exemplifies the crux of the book’s argument by falling on my analysis of Chinese American writer and editor Wong Chin Foo’s efforts to obstruct the 1892 Geary Act, one of the Chinese exclusion acts which required all Chinese to register with the possibility of imprisonment and deportation for undocumented immigrants. This page features Wong as a radical in contrast with his liberal counterparts in the book, Yan Phou Lee and Yung Wing, who sought and received the help of William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. who links Black liberation to Asian American civil rights. This relation gets at the heart of the book, which contextualizes the driving-out era of Chinese Americans, which included lynching by rope and other methods, in the larger post-Civil War era of rampant African American lynchings. The book differentiates between the lynchings of African Americans and Asian Americans in the late nineteenth century as quotidian and exceptional, respectively, but both spectacular and part of the liberal state of exception which requires what Agamben calls a homo sacer, a killed but not sacrificed other. Against Exclusion is the first monograph that contextualizes the first Chinese American court cases of Ah Toy and Mary Tape and the autobiographies of Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung Wing, which have been documented as the first Asian American literature, within the driving-out era of the 1870s and 1880s in which Chinese Americans were lynched or driven out of West coast cities in California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado en masse. The violent expulsions led, in part, to the 1875 Page Act, which prevented the immigration of Chinese women on the premise that they were all prostitutes, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented the naturalization of Chinese immigrants, deeming then “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Surviving this period of rampant violence and legislated objectification, Ah Toy, Mary Tape, Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung Wing “enfleshed” and humanized themselves through court cases and their autobiographies as acts of defiance and protest.

Visit Audrey Wu Clark's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Polly Zavadivker's "A Nation of Refugees"

Polly Zavadivker is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the editor and translator from Russian of The 1915 Diary of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front. Her articles and essays have appeared in Jewish Social Studies, the Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, and the multi-volume series Russia's Great War and Revolution.

Zavadivker applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I, and reported the following:

A Nation of Refugees describes how the world’s largest Jewish population experienced World War I and its violent epicenter in Eastern Europe. Page 99 falls within a chapter entitled “A Sacred Duty,” which explains the war relief campaign organized in 1914 by Jews in Russia’s capital cities for millions of civilians in front zones. It details how the Russian-language Jewish press publicized emergency relief work efforts during the first months of the war. Tens of thousands of homeless civilians had fled their homes in mortal fear during early battles between the German and Russian armies in what is now Poland and Lithuania. Writers in the press represented philanthropy and war relief as national and patriotic duties, as well the secular equivalent of the sacred obligation to give charity, a law passed down through generations that originated in ancient biblical laws of tithing.

The campaign generated great success, drawing millions of rubles in donations from nearly 500 different Jewish communities throughout Russia, including distant corners of the empire such as Baku (now in Azerbaijan) and the Pacific port city Vladivostok. I explain the novelty of this effort—that Jews dispersed across a continent-wide empire expressed solidarity with their beleaguered brothers and sisters, sometimes at a geographic remove of thousands of miles:

Rarely in the recent past had so many Jewish communities in the Russian interior raised funds for distant causes. In notable exceptions before the war, local communities sent dues to the world Zionist organization, and to support victims during the pogrom outbreaks of 1903–1906 in Bialystok, Odesa, Kishinev, and elsewhere. Mobilization for war relief in 1914–1915 occurred on an exponentially greater scale.

I wouldn’t say that page 99 provides a microcosm of the book, but it does present one of its three core themes, which include state and military violence, civilian experience, and the humanitarian campaign for war victims. The contents of page 99 convey the latter topic, with only passing reference to violence or the plight of civilians. Now, page 100, on the other hand…

Learn more about A Nation of Refugees at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan McGarry's "Political Voice"

Aidan McGarry is Professor of International Politics and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at Loughborough University, London. His books include Who Speaks for Roma? and Romaphobia: The Last Acceptable Form of Racism. His research has been published in leading international journals, including Social Movement Studies; International Political Science Review; Ethnic and Migration Studies; and the International Journal of Communication. In 2018-2019, he was a EURIAS/Marie Curie Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, and in 2022-2023, he was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award at the University of Southern California.

McGarry applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Political Voice: Protest, Democracy, and Marginalised Groups, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in Chapter 3 which outlines the key concept of my book, political voice, and its three core elements: autonomy, representation, and constitution. Page 99 focuses on constitution. It does pass the Page 99 Test as it advances the book’s main argument which is the relationship between protest, democracy, and marginalised groups.

Here is an excerpt of page 99 (references removed):

The articulation of political voice constitutes groups and affirms a consciousness, an awareness of one’s position, an apex of production which ruptures its surroundings and transforms the consciousness of the group. Most research on policy, politics, social movements and studies on revolutions look for impact and the proof of resonance on regimes, authorities, or institutions. This is not a central interest for this book. I attempt to shift the analytic focus and show how political voice actually creates groups through the act of articulation. This is a significant outcome in and of itself.

Articulation is therefore an action whereby a subject constitutes an object – a ‘meaningful unity’ or ‘unity of sense’- in a shared space. And so, the articulation of political voice crystalizes collective consciousness. We witness a dialectic process of subject constitution and object formation through political voice…Political voice is built on collective agency but does not collapse the individual agent into the group.

Status in politics comes from the constitution of the political subject, being seen and, in turn, securing recognition as a legitimate political actor. It is important to avoid the assumption that every voice will be heard because existing structures, the very ones which suppress and exclude minority voices, will ultimately decide which voices are heard and which are not. This highlights a tension with constitution, and one which suggests constitution is relational, depending on intersubjective interaction, specifically the recognition of existence. Do we really exist if others deny our existence? The same quandary arises when nations declare their sovereignty and create a constitution with newer states requiring other states to recognize their existence, Kosovo and South Sudan being two recent examples. Constitution through the articulation of political voice thus carries a plaintiff hope to be recognized as a legitimate political agent.

Page 99 highlights three central arguments of the book:

First, it suggests that the importance of the articulation of voice is in the act itself, speaking up and speaking out. When we think of protests throughout history, we often evaluate those that have ‘succeeded’ and those which have ‘failed’, but this misses the point. Protest should not always be measured by impact or perceived success because, for marginalised people, the simple act of making oneself heard is an important political outcome. This is especially true for marginalised people like queers, refugees, or ethnic minorities who are often actively silenced or excluded from mainstream political institutions.

Second, it explains how people constitute themselves through articulating their voice. In essence, we speak ourselves into being. This page reflects on how, in protest movements, the individual is sometimes collapsed into the collective, such as a demonstration. The group is often assumed to be a unified coherent and bounded block, when the truth is that all protests are extremely heterogenous and do not tend to act in a unified manner. The individual and her agency is sometimes lost when we examine collective action.

Third, it develops an understanding of constitution, when new political subjects are brought into being through the articulation of voice. A key part of this dynamic is recognition of others. This develops earlier arguments in my book on how voice is relational and ultimately requires external actors (such as the media, the government, political parties, international organisations, oppositional movements, and the general public). This recognition is fraught with problems because powerful actors will invariably seek to silence and deny the voice of marginalised groups to affirm their own power. Throughout the book, and on page 99, I argue that the articulation of political voice is the only way to change the status quo.

Visit Aidan McGarry's website.

--Marshal Zeringue