Jennie Lightweis-Goff's "Captive City"

Jennie Lightweis-Goff is a scholar, lyric essayist, and, most essentially, a New Orleans flâneur. She is the author of two scholarly books, Blood at the Root and Captive City. Her essays have appeared in the major journals of U.S. literature, including Signs, American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, minnesota review, and south. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Liberties, and at her Substack, The Butcher's Darling, where she writes on grief, precarious labor, sobriety, and intellectual work that was "born in the back of the house."

Lightweis-Goff applied the “Page 99 Test” to Captive City and reported the following:

Ten years ago, I reached for a volume on the top shelf among the Fs in Dewey’s Decimal Classification System. It was a quiet day at Tulane, where I worked as the ACLS New Faculty Fellow. Despite my comparatively young age, I am a Luddite! There are not enough random buttons on the internet. But there are plenty on paper; page 99 in Captive City is one of them.

When people remember the great poets of the 1920s, they think of Eliot, Hughes, Stevens, Cullen, and Moore. Our grandparents’ generation thought of Stephen Vincent Benet. You might find 8 copies of Benet’s John Brown’s Body (1928) in the Ps of some library or its offsite depository. Intellectuals and middlebrow readers alike love pretending that we do not know who Colleen Hoover or E.L. James are, and so we often forget the long-dead “thought-leaders.” I let Dewey guide me to them.

Page 99 of Captive City won’t take you to Benet. Rather, it introduces you to Abraham Oakey Hall, who I met in the F shelves. There, I found a reprint of his book The Manhattaner in New Orleans (1851), published by the Louisiana Bicentennial Commission in 1976 as one of the signal books for understanding the city. Recent travelers see the city as a wax museum of the past, or a hipster laboratory of the future. Hall, rather, saw it as an investment opportunity. Page 99 reminds you that “cultural and economic powers converge…..Culture is a resource to be exploited: a vein of myth, money, and materiel worth mining.”

Hall was a Northern Democrat, a Lincoln antagonist, and the eventual Mayor of New York City (1869 – 1972). Cartoonist Thomas Nast liked to show him as a shaking “mare” between the legs of Tammany Hall Boss William Magear Tweed. Captive City shows him as a more malicious figure….but a compelling one. I cannot be sure which Hall would prefer, but I’m confident that page 99 shows you how my book meanders in the archive of the past. A bad reviewer of the manuscript said I had mistaken myself for Christopher Columbus, but that was closer to a non-reading than a misreading. When it troubles me, I pretend they meant my sense of direction. I’ll have some idea of where I’m going once I get there.

Follow Jennie Lightweis-Goff on Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

Vicente Valentim's "The Normalization of the Radical Right"

Vicente Valentim (PhD European University Institute, 2021) is a political scientist working on comparative politics, political behavior, and political culture. He explores how democracies generate norms against behavior associated with authoritarianism, how those norms are sustained, and how they erode. He also has a keen interest in political methodology, especially causal inference methods. His work has been published in journals including Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies.

Valentim applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Normalization of the Radical Right: A Norms Theory of Political Supply and Demand, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Normalization of the Radical Right is a half-page that closes Chapter 4. This chapter discusses the difficulties of measuring some of the key concepts in the book—like social norms and preference falsification—and proposes a measure with which to do so. This, called reported vote, consists of comparing the official vote share for a given party that is declared in post-electoral surveys. The rationale is that voting is private and, as such, it should not be very affected by perceptions of what is acceptable. However, admitting one’s vote is a social interaction, and thus likely to be affected by perceptions of what others think is desirable and acceptable. The implication is that, if a given political party is stigmatized, there will be individuals who vote for it but do not admit having done so—resulting in the party being under-reported in post-electoral surveys.

In this specific page, I discuss how a similar approach can be used in future work, and then circle back to the main argument of the book:

This approach can be followed in subsequent studies interested in studying normative influences. If they are interested in political stigma per se, they can use reported vote as a measure of it. If they are interested in other outcomes, they can use the broader approach discussed in the previous section to apply this logic to other behaviors of interest.

The goal of this chapter has been to discuss reported vote and its underlying logic, since it is crucial to many analyses throughout the book. In the following chapters, I return to the theory of normalization discussed in Chapter 3. Using the approaches discussed in this chapter, I now test observable implications of that theory empirically.

Given that this only a half page and that it is part of the chapter dealing with measurement, readers skipping to page 99 would unfortunately miss much of the core argument of the book. Such argument is twofold: first, more generally, that social norms are a crucial driver of political behavior; second, more specifically, that social norms are central to understand one of the main important political developments of recent years: the rise of radical-right parties and politicians.

I hope this blog post makes readers curious to look into this and other sections of the book!

Visit Vicente Valentim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Highmore's "Playgrounds"

Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (2017) and Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain (2023).

Highmore applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Playgrounds: The Experimental Years, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Playgrounds, the experimental years falls roughly into two halves. The bottom half of the page consists of a photograph of a playground on London’s South Bank, which was included in the film Come Out to Play, from 1954, which accompanied an exhibition and a symposium on Children’s Playgrounds. This playground was built for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and has that mid-century modern feel to it. The photograph shows the playground from above. It consists of a model of a large concrete ship, with a set of funnels. The main part of the ship is filled with sand and about 10 children are playing in it. Nearby are a set of swings, some concrete cubes for clambering over, and a roundabout set on a raised area. In the middle there is a small cluster of mothers and a pram. The top half of the page introduces the playground exhibition and explains that it divided playgrounds into 5 types. The first type was ‘the equipped playground’. Today this might be referred to as a ‘static playground’ or conventional playground and is probably the playground that most usually springs to mind: a flat area of asphalt or concrete (or more recently, spongy rubber) with a selection of fixed devices (swings, slides, and so on). The second type was the ‘unequipped playground’, which as the name suggests was just the flat space and was usually used for playing ball games. The third type was the ‘natural playground’, which the exhibition catalogue describes as a ‘romping ground with undulation, banks, trees, bushes and other natural features’ – basically a section of a park. The fourth type mentioned is the ‘adventure playground’ which had a prominent place in the exhibition and in the debates surrounding it. The catalogue describes the adventure playground as a place where ‘destruction and vandalism are transmuted into creative effort’. Lastly, and least remembered, was the ‘traffic playground’: a miniature road system that children navigated on bikes and in peddle cars.

Page 99 gives the reader a good flavour of the book in terms of the prominence of images throughout the volume. But in other ways it isn’t particularly representative. The book primarily tells the story of the rise of the adventure playground and associated types of play spaces (junk playgrounds, city farms, and the like). These are playgrounds that could be seen as having a social mission. I tell the story of how a playground movement emerged in the late nineteenth century and was then revived in the immediate postwar years, as a ‘child saving’ movement. While the conventional, static playground was simply about physical play and ‘letting off steam’, the adventure playground movement saw itself as creating a safe, creative space, away from adult rules about obedience and authority. It was going to be a space where the young could develop on their own terms.

Page 99 comes at a pivotal moment in the unfolding story of experimental playgrounds. It comes at the start of a chapter titled ‘Busy Roads and High-Rise Living’, which provides the social context for understanding adventure playgrounds and the arguments that were unfolding around them. The adventure playground was a response to a set of forces that was increasingly turning inner cities into hostile environments for children and young people. The exponential rise in traffic posed a daily threat to the lives of children who had been used to playing in the street; more and more working-class children were living in tower blocks without much provision for play; and children wandering around the city on their own were being perceived by the police as potential juvenile delinquents. My book sidelines the school playground and the conventional swings and slides playground, to look intensely at the past, the present, and the future of these inspiring experimental playgrounds.

Learn more about Playgrounds at the Reaktion Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie M. Lane's "More Than Pretty Boxes"

Carrie M. Lane is Chair and Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where she teaches about work, gender, community, ethnography, and disability. She earned a BA in cultural anthropology with a concentration in women’s studies at Princeton University and a PhD in American Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on how work is changing in the Unites States, and what that means for individual workers as well as their families, communities, and country.

Lane applied the “Page 99 Test” to her newest book, More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn’t Working, and reported the following:

From page 99:

… to convince her that was not the life for her. Thus, while she knew that whatever freedom she’d gain would need to be secured firmly within air quotes, at some core level, she still knew it felt freer, at least to her.

In the two years since she started organizing full-time, Maggie’s time working with corporate clients has only confirmed her impres­sion of standard employment. “I do really like variety,” she said. “When I go in and work at [corporate client offices] and I see these people, I do not envy them at all going to the same place every day and having a boss. I think that might be something I also don’t want—a boss. They just all seem really miserable.” When organizing work is slow and finances are tight, “there are moments when having that stability seems really, really great.” In those down times, she takes on as many side jobs as she can find, and she’s grateful for her partner’s steadier income, but she’s uncomfortable not always being able to pay her full share of expenses. She’s even talked with her partner, she told me, “about how I should just apply for a full-time job and let all this craziness just go away and just go to one place every day.” And yet, ten years have passed since Maggie and I first spoke, and she still hasn’t opted to return to full-time employment.

For Maggie, a brief taste of full-time work and occasional forays into corporate environments were all it took to compel her to start her own business. For others, the decision to leave full-time employment took much longer and, when it came, was not entirely voluntary.

At fifty-three, organizer Lara had spent most of her adult life working for someone else. Originally from the East Coast, she moved to California in the 1970s to attend college but dropped out to work full-time as a receptionist at a large financial services company. Her attention to detail and straightforward manner earned her a quick promotion to secretary, then personal assistant. She started attending night school and, upon earning her associate’s degree, was promoted to office manager, a position she held for nearly twenty years. In 2010, she was laid off without warning due to budget cuts. Lara’s husband also worked, but she’d always earned the bigger income. “Not working,” she told me, “was not an option. I had to get to work.” But after three decades of working for someone else, she was dreading the…

Page 99 gives the reader a decent sense of the argument of Part One of the book, namely that organizers pursue this career as an alternative to standard employment, one that offers variety, flexibility, and (though this part isn’t on page 99) an opportunity to do meaningful work that helps people. What page 99 misses is the gist of the book’s second half, that through their work with clients, organizers help people manage the feelings of overwork, overwhelm, and self-blame that come from having too much to do and too little time in which to do it.

Happily, page 99 effectively conveys the book’s focus on real people talking about the work they do and why they do it. Other pages might highlight scholarly arguments about the cultural and historical significance of organizing’s rise, but the book’s heart lies squarely in the words and perspectives of organizers themselves. My hope is that any reader could pick up this book and resonate with the stories in its pages, stories of people looking for meaningful work, organizers offering empathy and connection to their clients, and clients—especially women—seeking help managing the overwhelming too-muchness of contemporary life.

I’d have loved for page 99 to have landed on one of the “organizing stories” I sandwich between the book’s chapters, which offer glimpses into the real-life organizing jobs I assisted on for my research. There, in the stories of sorting through mugs and storage units and memorabilia, readers can see for themselves how complicated, intimate, and emotional the organizing process can be.

Visit Carrie M. Lane's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Fuhrmann's "Influence without Arms"

Matthew Fuhrmann is the Cullen-McFadden Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Yale University (2023-24), Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University (2016-17), Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (2010-11), and Research Fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (2007-08). He was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2016 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

His research and teaching focus on international security issues with an emphasis on nuclear weapons, diplomacy and bargaining, and alliance politics. He is the author of three books, including Influence Without Arms: The New Logic of Nuclear Deterrence (2024) and Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (2017, with Todd S. Sechser). His articles are published in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Organization, International Security, and International Studies Quarterly.

Fuhrmann applied the “Page 99 Test” to Influence without Arms and reported the following:

Page 99 offers a technical primer on how to make nuclear weapons. It describes different kind of bomb designs, including the Fat Man implosion-type bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. The page goes to discuss other technological challenges in making more sophisticated weapons. This includes miniaturizing warheads so that they can be mated to a long-range missile. The goal of this discussion is to generate a timeline – how long would it take for a country with a large nuclear energy program, such as Japan, to build a nuclear weapon following a political decision?

Influence Without Arms offers a mixed bag for the Page 99 test. This page gives readers a good sense of a key subject in the book: the technology needed to make a nuclear weapon. But it doesn’t get at the core questions examined in the book, nor does it lay out any of the main arguments or evidence. Page 99 might give one the sense that this book is primarily technical in nature, perhaps like a “how to” manual for making a bomb. But it is primarily about international politics.

The book is about a group of countries that have been overlooked by scholars and policymakers: those that have the technology needed to make a nuclear bomb but choose to stay nonnuclear. These countries, including Brazil, Japan, and (for now) Iran, have what is known as “nuclear latency.” Influence Without Arms develops the concept of latent nuclear deterrence – the use of a non-weaponized nuclear program to gain greater international influence. It provides new quantitative and qualitative evidence that latent nuclear deterrence can work. Being almost-nuclear leads to a reduction in international crises, better foreign policy relations with adversaries, a lower risk of their adversaries arming with nuclear weapons, and stronger defense commitments for U.S. allies. However, latent nuclear deterrence can be a risky strategy. Countries attempting it can also invite military conflict and arms races, especially if others believe that the latent power is racing to build a bomb.

The book has implications for big policy questions facing leaders in Washington and around the globe. What are the prospects for future nuclear proliferation? Will countries like Iran and South Korea seek nuclear weapons in the coming months and years? Would the world be safer and more peaceful without nuclear weapons? What would peace and stability look like in a world with many latent nuclear powers but no assembled weapons? The book provides answers, teaching us how nuclear latency can enrich our understanding of international politics.

Visit Matthew Fuhrmann's website.

The Page 99 Test: Atomic Assistance.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Chappel's "Golden Years"

James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. The author of Catholic Modern, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, and the New Republic.

Chappel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book is about the birth of “retirement communities” after World War II. It describes especially those neighborhoods that were known as ARCs, or “age-restricted communities.” These came into being for the first time in this era. It also describes other forms of congregate living for senior citizens that sprang up in the 1960s, including some sponsored by the federal government. Lastly, it describes some research, undertaken then and since, that indicates that age restriction of this sort has many benefits for older people.

This is a fun page, I think! It definitely brings the reader into the mind-set of the book as a whole. After all, the main questions of the book are: why did America decide that “older people” are a class apart, and how has that changed over time, and what have been the costs and benefits of such a decision? The book talks a great deal about social policy and popular culture—those are probably the two main throughlines of the book. But another thread concerns housing, which after all is one of the most important issues facing older people, and younger ones, today.

The issue of housing does not have a chapter of its own, but it crops up in every single chapter. Basically, the early parts of the book, about the early twentieth century, show how older people used to live, primarily, with family members. The middle parts of the book, from which page 99 are drawn, show how senior citizens participated in the vogue for independent, single-family homes after World War II. Now, they parritipated somewhat uncomfortably in this vogue, because an older couple without resident children is not really a “single family,” as the term is usually understood. Other forms of senior housing therefore developed, of which the ARCs and retirement communities were one. The last part of the book shows the crisis that has been wrought by that drive for independent housing, which creates crises in the care economy and also in the housing market. It describes new experiments in assisted living facilities, and the return of intergenerational living.

Learn more about Golden Years at the Basic Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ivan Gaskell's “Mindprints: Thoreau’s Material Worlds”

Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History at Bard Graduate Center, New York City. His research centers on three fields in philosophy: how humans make and use material items; questions arising from writing history from material items; and the role of museums in the generation of knowledge claims. Recent books are Paintings and the Past: Philosophy, History, Art (2019), and (as editor with Sarah Anne Carter), The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (2020).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mindprints: Thoreau’s Material Worlds, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book plunges the reader into a discussion of “Artistry.” The first paragraph concludes an account of the similarities and differences between Thoreau and his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson regarding the “useful arts.” Thoreau concurs with Emerson that craft skills can be beneficial but fears that “men have become the tools of their tools,” a demeaning state. He concludes that “The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.” In the paragraph that follows, the reader sees how Thoreau imagined what it might be for an artist to free himself through uncompromising devotion to the pursuit of artistic perfection. Thoreau consistently appealed not only to the classical tradition of Greek and Roman letters in which he had been educated, but — most unusually in mid-nineteenth-century America — to orally transmitted Native American knowledge, Chinese Confucian texts, and Hindu scripture. On page 99 the reader will find Thoreau’s presentation of a parable drawn from the Hindu Visnu Purāna. From page 99:

The object of the artist’s pursuit was a perfect wooden staff, and his concentration and determination were such that “time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him.” While the artist determinedly sought a suitable stick and eventually fashioned it, his city of Kouroo disappeared, its ruling dynasty died out, and the polestar—which … lasts a day of Brahma, or 4,320,000,000 years—was replaced by a new polestar. On completing the staff, in Thoreau’s words, “it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions.” Thoreau concludes the parable: “The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?” Thoreau’s tale of uncompromising artistic creation toward the end of his scriptural book, Walden, encapsulates an unrealizable ideal of artistry, but it is an artistry that takes a practical item, a wooden staff, as its means of world renewal

Page 99 of Mindprints advances the book’s overarching theme of tracing the role of aesthetics–notably everyday and environmental aesthetics–in Henry David Thoreau’s thought. Like nearly every other page in the book, it includes quotations from Thoreau’s writings: not only from Walden, but, most especially, from his extensive journals, one of the richest documents of observation and reflection in American letters. Appropriately enough, readers may conceive of this exercise–turning to page 99–as an act of divination akin to the Chinese I Ching process of random selection. Indeed, as I discuss later in Mindprints (page 143), the composer John Cage, an admirer of Thoreau, created Lecture on the Weather (1975) for “twelve speaker-vocalists (or -instrumentalists)” by–in Cage’s words–“subjecting Thoreau’s writings to I Ching chance operations to obtain collage texts.” The Page 99 Test works!

Learn more about Mindprints at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew H. Kramer's "Rights and Right-Holding"

Matthew H. Kramer is Professor of Legal & Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is the Director of the Cambridge Forum for Legal & Political Philosophy, and he has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2014. His work covers numerous areas of political, moral, and legal philosophy.

Kramer applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book, Rights and Right-Holding: A Philosophical Investigation, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my 2024 book Rights and Right-Holding is the opening page of the book’s third chapter. Given that the page tersely summarizes some of the main lines of thought from the preceding chapter while also outlining the chief aims of Chapter 3, a sciolist who wants to appear to be acquainted with the content of the book without actually reading it could do worse than to turn to page 99. Still, the book was not written for sciolists, and anyone who peruses page 99 in isolation might feel somewhat at sea. For example, such a person will encounter the phrase “disjunctive universal quantification.” If he or she is already familiar with the terminology of formal logic, then the phrase just mentioned will be understandable. Otherwise, however, that phrase may seem formidably opaque to anyone who has not taken the time to read Chapter 2 before moving on to the opening page of Chapter 3.

In five chapters that span 400 pages, Rights and Right-Holding presents a systematic philosophical exposition of the nature of rights and the nature of right-holding. Page 99 of the book occurs approximately halfway through the exposition of rights. For some readers, the issues addressed in the book that will be of greatest interest are those which pertain to the holding of claim-rights (and of other entitlements such as liberties, powers, and immunities). Such readers might, for example, be particularly interested in questions about the holding of claim-rights by non-human animals or by future generations of people or by dead people. Those issues, and numerous other matters pertaining to the holding of claim-rights or other entitlements, are nowhere in evidence on page 99. Thus, anyone who starts and finishes with page 99 will get a highly distortive and impoverished sense of why I have written Rights and Right-Holding.

Learn more about Rights and Right-Holding at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Light's "The White Ladder"

Daniel Light has been climbing for twenty years indoors and out. He lives in London, UK.

Light applied the "Page 99 Test" to The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering, his first book, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The White Ladder thrusts us, mid-sentence, into the precipitate retreat of William Woodman Graham, the first European alpinist to climb in High Asia.

Graham is soon licking his wounds back in Darjeeling, where he makes plans to return to the mountains, his mind set on one particular massif in the Garhwal Himalaya:

Nanda Devi, ‘the Bliss-Giving Goddess’, is a mountain steeped in Indian folklore, said to be the last refuge of a beautiful princess who dared to rebuff the advances of a Rohilla prince. The young man did not take rejection well and waged war against her father, the king, defeating him on the battlefield. With no alternative but to run and hide, the princess, Nanda, fled to the highest reaches of the mountain, retreating into the rock itself. Thus, she became the mountain, its Devi, or patron-goddess, and it her eternal sanctuary.

And what a sanctuary. The mountain ‘rises from the centre of two concentric amphitheatres, resembling two horseshoes placed one within the other and touching each other at the toe,’ wrote the English mountaineer Dr Tom Longstaff. ‘The outer amphitheatre, or horseshoe, measures seventy miles in circumference and from its crest rise a dozen peaks of over 20,000 feet, including Trisul and Dunagiri as well as Nanda Devi East.’

Graham arrived in the vicinity of Nanda Devi in July...

William Graham is a pivotal figure within the book, a sportsman who courted controversy by going to the Himalaya 'for no higher purpose' than to climb at a time when, where the British were concerned, the mountains were the preserve of scientists and surveyors.

At this critical moment, when he might easily have lost heart, we find him resolutely determined - one of few characteristics common to the cast of eccentrics who pioneered high-altitude mountaineering on the greater ranges of the world.

Page 99 features another of the book's unsung heroes - the mountain, Nanda Devi. Today the Western world fixates on Mount Everest, so much so that, for a few days each summer, queues form at the summit. Such is 'the pull of the absolute'. In The White Ladder, I have tried to shine a light on some of the other peaks and mountain massifs that shouldered the upward advance of mountaineering's world altitude record, and to tell stories of their own. With its mix of fable and the physical, page 99 attests to the challenge of conjuring dream-like scenes amidst a landscape that must remain clear and comprehensible.

Graham exits page 99 as abruptly as he arrived, as he and his guide and porter advance towards the mountain along 'the course of dramatic river-cut gorge, the Rishi Ganga'. So ends his tidy cameo, in a book that finds one pioneering figure after another testing themself against some of the highest mountains on Earth. Graham, one of the more human - and humanitarian - is a better representative than some of them deserve.

Visit Daniel Light's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren E. Oakes's "Treekeepers"

Lauren E. Oakes is a conservation scientist and science writer. She has held various appointments at Stanford University over many years, as a researcher, a lecturer, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science. Author of In Search of the Canary Tree, she lives in Bozeman, Montana.

Oakes applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Treekeepers: The Race for a Forested Future, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…data revealed that Aboriginal people were responsible for moving around Castanospermum australe, a flowering tree native to the eastern coast [of Australia]. After a careful treatment that removed toxins, the seeds of these “bean trees” could yield a ground meal for food. “Dreaming stories” of tracks were passed across generations to maintain knowledge of physical pathways that Aboriginal people had traversed. The researchers who discovered the species’ dispersal followed these physical pathways inland from the coast to the western ranges. The routes that had been shared through song and story revealed the intentional movement of trees along ridgelines to the various inland groves. Back then, people weren’t moving them to help the trees survive. They were moving those trees to grow them where they needed them most.

Strange as it seems, changing planting strategies because of climate change may be a modern-day extension of what people have been doing for quite some time.

It seems fitting to discover an historical example of people moving species around intentionally by page 99 of Treekeepers: The Race for a Forested Future. This excerpt might lead the reader to think the book is about the ways Indigenous communities have shaped and stewarded forests. Yet, the dispersal of bean trees along ancestral pathways serves as a brief example of how people have been transporting seed and planting species far from their original sources for millennia. As people now face hotter and drier climate conditions in many places across the world, planting trees ‘out front’ of climate change could help those trees endure future conditions.

In recent years, planting a tree has become a catchall way to ‘do something good for the planet.’ Despite the negativity and sense of doom-and-gloom surrounding climate change, outlets across the political spectrum have purported the same potential solution: planting trees. But to what extent can trees really save us, and how?

Treekeepers offers a critical look at how forests contribute to the fight against climate change, revealing the complex roles they can play in making the planet more habitable for life into the future. By page 99 of the story, it’s evident that a new movement to increase forest cover around the world is underway and that keeping trees is far more complicated than just planting them. But if you’re going to plant, considering what populations and species are more likely to cope with the future climate is one piece of the puzzle.

Our ‘treekeepers’ today include people caring for trees in remote forests and cities, in governments, organizations, companies and local communities. Without spoiling too much, the story leaves readers feeling like anyone can contribute, and there are also some ways we can collectively do this work better.

Visit Lauren E. Oakes's website.

The Page 99 Test: In Search of the Canary Tree.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gerald Roche's "The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet"

Gerald Roche is an anthropologist, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University, and a Co-Chair of the Global Coalition of Language Rights. His work focuses on power, the state, colonialism, and racism.

Roche applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my new book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, tells the story of Lhamo, a Tibetan woman born on the northeast Tibetan Plateau in 1993. Lhamo doesn’t actually exist. Her story is a fictional ethnographic composite, based on autobiographical interviews I did with dozens of people, designed to dramatize the profound changes that took place in the everyday life of the third generation of Tibetans to live under Chinese rule. Lhamo’s story describes her schooling, her struggle to find employment, her relationships with her family, and significant historical events and trends that formed the backdrop of her life.

Browsers opening The Politics of Language Oppression to page 99 would probably not get a very good overall idea about my book. Although Lhamo’s story deals with many of the key issues that the book explores, readers would miss most of the context they need to understand how her story encapsulates those issues. Three significant issues that appear on page 99, but which might not make much sense to readers, are the local ethnographic context, Chinese state policy towards Tibetan languages, and the Tibetan movement to resist those policies.

The local ethnographic context where Lhamo lives is the valley of Rebgong, on the northeast Tibetan Plateau, in what is today the province of Qinghai. Rebgong is predominantly Tibetan, and although Lhamo is Tibetan, her preferred language is not Tibetan, but a language called Manegacha. Manegacha is one of about 30 minority languages spoken today by Tibetans in China.

State policy completely ignores these languages, and we see this in Lhamo’s story. Lhamo studies in a school where Tibetan dominates, but she also has to learn China’s national language, Mandarin. She has no opportunities to pursue meaningful life opportunities through her own language.

Lhamo lives through moments of Tibetan resistance to such policies: the protests of 2008—the most widespread protests against Chinese rule in Tibet—2010 street demonstrations in Rebgong, and a series of self-immolation protests in 2012. However, all these protests focus only on a single, dominant Tibetan language, not minority languages like Manegacha. Lhamo’s story shows us that all she can expect from other Tibetans is discrimination in the form of taunts and jokes, rather than political support for her marginalized language.

So, although page 99 tells us a lot about Lhamo’s life, and about language oppression in Tibet more generally, readers could be forgiven for missing the significance of these details without some of the broader context.

Learn more about The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Ashcroft's "Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought"

Caroline Ashcroft is Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. She works in twentieth century political theory and history of political thought, particularly German and Anglo-American. She has previously published widely on Arendt’s political ideas, including Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt (2021).

Ashcroft applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes towards the beginning of the book's chapter on technologies of destruction; the way in which the political theorists that this book focusses on saw the technologies of modern war as embodying the essential destructiveness of contemporary technology itself. On page 99, I observe how the destructive capacity of modern warfare is linked by these thinkers to the inherently destructive tendencies of modern technology: "the ‘total’ character of modern technologies of war makes irrational the act of war itself; the scope of environmental degradation and catastrophe goes beyond anything earlier technologies might have been responsible for; and while wars have inevitably stoked and utilised the aggression of its soldiers, the extent of technology’s drive to aggression reaches into every corner of peacetime society." This is exemplified by the atom bomb, but even this is viewed as a somewhat inevitable development in the inexorable march of technological advancement.

Page 99 gets to the heart of Catastrophic Technology. The book analyses the critique of technology offered by a number of influential political theorists in the post WWII and Cold War era, including Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno, and their claims that technology is catastrophically reshaping contemporary politics and society, and opening humanity up to unacceptable risks. Many of the thinkers whose work I explore were Jewish exiles from Germany, one (Jacques Ellul) was a member of the French Resistance, many (Lewis Mumford, Hans Jonas) lost parents or children in the fighting or the death camps. In different ways, their lives were shattered and reshaped by the experience of German totalitarianism and total war. Their view of politics - and the influence of technology on politics - was through the lens of these experiences. They came to see, I argue, an inherent relationship between totalitarianism and modern technology as such; the increasing destructive power of technology, its inescapable progression, they argued, led with some inevitability to deeply pernicious political outcomes.

But the fact that these theorists associate technology itself with totalitarian politics also meant their understanding of totalitarianism, and its threat to the modern world, took on a particular political hue. In the Western world, during the early Cold War era, a self-understanding of liberal democratic freedom as something that stood in opposition to the threat of totalitarianism (then identified with the communist East) became a central component of Western political identity: the West stood for freedom, against totalitarianism. The critics of technology challenged this. Although they occupied diverse political positions, from left to right, they agreed - challenging the predominant ideological claims of the period - that liberal states also exhibited at least some of the totalitarian tendencies of technological modernity. What characterised modernity, in the East and the West, was its technological character, they claimed. Liberal political states should not be too self-congratulatory, they suggested, but rather must be aware of the dangers inherent in their increasingly technologized politics and society. One of the problems of liberal politics identified here was the failure of liberalism to identify this threat. Another was the emphasis by liberal ideology on 'progressive' politics and an enduring faith in progress itself - now, frequently identified with technological progress. Liberalism was thus structurally favourable to the continuing advancement of technology, with all its flaws, threats and risk to freedom.

Learn more about Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought at the Edinburgh University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shane Bobrycki's "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages"

Shane Bobrycki is assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, and reported the following:

The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages is about people holding onto something lost. It asks what happens to collective behavior — crowds, protests, riots, gatherings, assemblies — in an age of demographic decline (the ancient/medieval transition). Europe in the period c. 500–1000 CE was thinly populated, but deeply engaged with the more populous Roman past, in which crowds were a regular part of life. So the book is all about the ways early medieval Europeans did or didn’t hold onto crowds as they existed in the days of gladiators and circuses. Page 99 turns out to be pretty representative. It discusses churches as a venue for gatherings.

Churches were special spaces in early medieval Europe. Not only were they imbued with religious significance in a largely Christian world, they were bigger and more solidly built than most buildings (homes, work spaces, granaries, etc.). They had their own distinctive feel, light, smell, and look. Their interiors were divided up by means of columns, curtains, chancels, and other separating structures. So human bodies could be organized hierarchically in them: men here, women there; the poor here, elites there; lay people here, clerics there. Such divvied-up spaces fostered a sense of grandeur: in small spaces, fewer people feel more numerous.

Page 99 also gives the counter-example of churches in Rome. Once the greatest metropolis of the ancient world, Rome had shrunk from around 1,000,000 inhabitants (first or second century CE) to perhaps 500,000 inhabitants (fifth century CE) to only around 30,000 inhabitants for most of the period discussed by the book. Whereas the old entertainment facilities (Colosseum, Circus Maximus) tended to be cannibalized for parts or reused (as with the Colosseum) for housing, the huge churches of the fifth century retained their function. Here the effect was different: “Small crowds in huge spaces can experience effects no less profound than large crowds in small ones.”

So the Page 99 Test works pretty well. This page expresses an important argument of the book, which is that crowds did not disappear in the early medieval world, but did change in form and function. One reflection of this is that the crowd served the interests of the powerful more often than of the powerless. The church crowd is a quintessential example of this “early medieval crowd regime.” As for (rare) peasant rebellions and (frequent) non-elite refusals to participate in elite gatherings, you’d have to crack open different pages!

Learn more aboutThe Crowd in the Early Middle Ages at Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane E. Calvert's "Penman of the Founding"

Jane E. Calvert received her PhD in history from the University of Chicago. She has taught at St. Mary's College of Maryland, the University of Kentucky, and Yale University and is currently director and chief editor of the John Dickinson Writings Project. Her work, which has been supported by leading research institutions as well as federal agencies, focuses on the intersection of theology and political theory in the Colonial and Founding Eras. Her first book, Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson (2009), describes the origins of civil disobedience in Quakerism and provides the first explanation of Dickinson's thought and action during the Revolution.

Calvert applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Penman of the Founding, 26-year-old John Dickinson, a newly minted barrister, is nearing the end of his representation of William Smith, an Anglican minister, in his trial for libel against the Pennsylvania Assembly by the Pennsylvania Assembly. It’s a sham trial with a foreordained guilty verdict, but Dickinson persisted through interruptions, misrepresentations, censures, and threats against him by the assemblymen to speak truth to power and argue for liberty of the press. Here is a key quote:

“The Freedom of the Press is truly inestimable,” he effused. “It is the Preserver of every other Freedom & the Antidote to every kind of Slavery. By the Assistance of the Press, the Language of Liberty flies like Lightning thro the Land, and when the least attack is made upon her Rights, spreads the Alarm to all her Sons & raises and rouses a Whole people in her Cause.” His conclusion was this: “Freedom of the Press is so opposite & dreadful to the Usurpers of unjust Power & the Enemies of Mankind, that Liberty however maimd & wounded still breathes & struggles, while that prevails.”

The page ends with the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania stepping in to defend Dickinson against the Speaker of the Assembly (who, years later, would become his father-in-law).

Page 99 is a surprisingly good test for giving readers a sense of the book. It shows Dickinson putting into practice what he vowed to do when he was studying in London to become a barrister and what he tried to do his entire life as a lawyer, a statesman, and a private citizen—to “defend the innocent and the injured” and, if necessary, to become a martyr for the cause of justice. Dickinson went on to defend the lowliest of criminals who might not otherwise have had a champion, such as the mixed-race servant woman accused of killing her infant and concealing the body. He taught Americans how to defend their own rights against an oppressive British government, both with peaceful means and with military force. He served in more public offices than any other American Founder and wrote more documents to codify and protect rights. Liberty of the press was just the beginning. He wrote legislation to protect free Black people in what is now Delaware, and he was the only major leader to free all of the Black people he enslaved and write abolition legislation. He tried to protect Americans’ religious liberty, including women’s rights to worship freely and speak publicly. He founded schools for poor children to protect them from ignorance. He proposed the solution for representation in the US Constitutional Convention to protect small states from the large ones and the American union from disunion. He founded the first prison reform society to protect prisoners from inhumane conditions. And he did all of these things and more at sometimes great personal cost to himself, his health, and his family. Thus, page 99 shows the reader exactly the kind of selfless leader Dickinson always was.

Visit Jane E. Calvert's website and The John Dickinson Writings Project.

--Marshal Zeringue

Volha Charnysh's "Uprooted"

Volha Charnysh is a Ford Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Uprooted: How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Uprooted discusses associational life in West German communities that received Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe after WWII. Simply put, associational networks did not cross group boundaries. The locals found numerous ways to exclude expellees from their associations, including rules based on duration of residency, property ownership, and religious affiliation. For example, a local rifle association in Westphalia only accepted Catholics and stipulated that its chairman be a long-time resident. Page 99 illustrates the effect this had on the expellees:

Expellees dealt with exclusion not only by retreating into the private sphere but also by founding their own associations and interest groups […] A survey conducted in the early 1950s indicates that 20 percent of expellees participated in clubs alongside natives; 40 percent were active in expellee organizations; and the remaining 40 percent were entirely isolated (Wurzbacher 1954, 146).

Page 99 successfully conveys the first part of my book’s argument: rearranging ethnically homogeneous populations in space creates new cleavages based on migration status and region of origin. Germans who did not experience uprooting resented having to accommodate their expelled compatriots. They closed their ranks to defend access to jobs and housing. Expellees likewise stuck together, organizing around their shared experience of forced migration and economic hardship.

Unfortunately, readers who stop at page 99 would miss out on the book’s central message: Forced migration negatively impacts societal cohesion in the short term but ultimately creates opportunities to build stronger states and more prosperous economies. By engendering new societal divisions and eroding cooperation needed for public goods provision, the arrival of forced migrants also creates a window of opportunity for strengthening the state. Uprooted heterogeneous societies have more to gain from the state’s presence and are also less able to resist the expansion of state authority. As governments invest more resources into these communities, they build greater institutional capacity. This enhanced state capacity, combined with the skills migrants bring from their diverse places of origin, can improve economic performance in the long run.

My book draws on qualitative and quantitative evidence from Poland – whose borders were moved 200 km west in 1945, uprooting millions of Poles and Germans – and West Germany – which received German expellees from Poland and other countries. Within-country analysis maximizes internal validity, while cross-country comparisons support the generalizability of my conclusions.

I do hope page 99 inspires readers to delve deeper into Uprooted!

Visit Volha Charnysh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James M. Brophy's "Print Markets and Political Dissent"

James M. Brophy specializes in modern European history, particularly the social and political history of nineteenth-century Germany. He received his B.A. from Vassar College, did graduate training at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, and took his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He has written Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800-1850 (2007) and Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Prussia, 1830-1870 (1998). He has co-edited Vormärzliche Verleger zwischen Zensur, Buchmarkt und Lesepublikum (2023) as well as Perspectives from the Past: Sources in Western Civilization (1998; 7th ed., 2020). In addition, he published over three dozen essays on modern European history. He is the former president of the Central European History Society and currently sits on the board of editors for the Journal of Modern History.

Brophy applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Print Markets and Political Dissent in Central Europe: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800-1870, and reported the following:

Page 99 is indeed an instructive page for readers. To understand how forbidden political literature circulated in Germany and Austria, the book follows three hundred publishers who created print markets that advocated constitutionalism and rights-bearing citizenship. How publishers printed and sold banned literature between Napoleon and German unification was no easy matter. Censorship and surveillance were watchwords of the political order under Prussia and Austria. The underground book trade therefore depended on the trust of other booksellers and their commercial networks to evade state control and circulate illegal print matter. This page showcases one of the book trade’s leading political publishers: Heinrich Hoff. A committed democrat, he typifies his profession’s savvy to combine profit with political principles. The revenues from his balanced list of print matter – newspapers, novels, history, and scientific treaties – enabled him to speculate on illicit political pamphlets and books. Hoff deftly gamed the censorship system and brought banned print to market. His civic courage is noteworthy but so is his goal to extend democratic ideas to common readers. Using formats of popular and middlebrow literature (e.g., magazines, almanacs, calendars), he condensed and simplified issues of freedom and political representation for social groups not privy to elite political philosophy. Using an expanding publishing landscape and the clandestine exchange networks of bookdealers, Hoff and other publishers promoted political literacy for the dawning era of mass politics. Hoff’s end is poignant. During the Revolution of 1848, Baden’s government arrested and imprisoned him. Having fled to the US, he died in 1852 penniless in New York City. These citizens of print and their role in creating a democratic public sphere beckon our attention.

Learn more about Print Markets and Political Dissent in Central Europe at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eva Payne's "Empire of Purity"

Eva Payne is assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi. Her writing has appeared in publications, such as the Journal of Women’s History and Radical History Review.

Payne applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution, and reported the following:

A curious reader browsing Empire of Purity would be lucky to land on page ninety-nine! The page illustrates one of the book’s central arguments: US anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution efforts were a crucial means of extending US imperial power under the guise of protecting women. The page appears in the final section of chapter 3, which details the development of laws criminalizing “white slavery” in the early twentieth century. Anti-white slavery laws were paradoxical, designed both to protect “innocent” white American women from being kidnapped into prostitution, and to exclude and deport foreign prostitutes, whom officials painted as a danger to the nation. In addition to the domestic implementation of these laws, my book is interested in how they operated outside of the US mainland.

As the following passage demonstrates, US officials used white slavery laws to expand their authority in US territories like the Panama Canal Zone, as well as sovereign states like the Republic of Panama:

Preventing white slavery justified increasing US control over immigration to the Republic of Panama as well as the Canal Zone. The US government appointed an officer to work with US quarantine officials, as well as the Panamanian government, to forbid “undesirables” from entering the Republic, even though Panamanian officials licensed prostitution. Through his efforts, the officer reported, “a number of white-slave dealers and notorious prostitutes were thereby turned back and not permitted to debark and yet others were deterred from attempting to come into the Republic.” (99)

Through their war on white slavery, US officials on the isthmus of Panama took charge of crucial state functions, including policing immigration and prostitution.

In addition to presenting my argument about US empire, the page’s first sentences show how US officials used white slavery laws to police racial boundaries and maintain white supremacy. And the end of the page introduces evidence that despite US officials’ claims that they were rescuing victims of forced sex trafficking, many women migrated and sold sex because it was the best economic option available to them. What’s missing on the page, however, are the perspectives of women who sold sex, which are centered throughout the book. While the Page 99 Test doesn’t capture the full geographic scope of the book, which has chapters about Europe and Asia as well as the Americas, nor the extent of my source base, it gives the reader a surprisingly accurate sense of the book’s key interventions.

Visit Eva Payne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas R. Jones's "Cervantine Blackness"

Nicholas R. Jones is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He is the author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, and coeditor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production.

Jones applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Cervantine Blackness, and reported the following:

From page 99:

[…] palpitates and perspires an erotic life of desire. Things are done in secrecy—behind and within closed doors.

I have always been struck by the homosocial, queer bond between Loaysa and Luis. Critics have also noticed their intimate proximity. In Del teatro a la novela: El ritual del disfraz en las Novelas ejemplares de Cervantes, Eduardo Olid Guerrero highlights how Loaysa “attracts and seduces” Luis with his guitar and music. Alban K. Forcione also confirms similar interactions between the two in his 1982 classic Cervantes and the Humanist Vision. What strikes me as odd remains how and why scholars have acknowledged, on the one hand, yet have evaded, on the other hand, the explicit naming—calling out the social interaction and proximity for what it is—of the textual potential apparent in Loaysa’s and Luis’s interracial and same- gendered bond to each other throughout the novella. I cannot help but to explore the productive possibility of queering Luis in these terms, along the lines of the same-gender relations between white men and black men. Expanding on our understanding of how queerness ebbs and flows in El celoso extremeño, I gravitate toward Roland Betancourt’s important work on Byzantium, eunuchs, and institutionalized spaces, where homosocial, homoerotic, and same-gender intimacy had room to maneuver in certain cordoned-off, private, or homosocial spaces, even if they manifested differently than in our own time.

Quoting Eve Sedgwick’s classic definition of “queer,” Betancourt reiterates that queerness for Sedgwick moves as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excess of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” On queerness I privilege Robert Reid-Pharr’s framing of the term: “If there’s one thing that marks us as queer, a category that is somehow different, if not altogether distinct, from the heterosexual, then it is undoubtedly our relationships to the body, particularly the expansive ways in which we utilize and combine vaginas, penises, breasts, buttocks, hands, arms, feet, stomachs, mouths and tongues in our expressions of not only intimacy, love, and lust, but also and importantly shame, contempt, despair, and hate.” The diversity of textual material from El celoso extremeño that captures Luis’s and Loaysa’s connection and proximity to each other, through music, song, and dance, implore us to rethink Luis, through modes, spaces, and temporalities of queerness, in terms of vulnerability. Vincent Woodard in The Delectable Negro compels us to think about how “a master would often choose a ‘favorite’ male slave as the […].

On page 99 of Cervantine Blackness, readers will meet my closing remarks on book’s third meditation, “Rethinking Luis.” This meditation historicizes and unpacks the sociocultural range of blackness exhibited by the old, black eunuch Luis from the story El celoso extremeño (1613). To achieve this, I distill and make meaning out of the intersecting phenomena that BDSM and pornography, music, queerness, and sound harness in my study of blackness as a fecund space to think through the material consequences of Cervantes’s construction of Luis.

The Page 99 Test works beautifully and readers would get an excellent idea and sense of Cervantine Blackness. Uncannily, of the hundreds of pages in my book, page 99 is the very best single page to introduce browsers to the book’s core tenants. In short, the “test” absolutely serves as a good browser's shortcut to Cervantine Blackness, precisely because the book is deliberately irreverent, rambunctious, and wayward. Taking methodological cues from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Cervantine Blackness concerns itself with breaking open archival documentation—literary and otherwise—from Cervantes’s and his contemporaries’ worlds so that they might yield a richer picture of pre-Enlightenment Iberian black social life. Through vulnerability and risks, I prefer to think of Cervantine Blackness as a fugitive text, marked by the errantry with which it identifies and that it catalogs. In this spirit and in its queerness, I read against the grain and press at the limits of the historical and literary archives associated with Cervantes and those in his writerly orbit. Waywardness in this book speculates about what might have been. As a method, the wild ideas reverberating in this book reimagine blackness through Cervantes’s spirit of irony conveyed in writings—yet also his pulcritud, or neatly nuanced details—that simultaneously flicker before our eyes.

Learn more about Cervantine Blackness at the Penn State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amogh Sharma's "The Backstage of Democracy"

Amogh Dhar Sharma is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. He has previously worked as a Departmental Lecturer in Modern South Asia Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and as a Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at the Queen's College, Oxford. His research interests include comparative politics, political communication, and the political economy of development in South Asia.

Sharma applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Backstage of Democracy: India's Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The Computer and the ‘Computer Boys’

After Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October 1984, Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as the PM, and two months later the party achieved a landslide victory in the general election. Although as the PM, Rajiv Gandhi had less time to devote to managing intra-party affairs, nonetheless data collection and computer-based analysis continued to form the two legs of his plan of professionalising the party. Assisting him in the process was a growing team of advisors comprising technocrats, civil servants and business and media professionals. In his speech at the INC centenary celebrations in Bombay in 1985, Gandhi lashed out at ‘power brokers’ in the INC and promised to purge them to strengthen the party (R. Gandhi 1985). To operationalise this plan, he turned to Sam Pitroda to prepare a detailed vision document charting out the course of reform in the party (Nugent 1990, 64–66; Pitroda and Chanoff 2015, 147). Satyanarayan Gangaram ‘Sam’ Pitroda was an engineer and entrepreneur who had returned to India from the US in the early 1980s. Soon after, he was appointed as Gandhi’s advisor on the government’s ‘technology missions’ and played a major role in India’s telecom revolution. A close confidant of Gandhi till the end, Pitroda also played a crucial role in managing the INC election campaigns in 1989 and 1991 (Merchant 1991, 283; Nugent 1990, 66; Pradhan 1995). Gandhi’s reliance on technocrats like Pitroda, who had no formal associations with the INC, was indicative of his suspicions about the efficacy of most party bureaucrats and his tendency to bypass the party’s organisational machinery in the hopes of eventually reforming it.

Soon after being elected as the PM, Rajiv Gandhi introduced a programme for creating a computerised database of all members of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. In September 1985, a pro forma was circulated among all INC MPs asking them to provide details of their educational qualifications, tax history, language proficiency, marital status, number of children, countries visited by them, previous membership of political parties, history of association with the INC, public meetings and rallies addressed by them in their constituency, nature and duration of visits to their constituency and their participation in parliamentary proceedings. A similar technique of computerised data collection had previously been trialled among MPs and MLAs in Bihar. The purported aim of this exercise was to provide Gandhi with easily accessible information about all INC MPs ‘at the push of a button’, in the hope that ‘[t]his [would] help remove groupism and prejudiced selection[s]’ in the formation of parliamentary select committees. In other words, the INC computer was to act both as a virtual panopticon that could…

It appears that the Page 99 Test only partially works for The Backstage of Democracy. While the excerpt certainly reflects some of the key themes that run through the book, it doesn’t manage to capture the central focus – namely, election campaigns! From the excerpt above, the reader may rightly surmise that the book focuses on the interface between technology and politics in modern India, particular the tendency of technological fetishism (for example, centered on computers, as in the case of the passage that has been quoted) and the role and power that technocratic elites enjoy in political decision making. However, it may give the reader the faulty impression that the book is more historical in its orientation than it actually is. The primary focus of the book is to explore the changes that have taken place in India’s election campaigns over the last decade. The roots of these changes can certainly be traced to the 1980s and the section above is part of the book where I flesh out this contextual overview.

Nevertheless, I am quite glad that the Page 99 Test threw up this section. Writing this section of the book was notoriously difficult because of a lack of adequate archival material and because key interlocutors were not available to be interviewed. But in the end, this was also the part of my research that was the most analytically rewarding and enjoyable. At times, it felt like almost a detective story – piecing together the most disparate clues on how India’s political elites in the 1980s had started using computer technology and large-scale data gathering to rethink how electoral strategizing and intra-party politics could be managed. For readers interested in the longer story, the book awaits…

Learn more about The Backstage of Democracy at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Merten Reglitz's "Free Internet Access as a Human Right"

Merten Reglitz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Free Internet Access as a Human Right, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book does two things. It first concludes and summarises the argument of chapter 4. This argument is that internet access should be recognised as a human right because having such access has become necessary for having sufficient or adequate opportunities to exercise our political human rights (e.g. free speech, free information, free assembly) today. Secondly, page 99 introduces a crucial objection to this argument, namely that we don’t need a new, stand-alone human right to internet access because such access is already protected by our existing human rights such as our right to free speech. Beyond page 99, the chapter goes on to discuss and to defuse this objection.

Page 99 gives you a good idea of what the book is like because it summarises one of its central arguments. Moreover, the consideration of an objection is central for building and defending philosophical arguments. So page 99 contains some of the essential elements of a philosophical work, which this book is. At the same time, page 99 is not representative of the book. This is because it doesn’t contain any examples of how the internet is used by people, governments, and companies. It also doesn’t contain any explanation of how these uses of the internet matter morally, and for our human rights. These examples and their normative analysis make up much of the book.

This combination of philosophical argumentation with normative analysis of examples of internet use is a crucial contribution that the book makes to the existing literature. Philosophers and other researchers have discussed individual aspects of the internet. They have investigated e.g. what the internet has done to people’s understanding of knowledge, how it has enabled more powerful ways of expressing ourselves, what new ways of misinformation it unfortunately also makes possible, or how it has transformed how we spend our time and interact with each other. What the book does with these considerations (and many other examples) is to make the case for a new universal entitlement that would guarantee a minimum internet connection for everyone and which, importantly, will require public institutions to ensure a certain quality of internet access for people. This should be such that the internet can be used as an empowering medium, rather than one that is used to maximise profits, monitor populations and oppress political opponents, or to misinform and manipulate. The book’s main conclusion is that public institutions ought to adopt a new human right to free internet access as a foundation of a vision of the internet that, as the UN hopes, will contribute to “the progress of mankind as a whole.”

Learn more about Free Internet Access as a Human Right at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Munson's "Ingenious"

Richard Munson is an author and clean-energy advocate. His books include Tech to Table: 25 Innovators Reimagining Food, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern, From Edison to Enron, Cardinals of Capitol Hill, and Cousteau: The Captain and His World.

Munson applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ingenious describes Benjamin Franklin’s efforts after the French and Indian War to advance a union between England and the American colonies. It states:

As the war wound down, Franklin weighed in on the peace negotiations to suggest that England assume control over Canada rather than Guadeloupe, arguing that the British Empire needed to secure North America’s northern and western frontiers. He asserted that settlements in the Mississippi valley and Quebec would offer substantial benefits to the mother country, providing an immense outlet for British industry.

The Page 99 Test doesn’t work that well because by page 99 (of 197) Franklin is still loyal to the British king, even suggesting Americans would not “unite against their own nation [England], which protects and encourages them.” That page also does not address Franklin’s science, which this biography asserts is the throughline that integrated Benjamin’s diverse interests.

I argue that historians have highlighted certain of Franklin’s actions – particularly diplomacy – and ignored others – particularly science. One of the most cited biographies devotes only 30 of its 500 pages to Benjamin’s experiments and observations, and an encyclopedia maintains that “Franklin never thought science was as important as public service.”

I disagree. With all due respect to Franklin’s public service, we wouldn’t be discussing his diplomatic prowess were it not for his fame as a leading scientist, which opened doors for him in France, Britian, and the colonies.

Franklin gave us practical advances – including lightning rods, efficient stoves, and bifocals – as well as innovative research on electricity, heat, chemical bonds, weather patterns, and so much more.

Benjamin also used his science politically. Believing Americans would be recognized by European elites only if they could demonstrate technological and scientific strength, he created a scholarly association dubbed the American Philosophical Society, which was one of the first efforts to have representatives from all the then fiercely independent colonies work together.

Ingenious argues we don’t know Franklin as well as we believe nor as richly as he deserves. It concludes by suggesting Benjamin’s continued relevance:

"As a vocal set of modern-day activists reject science and dismiss fact, Benjamin (one of our nation’s founders) highlights the importance of verifiable analysis. As zealots impose their religious beliefs, he makes the case for tolerance. As censors ban books and limit debate, he defends printers and free speech."

Visit Richard Munson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue