Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski's "The Price of Empire"

Miles M. Evers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. Eric Grynaviski is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire and reported the following:

Opening The Price of Empire to page 99 gives the reader an excellent summary of the book. We were surprised. Our central argument is that American entrepreneurs were responsible for early American imperialism in the Pacific. This page is at a turning point in the book and captures this argument well.

Page 99 briefly summarizes the previous chapters about how the search for guano and copra led to imperial projects. The page then compares these to American imperialism in Hawaii. It begins by discussing the conventional wisdom of U.S. annexation of Hawaii, which is often credited to American strategic and trade interests. We describe this position (which we disagree with): “Pearl Harbor, since the 1940s, has been central to the U.S. Navy’s strategies for defending the American west coast. It is also economically important as a harbor and, of course, later became a destination for American tourists. Theories that emphasize strategic or trade interests should therefore be well-placed to discuss Hawaii.”

It then turns to a summary of our argument about Hawaii: “Rising sugar prices led Americans to invest in the Hawaiian Islands. These entrepreneurs entered the economic and political life of the islands with vim and vigor, reshaping the domestic political environment of Hawaii to suit their interests. When threats arose – primarily tariffs and falling prices – they turned from entrepreneurs into lobbyists, using their positional advantages to secure favorable trade terms that initiated a pattern of imperialism in Hawaii decades before annexation.”

There are two aspects of the argument not well represented. The first is the idea of “positional advantages.” A significant part of the book explains why the U.S. government turned to entrepreneurs in crafting policies concerning overseas expansion, where we argue that their position in-between societies created special opportunities for political lobbying. The second is the long legacy of entrepreneurs with respect to indigenous rights. The introduction and conclusion highlight the long legs of imperialism and why they continue to persist today.

In sum, we give ourselves a passing grade on the Page 99 Test. Most of the argument is present, along with a summary of the historical chapters of the book, but the discussion about why it matters for contemporary readers – the nexus between economics and security, and its racist legacy – is missing.

Visit Miles M. Evers's website and Eric Grynaviski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness's "The Influencer Factory"

Grant Bollmer is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, and Katherine Guinness is Lecturer in Art History, at the University of Queensland.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Influencer Factory we see a screenshot from MrBeast’s popular video “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!” We describe how this video cost more, minute-to-minute, than the actual Netflix show it recreates. MrBeast’s videos, and their ever-increasing scale and cost, we argue, “almost seem to enact a contemporary form of potlatch,” a competitive system of giving and waste described by the Anthropologist Marcel Mauss. Potlatch, for Mauss, was a kind of mutual squandering of resources between equals. What differentiates MrBeast’s spectacular giving is that he mostly seems to be competing with himself. MrBeast’s stunts grow larger and larger while the cash squandered must perpetually increase—pressure that comes from his need to attract and maintain his massive global audience.

Page 99 gives the reader a good sense of The Influencer Factory as a whole. The theme of waste and excess is central to many of our arguments about the “elite” influencers we discuss in the book—not only MrBeast, who is mentioned throughout, but people like Jeffree Star and Emma Chamberlain, both of whom regularly engage in feats of wasteful spending and other excessive stunts. This page also provides a good sense of the approach we take in our book. We look closely at the content of specific videos made by these influencers, branching out into an analysis of their backgrounds, their production, their broader historical and conceptual contexts. In doing so, The Influencer Factory reframes how we understand YouTube, capital, and the class politics of influencer culture. The specific image on page 99 is captioned “I could remake this.” This is also a theme that follows many of the other image captions in the book, many of which also begin “I could,” examining some of the aspirational forms of wastage that can be seen in many influencer videos. Waste gets attention, and foregrounding waste reveals a different way of understanding luxury and excess, in which the literal production of trash can be understood as a performance of class mobility.

MrBeast’s excessive spending, we argue elsewhere in The Influencer Factory, points towards a context in which individual human beings and vertically integrated conglomerations converge. Each MrBeast video is also an advertisement for some other industry into which MrBeast has some ownership stake—chocolate bars, apps, a burger chain. The individual person that is MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is indistinguishable from the corporate enterprise that is MrBeast. We term this moment the Corpocene, a moment in which individual body and corporate body converge, in which individuals like MrBeast become images of “success” to be emulated by countless others who are seeking to make it as an influencer or content creator. Influencer culture, we ultimately conclude, represents a point in time in which one desires to become capital personified—a kind of individual represented by MrBeast—and how class mobility on YouTube should be understood as motivated by a desire to literally become capital, to transform oneself into a vertically integrated corporation.

Visit Grant Bollmer's website and Katherine Guinness's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua O. Reno's "Home Signs"

Joshua O. Reno is professor and graduate director of anthropology at Binghamton University. He is the author of several books, including Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness and, with Britt Halvorson, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest.

Reno applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Home Signs: An Ethnography of Life beyond and beside Language and reported the following:

My latest book is about the subtle ways that we all communicate with those closest to us using facial expressions, gestures, bodily movement and contact, that is, without words. The passage that concerns me here is from the third chapter, which is the only one in the book that appeared previously, twelve years ago in fact, as a standalone article.

Like that article and like all the other chapters of this book, page 99 focuses a lot on my non-verbal son, Charlie. Charlie was diagnosed on the autism spectrum years ago and non-verbal communication is all that he has, so he offers a useful case study of how much we can do without language. Nearly one hundred pages in, and I am explaining how attempts to get him to use language have failed over the years (twelve years ago and in the present day). I describe one method in particular, known as PECS, which is a method specifically designed by speech and language therapists to get people like him to learn to exchange words (in the form of symbols) for things they want. But from another point of view this is not just an example about how incapable Charlie is of using words. Rather, it shows how well he can assert and express himself:

Sometimes Charlie would push the PECS folder away, a home sign for “I don’t want to do this now.” Sometimes he would decide not to eat at all when he would see it near his food, a sign that he was defying the exercise even if it meant starving himself for that moment. But Charlie’s most common way of defying the exercise, then and now, is to look away while grabbing symbols or tapping icons on a screen. If he did this over and over again, even if I moved the symbols around, eventually he’d get food out of it.... From our perspective, he was too good even then at home signing, at expressing his intentions and modifying interactions without symbols, to the extent that he could work around them if need be.

In that sense, at least, on page 99 readers will encounter something that they have witnessed already for several chapters -- a purportedly “disabled” communicator capably controlling situations and making his intentions known to those around him. Charlie may not do what his teachers and parents want, may refuse to communicate in socially prescribed ways, but in so doing he shows us all that he is neither hapless nor helpless simply because he lives now, and likely will live for his whole life, beyond and beside language.

Learn more about Home Signs at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Waste Away.

The Page 99 Test: Military Waste.

--Marshal Zeringue

Núria Silleras-Fernández's "The Politics of Emotion"

Núria Silleras-Fernández is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and affiliated faculty in the Humanities Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her research focuses on cultural and intellectual history, gender, and literature in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia and the Mediterranean. She is the author of Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship. Maria de Luna (2008) and Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2015).

Silleras-Fernandez applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Politics of Emotion. Love,Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2024) and reported the following:

This excerpt refers to Isabel of Portugal (r. 1447–1454), one of the case studies I analyze in detail in The Politics of Emotion. It represents the book such that it explores how medieval society understood the dangers of love and desire, which, are explored in my book in conjunction with grief (which at times, turned to “madness”) and are intertwined with the public and the private: government and emotions. Excerpt from page 99:

In fact, we can see Isabel of Portugal and Álvaro de Luna as they are presented in the chronicles as two sides of the same coin. Accounts hostile to the queen accused her of being an object of excessive desire on the part of Juan and lamented her ability to “manipulate” her weak husband. For his part, Álvaro de Luna is presented in exactly the same terms, which were even more worrisome in his case because of the moral implications that same-sex love carried in that era. The accusation of sodomy became a powerful tool to discredit someone and could be deployed for political gain.

Isabel was the queen-consort of Juan II of Castile, and both were the parents of one of the most famous queens of all times, Isabel I of Castile “The Catholic” (r. 1474–1504). The chronicles portrayed Juan II as a weak hedonist, easily manipulated, and always at the mercy of others: first, his royal favorite, friend (and lover?) Álvaro de Luna who was later displaced by the king’s young second wife, Isabel of Portugal. In the Middle Ages, whoever controlled the king (or queen) held great indirect power and thus awakened the envy and criticism of those who coveted this position of influence. Hence, mirrors of princes and princesses were consistent in admonishing the ruler against malicious counselors and conduct literature (which was often misogynistic) warned against the domination a wife could exercise over her husband – particularly a wife like Isabel who not only enjoyed the status of a queen but was the object of the king’s love and lust. Poetry, sentimental fiction, and medical and religious discourse all made the dangers of love clear.

In the end, politics and “social property” ruined this peculiar triangle. Juan II loved his crown more than Álvaro and, to avoid further turmoil, was obliged to condemn him to death in 1453, accused of treason. Within a year the monarch had also died, because as Gonzalo Chacón, a contemporary chronicler, put it, “the burrowing worm of his conscience was what killed him.” For her part, Isabel of Portugal is said to have been overwhelmed by grief after the death of her husband and lived in relative isolation for her remaining forty-two years. Thus, Isabel and Álvaro are two sides of the same coin and comprise an excellent example of the emotional dynamics examined in my study.

Learn more about The Politics of Emotion at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sten Rynning's "NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance"

Sten Rynning has researched and written on NATO for twenty-five years. He is a professor and director of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, University of Southern Denmark, and the author of NATO in Afghanistan and NATO Renewed.

Rynning applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works moderately well for NATO. It captures a key event in the history of the alliance still of great relevance today. But it comes out of a discussion of the fine grains of 1960s alliance politics that for the browser of the book may come across as a bit of ‘inside baseball.’

The fine grains are important, though, because for the reader of the book—as opposed to the browser—they tell the story of why the political seams of the alliance were coming undone. The allies lacked trust, and they were pursuing incompatible national approaches to East-West relations. France had decided to kick NATO headquarters off its territory, and NATO was in addition approaching its twentieth anniversary (in 1969), which by its treaty allowed individual allies to leave the alliance at a one-year notice. Might France be tempted to leave? Might West Germany leave to pursue German unification? The one sure thing was the Soviet desire to stoke trouble.

Into all this—and on page 99 of the book—stepped Pierre Harmel, Belgium’s foreign minister, and undertook a study of NATO’s “future tasks.” This proved a crucial moment for the alliance. Pierre Harmel succeeded in establishing principles that brought allies together and which resonate to this day—that NATO must be able to do both collective defense and East-West diplomacy, and, critically, that defense must come first.

“Defense first” was NATO’s Cold War recipe for countering the threat of political fragmentation. NATO leaders have since invoked this recipe multiple times, also in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. However, NATO allies diverge in their level of support to Ukraine and in their willingness to stand up to Russia. In essence, allies disagree on what “defense first” today means. Page 99 of NATO will help the browser—and especially the reader—understand why this present-day rerun of the Harmel debate is so momentous for the alliance.

Learn more about NATO at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: NATO in Afghanistan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum's "Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists"

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is an award-winning author whose research explores how individuals navigated the traumas of the twentieth century. Her books include Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (2000); The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995 (2006); and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War (2015).

Kirschenbaum applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip, and reported the following:

If you opened Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists to page 99, you would find the first page of the chapter on what I call “complex hybrids.” In 1935, these “hybrids,” mostly Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire, helped the Soviet satirists Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov pull off an epic 10,000-mile road trip across America. The chapter begins with the observation that the writers’ “dream of seeing and understanding America faced two daunting obstacles: Neither spoke much English and neither knew how to drive.” To overcome these difficulties, they relied on “immigrants from the Russian empire to show them around.” However, the authors omitted most of these mediators from their published travelogue, One-Story America (Odnoetazhnaia Amerika). Page 99 emphasizes that the chapter recovers the stories of the individuals who facilitated Ilf and Petrov’s discovery of America and “reveals a central and incompletely suppressed paradox of their quest: their impressions of ‘real’ America came filtered through the eyes and mouths of outsiders or immigrants.”

The Page 99 Test works well to give readers a sense of the book’s methods and arguments. My interest in retracing Ilf and Petrov’s road trip grew out of a desire to locate the people who worked to construct friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Page 99 introduces a critical, but publicly unacknowledged subset of these individuals – immigrants from the Russian empire, who served as the writers’ guides and translators. Citing Ilf’s notebook, page 99 suggests that clues in the pair’s unpublished writing allowed me to track down many of their contacts. The page also hints at the importance of highways in Ilf and Petrov’s account of America; their early adventures convinced them that to really understand the country, they had to travel by car, not train.

Focused on Ilf and Petrov’s omissions, page 99 sheds little light on how I learned the stories of the pair’s American interlocutors. In the case of the complex hybrids, I relied on personal papers and FBI files. The most challenging problem I faced was finding the more ordinary people with whom Ilf and Petrov interacted. In these cases, I had to generate creative sourcing solutions such as the remarkable series of life history interviews collected in 1935-1936 as part of a survey of San Francisco’s foreign-born population.

Finally, this single page may give readers the mistaken impression that I retraced Ilf and Petrov’s journey primarily as a means of judging their accuracy. While page 99 highlights the writers’ dependence on immigrants, it has little to say about why immigrants wanted to help. Nor does it address the book’s larger goal of understanding the process of cross-cultural understanding and misunderstanding. By reading Ilf and Petrov’s notes and narratives against the American sources, the book aims to illuminate the shared concerns as well as the preconceptions and misconceptions that guided and sometimes limited efforts to bridge cultural, linguistic, and political divides.

Learn more about Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Alff's "The Northeast Corridor"

David Alff is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo, where he researches the eighteenth-century Anglophone world.

Alff applied the Page 99 Test to his new book The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region, and reported the following:

My book is a cultural history of the northeast corridor: both the railroad that runs between Boston and Washington, and the seaboard metropolitan region it helped build. This history begins several hundred million years ago, in the Ordovician period, when the microcontinent of Avalonia smashed against proto North America. It ends on New Year’s morning 2021 when Moynihan Train Hall first opened to the public.

Page 99 picks up at a crucial moment in the corridor’s development. It describes Thomas Edison’s construction of an experimental electrical railway in what is today Metropark, New Jersey. I show how Edison’s track drew direct current from his laboratory’s steam generators, and how tourists flocked to Menlo Park for the chance to snag a ride on one of his trains. One journalist recounted how the silent train “shot off like a bullet,” in sharp contrast to the slow percussive build of steam locomotives.

Of my book’s two-hundred-and-eighty-odd pages, 99 is a great place to land. It features one of many passages that describe technological change through story. Drawing on archival research and secondary reading, I try to immerse readers in the details of the past: the crackle of current coursing through iron rails; Edison’s comical indifference to his railway’s frequent wrecks; and the incongruity of the fact that the line terminated beside what is now the fifteenth hole of the Metuchen Golf and Country Club. Such minutiae, I hope, can help us share the wonder that a nation of train passengers felt at dawn of electric railroading.

Beyond my own narrative strategies, page 99 happens to depict a momentous turning point in the history of transportation engineering, as people realized that steam traction was bumping up against physical limits, and faster trains would require remote power generation. Though Edison’s railway was long ago abandoned, reclaimed by forest, and finally buried under suburban tract housing, the technology it tested continues to propel the world’s rapid transit systems and all high-speed passenger trains. The northeast corridor is the busiest and fast inter-city passenger line in North America because its trains receive current from overhead wires (instead of generating it themselves from igniting diesel fuel).

While no single historical anecdote could encompass an infrastructure as wide-ranging and diversely-experienced as the northeast corridor, page 99 offers an unusually representative glimpse into innovations that made the rail line and region what they are today.

Learn more about The Northeast Corridor at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane Webster's "Materializing the Middle Passage"

Jane Webster is Senior Lecturer in Historical Archaeology at the University of Newcastle (UK).

She applied the Page 99 Test to her book Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping 1680-1807, and reported the following:

Page 99 comprises endnotes from Chapter 3 (‘Voices from the Sea: Documentary Narratives of Middle Passage Voyages’). This is unsurprising, indeed characteristic—this is a lengthy book, with more than 1500 notes supporting its 12 Chapters—but is not, for present purposes, illuminating. So, I have turned back to page 90, the last full page of Chapter 3. This contains an extract from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789): one of very few accounts of the voyage on a slave ship written by an African (though see below), and by far the longest. In fact, I make little use of this famous narrative between Chapters 3 and 11, but the reasons for that are a central discussion point in Chapter 12 (‘The Middle Passage Re-Membered: A Conclusion in Three Objects’), where one of the three objects in question is Equiano’s book. By the time readers reach Chapter 12 they have become very familiar with accounts of eighteenth-century slave ships made by British sailors who had crewed them, and who were questioned in Parliament about their experiences (1788-1792). Crew narratives are at the heart of my book: I draw on them repeatedly in exploring the design of British slave ships (Chapter 5), African understandings of these vessels (Chapter 6), the trade goods they carried (Chapter 7), the African goods they transported home to Britain (Chapter 8), and the Middle Passage as experienced by both captives and crews (Chapters 9-11). Equiano’s account appears rarely in these chapters; not because of a fractious, ongoing scholarly debate concerning his birthplace, and questioning whether his account is a fiction, but because virtually everything he had to say about the Middle Passage had been said before, by someone else. As I argue in Chapter 12, I do consider that Equiano’s account is a fiction; but I make that argument whilst asking why so few detailed African accounts of the voyage into slavery exist. My conclusion is that those Africans who endured the slave ship did not want to remember it; or not, at least, in writing. Their Middle Passage was with them forever but, caught somewhere between the imperative to recall and the need to forget, it was remembered in ways that challenge scholarship today.

Learn more about Materializing the Middle Passage at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Bernstein's "Freeman’s Challenge"

Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights.

Bernstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, and reported the following:

The 99th page of the book is the first page of Chapter Five, the chapter that narrates the murder at the heart of Freeman’s Challenge. The murder is the challenge, because it threatens the Auburn State Prison, America’s original profit-driven prison. The chapter is called “Work” because that’s the word William Freeman later used to describe the murder. He had been forced to labor in factories inside the Auburn State Prison, and now his “work” of murder would turn the prison inside-out. The 99th page—and the chapter—opens with the full moon rising on a snowy March evening in 1846. Freeman hides his weapons in the folds of his clothes and starts walking south. He walks almost five miles from his home in Auburn toward the neighboring town of Fleming, where his “work” will begin.

This page gives you a great idea of the whole book! Freeman’s Challenge is a work of history, and every word is based on historical sources—but I wanted the book to read like a novel. I wanted to write the kind of book someone would read in one sitting because they couldn’t put it down (and the book is short, so that’s possible!). To manage that balance, I did massive research to recover William Freeman’s experience. The road from Auburn to Fleming is a great example: historical sources told me what that road was like. I knew the road was narrow and slick with mud and slush; I knew that a nearby lake pulsed against the shore. I knew that owls and wolves lived in the woods alongside the road. These truths enabled me to reconstruct Freeman’s experience.

William Freeman’s voice is very important to the book—and to this page. Freeman never wrote or dictated his own story, but people who knew him reported his words. I wove these quotes into Freeman’s Challenge for two reasons: to do justice to Freeman and to make the book enjoyable for the reader. You can hear Freeman’s distinctive voice on this page: as he’s deciding to start out toward Fleming, he regards the sky. “Just at dark,” he calls it, “edge of evening.” I love how William Freeman used language, and his eloquence shines on this page.

This page is also representative of the book because it describes the everyday racism that affected Freeman and every other Black person in New York State (and beyond). As Freeman walks southward, a white man in a cutter—a small sleigh— comes up behind him on the same road. As the man passes Freeman, he looks suspiciously at him. The truth is that Freeman did plan to commit a crime, but the white man had no access to that information. The white man was suspicious simply because a Black man was walking at night—“walking while Black,” we might call it now.

Learn more about Freeman’s Challenge at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian M. Ingrassia's "Speed Capital"

Brian M. Ingrassia is an associate professor of history at West Texas A&M University and the author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a typical page of Speed Capital, but not necessarily an exceptional one. It discusses the 300-mile sweepstakes race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1916. That was the only time, from May 1911 to the present, when the big race was shorter than 500 miles. (It was not held 1917-1918 or 1942-1945.) That page also discusses how Indianapolis became a place for testing automotive technologies, including some that never materialized: in this case, a fuel substitute called "Zoline," which was really a con-man's clever scheme!

Page 99 imparts the book's flavor, but not the full range of courses. Speed Capital uses the story of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's early years to illustrate connections between modern transportation technologies, popular culture, capitalism, and geography. The title is a double entendre: Indianapolis was the capital of speed, but its history conveys how people devised rituals to facilitate and exhibit the speedy movement of capital. The book starts with the idea of "space annihilation": automotive speedways utilized and popularized technologies that elided the tyranny of space and time. Early on, Indianapolis's speedway was a place for both automobility and aviation. But after World War I it narrowed, becoming a place mainly for motor sport. The track also became a site for traditions and nostalgia—for looking back with fondness to earlier eras of technological transformation and popular spectacle. The speedway and its museum, which opened in the 1950s, soon became a site for a different kind of space annihilation: eliminating distance between present and past.

Page 99 briefly mentions Carl Graham Fisher, the primary founder of the speedway. Fisher is a significant yet somewhat overlooked figure in American history, and his life story is a narrative thread running through Speed Capital. Other pages more successfully invoke Fisher and Indianapolis's connections to farther-off places, including Chicago, Detroit, Miami, and New York. Many people traveled from these and other places—from all over the nation and the world—to see the famous races. The book also discusses how Fisher spearheaded important transcontinental routes, namely the Lincoln and Dixie Highways, and even famously transformed a South Florida sandbar into the popular resort town of Miami Beach. Basically, I argue, Fisher taught Americans how to enjoy cars as well as how to use them to consume geographical space.

Learn more about Speed Capital at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosamund Johnston's "Red Tape"

Rosamund Johnston is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969, and reported the following:

Readers who open at page 99 of this book will be met with two young journalists, Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund, who became radio celebrities in postwar Czechoslovakia. This page explores the reasons for their fame, suggesting that it hinged upon their youth, desirability, and ultimately their appeal to socialist politicians and listeners both.

I am delighted that these two are foregrounded by the Page 99 Test: they were in fact the first journalists I wrote about for this book and, as such, set the framework for the rest of Red Tape. They helped me answer the question I posed throughout which was: why might people genuinely like and look forward to censored and propaganda-tinged socialist radio? And they form part of the answer, which I found to be on account of the relationships that listeners fostered with reporters such as Hanzelka and Zikmund through the medium of radio (hearing their voices at a regular time several times a week, writing to them with feedback about their work, and then finding their letters in some ways incorporated into the fabric of the pair’s reports). Hanzelka and Zikmund were broadcasting during Stalinism, and their example shows the responsiveness of radio to listeners’ concerns at that time. They also show that there was more to Stalinist radio than the murderous show-trials (which I write about in other chapters, but which I am delighted are not front and center here).

I was not always able to take a biographical approach to the history of radio in socialist Czechoslovakia—sometimes it made more sense to think about technologies (such as the tape in the title, for example) and how these served to reconfigure listeners’ expectations of the medium. But I always felt the most at home being led through the period by reporters such as Hanzelka and Zikmund and the fan-mail that was addressed to them. In this sense, this page represents some of my favorite lines of inquiry and sources used in this book. Here, I am specifically writing about the generation to which Hanzelka and Zikmund belonged, which, I argue throughout, shaped postwar radio and the rhetorical environment of socialism’s first two decades in Czechoslovakia. When they and their peers (all by now middle-aged) were pushed out of Czechoslovak Radio in the wake of the Soviet-led invasion in 1968—events captured in the final chapter of this book—then, I argue, radio finally ceded its “dominance” to television.

Visit Rosamund Johnston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David W. Congdon's "Who Is a True Christian?"

David W. Congdon is a Senior Editor at the University Press of Kansas, where he acquires new titles in political science, and an Instructor at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. His books include The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann's Dialectical Theology (2015, which won the Rudolf Bultmann Prize in Hermeneutics from the Philipps University of Marburg), and he is the editor of Varieties of Christian Universalism: Exploring Four Views (2023).

Congdon applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Who Is a True Christian?: Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture, and reported the following:

Here is what I found on page 99 of my book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture:

Newman provides seven tests to determine whether a development is the continuation or the corruption of the idea of Christianity, and the rest of the book applies these tests to particular points of doctrinal controversy. But as David Bentley Hart acknowledges, “these criteria amount to little more than a transparently forced ideological reconstruction of the historical narrative,” requiring both “willful narrative creativity” and “selective ignorance regarding those historical data that the preferred narrative cannot assimilate.” Reducing the complexity of history to the adaptability of an idea made it all too easy for Newman to reconstruct an account of Christian history that supported his argument, and any reconstruction under these presuppositions is “self-evidently specious,” an exercise in “saving the appearances.” Newman’s Essay is a stunning work of historical eisegesis, a retrospective reading of the past that already knows where history leads – namely, to his own position. His failure is thus an instructive one, serving as a cautionary tale for all those people, whether church leaders or Supreme Court justices, who wish to use history to prove the rightness of their beliefs.

To my surprise, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Who Is a True Christian? This page is my analysis of John Henry Newman’s effort to establish historical continuity between the origins of Christianity and Roman Catholic orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. Newman was a prominent figure at the time, but he has become especially important in the last several decades, not only as an inspiration for many converts to Rome but also as an intellectual lodestar for Protestants seeking to prove their fidelity to the ancient rule of faith (regula fidei).

The problem, as I show (with some help from David Bentley Hart), is that Newman’s reconstruction of this history is a convenient just-so story that all too easily leads directly to his own position, as if his account of Christianity were foreordained from the beginning. Newman failed to consider that he could have constructed such a narrative for any version of Christianity. It is always possible to trace how later developments emerge from earlier ones, and if you already know how history ends, the path to get there can seem inevitable.

This passage is particularly fitting as a summary of my book, since I connect Newman’s misuse of history to church leaders and Supreme Court justices—highlighting the way my book joins theological and political history. The quest for “true Christianity” has a political counterpart in the quest for the “true America.” Theologians pursue “historic Christianity” while justices and politicians pursue the “original America.” I suggest in my book that both quests are best abandoned. With respect to religion, I propose replacing the exclusionary pursuit of true Christianity with the open-ended, pluralistic search for new Christianities. Perhaps the same might apply in politics.

The Page 99 Test highlights whether a book remains focused on a clear thesis, and I made an effort to keep the material in my book tethered to my central argument. While not every page in my book would succeed as well as this one, I am pleasantly surprised with how well this page captured a central theme of my work.

Visit David W. Congdon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna S. Mueller & Seth Abrutyn's "Life under Pressure"

Anna S. Mueller is Luther Dana Waterman Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a leading expert on youth suicide and suicide prevention in schools, and her work has helped families, schools, and communities understand how social environments generate risk of suicide and why youth suicide clusters emerge and persist. Her work on youth suicide has received numerous awards for its contributions to knowledge, including the Edwin Shneidman Early Career Award from the American Association of Suicidology. In 2020, she was named one of Science News's "Top 10 Early Career Scientists to Watch."

Seth Abrutyn is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Abrutyn specializes in youth suicide and is also a general sociologist whose research rests at the intersection of mental health, emotions, social psychology, and culture, and which has won several national awards. His overarching goals as a social scientist are to merge sociological theory with the public imagination in hopes of making accessible sociological tools in the service of solving social problems.

Mueller and Abrutyn applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Life under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them, and reported the following:

Page 99:

level, so I must be doing terribly with my life.’ So, I think that’s something that happened a lot.”

That must have been hard to hear for kids who were struggling to get by, more so because so many of the youth who died by suicide had been among those high achievers— the kids who embodied Poplar Grove’s ideals. Krista said her friend Michelle had been “trying to find worth in things that she felt, like, she could never do perfectly.” Poignantly, she concluded, “I guess she felt like there was no reason to keep living, because nothing was giving her the worth that she wanted.” Perfectionism in a tight- knit community where everybody knows your business, the ideal youth is visible and known, and yet the standards of perfection are a moving target, is a dangerous cultural directive: anything short of an always- out- of- reach “perfect” may feel like a shameful failure.

3.4 THE PAIN OF FAILURE
Thus far, we have looked at the stories of young women who struggled with the painful mismatch between who they thought they were and who they thought they should be. We also found, more prevalent among the young men we got to know through interviews with families and friends, that youth suicides coincided with instances in which youth had more concrete evidence of their “failure,” such as tangles with the law. Young men, however, were not immune to the agony of measuring themselves against perfection and believing they came up short. Meet Brian. Brian was dreamy. Handsome. Artistic. Smart. Sociable. “He was really cool,” shared his friend Chloe. “Kind of introverted. Super- hot, you know? Blond hair, blue eyes, really artsy. . . . And he was a really nice sensitive sweet guy.” Brian’s father Bruce made less of the young man’s looks, perhaps, but said much the same: “He always had girlfriends and he was pretty sensitive with those relationships . . . he took things to heart and— but he was also happy- go- lucky, damn the torpedoes, did stuff he shouldn’t do, [tried to] get away with it.” Bruce laughed, maybe remembering some

The Page 99 Test works well for introducing our book to a reader.

This passage is a small window into one of the central reasons we found for youth suicide clusters and their perpetuation. As the preceding section concludes, the pressure youth were under – in short, to achieve academically, athletically, and socially – stands out in the story of Michelle, one of the more popular suicide victims in Poplar Grove. The nuance also stands out: perfection is not something that is actually achieved, but an on going project whose standards are perceived to be always moving. Not hitting those standards, not just for Michelle, robs youth of a sense of value despite the rich, rewarding (from the outside) lives they live. The dilemma youth face, then, is that perfection in achievement is not a black or white attribute. Rather, it requires one to be in perpetual motion, but, as other research in sociology has demonstrated, this motion must appear—on the outside at least—as easy and routine. Kids in Poplar Grove, both the ideal youth and those who fell outside of the cream of the crop, all felt the endless push of an achievement hamster wheel.

Consequently, as the second half of the passage illuminates: youth feared failure more than anything else. They lived in a heightened state of awareness most of the time, irrationally (from the outside) sensing failure was imminent; and that one B would ruin their lives. That many youth were struggling with mental health issues made things worse, because showing any signs of imperfection would violate the goal of achievement and represent failure. So, the truth was many kids felt like they were failing even when their school record, parent’s social media accounts, and standing among their peers reflected a successful youth. In the end, shame, or the emotional response to the belief that one is not meeting others’ expectations and that they are a contemptuous person as a result, was a pervasive response that only amplified the challenges of adolescence, leading to greater emotional distress.

Ultimately, youth suicide clusters because kids get trapped in these perfection-failure-shame cycles. They see a friend or classmate die by suicide, and they explain it through this lens of “pressure-to-be-perfect can cause suicide.” They can identify with that person’s pain, even if their own pain or situation isn’t identical. Suicide becomes a cultural script for expressing emotional distress instead of the sort of help-seeking behaviors that might alleviate this distress.

Visit Anna S. Mueller's website and Seth Abrutyn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Carruthers's "Human Motives"

Peter Carruthers is Distinguished University Professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, where he has worked since 2001. He previously held appointments at a number of universities in the UK. He has published widely across many areas of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, including work on cognitive architecture, the role of language in thought, self-knowledge, consciousness, the mentality of animals, and meta-cognition. His most recent books are The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us About the Nature of Human Thought (2015) and Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest (2019).

Carruthers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect, and reported the following:

Page 99 advances a particular theory of what pleasure and displeasure really are. Rather than being intrinsic felt qualities of experience, or a sort of “hedonic gloss” that attaches to experience (as many philosophers and others assume), they are better understood as perception-like representations of value. Pleasure attaching to the taste of a ripe strawberry, for example, represents it in a fine-grained perception-like way as good (to some degree), and in consequence makes continued eating seem choice-worthy. But what are these values and disvalues that are represented by degrees of pleasure and displeasure? Page 99 suggests that they are best understood in evolutionary terms, as adaptive values and disvalues (to be cashed out in terms of inclusive fitness). This answers a problem that had been raised previously in the chapter, that since values don’t really exist as part of the natural world, they can’t be represented correctly or incorrectly. Page 99 points out this problem evaporates if the values in question are cashed out in terms of biological inclusive fitness.

A reader who opens the book to read just page 99 won’t get a good idea of what the book as a whole is about, I’m afraid. But he or she will have landed on a crucial node in the overall argument. The book aims to refute a new and powerful, scientifically grounded, form of motivational hedonism. (This is the view that all human actions are really taken to secure pleasure and avoid displeasure.) The new hedonism argues on very good grounds that pleasure and displeasure are the common-currency of all human and animal decision making, enabling seemingly incommensurable things to be traded off against one another. (Is it worth getting stung by the bees to extract the honey from the hive? Here pain is pitted against pleasure.) As a result, it seems that genuine altruism is impossible. When I act to save someone’s life, I am really acting because I anticipate that saving the life will make me feel good, or because not acting will make me feel bad, or both. While accepting the common-currency idea, I argue that because pleasure and displeasure are really representations of value, altruism is possible after all (and frequently actual). When acting to save the life, I act because doing so strikes me as an intrinsically valuable thing to do (this is what the anticipated pleasure really is), not because I think it will make me feel good. The goal of the book is to flesh out this account in detail, to defend it against alternatives, and to show how it provides the best interpretation of the underlying affective science.

Learn more about Human Motives at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colleen Taylor's "Irish Materialisms"

Colleen Taylor is Assistant Professor of English and Irish Studeis at Boston College in Massachusetts, USA. She has been the recipient of research fellowships from the Keough-Naughton Institute at the University of Notre Dame, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Irish Research Council. Taylor has taught English and Irish Studies at Notre Dame, University College Cork, and Boston College and has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eire-Ireland, Tulsa Studies, Persuasions, and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Her research specializes in eighteenth-century studies, Ireland, new materialism, and the environmental humanities.

Taylor applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830, and reported the following:

Page 99 is part of the chapter on Flax, which details the steps in the eighteenth-century Irish linen manufacture, Ireland's sole and most important industry in the century. It takes part in my wider analysis that the introduction of linen as a proto-industry in Ireland contributed to Britain's paternalist model of Irish colonialism: namely that British influence could improve and civilize Irish character. The discussion on page 99 focuses on industry improvements to make the linen bleaching process more efficient, specifically the addition of alkaline chemicals like sulfuric acid. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the whiteness of Irish linen became an increasingly important selling point, as the addition of alkaline solutions streamlined the industry's final step of bleaching flax. Although sulfuric acid ostensibly improved the bleaching process in comparison to older, more time-consuming processes involving buttermilk, the acid ultimately altered and damaged flax's naturally brown fibers at the molecular level. As I write on page 99: "When flax is bleached, when it sheds its brown oils in response to an oxidizing agent, it loses some of its matter and is permanently, irrevocably altered--a fact that implicitly extends to ideas about white fabric's correlative cultural ideal: purity" (99).

Yes, the Page 99 Test does work for my book. The example displayed on page 99 (bleaching flax in the linen manufacture) effectively demonstrates one of my central arguments: that material details metaphorically correlate to wider socio-cultural processes in Britain's colonial wheelhouse (in this instance, bleaching flax and cultural cleanliness). This page marks an important step in the book's wider story, which moves between coins, linen, mud, and pigs. Page 99's discussion exemplifies that the way materiality was treated in Ireland speaks to the ways the Irish character was colonized under a British government. Readers jumping to page 99 might be surprised, but they would get a sense of the book's new materialist methodology--of reading the metaphoric resonance of real, material details--and this new methodology's relevance for Irish studies.

Irish Materialisms argues that small material details mobilized big ideas in colonial Ireland. On page 99 the two extremes of this paradigm come together: the smallest material object discussed in the book (a molecule) and perhaps the biggest or most controversial idea in the argument (race). In the pages that follow, I move from discussing to the whiteness of flax linen to the deemed necessity of "cleansing" or "whitening" the Irish character, as expressed in British ideology, from its lazy, slovenly, "piggish" nature to the civil, white, and implicitly more "human" ideals of English society. That Irish flax could be treated with outside forces and bleached into whiteness implicitly said the same of Irish character: that it could be whitened, Anglicized, and improved through sometimes violent processes. Thus, the way objects were discussed in colonial Ireland mattered in powerful ways, as something as small as a flax molecule can articulate. As I argue throughout the rest of the book, reading matter deeply not only helps us better understand the functionality of colonial stereotypes, but it also guides us to retroactively read Irish colonial resistance with and through those same materials: coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs.

Learn more about Irish Materialisms at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kristalyn Marie Shefveland "Selling Vero Beach"

Kristalyn Marie Shefveland is associate professor of American history at the University of Southern Indiana. She is the author of Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1646–1722.

Shefveland applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Selling Vero Beach: Settler Myths in the Land of the Aís and Seminole, and reported the following:

Page 99 picks up on a story of a Swedish émigré to the lower Indian River Lagoon in SE Florida and his successful attempts, after much hardship, to grow pineapples along the Atlantic Ridge. Excerpt from page:

Abundance came in time but an examination of the letters from the Hallstrom homestead tell quite the story of the realities of farming in the region and what settlers faced in Oslo and along the Atlantic Ridge, from heartbreak to success in the bright sun laden fields of South Florida. To this one can add the intrigue of family scandals, in this the Hallstrom’s are uncharacteristically open in their letters about their concerns and feelings, providing a unique window into their experiences. Axel Hallstrom was one of ten children from Skane in southernmost Sweden, thusly his correspondence involved many of his extended kin and family across the world.

Missing from this page, but would be found on surrounding pages, is that Axel Hallstrom found success on lands maintained by the Seminole, particularly the relatives of Tom Tiger, and that many settlers to the region chose to farm in the Tiger Hammock in part because it was already cultivated and filled with rich soil. Transformed entirely, the Tiger Hammock became Hallstrom space, a testament to settler memory, but this is also a form of Native erasure and further research is necessary to understand the longer history of the landscape, the story of the Seminole peoples whose original cultivation of the land likely made success for the Viking settlement possible.

While the Page 99 Test doesn’t necessarily work, per se, it reveals an interesting element to the story, a window into one settler family and their efforts in the Atlantic Ridge. The top of the page includes references to success from booster literature, but the lead to the next page hints at family discord and the strain of a transatlantic endeavor on the Hallstrom family.

Learn more about Selling Vero Beach at the University Press of Florida website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Regina Kunzel's "In the Shadow of Diagnosis"

Regina Kunzel, Larned Professor of History and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is an historian of the modern United States with interests in histories of gender and sexuality, queer history, the history of psychiatry, and the history of incarceration. She is the author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality and Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945.

Kunzel applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life, and reported the following:

Page 99 of In the Shadow of Diagnosis considers queer people’s resistance to psychiatric authority and treatment in the mid-20th-century U.S., and to psychiatrists’ insistence that homosexuality was a treatable mental illness in particular. It features evidence from the archival collection that inspired and enabled the book: a rich and remarkable set of previously unexamined case files from Saint Elizabeths Hospital, the federal hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C., in which psychiatrist Benjamin Karpman asked his patients to write autobiographies, journals, responses to questionnaires, and reviews of psychiatric texts. Page 99 includes one of my favorite lines drawn from one of those files. Frustrated by a lesbian who expressed “her profound skepticism with respect to all psychoanalytic findings and her intense resistance to all forms of psychic therapy,” Karpman acknowledged that “actually she does not want therapy. What she wants is either a social revolution which will permit her neurosis to be accepted, or a secret means of securing sexual gratification.”

Page 99 highlights gratifying stories of queer resilience and resistance. But to focus on resistance alone would require that we read the historical record very selectively and ignore evidence of the deep effects of stigma on queer and gender-nonconforming people that I explore beyond this page. The history of the encounter of queer people with psychiatry offers up resistance, to be sure. But it should not surprise us that for many, psychiatric thinking and treatment instilled, compounded, and consolidated a sense of stigma and shame. Others engaged psychiatry in more ambivalent and complex ways. One of the book’s challenging claims is that while psychiatry’s capture of queerness was far from complete, it is impossible to conceive of modern queer life sealed off from the influence of psychiatric thinking or stripped entirely clean of its assumptions.

Page 99 doesn’t shed light on another big claim of the book: that psychiatrists’ claim to expertise over homosexuality and gender variance underwrote the expansion of their power and authority at mid-century, used to broker some of their most important and strategic collaborations with the state. And so a story often told within the confines of the history of medicine or the history of the oppression of gay men and lesbians is also a story about American state and carceral power. In this history, (putatively) therapeutic and carceral spaces, practices, and logics blend and blur.

Learn more about In the Shadow of Diagnosis at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Criminal Intimacy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Trueheart's "Diplomats at War"

Charles Trueheart is a former foreign correspondent of the Washington Post, a former Associate Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, and a former Director of the American Library in Paris.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict, a third of the way into the book, happens to introduce one of the themes of this history/memoir of Vietnam during the Kennedy administration: the outsized role of US news correspondents in shaping the gloomy narrative of an alliance that was not working.

The most famous of these correspondents was David Halberstam, whose book The Best and the Brightest, published nearly a dozen years later, charted the series of hubristic misjudgments that led the United States into a ten-year war. My page 99 introduces Homer Bigart, Halberstam’s predecessor as the New York Times correspondent in Saigon, and a model of the skeptical reporting that would undermine the optimistic progress reports the US government was producing for public consumption. Bigart famously coined a phrase describing the American reliance on the flawed governance of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, pronounced Ziem: “Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.”

To quote a salient passage about the US reporters from page 99, “The presidents of the United States and South Vietnam, and their entourages, were being driven crazy by their reporting. They thought it was inaccurate. They thought it was tendentious. They thought it was simplistic. But at least some Americans knew it was accurate.”

Although the focus of Diplomats at War is on the ranking US Foreign Service officers in Saigon at the time – US ambassador Frederick Nolting and deputy chief of mission William Trueheart, my godfather and father, respectively – their stormy relationship to the press corps is an important element in the narrative, and not a bad glimpse of the forces shaping historic outcomes in Vietnam more than sixty years ago.

Visit Charles Trueheart's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Douglas Dowland's "We, Us, and Them"

Douglas Dowland is Associate Professor of English at Ohio Northern University and the author of Weak Nationalisms: Affect and Nonfiction in Postwar America.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump, and reported the following:

Much of my research focuses around synecdoche: the rhetorical tactic of substituting a part for a whole. This makes the Page 99 Test all the more fascinating to me, as it’s an exercise in synecdoche itself. Can page 99 give the reader an idea of a book overall? Can one page speak for an entire book?

For mine, the answer is, yes, I believe so! On page 99 of We, Us, and Them, you’ll find me winding down a chapter focused on the writer James Baldwin. What I’ve tried to do throughout the book is offer a counterintuitive narrative to our understanding of several American authors. Earlier in the book, I explored how John Steinbeck’s enthusiasm for the Vietnam War was derived mostly from his importing of the American story onto South Vietnam. I also explored how Hunter S. Thompson’s bilious reading of America was not so much driven by a countercultural impulse but more by good old-fashioned populism.

By page 99, I’ve finished perhaps my most counterintuitive move. For the previous twenty pages, I explore a book by James Baldwin that almost all critics have dismissed, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. My argument is that critics simply missed the point of the book – to them, Baldwin had written poorly and betrayed his legacy. But to me, Baldwin’s book is not a disaster but a conclusion: going farther, it is Baldwin’s stepping away from the premises of both his reputation and of his decades-long insistence that justice could be done, that African-Americans could be treated as equals in the United States. My thesis is that he realizes the futility of America as a nation and that his book is a practice in the art of futility. His giving up is thus exactly the point that critics miss, if only because it pulls from under their feet the idea of what I call “James Baldwin,” not so much the man, but the reputation white critics built for him.

Thus I write on page 99:

What if [Baldwin] is no longer interested in seeking to reason with white critics or white people, or whiteness altogether? What if he no longer cares if he has produced ample reasons that justify his anger to critics, or expended energy appealing to the decent and humane when those appeals go perpetually unenacted? What if he does not want to be together with us? And, ultimately, what if he no longer believes that white America, or America entirely, is worthy of his patience, his intellect, his identity, or his voice?

To me, Baldwin’s book is an “affective exit from America. It is a rejection of loyalty to the nation that does not nurture but only threatens him.”

All said, there is much that can be derived from page 99, and that itself says something about the power of synecdoche. In my book, it’s a page that gets to the point of the book entire – that how authors write about America reveal the strong affects at work in their depictions, we see the presumptions and frustrations that emerge when they employ three deceptively simple words: we, us, and them.

Learn more about We, Us, and Them at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Kinley's "The Liberty Paradox"

David Kinley is the inaugural Chair of Human Rights Law at the University of Sydney, a founding member of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, and an Expert Member of Doughty Street Chambers in London. He is the author of Necessary Evil: How to Fix Finance by Saving Human Rights and the coauthor of The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Kinley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Liberty Paradox: Living with the Responsibilities of Freedom, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Liberty Paradox deals with happiness. What are our freedoms and responsibilities in its pursuit and how do we negotiate them individually and collectively?

Specifically, the page tells us that in handling “the slings and arrows of fortune, however outrageous,” our “capacity for adaptation” is critical to securing happiness. And adaptation, in turn, boils down to how well we manage expectations, not only in the banality of everyday existence but also when fate changes our circumstances extraordinarily. One might suppose, for example, that winning the lottery or suffering a paralyzing injury will inexorably, fundamentally, and lastingly change our levels of happiness. Yet that appears not to be the case in practice. Apparently, we all have what psychologists call a set point of happiness, “to which we nearly always return, regardless of what befalls us in the meantime.” As a result, counterintuitively, “the world is not short of wealthy whingers and paralyzed optimists.”

In terms of the book’s central argument – that liberty’s paradox lies in it necessarily comprising both freedom and responsibility – page 99 reflects one of the enduring conundrums of that relationship. Namely, that while our freedom to choose what makes us happy is always hemmed in by our commensurate responsibility to recognize and respect our neighbor’s freedom to do the same (and all that delicate equilibrium entails), each of us also possesses personal predilections for self-awareness, empathy, and law-abidingness that significantly influence how we process the relationship internally and how we express it publicly. In this respect, much the same can said of the other realms of human life covered in the book – health, wealth, work, security, voice, love, and death. Liberty while living in the company of others is a bargain into which all of us must enter for each of us to enjoy.

Learn more about The Liberty Paradox at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas M. Larkin's "The China Firm"

Thomas M. Larkin is assistant professor of the history of the United States of America and the world at the University of Prince Edward Island.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his book, The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The China Firm begins halfway through a paragraph discussing the nostalgia Americans in nineteenth-century China felt during annual Fourth of July celebrations. The rest of the page describes how such celebrations were a source of friction between American inhabitants of Hong Kong and their British peers; it concludes by switching gears to introduce the expensive social rituals that the port’s American elite performed daily, beginning with an account of riding culture in the colony. The three paragraphs on this page take the reader through themes at the heart of the book: patriotism and nostalgia; Anglo-American tension and amity; class and social performance. To put it simply, the Page 99 Test works.

Expanded upon further throughout the rest of the chapter, the anecdotes on page 99 point to the balancing act that overshadowed American attempts to navigate British colonial and semi-colonial space along the China coast. American elites arriving in nineteenth-century China recognised the social, economic, and diplomatic value of becoming accepted amongst British society, but their efforts to do so were often inflected by their heightened sense of national identity, antecedent tensions between Britain and the United States playing out on a global scale, and their ability to perform the requisite markers of success. The Fourth of July was, for example, an important opportunity to express one’s national pride, but how the broader colonial community reacted was subject to wider circumstances. When things were swell between the American and British communities, the British joined in the revelry; when tensions flared, as they did during the American Civil War, acerbic British commenters in the port’s China Mail newspaper derided the day as an ‘inordinate national vanity.’ We see, then, on page 99, a brief instance reflecting the calibrated performance Americans sustained as they were ‘made’ in and helped ‘make’ British colonial society in China.

Learn more about The China Firm at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hajar Yazdiha's "The Struggle for the People’s King"

Hajar Yazdiha is assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her first book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement, and reported the following:

Page 99 concludes a chapter on battles over civil rights memory between the progressive LGBTQ movement and the conservative family values movement. This page describes how each group had worked to claim the memory of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement to take the moral high ground in their political battles.

More importantly, this page describes the consequences of these strategies where conservative groups increasingly use Dr. King to frame themselves as the new oppressed minorities fighting for their rights. As I write on page 99,

As conservative groups attempted to both discredit progressive groups’ claims to civil rights memory and establish their own claims to memory, rainbow coalitions were forming to challenge the reactionary right-wing movements that were gaining popularity in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential campaign.

It's incredible how well the Page 99 Test works here! Though we’re only getting a snapshot from one of the cases in the book (other chapters take on different social movements), the takeaways about the co-optation of civil rights memory are a throughline. From page 99 we get a sense of how the book explores the political misuses of Dr. King and how they matter for contemporary politics.

One of the major takeaways of The Struggle for the People’s King is that the political misuses of Dr. King and civil rights memory are not just rhetorical. These are intentional political strategies and they have powerful effects. These misuses of memory don’t just change the way we collectively remember the racial past. They also shape the way we make sense of the present, tackle social problems together, and direct action toward the future. This is where the real danger of historical revisionism lies, in its capacity to evade social reality.

There is a popular way of understanding the divisive nature of American political culture as a matter of polarization. My book shows that it is not that we are polarized into different sides of the same coin. Through the politics of historical revisionism, we have diverged in our conceptions of social reality. We are living on different planes.

Despite this grim reality, at the core of The Struggle for the People’s King are these perennial questions about identity and belonging. What does it take to feel like we belong, to a community, to a nation, and to one another? How does our understanding of our place in society, our connection to its past, shape our imaginations of what type of society may be possible?

Dr. King said, “The difference between a dreamer and a visionary is that a dreamer has his eyes closed and a visionary has his eyes open.” My book is an invitation to readers to confront the past, present, and future with eyes wide open, to come together in community, to be visionaries.

Visit Hajar Yazdiha's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Holmes's "The Graft Hybrid"

Matthew Holmes is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental History at the University of Stavanger, where he examines the modern history of the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) in urban spaces. His previous postdoc position at the University of Cambridge investigated science and agriculture in the British Empire. Holmes's new book, The Graft Hybrid: Challenging Twentieth-Century Genetics, explores the creation of chimeral plants and animals. He also publishes on the history of biotechnology, morphology, and natural history.

Holmes applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Graft Hybrid and reported the following:

Although page 99 of The Graft Hybrid does not engage with the book’s titular subject, it does provide an entry point to one of the greatest controversies in the history of biology: whether grafting different plants and animals together could produce new species. Page 99 introduces a botanical power couple, Mabel Rayner and William Neilson Jones, lecturers at Bedford College, London. In 1920 Rayner and Neilson Jones published a textbook that described the famous experiments of Gregor Mendel on pea plants. Mendelian genetics, they claimed, had great practical promise for breeding new plants and animals for agriculture. Grafting only received a brief mention.

Reading page 99 alone would give a one-sided view of The Graft Hybrid, and indeed, of the history of biology itself. Alternatives to Mendelian genetics as an agricultural tool persisted across the twentieth century. One of these alternatives was graft hybridization. Over the course of the twentieth century, biologists from around the world claimed to have been able to artificially create an extraordinary array of new species: from strangely colored chickens and salamanders to potato-tomato hybrids. If we read beyond page 99, we find that Neilson Jones also published an influential 1934 book titled Plant Chimaeras and Graft Hybrids. In it, he claimed that it was theoretically possible for the cells of grafted plants to fuse together to create new hybrid species.

The story of the graft hybrid has many twists and turns, which Neilson Jones experienced. While the first edition of his book on graft hybrids was widely praised, its second edition – released in 1969 – was harshly criticized. In the Soviet Union, genetics was under attack as a bourgeois science, with graft hybridization promoted in its stead. Neilson Jones’s fall from grace reflects the larger argument of my book, which demonstrates that belief in the existence of graft hybrids was scientifically respectable until the “Lysenko affair” in the Soviet Union divided biology along ideological lines.

Visit Matthew Holmes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue