Mariya Grinberg's "Trade in War"

Mariya Grinberg is an assistant professor of political science and member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She focuses on international relations theory and international security. Her research interests center on the question of how time and uncertainty shape the strategic decisions of states, examining economic statecraft, military planning, and nuclear strategy.

Grinberg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Trade in War: Economic Cooperation across Enemy Lines by Mariya Grinberg, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, the reader will find an assessment of the changing expectations of the length of war among British decision-makers in World War I. The page picks up the story in 1915, remarking on the sense of optimism around the launch of the Dardanelles campaign. However, by the middle of the year, given the failure of the Dardanelles campaign to restart a war of movement, expectations of a short war once again gave way to planning for a long war.

The Page 99 Test would rather grievously deceive the reader about the contents of the book. Judging purely from page 99, a reader might expect this book to be a military history of World War I. In fact, the book explains wartime trade – why states would allow their own firms to trade with the state’s military opponents during open hostilities. British decision-making in World War I is one of the cases used to test the argument; other cases include the Crimean War (1854-6), World War II, and the United States wartime trade in its post-Cold War conflicts.

The book argues that states develop nuanced wartime commercial policies, determining how each product will be treated during the war. Products that can be quickly converted into military capabilities by the enemy are prohibited from trade, while those that take a while to become useful on the battlefield are more likely to be traded. Products that are essential for the key domestic industries of the state are also traded in war. Furthermore, states tailor their commercial policies to the war they expect to fight. When states expect a a short war, more products can be traded with the enemy; while expectations of a prolonged war bring a more restrictive wartime commercial policy.

Page 99 captures British expectations of the length of war – which in 1915, in the moment of optimism allowed them to continue importing German dyes, which were integral for the British textile industry. However, the changing expectations towards a long war in 1915 ended such imports and brought prohibitions on the export to the enemy of food, cotton manufacture, rubber, and other raw materials. All of which were previously allowed to be traded with the enemy. Of course, for these details, the reader would have to reach page 109.

Visit Mariya Grinberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew A. Szarejko's "American Conquest"

Andrew A. Szarejko is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wartburg College. His work has been published in journals such as PS: Political Science and Politics, Millennium, The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and The Journal of Global Security Studies. He is also the editor of Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations amid COVID-19.

Szarejko applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy, and shared the following:

Page 99 of American Conquest is near the end of Chapter 4. After examining the origins of the Northwest Indian War (1790-1795) in Chapter 2 and the process by which military basing decisions helped U.S. forces defeat the countervailing Native American coalition in Chapter 3, I turn in Chapter 4 to the ways U.S. forces brought the perceived lessons of the “Indian Wars” abroad. More specifically, Chapter 4 is about how the U.S. military brought a sort of nascent counterinsurgency doctrine learned (and continually re-learned) on the American frontier into the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). Page 99 speaks to “lessons learned” processes that the U.S. military has since established to try to more systematically codify the lessons of recent experiences in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I caution against trying to make law-like generalizations on the basis of such experiences.

This gives readers a good sense of what I am doing in this book. I am not just interested in the origins of the Northwest Indian War; I am also interested in the ways its influence lingers in U.S. foreign policy and American politics. Readers who continue a few more pages into Chapter 5 will find the most recent events I discuss—debates in Fort Wayne, Indiana, concerning whether to celebrate the city’s namesake and the victorious general in the Northwest Indian War, Anthony Wayne.

Page 99 also speaks to my interest in how foreign policy professionals continue to use the Indian Wars as an analogy. There I begin a final section in Chapter 4—a coda in which I discuss how a U.S. military official, Colonel Elbridge Colby, justified indiscriminate violence in the Philippines with reference to the purportedly “savage,” “uncivilized” nature of the Filipino insurgents. I then turn to a description of how Colby’s great-grandson and President Trump’s current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge A. Colby, has used the “Indian Wars” as an analogy in some of his own work on military strategy. In short, American Conquest is about the origins and legacies of the Northwest Indian War, and page 99 underscores those central concerns.

Visit Andrew A. Szarejko's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julija Šukys's "Artifact"

Julija Šukys is associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, where she teaches the writing of memoirs, autobiographical writing, essays, and archival research methods. She is the author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007). Šukys holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto.

Šukys applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives, with the following results:

Page 99 of Artifact lays out the background for Amy Bishop’s tenure denial. That denial was the reason Bishop opened fire on her colleagues during a faculty meeting, killing three colleagues. As part of my research, I interviewed Bishop’s former department chair. We talked about Bishop’s career trajectory. “Amy wasn’t stupid or incapable of receiving tenure,” said Debra Moriarity in the interview. “It’s just that her timing was bad and that she spent too much time developing the [cell] incubator and not enough producing the kind of scholarship that would have secured her position at the university.” Page 99 then takes us through the kind of research activity that would have earned Bishop tenure: ‘“at least two papers a year,’ that is, ten papers before tenure (which usually comes in Year 6 of an academic appointment as assistant professor),” plus a solid record of grantsmanship. The final paragraph introduces the issue of gender, and whether or how institutional structures played a role in Bishop’s professional struggles.

Page 99 of Artifact isn’t a terrible representation of the book’s concerns, but it has the disadvantage of falling mid-weeds, so to speak. I write incrementally, so each paragraph, section, and chapter builds on the last. To enter the book at this point in the Amy Bishop story feels like walking into a documentary film 1/3 of the way through. It’s not disastrous, but you’ve got to work quite hard to catch up.

The idea to write this book grew out of those three events. One was a shooting in a writing classroom. That occurred at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. The event shook me because that could have been my classroom—I too teach writing. Then came the second event: a law professor at the University of Missouri sued the university administration for the right to carry his weapon with him on campus. Finally, within two weeks of that lawsuit, there was a third event, this time at the University of Northern Arizona, a couple of students shot one another at a fraternity house.

That third shooting happened shortly before I was about to travel to Flagstaff, Arizona, to attend a large nonfiction writers’ conference. Suddenly our writing community was talking about this event on social media. There was talk of whether we, as a community of writers, should address this violence at the conference. I remember reading a passing comment: “Somebody should write about this.” That’s when the idea went ding, ding, ding in my head. Maybe this was a way to deal with the discomfort, disquiet, and fear I’d been carrying while on campus.

I ended up traveling to and writing about five different campuses where shootings occurred. I’m an archival researcher by nature, so, as is my habit, I arrived on each campus and then headed out to see what its archives held. I tracked the story the archives told me about each shooting. Every archive told me something different. Slowly, the book began to take shape.

In the end, Artifact became a text about what institutions collectively choose to remember, about what they willingly forget, what they silence, what they keep, what they trash. The book is also about my love for the university. It’s about the ways the university grows increasingly broken. And it’s about my beloved profession, that is, being a professor.

Visit Julija Šukys's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven A. Dean's "Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law"

Steven A. Dean is an award-winning author and a Professor of Law and the Paul Siskind Research Scholar at Boston University. He has spoken at the United Nations and testified in Congress about the impact of racism on tax law. Dean's work forced President Biden to change course on tax havens and forced the leading international tax policymaking organization to withdraw a major marketing brochure. He led the world's foremost graduate tax law program at NYU and practiced tax with leading global law firms. Dean earned his law degree from Yale. His books include For-Profit Philanthropy (2023), Social Enterprise Law: A Multijurisdictional Comparative Review (2023), and Social Enterprise Law: Trust, Public Benefit, and Capital Markets (2017).

Dean applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow, and reported the following:

On page 99, I describe how the 2000 US presidential election shaped the fate of the OECD’s effort to blacklist tax havens. The change in Treasury leadership—from Lawrence Summers, Clinton’s secretary and the OECD initiative’s strongest supporter, to Paul O’Neill, Bush’s pick and one of its fiercest critics—proved decisive. Personnel shifts like this can make the difference between momentum and collapse in global tax diplomacy.

The page also considers the role of right-wing think tanks, especially the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (CFP), which mobilized opposition to the OECD plan. Even if the CFP exaggerated its influence, it managed to forge improbable alliances, linking the Heritage Foundation with members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The section closes by speculating how different things might have looked had Al Gore won in 2000—a reminder that international tax law is never just about taxes but about politics, power, and identity.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Yes—almost eerily well. A browser landing on this page would immediately see the book’s central themes at work: how domestic political battles in the United States shape global tax policy, how right-wing institutions exert surprising influence, and how questions of race and identity are never far from the surface.

Page 99 captures the larger argument of the book: international tax law cannot be understood without grappling with racial capitalism. The Clinton-to-Bush transition, the replacement of Summers with O’Neill, and the lobbying of groups like the CFP all illustrate how seemingly technical tax rules are embedded in struggles over legitimacy, sovereignty, and belonging.

This single page shows both the drama of individual political actors and the deeper structural forces at play. That’s what the book does throughout: reveal how international tax law reflects and reinforces racialized hierarchies, while also tracing the moments of resistance—from small states labeled “havens” to dissenting voices within US politics—that sometimes push back against those hierarchies.

In short, if you opened the book to page 99, you would get a very good sense of what the book is about.

Learn more about Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frances R. Aparicio's "Replaying Marc Anthony"

Frances R. Aparicio is Professor Emerita in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. She is the author of Negotiating Latinidad: Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago and Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, among other books, and coeditor of various critical anthologies.

Aparicio applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Replaying Marc Anthony: Sonic, Political, and Cultural Resonances, and shared the following:

If one reads page 99 in Replaying Marc Anthony, its discussion around singing in English, crossover, and the Latin music industry serves as a window to the rest of the book. Fueled by my curiosity regarding how Marc Anthony's arrangements and songs allow him to resonate with specific communities and identities, Chapter 3 delves into his engagements with Anglo rock and roll, freestyle and R&B in the song "I need to know."

Page 99 describes the ways in which Marc Anthony was discursively framed as a “crossover” act around 1999, when he first performed “I need to know” on Good Morning, America on July 23. Yet his musical history evinces the opposite, as he started his singing career in the 1980s singing freestyle in English in local New York clubs, to later sing salsa in Spanish in 1993. Refuting these mainstream notions of “crossover,” Marc Anthony reaffirms his bicultural and bilingual upbringing as the foundation for these linguistic dilemmas. I document the ways in which his arrangements deploy forms of translanguaging or Spanglish, as in his unexpected version of Bread’s “Make it with you.” This chapter analyzes Marc’s multiracial arrangements in “I need to know” as a sonic text and performance that rewrites so-called “American music,” and specifically rock and roll, as sounds that also belong to racial minorities in the United States.

Known as the King of Salsa and as a global celebrity, Marc Anthony is also, as I propose in the Introduction, a “listener” himself who has brilliantly curated songs that resonate with multiple audiences and listeners. By highlighting the rich diversity of voices, singers, songs, and musical traditions with which he has been in dialogue, we can better understand the sonic, cultural and political meanings and resonances of his repertoire. This framework allows me to argue that some of his most canonical songs have circulated hemispherically and globally, thus hailing multiple identities that include Puerto Rican, Latino, Latin American, American, Black, and Algerian/North African. Rather than just “Latin pop,” Marc Anthony offers us serious sonic incursions that allow us to acknowledge ourselves within the colonial precarity of our lives. The impact of Marc Anthony is profoundly felt by Puerto Ricans, Nuyoricans and so many others in the U.S. Latinx community as we critically listen to our own vulnerabilities through the power of his extraordinary voice.

Learn more about Replaying Marc Anthony at the Ohio State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Grehan's "Empire of Manners"

James Grehan is Professor of History at Portland State University. His previous book is Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (2014).

Grehan applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Empire of Manners: Ottoman Sociability and War-Making in the Long Eighteenth Century, with the following results:

The Page 99 Test for Empire of Manners whisks readers to the literary scene in the Ottoman Empire during the ‘long eighteenth century’ (c. 1680-1830). Here they mingle with urban gentlemen—scholars, officials, and assorted literati—who flaunted their love of poetry, the main form of Ottoman literary expression, and wielded it as proof of their urbanity and sophistication. Most probably, these refined cultural tastes and their association with the polite and educated are exactly the image that will come to readers’ minds when they think of the word ‘manners’. But for this very reason, the Page 99 Test will only mislead them. If we look more widely at Ottoman society, other manners—not always so nice—immediately catch our eye. Beyond page 99, readers will see how questions of honor might drive even a polite gentleman to explosive displays of emotion or full-blown violence. Venturing into urban markets, coffeehouses, and neighborhoods, they will jostle their way through a vibrant and earthy street culture, which delighted in physical bravado and vulgar speech and humor. From page to page, lazy clichés about ‘Islamic culture’—so familiar to anyone who has ever picked up a book about the Middle East—will slowly dissolve in panoramic surveys of fashion, bodily comportment, and leisure culture across the length and breadth of the empire. The eighteenth century was a particularly interesting moment for Ottoman manners. It witnessed the slow blurring of social hierarchies; the expansion of polite society; the quickening of leisure culture; and the heyday of a bawdy paramilitary subculture. Curiously enough, it was the war-making of the state which was most responsible for generating these trends. To put it another way, manners and violence are fundamentally intertwined. For readers who are interested in learning more about etiquette and sociability in the premodern world, and keen on joining historical excursions across the Balkans and Middle East, Empire of Manners is an opportunity to consider this paradoxical relationship in colorful detail.

Learn more about Empire of Manners at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Twilight of the Saints.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Fritzsche's "1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe"

Peter Fritzsche is the W. D. & Sarah E. Trowbridge Professor of History at the University of Illinois. His many books include Hitler’s First Hundred Days and the award-winning Life and Death in the Third Reich.

Fritzsche applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, 1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe, and reported the following:

A terrifying judgment falls on the British Empire on page 99 as the long-term consequences of the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942 become clear. Not only have huge pieces of the empire been lost–Singapore, Malaya, Burma, Hong Kong–but the losses suggest the rottenness of the empire itself. George Orwell and others get some delicious quotes about these “blackest weeks.” For independence fighters in India from Gandhi to Bose, it looked like Britain would lose the war, a turn of events which would secure their long-term dream of freedom. By the end of page 99, British statesmen tried to rally, promising reform, explaining problems by pointing to internal ethnic conflicts within the colonies which were then taken to be the premise for more imperial rule.

The severity of judgment and the persistent hope for reform, the wartime drama on page 99, indicated the long-term struggle Britain had confronting its post-imperial future. Page 99 thus gives a very good idea of the key theme of “self rule” in the book. Even as Britain regained sovereignty over Singapore and Malaya at the end of World War II, the defeat of the Japanese could not undo the historical significance of their initial victory over the European empires in 1942. This is why the fall of Singapore in 1942 is an event of such shattering importance: it points to the end of empire as the pages that follow page 99 argue. This was a judgment that mainstream Americans shared with the victorious Japanese early in the war.

My book, 1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe, examines the genuinely global nature of the world war: the struggle among new and old empires, but also the assault on empire and the tenacity of anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggles. It covers Singapore, but also places like Johannesburg, South Africa; Calcutta, India, and Detroit, Michigan. However defined, this fight for freedom cut across the bias of the battle between the Allies and the Axis, and it is these criss-crossing struggles over sovereignty that provide the overawing shape to World War II. In 1942, there is Guadalcanal and Stalingrad, but there is also Singapore, and while there are states’ rights, there are also civil rights. Events pulled the Allied fight to restore the independence of Poland from German predation into the fight for independence in many more spheres of life: in the colonies, and among subject populations, minorities, and women. In many ways, the Atlantic Charter, which Churchill and Roosevelt signed in August 1941 in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, had the unforseen effect of creating the moral energy that expanded the untidy struggle for freedom across the world even to those who had not been invaded by the Germans in September 1939. Singapore in February 1942 globalized what had been a Polish or a French fight for freedom. Page 99 pivots to our own times.

Learn more about 1942 at the Basic Books website.

The Page 99 Test: Hitler's First Hundred Days.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Conly's "The Limits of Liberty"

Sarah Conly is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism and One Child: Do We Have a Right to More?

Conly applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Limits of Liberty, and shared the following:

The Page 99 Test is not entirely successful in presenting the core of my book's argument. That argument is that liberties that do great harm to others should be limited. On page 99 of my new book, The Limits of Liberty, I discuss the need to reduce our population numbers if we are to reduce the degree of climate change that we have brought upon ourselves. It shows how increased greenhouse gas emissions are, not surprisingly, causally linked to our increased population numbers, even more than to our consumption. "Of course, we should reduce consumption as well—but the chances of our reducing consumption to the level of the poorest countries is nil. ...And unfortunately, that is what it would take for population growth to have a negligible effect on emissions."

This is important to my discussion, but does not include my conclusion as to the best public policy in light of these facts about population. In the section that includes page 99, I argue that if we do not reduce our numbers voluntarily, it would be appropriate for government to take steps to discourage having more children than is sustainable. That is, in times like these we should not have the liberty to have just as many children as we might like to have. Of course, we may reduce our numbers without any government intervention, and that is certainly to be preferred. If we fail to do so, however, the government can justifiably take steps to disincentivize having too many children.

This chapter of the book discusses the liberties we should give up have because they contribute to environmental destruction. In another chapter I discuss issues in medical ethics where, again, certain liberties may justifiably be restricted. For example, I argue that if a contagious disease is dangerous enough and a vaccination is harmless, we can be forced to get a vaccination—in such a case we don't have the right to bodily autonomy.

In a third chapter I discuss what I call the Ethics of Personal Expression. Here I argue that in two areas where we tend to hold liberties dear we need to consider that in some cases we have gone overboard, specifically in some cases of speech and in the case of religious accomodation. For example, I argue that people should be legally liable for false factual claims that they make on public internet venues, if those prove to be dangerous, Claims such as "Barack Obama is not a citizen," which are demonstrably false and potentially dangerous, should be subject to civil and possibly criminal repercussions. Religious accomodation is the legal tradition where we make exceptions to laws for those who feel their religous practice requires violating that law. This allows, among other things, the Catholic church to practice sex discrimination in hiriing that would not be allowed to, for example, a law firm. I argue that the liberty to flout a just law for reasons of personal religious faith is a liberty we should not have. Since we do not allow religious exceptions to laws against murder, allowing them to laws against sex discrimination suggests we don't really think that sex discrimination is bad. While we should not engage in religious persecution, we should similarly not engage in religious favoritism when it comes to law.

When personal liberties allow great and unjustified harm to others, they should be limited.

Learn more about The Limits of Liberty at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Against Autonomy.

Writers Read: Sarah Conly (December 2012).

--Marshal Zeringue

Aaron Sheehan-Dean's "Fighting with the Past"

Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University and the current chairman of the History Department. He teaches courses on nineteenth-century US history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Southern History. His work as a historian focuses on the US Civil War and its meaning for Americans and the world.

Sheehan-Dean applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War, with the following results:

Page 99 of Fighting With the Past explores the contest between radicals and conservatives in the Civil War North over the changes wrought by the war. That contest, I argue, reflected and derived from their contrary readings of the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. The New York Herald, a conservative pro-war paper quoted a recent history of the earlier conflict to celebrate what they saw as Oliver Cromwell’s effective balancing of competing interests. After quoting the editorial, I conclude: “In this telling, Lincoln could emerge as a wise Cromwell, resisting the radicalism of the abolitionists even as he suppressed secession.”

Page 99 probably includes more quotation than is typical of the book as a whole, but it actually reveals my narrative strategy quite effectively. I am primarily interested in explaining various elements of the American conflict: how Southerners justified secession; why Northerners resisted it; how Northerners disagreed over emancipation and infringements on civil liberties; why the war ended with generous reconciliation rather bitter recrimination. Because Americans referred back constantly to “the Civil War” (meaning the seventeenth-century one), I wrote the book in a way that braids together explanations of the English Civil War, the American Civil War, and how participants in the latter used the former to navigate through the conflict.

I realize now that taking a page (99, for instance) out of context might leave the reader somewhat confused about which conflict was the book’s subject, but that position actually illustrates one of my underlying points. We rely on the past to make sense of the present so often that, to quote William Faulkner, “it’s not even past.” Civil War Americans understood their experience by refracting it through the prism of English history, just as we do today when we invoke “the Civil War” in the midst of partisan political disputes.

Visit Aaron Sheehan-Dean's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Cordery's "Gilded Age Entrepreneur"

Simon Cordery is Professor and Chair in the History Department at Iowa State University. He is the author of The Iron Road in the Prairie State, Mother Jones, and British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914.

Cordery applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Gilded Age Entrepreneur we find Albert Benton Pullman (1828-1893), the subject of this biography, working as a railroad executive. He is travelling to Indianapolis and Detroit on business in 1870 for his employer, Pullman’s Palace Car Company. Founded by his brother George Mortimer Pullman, this corporation made luxury railroad passenger carriages, beginning with sleeping cars. In Indianapolis he exercised his persuasive charm to smooth the ruffled feathers of a fellow railroad executive and then in Detroit he confirmed that the company wanted to buy a factory to make its vehicles. Sending Albert to inspect a plant Pullman wanted to purchase indicated how important he was as a marketing expert who also knew all about building cars to the company in its early years. This page demonstrates how Albert’s role working with the men and women who built the cars was coming to an end. His mutual approach to labor relations, the idea that all had a shared interest in the profitability of the firm, was impractical in a company where manufacturing would now occur in plants hundreds of miles apart. His ideal of working with directly with, and getting to know, employees was obsolete. Read on its own, page 99 goes a long way to toward identifying many of the talents that made him so useful to his brother George Pullman.

Readers would find several important themes on display on page 99, though ultimately they would get only a partial view of Albert Pullman’s life. His mutualism and his central role in the early years of the Pullman Company are evident, but his family and his entrepreneurship are absent. Albert was a skillful marketer of Pullman products, taking potential clients on trial rail journeys to show off the luxurious cars and convince them to use Pullmans. Particularly important to the trajectory of the biography are the ways in which Albert Pullman built, used, neglected, and destroyed interpersonal networks to find and develop investment opportunities. Those are obscured from view on page 99. His early use of his position in the Pullman Company to place a lucrative cleaning contract with a laundry into which he invested is a key foundation for his financial efforts. Despite this insider access, Albert suffered from poor timing, such as doubling the value of his holdings in a fire insurance company days before the Great Chicago Fire bankrupted it, for example, and a willingness to engage in dubious financial practices, including creating a fraudulent land company and a sham mining concern.

The material on page 99 also hints at Albert Pullman’s mechanical skills. His career started as a carpenter, in which role he helped to create Pullman’s distinctive and elaborate car designs. He learned about the railroad industry by watching and listening, eventually being seen as an expert whose opinion other railroaders sought. He played a key role in the creation of the town of Pullman, where the Company housed many of the workers it employed, and toward the end of his life invested with little success in hansom cabs, telephones, automobiles, and electricity. Newspapers across the country covered his death, but by then George Pullman had been systematically erasing Albert from the story of the family business—but to know why he did that, readers would need to jump into the whole book!

Learn more about Gilded Age Entrepreneur at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Manu Bhagavan's "The Remarkable Madame Pandit"

Manu Bhagavan is a specialist on modern India, focusing on the twentieth-century late-colonial and post-colonial periods, with particular interests in human rights, (inter)nationalism, and questions of sovereignty. He is Professor of History, Human Rights, and Public Policy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. At the undergraduate level he lectures on modern world history and on modern South Asian history, and offers seminars on Gandhi, modern India, and violence and ethnic conflict. His graduate classes focus on human rights, internationalism, and biography.

Bhagavan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Remarkable Madame Pandit: Champion of India, Citizen of the World, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Remarkable Madame Pandit deals with Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit’s extended thoughts on women’s rights, societal norms, patriarchy, and liberation. She observes that “Woman…must not try to see things as they are, or give expression to the urges within her…[Men and the women they have mesmerized] beg woman not to throw away her modesty and become unsexed and shameless. They entreat her in the name of India’s past glory not to discard those virtues which, it is said, made the woman of a past age great. What these people really wish to preserve is neither virtue nor chastity, but the ignorance which has kept woman enslaved through the ages and which is now giving place to the light of knowledge. Once that light spreads, no power can prevent its reaching women, and they will shake off all restraint and fear and go eagerly forward with men to establish a better order of things.” She then contrasts her treatment as a public figure with her brother’s, he also in a similar line of work. She laments the fact that stories about her focus on her looks and clothes while those about him deal with his ideas and actions.

The Page 99 Test works! Madame Pandit (1900-1990) was a woman of many firsts, and one of the most important figures of the 20th century. Here she is reflecting on some of her early experiences, her observations ultimately capturing the very essence of her life, and hence of the work generally.

Born into an illustrious family, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit grew to be internationally recognized as one of the two greatest women in the world, widely admired for her brilliance and beauty. Her election as the first woman Cabinet minister in the British Empire to hold significant portfolios catapulted her to initial celebrity. She used her fame to further her country’s fight for freedom, facing repeated imprisonment for her efforts.

Steeled by painful personal loss, she launched a pioneering, globe-trotting career spanning Moscow, Washington, London, and New York, where, especially at the United Nations, she shaped the modern world order as her country’s premier diplomat. With wit and charm, Madame Pandit bridged East and West, defeated top lawyers in debate, advanced US civil rights and modern human rights, helped settle the Korean War and resolve the Suez Crisis, and championed world peace. She worked alongside the likes of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell and won plaudits from Winston Churchill and Konrad Adenauer, while dominating the gossip pages and winning over everyday people. Marlon Brando named her the woman he most admired, and Eleanor Roosevelt called her “the most remarkable woman” she had ever met.

Then, in her country’s darkest hour, she came out of retirement to battle her own niece, Indira Gandhi, to stop an authoritarian takeover and save democracy.

The Remarkable Madame Pandit is a comprehensive biography based on continent-spanning, multi-lingual research. It recovers the story of one of the world’s most significant and celebrated women, while asking how even one such as she could be erased from history.

Visit Manu Bhagavan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Woodman's "The First King of England"

David Woodman is Professor and Fellow in History at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. His books include Edward the Confessor: The Sainted King and The Chronicle of John of Worcester, Volume IV: “Chronicula.”

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, readers will find a discussion of Æthelstan’s law-making activities, the ways in which he tried to govern and, more specifically, his attempts to deal with the issue of theft. It discusses the difficulties he encountered in trying to ensure that law was maintained and the sophistication of early tenth-century governance.

Readers opening page 99 of my book would certainly get a good idea of one aspect of Æthelstan’s extraordinary life - that is, of his approach to kingship, the reforms that he implemented and the ways in which he tried to impose law and order across his kingdom. Page 99 shows that Æthelstan was an early medieval ruler of exceptional energy who relied on relatively sophisticated systems of governance. But this is only one aspect of Æthelstan’s kingship. Perhaps the principal reason he should be remembered is for his formation of the ‘kingdom of the English’ for the first time in the year 927, which makes him England’s founding father. This vital detail is not mentioned—or alluded to—on page 99.

The remainder of my book offers a full narrative account of all aspects of Æthelstan’s life and time as king. It details: what little we know (and can surmise) about his childhood; how he first came to power in 924 and secured his position as king; his formal coronation on 4 September 925; his dealings with other kings of Britain (over whom he sometimes claimed authority); his nurturing of the church; his strategy with regard to contemporary European rulers; and finally his death and legacy. In the end we know frustratingly little about details such as Æthelstan’s appearance or temperament, but we can see from surviving royal documents that he must have been ruthlessly ambitious, that he saw through his ambitions by means of war, but that he also supported learning and cultural advances, and encouraged scholars and others from across Europe to attend his court. He was an extraordinary individual. To my mind, the date when he first formed ‘England’—927—should be as well known as those other famous dates of English medieval history, 1066 (the Norman Conquest) or 1215 (the signing of Magna Carta).

Visit David Woodman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Garbes's "Listeners Like Who?"

Laura Garbes is a Sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. Her research focuses on racism, voice, and the cultural industries.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Listeners Like Who?: Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry, with the following results:

Page 99 of Listeners Like Who? describes the types of feedback received by two employees of color in the public radio industry, Jay and Devin. Jay is a Latinx reporter, and he discusses how he has received feedback from a white audience member about how to pronounce his own name. He reflected on how this is part of the job, as he assumes he needs to educate white audiences given the typical public radio listener. Devin is a Black reporter, and he told me about the pattern of who gets feedback: usually women and people of color, not white men that conform to the typical voice of authority associated with broadcasting.

Looking at page 99 of Listeners Like Who? gives us a good sense of Part II of the book, which outlines how people of color navigate the contemporary public radio industry. Jay and Devin’s experiences, as told in their own words, appear in Chapter 4, "Sounding Like Myself." In this chapter, I ask how employees of color define themselves in relation to an established “public radio voice.” I show how public radio broadcasters of color develop a unique relationship with their own voices through their interactions with existing public radio voice models, audience members, and coworkers. Jay and Devin’s accounts show that they have a deep understanding of public radio’s existing expectations through their interactions with audience members. It also brings to the fore the gendered dimension of these expectations, when Devin noted that any feedback he got was way worse for his female counterparts.

You may walk away from page 99 thinking this is only a contemporary story. But Part I of the book roots these experiences of people of color in public radio in deeper historical processes. In it, I show how public radio was formed as a white racialized industry, despite the best intentions of its founders. I then elaborate on how public radio’s voice developed in the 1970s and 1980s as a new type of authority, one more inclusive to white women but still racially exclusionary. Finally, I discuss the underfunding of public radio, and how it forces stations to rely on donors from the white professional class for financial survival. These elements are key to contextualizing why people of color in public broadcasting continue to face barriers to full inclusion.

Visit Laura Garbes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christine Shepardson's "A Memory of Violence"

Christine Shepardson is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is author of Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy and Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria.

Shepardson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity, and shared the following:

Scholars of early Christianity know well that opposing interpretations of key texts can make the difference between orthodoxy or heresy, between a promise of eternal peace or the threat of eternal torment. With that in mind, I approached the Page 99 Test with some trepidation, wondering what I would find, but also what it might mean to see “the quality of the whole... revealed” on that page. I believe that readers will indeed find the quality of the book reflected on page 99 in its depth, rigor, methodology, and topic, even if its words reveal only one part of the book’s complex story.

Page 99 catches readers in a morass of insults that miaphysite Roman Christians (named for their ‘one-nature’ – mia-physis – doctrine about God’s Son) lobbed at their Chalcedonian Roman Christian opponents (who accepted the 451 Council of Chalcedon, which miaphysite Christians rejected). Page 99 cites late fifth- and early sixth-century Greek and Syriac writings of Bishop Philoxenus of Mabbug and Patriarch Severus of Antioch, two pillars of today’s Syrian Orthodox Church, immersing readers in these church leaders’ politicized struggles to claim the title of Christian orthodoxy.

Previous chapters laid the historical foundation for the project, and traced miaphysite claims to inherit orthodoxy from the church’s earlier apostles, martyrs, saints, and councils, before tracing their opponents’ genealogies of heresy through page 99. Later chapters demonstrate leaders’ strategies to persuade congregants to persevere in miaphysite Christianity for the promise of eternal rewards, even if it meant suffering and persecution in this world under Chalcedonian Christian emperors. The final chapters follow Syriac miaphysite Christians through the late sixth-century consolidation of Chalcedonian Christian power under Emperor Justinian, to the seventh-century rise of Islam, when the conquests of Muhammad’s followers separated most Syriac-speaking Christians from the Christian Roman emperors who considered them heretics.

While religious radicalization can lead to violence and schism, opponents often share more in common than their heated arguments suggest. As page 99 shows, for example, “All sides of these debates claimed to inherit orthodoxy’s lineage.” It is my hope that studying the intersections of radicalization and violence in the past might help us de-escalate our increasingly violent and polarized present.

Learn more about A Memory of Violence at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David L. Sloss's "People v. The Court"

David L. Sloss is the John A. and Elizabeth H. Sutro Professor of Law at Santa Clara University.

He is an internationally renowned scholar who has published six books and several dozen book chapters and law review articles. His scholarship covers a broad range of areas, including international law, constitutional law, and international affairs. His scholarship is informed by a decade of experience in the federal government, where he helped draft and negotiate several major international treaties.

Sloss applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, People v. The Court: The Next Revolution in Constitutional Law, and reported the following:

Readers who open the book to page 99 will see this table:

Information in the table is taken from a YouGov poll conducted in May 2024. Positive scores indicate that respondents trust a particular information source. Negative scores indicate that they distrust that source. The text after the table notes that there is a large gulf between Democratic and Republican scores for CBS, the New York Times, CNN, and Fox News.

Page 99 continues:

It is questionable whether American democracy can survive the collapse of epistemic authority.... The problem today is that democracy cannot function effectively without agreement on shared facts. The rise of the right-wing media ecosystem has undermined agreement on shared facts because denizens of the right-wing media ecosystem occupy a different factual universe than citizens who rely primarily on the mainstream media as a source of news and information.

Unfortunately, the Page 99 Test does not work very well for my book. The book is primarily a work of constitutional theory. The theory is designed in part to address the problem of democratic decay in the United States. The book as a whole demonstrates that the Supreme Court’s constitutional doctrine is a key factor contributing to the problem of democratic decay. The book elaborates a theory of judicial review that, if implemented, would transform constitutional law from a body of law that is accelerating democratic decay to a body of law that could help ameliorate the problem.

Page 99 is part of chapter 4, which deals with election-related misinformation. Election- related misinformation is one important factor that contributes to democratic decay. Chapter 4 explains how the Supreme Court’s misguided First Amendment doctrine has exacerbated the problem of election-related misinformation, thereby contributing to democratic decay. Chapter 4 also sketches the outlines of a legislative proposal that would limit the spread of election-related misinformation. The analysis shows that changes in First Amendment doctrine—changes justified by my broader constitutional theory—are necessary to give Congress the flexibility it needs to enact effective legislation to curb the widespread dissemination of election-related misinformation.

Learn more about People v. The Court at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Tyrants on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

C. Yamini Krishna's "Film City Urbanism in India"

C. Yamini Krishna is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Languages at the FLAME University, Pune, India. She has been the recipient of India Foundation for the Arts grant (2023), Asia Art Archive – Shergil Sundaram Foundation archival grant (2022), Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute Independent Research Grant (2022), Philip M. Taylor Award for best article by a new researcher (2021), Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship (2017). Her research lies in Film History, Urban History, and Deccan history. She has published in Urban History, South Asian Popular Culture, Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, and South Asia. She is the founding member of Khidki collective, a group of scholars committing to reimagining and building perspectives on regional identities with a view to challenging established narratives around history, nationhood and belonging.

Krishna applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City, 1890-2000, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book discusses the burning down of Motimahal Cinema in Hyderabad in 1936, and how that led to one of the first legislations on cinema in Hyderabad, The Cinematograph Act, 1936. Large part of early film history of the Indian subcontinent has been about British India, often it stands in for the rest of India, subsuming all other histories under it. Unlike in British India where there was regular scrutiny of films and cinemas, in princely states like Hyderabad, cinemas and performances are relatively free to operate. The state did not interfere with them unless there was an incident that called for it. On 14 June 1936, the Motimahal Cinema located in the Residency Bazaar of Hyderabad, an erstwhile Prem Theatre which was converted to cinema, was burned down due to a fire. This fire led to the death of twelve women and two children. This incident was widely reported in the press across British India and beyond. The Nizam’s State Government set up a committee to investigate the accident and the committee’s report is one of the rare documents which gives insights into understanding early cinema in Hyderabad. The committee collected testimonies from workers, operators, and audiences in the cinema, and this helps us understand who were the people that watched film, what communities did they come from, how the cinemas were structured, and what was the film viewing culture like.

At the time of the accident, the cinema was playing the film College Girl. The cinema was divided into first class, second class, royal box, and reserved seats which each class being guarded by a separate gate keeper. While there was a separate Purdah section reserved for women, some women also sat in the non-Purdah section along with men. There was also a separate zenana yard for women to relax during the break. The audience testimonies give insights into emerging tastes in cinema: one woman said to that committee that she and her husband had come to watch separate films in adjacent cinemas. Multiple cinemas in the same location indicates the sprawling business of film in the city. Other businesses like bicycle repair shops, restaurants, parking had emerged creating an entire urban economy around film going. We see a small glimpse of film as a part of urbanization, which the book discusses in depth.

After a thorough investigation the committee had concluded that the absence of Cinematograph Act in the state was responsible for the accident. They expressed their disappointment that the men present in the cinema had not made efforts to rescue women and children. They placed certain moral obligations of honour and valour on a modern man. During this tragedy one Ashrafunnisa Begum was termed as the heroine of Motimahal Cinema by the press for saving many lives.

Based on the recommendations of the committee The Cinematograph Act of 1936 came into existence. This act established guidelines of structural aspects, operational procedures, inspection protocols for cinemas. Cinemas which until then were operating in multiple ways were now forced to be standardized. This event led to the inspection of all the cinemas in the Hyderabad city, and shutting down of a few which did not meet the standards. Furthermore, the event also led to inspections in other cities of British India. The case also indicates the hands-off approach of the princely state towards regulation; an aspect which was so central to the colonial government.

Interestingly page 99 gives a sneak-peak into the method I follow in the first half of the book: to use various cases to discuss the larger distinctions and interflows of princely film history, from British India. It introduces the readers with the important actors in the first part i.e., princely state government, the British colonial administration, trader capital, early audiences, and practices. The case discussed above is one of the many other cases I use to tease out the details of capital, labor, infrastructure, and organizational details of film history in the princely city. The 99th page however does not give a sense of my second part of the book where the stage shifts from colonial world to post-colonial, and then the global world, where the actors and the networks they mobilize are different. In the post-colonial city, the state government, politics of linguistic identity, and questions of labour competition shape the film – city relationship. In the global city, the book locates the film-city relationship it is global outsourcing industries, transnational flow of capital.

Learn more about Film City Urbanism in India at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keriann McGoogan's "Sisters of the Jungle"

Keriann McGoogan has a PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Toronto. She spent months living in Belize, kayaking rivers in search of black howler monkeys and coping with the hardships of field science, including rainy-season floods, wasp stings and two bouts of malaria. Her memoir and first book, Chasing Lemurs: My Journey into the Heart of Madagascar (2021), chronicled her nineteen months studying groups of endangered lemurs in an isolated forest region. McGoogan lives in Guelph, Ontario.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sisters of the Jungle: Women Who Shaped the Science of Wild Primates, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Sisters of the Jungle: The Trailblazing Women Who Shaped the Study of Wild Primates finds us in 1966 with Dian Fossey, preparing for her long-term research on the mountain gorillas of the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda. Still green to scientific research, Fossey had been selected by charismatic archaeologist Louis Leakey to study the mountain gorillas to learn more about how our early human ancestors may have lived.

This page captures a pivotal moment in Fossey’s journey: she is buzzing with excitement as she prepares for her field research. Fossey receives help from Jane Goodall and Alan Root, and is warned of growing political instability in the region. Unbeknownst to her, as a young woman without experience in the field, her qualifications are being called into question. This blend of passion, risk, and scrutiny reflects the tensions that are at the heart of Sisters of the Jungle.

Page 99 also offers a glimpse into Fossey’s character: her stubbornness and fierce commitment to her work, even in the face of doubt and danger. These same traits would result in her groundbreaking conservation achievements, her controversial legacy, and her still-unsolved murder in 1985. In this moment, as Fossey embarks on her fieldwork, we see the seeds of her successes and her struggles.

This page exemplifies a pattern faced by women scientists in the early stages of primatology: they venture into the unknown, filled with hope, only to encounter complex realities that test their resilience, values, and sense of self. Promise and peril coexist on this page, as they do throughout Sisters of the Jungle.

Sisters of the Jungle explores why primatology became a uniquely female science and how the abundance of women primatologists has shaped the discipline. Fossey is just one of the many intrepid women who—in the early days of primatology—travelled to far-off places to learn more about wild primates and ourselves. Page 99 is a microcosm of the key themes in Sisters of the Jungle: gender, science, courage, ethics, and discovery. In this single page, we glimpse the early optimism, personal conviction, and ethical complexities that shape the stories of all the women featured in Sisters of the Jungle. Like Fossey on page 99, they all once stood at the threshold of transformation.

Visit Keriann McGoogan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Juyeon Park's "Families for Mobility"

Juyeon Park is an assistant professor of sociology at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Families for Mobility: Elite Korean Students Abroad and Their Parents' Reproduction of Privilege, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Joy’s mother — another less affluent, locally based parent — offered a distinct perspective on sending her two daughters abroad. Her dislike for the intense competition and fierce academic rivalries typical of schools and hagwons in Gangnam (the most affluent district in Seoul) drove her decision to enroll her children in a school near family in the United States: “One day, I asked Joy, ‘Would you prefer to study in Gangnam or go to the United States and live with Grandma?’ She replied, ‘Mom, I heard all the kids in Gangnam are so smart. They seem intimidating.’ That’s when I decided to send Joy and her sister to live with my mom in the United States.” With her parents and brother residing in the United States, sending her children there for their education was a feasible and economical choice. She framed her transnational parenthood as also financially motivated rather than educationally purposeful, stating, “If my parents and brother were not living in the United States, I wouldn’t have sent my kids there for school. [...] We saved a considerable amount of money [that would have been spent on English hagwons], thanks to my family.”

With two daughters studying in the United States for more than five years, Joy’s mother wanted to view their education abroad primarily as an opportunity for them to experience life outside of Korea rather than as a stepping stone to cosmopolitan careers. She envisioned overseas education as liberal, flexible, and culturally diverse—qualities she imagined rather than had firsthand experience with: “Looking back, I believe sending Joy to the United States was the right choice. She’s such a creative and insightful kid, with a sharp perspective on things. Although I didn’t fully realize it at the time, her teachers have consistently highlighted these qualities. Studying in the United States has been really beneficial for her.”

Although this page does not present the core argument of the study, it offers an important example that illustrates the diversity among my participants. Joy’s mother, introduced in detail on page 99, was among the very few parents who lacked significant transnational resources, such as foreign degrees or overseas work experience. Her positionality, shaped by this absence, set her apart from other parents in terms of how she understood the purpose and benefits of her child’s Ivy League education.

Whereas most parents with sufficient financial and cultural capital—whom I refer to as highly transnational parents—strategically viewed their children’s study abroad as a deliberate means of reproducing class privilege, particularly transnational mobility, a small number of parents—whom I call locally based parents—framed their children’s overseas study as more accidental than intentional or necessary. This contrast highlights how class produces meaningful differences—and, as I argue, inequalities—among Korean parents who send their children to elite U.S. colleges.

Visit Juyeon Park's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey H. Cohen's "Eating Grasshoppers"

Jeffrey H. Cohen is a professor in the department of anthropology at Ohio State University and the author or coeditor of several books, including Eating Soup without a Spoon: Anthropological Theory and Method in the Real World.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Eating Grasshoppers: Chapulines and the Women Who Sell Them, with the following results:

Eating Grasshoppers, tells the story of the women who sell toasted grasshoppers (chapulineras selling chapulines) in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Page 99, in the chapter “Building a Touchless Economy,” follows chapulineras as they create a touchless economy in response to the lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lockdowns devastated Oaxaca’s rural and urban marketplaces. The impact was immediate; sales fell, and it became difficult for chapulineras to connect with their clientele. The page notes the importance of cell phones to new and old clients and allowing people settled far from Oaxaca who now had the opportunity to order for delivery.

Page 99 makes clear the role cell phones play: “Bargaining and sales that might have been missed or simply impossible to conduct in the past can take place;” and sets the stage to understand how chapulineras used cellular services to create a touchless economy and manage the lockdowns.

For readers, page 99 is a good page to land upon. You’ll likely want to learn more about the ways chapulineras beat the lockdown and save a lot of people from going hungry! Ideally the readers’ interests are piqued, and they will want to learn more about these entrepreneurial women and how they created a dynamic market system. These topics and more are covered in parts I and II of the full text.

The story of the women who sell toasted grasshoppers is one of entrepreneurial success. It is easy to think that chapulineras are following in the footsteps of history; prepping edible insects as their ancestors did thousands of years ago.

Reality is more complex. Eating Grasshoppers recounts the historical importance of chapulines, and documents how chapulineras 1) meet the growing demands of restauranteurs and foodies; 2) connect with and export to consumers abroad; 3) create a touchless economy during the pandemic and 4) navigate the challenges of rural poverty.

Visit Jeffrey H. Cohen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heidi R. Lewis's "Make Rappers Rap Again"

Heidi R. Lewis is Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College. Lewis' first book, In Audre's Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk examines how women of color resist subjugation and do solidarity. She has also published in Womanism Rising, Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies II, The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, the Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, and Indivisible: Alliances against Racism and contributed to NewBlackMan, NPR, and Bitch.

Lewis applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Make Rappers Rap Again: Interrogating the Mumble Rap "Crisis", and shared the following:

Page 99 is in “‘Outsiders are welcome—but not, of course, necessary!’: The South,” the third chapter of Make Rappers Rap Again. Here is where I begin to explain the subjugation of Mumble Rap by situating it as Southern, noting most mumble rappers are from the South and that the subgenre is largely powered by Southern DJs and producers. I more substantially underscore the Southernness of Mumble Rap by examining mumble rappers’ discursive claims to the South in their lyrics and music videos and the ways they showcase Southern pride and/or appreciation vis-à-vis citational and collaborative politics.

At the top of page 99, there’s a screengrab from Missy Elliott’s music video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” (1997). Underneath is the conclusion of the paragraph that begins on the previous page, a discussion about the ways mumble rapper StaySolidRocky (Virginia) has been influenced by Missy and Pharrell Williams, Hip Hop’s Virginia old heads. The following paragraph, which concludes on the next page, is the start of a discussion about The Neptunes (Pharrell and Chad Hugo). I understand Ford’s original claim about the Page 99 Test to be focused on the quality of a text. In that way, page 99 gives readers a relatively good idea about the overall quality of Make Rappers Rap Again.

First, my argumentation is largely anchored by my decades long and very close relationship with Hip Hop, as well as my careful study of and attention to its vast history. I don’t simply argue Mumble Rap is “real Hip Hop” because I like a great deal of it. I make that argument by examining its congruence with myriad definitions of real Hip Hop. To do that effectively, I had to “dig in the crates” early and often. So, I was glad to see at least one footnote on page 99, because the book is heavily footnoted, and the bibliography is extensive.

Second, discourse analysis is my primary methodology. Discourses are highly regulated statements and concepts, but they’re also highly regulated technologies and practices, and I made every effort to be as comprehensive as possible in that regard. So, I was also glad to see an image on the page. I feature a lot of visuals so readers can better understand my arguments and perhaps develop their own. For that reason, the companion website features those same images (in color), playlists of all the music videos and songs I examine, and my interview with DJ Drama.

Visit Heidi R. Lewis's website, and check out the companion site for Make Rappers Rap Again.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Fusco's "Hollywood's Others"

Katherine Fusco is associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature: Time, Narrative, and Modernity (2016) and coauthor of Kelly Reichardt: Emergency and the Everyday (with Nicole Seymour, 2017).

Fusco applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System, and reported the following:

When you crack Hollywood’s Others open to page 99, you’ll meet Lon Chaney’s Erik the Phantom at his most optimistic, as he tells Christine Daaé that “your love will restore me.” I summarize this scene of The Phantom of The Opera (Julian 1925) in which the two characters converse for the first time, Christine accuses Erik of being the Phantom haunting the opera house, and he explains that if he is a monster, it is due to man’s hatred of him. He suggests to Christine that his “spirit” will overcome the fear produced by his mask. Poor Erik! As I argue on 99, everything about Daaé’s behavior and The Phantom of the Opera’s staging and editing will prove the opposite. I write, “as the film plays out, it exposes the limitations in the relations among viewing subject, viewed object, and such redemptive affects.” In the explanation that follows, I start explaining what this looks like, including the film’s habit of framing them in a two-shot, which she keeps fleeing. In contrast, I point out that when she is with her normate lover Raoul, they are framed together an exchange copious amounts of bodily fluids: kisses, tears, whatever is on an exchanged soggy handkerchief!

Though things don’t work out for the Phantom, it appears the Page 99 Test has worked out very nicely in my case. My book is about the limitations on feelings like sympathy or admiration in Hollywood films and fan magazine of the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter on Lon Chaney is all about how his stardom was discussed in terms of his impersonations of disability and disfigurement. While Chaney’s transformations were obviously appealing to his many fans, I argue that the star discourse—the talking about stars—that appeared in fan magazines warned against too much or too close identification with those framed as “other.” When Chaney died young, magazine articles (falsely) speculated about his suffering in imitation of disability as the cause of his death. Basically, a theory of sympathy for the other as fatal!

While other chapters of the book take up different cases—the marketing of Black child stars to white audiences, the disavowal of the pain of star suicides, a child star at a time child labor was being contested—the example of Chaney’s performance as the Phantom works very well to capture the skepticism I want us to have about what work commercialized or manufactured identification can do. As I see it, old fan magazines such as Photoplay acted as a kind of school for teaching Americans about the limits of feeling with and feeling for those positioned as other. Throughout the book I take up a series of stars who were limit cases, with whom white, able-bodied, hetero, or otherwise normative fans were encouraged to identify, but not too much. In the early movie magazines, fans were taught that sometimes their love should have a limit.

Visit Katherine Fusco's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas J. Main's "Reforming Social Services in New York City"

Thomas J. Main is Professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Rise of Illiberalism, The Rise of the Alt-Right, and Homelessness in New York City.

Main applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Reforming Social Services in New York City: How Major Change Happens in Urban Welfare Policies, with the following results:

In my case The Page 99 Test comes very close to working but not quite. On page 98--close enough, I think--there is an important exchange I had with J. Philip Thompson, who was Mayor de Blasio's deputy mayor for Strategic Initiatives. I interviewed Thompson and many players in New York City's welfare policy community. My big question was how to get the myriad set of agencies, bureaucracies, governments, and other players to coordinate their efforts to help the city's poor find work. Here's what was said:

Main: "You're saying, well, yes...the system is fragmented. But you're working to make it less fragmented....What other initiatives are you undertaking to try to reduce fragmentation?

Thompson: Well, vision...workforce [policy] is tremendously underdeveloped.... In terms of vision, I think there's general unclarity over what the future of work will look like.

Very interestingly, Thompson did not say what is needed to make government systems for employing people work better is more money, or more political will. No doubt he would like to see work development programs get more money and political support, but those were not his immediate answer to my question. His answer was "vision," that is convincing ideas, backed up with good field testing, about what actually works in helping people find jobs.

One of the main themes of my book is that the power of public ideas in policymaking is much underrated by many observers. By a public idea, or vision, I mean a pithy concept, backed up with a lot of rigorous research, about what government should do. In the 1990s, welfare policy was dominated by the public ideas of "end welfare as we know it," and "work first." They sound pretty vague, but they were backed up with high-quality research that showed welfare agencies put too much emphasis on making sure only eligible people received benefits and not nearly enough on helping people find jobs and succeed at them.

My point is that, whatever one might think of 1990s welfare reform, the combination of a simple formulation with plenty of good research to support it, is a powerful way to reform dysfunctional bureaucracies and to coordinate a fragmented system. When policy entrepreneurs can come up with such a vision, major change in government is possible.

Learn more about Reforming Social Services in New York City at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Obst's "Saving Ourselves from Big Car"

David Obst is a former journalist, publisher, screenwriter, and film producer. He worked as a literary agent for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, among others. Obst is the author of Too Good to Be Forgotten: Changing America in the ’60s and ’70s (1998).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Saving Ourselves from Big Car, and shared the following:

Page 99 lands in a chapter titled Car Dreams that details how Big Car – the network of industries, insurers, lawmakers, and lobbyists that my book reveals are not so slowly killing us with car crashes, lead poisoning, and toxic emissions – sold the American people on the idea that a car in every driveway is the epitome of successful living.

The page starts with an ending. Bertha Ringer arrives home after driving 60 miles to visit her mother and launches a new craze – the family road trip. But we reveal that the husband who welcomes Bertha home is none other than Carl Benz – as in Mercedes Benz, and that “The accompanying publicity helped bring Bertha and Carl’s company its first sales.”

This road trip trend demonstrates how Big Car drove culture which then drove big business: “Motor tourism was literally a get-rich-quick scheme that worked. In fact, road trips became so popular in America that a National Road Trip Day was established and is still observed every Friday before Memorial Day.”

Of course, this suited Big Car’s needs, too, and it’s clear our cars were going to cost us, one way or another: “Big Car didn’t hesitate to serve these new motorists. . . automobile laundries began to appear [that] cost the equivalent of a typical office worker’s hourly pay ($1.50) for the service.”

Unfortunately, while a fun story, page 99 will not give readers a sense of what the book is about. The remainder of the book explains the tremendous cost we’ve paid, which is that Big Car, in the last hundred years, has killed more humans than World War II and destroyed our environment.

This is a well-documented exposé on how a conglomeration of the automobile, gasoline, insurance, construction, and lobbying industries has dominated our lives over the last hundred years. It proves that the key decisions made by Big Car were exclusively to increase their bottom lines, and that, even when they knew what they were doing was wrong, they continued to do it in the name of profit.

The book is an easy read, with a wealth of anecdotal material, and the final chapters examine people and communities that are trying to develop alternatives to our long-standing reliance on the personal automobile.

My hope is that, like Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed, this book will start a new awareness of the critical need for us to take action before it’s too late.

Visit David Obst's website.

--Marshal Zeringue