Edward Hall's "Power and Powerlessness"

Edward Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. He works on three main research areas: political ethics, liberal political thought, and realist political theory.

Hall applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty-First Century, with the following results:

Page 99 of Power and Powerlessness is near the beginning of Chapter 4, which focuses on torture. On this page, I distinguish between three reasons why agents of the state torture. These are, first, to intimidate torture victims or third parties; second, to force confessions; and third, to secure valuable intelligence. I also remind readers that all three forms of torture occur in liberal-democratic regimes today.

Does page 99 give readers a good idea of the whole work?

Not really. The central aim of my book is to argue that the liberalism of fear – the negative and cautionary vein of liberal thinking, most famously articulated by Judith Shklar, which urges us to prioritize the avoidance of public cruelty – has something significant to teach us about politics in the twenty-first century. This matters because many prominent critics dismiss the liberalism of fear as an outdated form of “Cold War liberalism” that has little to say beyond blandly insisting that liberal democratic regimes are less terrible than their authoritarian alternatives. In contrast, I suggest that because contemporary liberal democracies invest people with coercive power that is routinely used in cruel ways, liberals today should be preoccupied by the question of how public cruelty can be mitigated.

The book is split into two parts. In the first part (chapters 1-3), I offer a detailed reconstruction of Shklar’s writings on the liberalism of fear and offer a defence of the liberalism of fear from various objections. In the second part (chapters 4-7), I employ this perspective to reflect on four issues of pressing political concern that all liberals should be deeply perturbed by today: torture, policing, immigration control, and hate speech. Here I depart from Shklar and engage with these issues in first-order terms, offering novel arguments about what the liberalism of fear suggests for these vitally important political matters.

Page 99 is, therefore, near the beginning of Part Two where my argument pivots. This is a crucial moment in the overall argument. However, page 99 does not typify what the book is about. Does Power and Powerlessness therefore fail the Page 99 Test? Perhaps not. Even though this discussion of torture is not very revealing of the overall project, I hope the page does reveal something about the quality of the book.

Learn more about Power and Powerlessness at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan S. Jones's "Opium Slavery"

Jonathan S. Jones, an assistant professor of history at James Madison University, is a historian of the United States Civil War and Reconstruction era (1820-1920) as well as American medicine and health.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis, and reported the following:

Page 99 presents evidence that the Civil War contributed significantly to the spread of opiate addiciton in the 19th century United States. This page presents evidence that the contemprary Americans blamed a surge in addiction on the war, while also noting that many Americans used drugs for a variety of reasons that were not connected to the lingering affects of war.

The Page 99 Test works moderately well for Opium Slavery. It gets at half the argument—that the Civil War caused an epidemic of opiate addiction among veterans. However, the other takeaways from the book—how addiction negatively affected veterans, what they did about it, and the epidemic’s lasting significance—are missing here. Perhaps that’s unsurprising, considering the multifaceted nature of America’s first opioid crisis. But certainly, the Page 99 Test gives a good snapshot of the book.

Opium Slavery is the first comprehensive history of the Civil War’s opioid epidemic. Schlolars and other interested folks, like medical doctors, have long been aware that some Civil War veterans used drugs. But we’ve never been able to guage the scope of addiction, let alone its lived experience or consequences. By reconstructing this history, we get the most detailed portrait of 19th-century drug users to date and a tragic view of the Civil War’s unexpected legacies.

Visit Jonathan S. Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Justin Randolph's "Mississippi Law"

Justin Randolph is Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history. His work has appeared in Southern Cultures and the Journal of Southern History; he has received prizes such as the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. His current research includes an oral history project with the first Black police officers after Jim Crow segregation as well as a cultural history of the Taser.

Randolph applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Mississippi Law drops readers into a local fight against America's regime of Jim Crow apartheid during the 1950s. In some ways I think it provides a fairly accurate snapshot of the book. The ingenuity of everyday people. A scope of violence too easily described as "segregation." Activist recognition of the police as part of a system of inequality. These are all historic truths I emphasize on page 99 and throughout the book. Yet this page should also leave readers wanting more.

Page 99 falls in Chapter 5, “The Cattleman’s Massive Resistance.” This chapter establishes the connections between new forms of rural economic power and so-called massive white resistance, the racist fight against a new phase of Black freedom struggles. Page 99 begins in Columbus, Mississippi, a small city by rural Southern standards. And there we meet two important activists, Emmett Stringer and Flora Ghist Stringer. The page covers the years in their lives between World War II and ends in 1954, the year the US Supreme Court invalidated racial segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. Black Mississippians like the Stringers drove civil rights movements in a time before civil rights icons like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. took center stage. The page shows us a world of possible futures. Will white elites simply implement Brown and desegregate the schools? Will Black Mississippians be allowed to continue to register to vote in larger numbers? Will segregationists find enough pro-segregation Black leaders to attack civil rights activists on the government’s behalf? The page ends in a moment when the future was far from certain.

None of these imaginable outcomes came to pass, and so page 99 should leave folks wanting more. Readers who continue in Chapter 5 and the rest of the book will find how the everyday campaigns against Black human rights came from all directions. Bankers canceled activist lines of credit. Insurance brokers refused to renew activist policies. Civil rights activists turned on each other. Police and courts amplified their criminalization of Black life in historic proportions. And yes, as the chapter title implies, Mississippi’s beef cattlemen frequently led the effort. One created the global white Citizens’ Council movement. Another expanded the state police force, a central topic of the rest of the book.

Learn more about Mississippi Law at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Mason's "Seeking the High Ground"

Matthew Mason is Professor of History at Brigham Young University and the author of Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World, with the following results:

On page 99 of Seeking the High Ground, fortuitously enough, readers will find the opening of a new chapter in the book, chapter 5, entitled “Humanity.” “The concept of humanity played a central role in both the imperial crisis and the Revolutionary War,” the chapter begins. After defining that ideal for 18th-century Anglophone thinkers, I note that “humanity’s most politicized manifestations in the imperial crisis and war included ideals connected to civilization, moderation, and the proper locus of sovereignty throughout these conflicts, and to military discipline during the war. To lay successful claim to it was to be safely within all the right categories in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, including proper religiosity as well as the cult of sensibility.” The rest of this chapter explores how the politics of slavery connected to all these angles for humanity as both Patriots and Loyalists, and their respective British allies, sought to lay claim to this virtue for their cause.

As such, the Page 99 Test works uncannily well as an indication of the kind of things I’m arguing in this book. For the five chapters of it dedicated to the American Revolution, I try to show how debaters on both sides connected slavery to the moral (and thus political) high ground for which they contended. They did so in complicated ways linked to the multiple facets of those ideals that constituted the high ground.

This is my contribution to the debate over slavery’s relationship with the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. Some historians argue that the traditional explanations of the American Revolution, centering on issues and taxation and representation with their accompanying high-sounding ideals, do not capture the way in which the defense of slavery and white supremacy drove the Patriot movement. And as such, these historians argue, the Revolution strengthened American slavery. Their opponents argue that we should take the traditional explanations, and the stated idealistic motives of the Patriots, seriously, and that the rise of antislavery was the really notable impact of the Revolution. I argue that it is better to see how slavery naturally and pervasively connected to those traditional issues and ideals. And I contend that for that reason, the Revolution had both specific antislavery and specific proslavery consequences for both the new United States and the remaining British Empire. So in short, the Page 99 Test works very well in my case.

Learn more about Seeking the High Ground at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward E. Andrews's "Newport Gardner's Anthem"

Edward E. Andrews is a Professor in The Department of History and Classics at Providence College. A scholar of early American history, his work explores issues related to race, religion, and slavery in early America and the Atlantic World. His first book, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, was published in 2013. His new biography, Newport Gardner's Anthem: A Story of Slavery, Struggle, and Survival in Early America, reveals the remarkable history of an important but forgotten African leader in early New England.

Andrews applied the “Page 99 Test” to Newport Gardner's Anthem, and reported the following:

Flipping to page 99 of Newport Gardner’s Anthem will reveal two of the major themes of the book: struggle and survival. A formerly enslaved African living in post-Revolutionary Newport, Rhode Island, Newport Gardner became a key leader, organizer, and activist for a community that had been historically oppressed and marginalized. In these pages we see Gardner’s struggles to keep a school running for Black children in the first decades of the nineteenth century, as well as his crucial role as a leader in the town.

Newport Gardner helped to found the African Benevolent Society in 1808, an organization primarily dedicated to the education of the people of color in the town of Newport. Not only did Gardner serve as president of this Society for years on end, but he was also one of the teachers in this promising school. But, as page 99 makes clear, the school had a rocky history. Opening with excitement and optimism, by the late 1810s the Society barely had enough money to keep it going. They even shuttered it temporarily and used the meager funds left over in the treasury to pay for private tutors instead. By the early 1820s it was back in action, but by that point Gardner was also looking to other reform projects, like creating a free Black church and, eventually, emigration to Liberia.

So, yes, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Newport Gardner’s Anthem, as we witness Gardner’s struggles to help his community survive in a city that offered no public education for Black children, dismal economic prospects, and limited civic rights. It highlights Gardner’s critical role as a Black leader in the region and foreshadows some of the other initiatives he will take on – church building and African emigration – towards the end of his long, fascinating life.

Learn more about Newport Gardner's Anthem at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pamela Walker Laird's "Self-Made"

Pamela Walker Laird is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin, which won the Hagley Prize; and Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Self-Made: The Stories That Forged an American Myth, and shared the following:

The American Revolution created openings and incentives for ambitious men to assert self-made success following centuries when that claim would have risked both their souls and social capital. Page 99 captures this transition in the evolution of the myth of self-made success. It describes how the label “aristocrat” shifted from a mark of esteem and authority to a “catch-all political pejorative, contrasted against ‘self-made’ as a catch-all political encomium” when the new political order required elites to seek votes from among recently enfranchised men. Aristocracy’s loss of cultural authority was one of many competitions for political authority fought in cultural arenas, as Self-Made reveals.

Page 99 also describes how Andrew Jackson’s opponents reframed the story of Roger Sherman as “A SELF-MADE MAN.” In the rough electoral politics around 1830, these partisans claimed this important Founding Father as a model of self-improvement and citizenship.

Throughout, Self-Made mixes ideas, such as America’s anti-elitist rhetoric, with stories about people, some still famous, some not. In that way, page 99 is a good measure of my approach. It also reflects one of the book’s arguments, namely that stories about self-making initially presented positive connotations by highlighting men who served faith and community. Sherman’s story is one of many that confirm that the materialist, individualist values now associated with “self-made success” are neither natural nor representative of the long stretch of American history.

Page 99 does miss several essential elements, however. It lacks a milestone to indicate that it’s only part-way along a four-century narrative, so readers might think the book is all about the Revolutionary era. Nor does it promise to explain how “self-made success” came to be associated with individualist economic success. Most of all, page 99 misses the book’s “So What?” If your hypothetical browsers were to look two pages ahead, they would see that as early as 1830, apologists had already begun using the myth to justify inequality and the regressive distribution of common resources.

Learn more about Self-Made at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gerard N. Magliocca's "The Actual Art of Governing"

Gerard N. Magliocca is Distinguished Professor and Lawrence A. Jegen III Professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. He has written six books and many articles on American constitutional history. His book, Washington's Heir: The Life of Justice Bushrod Washington (2022) won the Erwin N. Griswold Book Prize awarded by the Supreme Court Historical Society.

Magliocca applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, The Actual Art of Governing: Justice Robert H. Jackson's Concurring Opinion in the Steel Seizure Case, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Actual Art of Governing talks about how the invention of nuclear weapons increased executive power. Harry Truman was the first president with the exclusive authority to blow up the world. Moreover, President Truman argued that his unilateral decision to seize and operate the nation’s steel mills during the Korean War was justified in part by the need to safeguard America's nuclear program. Taken to its logical conclusion, the President’s nuclear authority could justify almost any unilateral executive action. If the President can destroy mankind by himself, then why can’t he do something less consequential on his own like raising taxes?

Turns out that page 99 nicely captures one of my book’s central themes. The Actual Art of Governing is about Justice Robert H. Jackson’s concurring opinion in the Supreme Court's Youngstown decision rejecting President Truman’s steel seizure as unconstitutional. Justice Jackson’s concurrence is the most influential opinion ever written on the separation of powers between Congress and the President. One reason why is that the opinion self-consciously updated the Constitution’s structure for an age in which the President was far more powerful at home and abroad than the Framers could have imagined. For example, Jackson wrote about the fact that Congress could and sometimes did give the President significant (though temporary) emergency powers. He also explained that the President was fully capable of persuading Congress to give him additional authority through his role of the head of state, the leader of his party, and his dominant media presence. As a result, courts should exercise great caution in giving the President emergency authority without such a statute or in circumstances that were at odds with legislative practice. At the same time, Jackson said that the President must have broad latitude to act on his own overseas given America’s role as a global superpower.

Learn more about The Actual Art of Governing at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan: Constitutional Law and the Politics of Backlash.

The Page 99 Test: American Founding Son.

The Page 99 Test: Washington's Heir.

--Marshal Zeringue

John R. Haddad's "Thrill Ride"

John R. Haddad is Professor of American Studies and Popular Culture at Penn State Harrisburg. He is the author of America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation and Cultures Colliding: American Missionaries, Chinese Resistance, and the Rise of Modern Institutions in China.

Haddad applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thrill Ride: The Transformation of Hersheypark, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes near the start of chapter 4. That chapter begins with Hurricane Agnes striking Central Pennsylvania in 1972. In Hershey, the torrential rains caused the creek that runs through Hersheypark to overflow, which led to massive flooding. The first part of page 99 catches the very end of a very touching story. Hersheypark employees rather heroically tried to save all of the animals in the nearby zoo and in Hersheypark. The park had two trained dolphins, Dolly and Skipper, whose lives were at risk because their saltwater tank had filled with muddy flood water. Since they would not survive in there for long, these heavy animals had to be physically lifted out and carried by a group of men up a steep hill to a pool – in a driving rain! Page 99 then introduces the main topic of the chapter, which is the demolition of Hersheypark landmarks. The backstory here is that, in 1972, the park was under construction because they were converting the old amusement park into a modern theme park in the model of Disneyland. Page 99 explains that this overhaul required the destruction of cherished landmarks inside the park – the Picnic Pavillion, Bandshell, and Starlight Ballroom. These structures had been built by Milton Hershey generations ago and had become sites of community memory. Thus, it was jarring for the community to watch them get razed. This chapter, in sum, is about a very emotional and tumultuous time in Hershey history!

This test does not work in the most obvious sense in that page 99 does not capture the larger idea of the book. However, if you read between the lines, you will discover that the Page 99 Test actually does work – though in very subtle fashion. Let me explain. The book tells the story of Hersheypark, from 1906 to the present day. However, the focus is squarely on the 1970s, because this was a transformative decade in the life of the park, one filled with big changes. The demolitions of landmarks and the construction of a modern theme park were two changes, but there were others. All this change was especially hard on the local community, which preferred Hershey “the way it was” and struggled mightily to adjust. The book explains how Hersheypark’s leaders really cared about the local community. In building a theme park, they opted for a sensitive design that used architecture and theming to honor the past and persuade local residents to accept change. Even though page 99 does not explicitly convey this point, I think that the love and dedication of park officials for the town’s beloved park does shine through in the heroic way they sought to save animals. Park officials invested that same level of caring in designing and operating the new theme park, which opened in 1973 – the year after Hurricane Agnes.

I hope readers will enjoy this book. By conducting interviews and reading company records and oral histories at the Hershey Community Archives, I uncovered lots of stories like this one. Taken collectively, these stories tell the remarkable history of Hersheypark. It is a unique place – unlike all other theme parks. The book was a joy to write, and I hope people find it informative and fun to read!

Learn more about Thrill Ride at the Penn State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Watts's "Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville"

Edward Watts is professor emeritus of English at Michigan State University. His previous book, Colonizing the Past: Myth-Making and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing (2020) was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2021.

Watts applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds the reader late in chapter four, a chapter that looks at the creeping suspicion among readers that “Indian Haters” might not be the uncritical heroes they become in dozens of stories, novels, poems, plays, histories, and travelogues between 1820 and 1860. Based on the legends of historical figures like Tom Quick or Lewis Wetzel, “Indian Haters” were white men on the American frontier between 1760 and 1830 who purportedly responded the loss of family members at the hands of a few “Indians” (strawmen of settler fantasy, nothing to do with genuine indigenous peoples) by vowing to kill all Indians and then largely succeeding, “out-savaging the savage,” in the terms of one scholar, marking racial superiority at an atavistic level. For decades, Indian Haters had been portrayed in sensational texts as heroes and martyrs, doing the necessary dirty work of settler colonialism, sacrificing personal safety for the race and nation. However, as Indian Haters were depicted more and more sensationally, skepticism crept in. On page 99, my discussion of Charles Averill’s ridiculous novel Kit Carson: Prince of the Gold Hunters (1849) concludes. Averill portrayed Carson as an Indian Hater, an obnoxious attempt to cash in on public interest in both the California Gold Rush and Carson’s celebrity after his depiction in John C. Fremont’s popular narrative. As the page ends, Carson’s own refutation of his textual exploitations begins in a responding text supposedly dictated to Dewitt Peters: the historical Carson was not an Indian Hater and, in fact, would marry two indigenous women, though his much later actions in the 1863 massacre of the Navajo cannot be forgiven.

While page 99 accurately represents the work, it does so in a minor key, as this chapter examines a broad variety of texts that celebrate Indian Haters into virtuous heroes. Averill’s book was soon forgotten, thankfully. Furthermore, his book was part of a broader effort to transpose a legend born in the eastern woodlands to the far West in order to establish a unifying narrative for the increasingly geographically disparate US. Other chapters offer more sustained readings of major Indian Hater fictionalizations by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Herman Melville. However, the book is mostly about the function of print culture and public media in the larger project of antebellum settler colonialism as seen through the example of the trope of Indian Haters. Averill wanted badly to profit from participating in the triumphant settler agenda. However, as Peters’ redemption of Carson on page 99 shows, this process was not monolithic or unilateral (as settler culture is often theorized to be). Averill’s Kit Carson stands as a dubious attempt to create a mythology suited to the racial and cultural goals of the settler nation as it aspired to subjugate the lands and peoples it intended to control and exploit. Peters’ pushback, in microcosm, reveals an intra-cultural tension that symbolizes the fragility and incompleteness of settler nationhood, even as it so wanted stability and totality

While Carson has come down (mostly) as a hero, it is not because he was or was not an Indian Hater. In Milford, Pennsylvania, there is still a Tom Quick Inn, named for a local Indian Hater who boasted of killing ninety-nine Lenape to avenge his father. Until recently, a monument to him in a public park that explicitly celebrates those killings. Currently, the monument remains in storage, its resurrection challenged by the descendants of the Lenape Quick never got around to. In other words, while my book studies an old story, even as shown on page 99, its subject pertains in 2025, as the settler nation still struggles about what parts of its past to embrace and which to disavow.

Learn more about Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Satya Shikha Chakraborty's "Colonial Caregivers"

Satya Shikha Chakraborty grew up in India and is Associate Professor of History at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). Her research and teaching focuses on histories of South Asia, British Empire, gender and sexuality, colonial medicine, and visual culture.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India, with the following results:

Page 99 of Colonial Caregivers contains an image, and very little text. The image shows an oil portrait of a British family fleeing during the violence of the 1857 Indian Rebellion (fought against the British East India Company’s rule in India). It was painted in 1858, in commemoration of the rebellion’s anniversary, by the British artist Abraham Solomon, who had never visited India. The reason I have included this painting in my book is because of the depiction of the British family’s Indian ayah (nanny/maid). She is shown carrying one of the British children, as she faithfully follows her British employers, even as her own countrymen are rebelling against British colonial rule. The painting, following the tradition of European art, places the brown ayah in the shadow of the trees, while moonbeams bathe the British women and child, who are thus resplendent in a surreal white glow, in contrast to the dark shadowy figure of the ayah. The rest of the page introduces a British fiction from 1872, where the plot centers around the sudden disruption of the “very happy home” of a British family, the Ogilvies in colonial Calcutta, when the 1857 Indian Rebellion breaks out. The Ogilvies are saved thanks to the intervention of their loyal Indian ayah Tara, who hides them from the rebels. The page ends with quotes from the fiction highlighting the supposedly “strange contrast” between the white “little golden-haired girl” of the Ogilvies, and the dark “faithful ayah” Tara.

While a random snippet, nevertheless, I feel, page 99 does give a good sense of some of the core arguments of my book – how the darkness of the South Asian ayah was used as a foil to highlight the white racial purity of the British family, particularly the British child. The chiaroscuro technique used by the British painter and the “strange contrast” mentioned by British writer demonstrate the visual and literary construction of race in a colonial context, particularly whiteness. The figure of the ayah, as my book shows, played a crucial role in British attempts to highlight their own racial purity at a time when inter-racial concubinage and “mixed” race children in the empire caused moral anxieties in Britain. The fidelity of the ayah to the British family, which we see in both the painting and the fiction, showcases another point my book makes – the sentimentalization of the love and loyalty of the colonial Indian caregiver, particularly during moments of anti-colonial violence (such as the 1857 Indian Rebellion), provided moral legitimacy to British colonialism in India.

So, the Page 99 Test sort of works for my book Colonial Caregivers, which argues that the South Asian ayah provided not only domestic labor, but also moral labor for the British Empire. The idealized ayah archetype, my book further argues, erased the precarious lives of real-life ayahs. Elsewhere in the book, we see numerous case-studies of ayahs who were sexually assaulted by their European masters, physically chastised by their mistresses, not paid their promised wages, taken to Britain to provide care-labor to British families during the long ship-voyage, but then abandoned without return-passages to India. The book also shows how colonial medical archives naturalized the care-labor of hardy brown women for fragile white women in the tropics, and upheld caste-based discrimination of ayahs in the name of hygiene. British cultural veneration of the ayah (which we see on page 99) obscured the vulnerabilities and everyday experiences of colonial domestic workers, which the book exposes.

Visit Satya Shikha Chakraborty's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scot Danforth's "An Independent Man"

Scot Danforth is the Jack H. and Paula A. Hassinger Chair in Education and Professor of Disability Studies at Chapman University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights, and reported the following:

A reader opening to page 99 would almost get an accurate understanding of my book.

Page 99 glimpses the preliminary sparks that foretell the blazing fire to follow. My book tells the story of the origins of the American disability rights movement through the life of activist leader Ed Roberts, a quadriplegic man who organized disabled students at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960’s. He helped develop a national network of over four hundred independent living centers, self-help units where disabled people assist one another to live successfully in the community. Roberts traveled the world spreading the outrageous idea that people with all kinds of disabilities could live full and rich lives.

On page 99, the graduate student Roberts met with his mentor, the brilliant Professor Jacobus tenBroek. Roberts and his hippy friends, an activist crew of a dozen students with physical disabilities, crafted the radical idea that their troubles were not caused by their failing bodies. Late night rap sessions in the infirmary campus housing yielded the crucial idea that what held them back was the many social and architectural obstacles in the larger society. The students planned a new kind of organization uniting people with many disabilities to work for dramatic social change.

Jacobus tenBroek seemed the perfect person for the upstart Roberts to consult. A blind man, the great scholar was the dedicated leader of the National Federation of the Blind, a coalition of blind people advocating for their own well-being. His prescient speeches presaged the political path forward that resulted ultimately in the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

TenBroek blasted the paternalism of the traditional blindness charities. Looking down upon blind people with pity, the nondisabled charity leaders acted to control a population they viewed as deficient. TenBroek called for blind people to lead the way to their own emancipation.

Roberts asked his mentor if people with other types of disabilities could join the National Federation for the Blind to create the revolutionary, multi-disability political organization that Roberts envisioned. Sadly, the Professor disagreed.

Roberts knew tenBroek was wrong. The disability rights revolution required unity. In 1980, Roberts worked with Canadian activists Henry Enns and Jim Dirksen and hundreds of disabled advocates from across the planet to found Disabled Peoples International, the first worldwide organization fighting for the rights of all disabled persons.

Learn more about An Independent Man at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mitchell B. Cruzan's "Looking Down the Tree"

Mitchell B. Cruzan is Professor of Biology at Portland State University. He received his BA and MA in Biology from California State University, Fullerton, and his PhD from Stony Brook University. He is currently an associate editor for Molecular Ecology, a leading journal in the field. He has previously published an advanced textbook, Evolutionary Biology: A Plant Perspective (2018).

Cruzan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Looking Down the Tree: The Evolutionary Biology of Human Origins, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Looking Dawn the Tree – The Evolutionary Biology of Human Origins we get a taste of how this book explores different ideas for the origin of human characteristics. This page introduces proposals concerning the origin of the clitoris and female orgasm in humans and sets up subsequent pages that evaluate these ideas. It discusses suggestions from previous authors on the origin of the clitoris. One is that that it is simply an artifact of development like nipples and non-functional breasts in men. Another suggests that we inherited it from a common ancestor that was similar to bonobos, where sexual interactions – and especially between females – were important for social bonding. In subsequent pages we come to understand that human clitoris is not just an accident of development or a leftover from an ancestor, but is a highly functional organ. We learn that it has a high density of nerve endings and is one of the most complex organs in the human body. The fact that orgasm releases hormones that make a woman feel relaxed and safe with their partner suggests that it has a function that was favored by natural selection in our ancestors. We come to the conclusion that the clitoris and female orgasm contributed to pair bonding and the maintenance of stable relationships for male-female and female-female couples. This was critical for the survival of our ancestors because, as brain volume tripled from Lucy’s species to ours, infants were born much earlier in development and required more parental care than could be provided by a single parent. We ultimately learn that stable relationships and cooperation within the clans of our ancestors was critical for their survival.

So yes, opening this book to page 99 would give a reader a good idea of the writing style and content of this book. I think that most readers would be intrigued enough by what they read on this page to continue with subsequent pages to see where it led. But this single page is not representative of all of the content of Looking Down the Tree. As the cover suggests, there’s more to this book than just a discussion of science. As a non-fiction book, this one is unique because it includes vignettes into the life of a fictional character who lived around 70,000 years ago. The story of her life serves to vividly illustrate the struggles and challenges that our ancestors faced. By the end, my hope is that readers will have a much deeper appreciation of the circumstances that led to our unique appearance and behaviors; like any other animal, our species is the product of the environments experienced by our ancestors as they struggled to survive.

Visit the Cruzan Lab website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Davis's "A Biography of a Mountain"

Matthew Davis is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale, and the first English-language children’s book published in Mongolia, The Magic Horse Fiddle. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among other places. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Davis lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, a diplomat, and their two young kids.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book dives into the politics of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, and begins to explore how his politics impacted his art. A representative sentence from this page is: “Borglum’s own politics were antiestablishment and championed the individual against overarching systems, beliefs he extended towards his art.”

In this sense, page 99 is both representative of the book as a whole while also limiting the book’s aperture. It is representative in that the relationship between politics and art is crucial to the meaning of Mount Rushmore—how Gutzon Borglum’s politics influenced his ideas behind the memorial, and how today’s politics influences its contemporary meaning is an important element of A Biography of a Mountain. But it is limiting in that what I hope to accomplish with this book is expand the story of Mount Rushmore beyond the actual sculpture itself. It is why the work of art is decentralized on the cover in favor a broad picture of the mountain of Rushmore, and why so much time is spent reporting from the present-day Black Hills. The actual sculpture is essential to any book about Rushmore, as is Gutzon Borglum. But what I hope to do in my book is tell a fuller picture of how the memorial came to exist in the Black Hills, how it represents the complicated conversations we are having today about the narratives of American history, and how it reflects the processes by which we memorialize those narratives. In this sense, page 99 limits that perspective.

Visit Matthew Davis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Griswold's "Resurrecting the Past"

Sarah Griswold is Associate Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. She has published articles in the Journal of the Western Society for French History, War & Society, and the Journal of the History of Collections.

Griswold applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate, and reported the following:

From page 99:

...the latter dynasty having displaced the Umayyads, moved the seat of Islamic power to Baghdad, and encouraged a historicization of their predecessors as despotic and decadent. German scholar Julius Wellhausen’s Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902) most influentially chipped away at the old paradigm, his book asserting the bias of Abbasid historiographers. Meanwhile, the Jesuit priest Henri Lammens, a historian of early Islam at the Université. Saint-Joseph in Beirut, became a leading public apologist for reinterpreting the Umayyads, doing so on either side of World War I; his La Syrie (1921)—written at the behest of the French High Commission—repositioned the long-discredited Umayyads as both Syria’s best Islamic legacy and Islam’s apogee, characterizing the religion as in moral, political, and cultural decline ever after.

It was thus amid this broader reformulation of the Umayyads that work at the Great Umayyad Mosque took shape, the site becoming a showpiece of the French regime’s focus on the Islamic past, and for multiple reasons. For one, it remained geographically axial and religiously dynamic in present-day Damascus. Built from 706 to 715, the Great Mosque continued to anchor the old city in the 1920s.

Does the Page 99 Test work in the case of Resurrecting the Past? I think so: oui. Page 99 drops readers into my 300-page book, which focuses broadly on heritage work in the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon, a regime set up after WWI. The page distills a critical shift that the book traces from the Christian preservation projects that anchored France’s initial claims in the Levant to projects about the Islamic past that seemed more politically serviceable by the late 1920s. The page, moreover, is neatly half text, half image--a layout that, if not all that common in the book, is still telling about its methods and arguments.

The text alludes to how French officials in Damascus had started to rethink what heritage should mean in a mandate setting that no longer felt "controlled" or practicable in the long-term. The image—a 1931 aerial photograph taken by France's aviation forces—shows Damascus' Great Umayyad Mosque, whose rediscovered 8th-century mosaics were suddenly being hailed by French heritage specialists as proof of earlier Christian and Islamic coexistence. The glittering tiles, French officials suggested, showed historical cooperation—and, by implication, justified French involvement in Syria and Lebanon.

It's also noteworthy that my page 99 suggests how images work in Resurrecting the Past. The book depends on images because the mandate’s heritage work did also. And this particular photograph illustrates a point that I make throughout the book: that heritage was produced through a dialectic relationship between representation and materiality.

Here we get a classic “view from above" of the Mosque that was shot by French military photographers and appeared in magazines back in France. The image is a reminder that the French wanted to frame how the Mosque was presented to French publics back home. But the Mosque is also, very clearly in its own right, a massive structure anchored in the heart of Damascus, and those properties gave the site qualities that often eluded French attempts at control.

You can see here, all on page 99, how real materiality and representational framing both defined heritage-making.

Learn more about Resurrecting the Past at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna-Luna Post's "Galileo's Fame"

Anna-Luna Post is a historian of knowledge at Leiden University. She is interested in all facets of the world of scholarship and learning in the early modern period. Trained as a cultural historian and Italianist, she is also fascinated by the intersections between early capitalism and environmental history, especially in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Post has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, Cambridge University, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, and the Medici Archive Project and the Netherlands Institute for Art History in Florence. She studied in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Bologna.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Galileo's Fame: Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century, and shared the following:

Readers opening my book on page 99 will be met by a black-and-white portrait of Galileo smiling at them. The portrait, made by Francesco Villamena, appeared in his 1613 work Letters on Sunspots, a polemical work flowing out of a dispute between Galileo and a German Jesuit, Christoph Scheiner, over the nature of dark spots that could be observed on (or near, according to Scheiner) the sun’s surface. Villamena’s portrait captures Galileo, dressed in a fur-lined robe, below two putti holding the instruments of his scholarly fame: his geometrical compass, the telescope, and the books he had published thus far. Most of the page is taken up by the portrait and caption, leaving space for just five lines of text. These lines let readers know that this was the first of Galileo’s works to include an author portrait, and convey the idea that an author’s portrait often served to capture readers’ attention and establish a sense of familiarity. The last line tells readers that the Accademia dei Lincei “paid for the design and worked—”, but then the page cuts off…

Alas, I don’t think the Page 99 Test works too well for my book, as it may give readers the wrongful impression that the book consists of 80% images and 20% text. Still, page 99, which appears in the middle of the third chapter, does showcase my book’s approach and thematic focus.

Galileo’s Fame recounts how a remarkable cast of characters, including artists, poets, philosophers, popes, lower clergymen, cardinals, courtiers, and, yes, the members of the Accademia dei Lincei, shaped Galileo’s fame through a variety of media. The book consequently embraces a wide variety of sources, pays careful attention to the visual culture of the time, and is not afraid to pursue in-depth analysis of poems written in Galileo’s honor: page 99 lies in the middle of a chapter that focuses especially on such poems and the visual artefacts of Galileo’s fame. I use these sources to show how people with different relationships to Galileo could try to latch onto his fame, in order to advance some of their own career goals, and argue that this could be beneficial (the poems meant attention!) but also detrimental (the poems did not always give him full credit) to Galileo.

That said, within the book, chapter 3 (“Admiration and Appropriation”) stands out as it discusses a full cast of characters for whom fame was a good thing. The other four chapters, meanwhile, show that for many seventeenth-century observers fame usually elicited some form of suspicion as well, as they associated it with gossip, the unreliable and unruly opinion of crowds, and with pride. In this way, the book captures the highly ambiguous nature of scholarly fame in this period, showing that fame was at once a highly coveted, and a controversial asset.

Learn more about Galileo's Fame at the University of Pittsburgh Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sanya Carley and David Konisky's "Power Lines"

Sanya Carley is the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. She is the coauthor of Energy-Based Economic Development: How Clean Energy Can Drive Development and Stimulate Economic Growth. David Konisky is the Lynton K. Caldwell Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, where he researches US environmental and energy politics. He has authored or edited six books, including Cheap and Clean: How Americans Think about Energy in the Age of Global Warming.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Power Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition, with the following results:

Page 99 of Power Lines comes toward the end of a chapter that discusses the challenges many Americans have in affording energy for their homes. Among the challenges for low-income populations is accessing energy assistance programs.

The first full paragraph reads:

A final important barrier is that many people distrust the government officials that implement energy assistance programs; that distrust may extend to the companies contracted to install energy efficiency upgrades in people’s homes. This distrust is reflected strongly in figure 4.3, which shows that only 6 percent of all low-income households called their utility company when they were struggling to pay their energy bills, and only 11 percent sought government assistance.

The Page 99 Test works reasonably well for our book, as it highlights a key theme of Power Lines that energy-related disparities – in this case, access to affordable and reliable energy utility services – are not merely a function of income, but also broader factors such as how people feel and interact with public and private actors. Energy assistance programs are poorly funded and only reach a fraction of the people that need them. On page 99, we demonstrate that the limited reach of these programs, in part, results from people not trusting government agencies and utility companies.

The overall argument of Power Lines is that the ongoing clean energy transition, despite its overall benefits, will create challenges for many people, including higher energy prices, job displacement, and burdens from living near new infrastructure. None of these challenges are reasons to reverse the transition. The urgency of the climate crisis means we need to accelerate the transition to cleaner sources of energy (e.g., wind, solar) and new, more efficient energy technologies (e.g., electric vehicles, heat pumps). At the same time, we need to devise public policies and programs to assure that all Americans will benefit from this transition.

Learn more about Power Lines at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Zakaras's "Freedom for All"

Alex Zakaras is professor of political science at the University of Vermont. He is the author of The Roots of American Individualism and Individuality and Mass Democracy and is coeditor of J. S. Mill’s Political Thought.

Zakaras applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Freedom for All: What a Liberal Society Could Be, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book falls near the beginning of a chapter about the exploitation of American workers in today’s economy. On this page, I’m discussing the history of American attitudes about economic freedom. In the early nineteenth century, not long after the country was founded, Americans tended to believe that most people who worked for wages were unfree. At the time, the United States was a nation of farmers, and most white families owned (or were on a path to owning) their own farms. Americans celebrated the independence of landowning small farmers who were their own bosses and who controlled their livelihoods; by contrast, they saw wage- earners as dependent on others for their daily bread, lacking economic security, and subservient to bosses or managers.

The Page 99 Test does not work very well for my book, because this is one of the few sections that looks backward into the (distant) past. If you started reading on this page, you might conclude that this is a book about American history; it’s actually about America today and in the future. Still, the themes I explore on this page are important throughout the book. The question I’m considering here is what a truly free economy would look like. In the eyes of our founders and the generations who lived right after them—including many of the abolitionists who fought to end slavery in this country—free markets were not enough, nor was economic growth or overall prosperity. If people doing essential work are economically stressed, vulnerable to being fired at will, and working in hierarchical workplaces that demand subservience, the country itself is not free—or so these early Americans believed. They also wanted an economy that was fairly equal, without extremes of opulent wealth and grinding poverty, where people could look one another in the eye as social and civic equals. For all these reasons, they would have been deeply unsettled by the American economy today.

Freedom for All argues that deep inequalities in wealth, power, and opportunity have pulled this country apart and left us vulnerable to demagogues and authoritarians. The book also invites us to imagine what our country could be if we really committed ourselves to building a society in which everyone is equally entitled to live freely.

Learn more about Freedom for All at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Georgina Wilson's "Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature"

Georgina Wilson is an early modern literary scholar specialising in material texts. Her work has been published in Criticism, The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England, and Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

Wilson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature, and shared the following:

Opening Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature at page 99 puts us near the beginning of chapter 3 of 4. We’re over half way through the book (excluding endnotes), which suddenly makes it seem shorter than it had felt to write. Taking part in a pattern of short, punchy chapter titles, chapter 3 is entitled ‘Form’; it’s about the history of formalism and the role of paper (as an imaginative and material form) in that history. Two of the three paragraphs are broader brush – the kind of ‘history-of-the-discipline’ stuff that might be useful for readers looking to situate themselves within the longue durée of material texts – while the third paragraph dives into a close reading of the early modern theologian William Pemble.

That swooping between the bigger picture and granular close reading is representative of the book as a whole, and the critics cited on this page (D.F. McKenzie, Peter Stallybrass, Margreta De Grazia, Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry span multiple generations of scholarship in a way which, I hope, also reflects something about the book. At the same time page 99 is broadly about book history rather than paper and so prises open the focus of the argument. The particular affordances of paper and form only start to emerge from William Pemble’s similies about souls and whiteness which are abruptly truncated by the edge of the page.

Having just taught an MSt class in which we discussed the units of pages, leaves, and sheets in relation to early modern books, I couldn’t help wondering what page 99 would mean in some of these different configurations. The real 99th page in this book, accounting for title pages and preliminary material, is numbered page 91, and comes at the end of possibly my favourite chapter on ‘composition’. This chapter is about the gathering together of stray sheets and paper fragments into books as a model for gathering words into sentences, and I enjoyed thinking about my own writing as I put the argument together. If Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature were a quarto – printed from sheets of paper folded twice to make 8 pages per sheet - then page 99 would fall on the 13th sheet, printed at the same time as pages 98, 102, and 103. Imagining this book as an octavo or a duodecimo would place page 99 in relationship to a plethora other pages. So to really do justice to the potential of early modern paper we couldn’t talk about page 99 without talking about all those other pages as well, and eventually we’d have to abandon the idea of the single page and go back to the unit of the book.

Learn more about Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Pearson's "Grievous Entanglement"

Erin Pearson is Associate Professor of English at Elon University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, with the following results:

As the pivot point between the two sections of Grievous Entanglement, the single paragraph on page 99 aptly introduces the book’s major concerns. It reminds readers that consumption-as-connection, the focus of the book, existed because meanings of the word “consume” shifted in the eighteenth century to include the economic sense of buying as well as older, largely negative senses like “eat” and “destroy.” The book as a whole argues that this semantic shift unlocked new ways for people far away from slavery to envision their own connection to (and complicity in) slavery. Consumption-as-connection revealed how everyday purchases drove a system designed to make human beings (economically) consumable. As page 99 notes, the first section of the book explores how this conceptual framework enabled people to understand commodities like sugar and tobacco as direct links to the enslaved laborers who had produced them. The rest of page 99 introduces the book’s second section, which moves from depictions of actual commodities to the metaphors of violent eating that permeated the discourse on slavery. Commentators repeatedly used metaphors of cannibalism or ravenous animals to capture the depredations of chattel slavery as well as its economic logic.

While page 99 offers an overview of the structure and argument of Grievous Entanglement, it does not give a sense of how that argument is developed. Grievous Entanglement investigates a conceptual framework adopted by a wide range of people throughout the Atlantic world. In order to show the pervasiveness of this thought pattern, the book carefully analyzes small details in a variety of texts, including poems, paintings, songs, political cartoons, novels, and antislavery pamphlets. A reader might thus get a better idea of the work by turning to a page that analyzes how Harriet Jacobs deploys animal imagery to denounce enslaver appetites or how Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses cannibalism metaphors to critique consumers’ failure to recognize the source of their luxuries. One chapter considers not only the lyrics of a blackface minstrel song, but the significance of the material form of the book in which it was printed; another traces how narratives by formerly enslaved abolitionists who resisted hungry animals influenced academic painting on both sides of the Atlantic. These cultural close readings illuminate historical conceptions of slavery, and that, ultimately, is the heart of the book.

Learn more about Grievous Entanglement at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Horbinski's "Manga's First Century"

Andrea Horbinski began studying Japanese in college after she started watching anime in high school, and went on to research hypernationalist manga in Kyoto on a Fulbright Fellowship. While pursuing her PhD in history and new media at the University of California, Berkeley, she harnessed her love of manga and pop culture, writing a general history of manga in its historical and global contexts for her dissertation. Along the way, she uncovered the role that fans of manga have played in the medium’s development since its earliest decades, mirroring her own experience in sci-fi and online fandoms since childhood.

Her new book, Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989, is the result of ten years spent researching, reading, and thinking about manga on three continents, including research stints in Belgium and Japan.

Horbinski applied the “Page 99 Test” to Manga’s First Century and reported the following:

Page 99 of Manga’s First Century takes readers to the 1930s, discussing the ideals and leading figures of the Shinmangaha Shūdan (New Manga Faction Group). The group rose to prominence in this decade by expanding manga for adults to new publication venues under the slogan “market acquisition” (shijō no kakutoku), and sought to avoid political content in their manga—a wise move amongst the escalating censorship of wartime Japan. Although they were quite well-paid for professionals at the time, two of the group’s leading figures, Kondō Hidezō and Sugiura Yukio, apparently saw the Shinmangaha and its activities as complementary to their interest in anarchism. The remainder of the page briefly discusses the nature of anarchism in imperial Japan, and how it was easily twisted to serve the wartime state.

In one sense, this page literally lives up to Manga’s First Century’s subtitle of “creators and fans,” as the Shinmangaha members were upstart young creators seeking to expand manga’s ambit beyond what the establishment thought was wise—a recurring phenomenon in my discussion of manga’s history in the 20thC. And insasmuch as I sought to explain how manga became manga, it is representative of that aspect of the book too; although the Shinmangaha and its creators are not well-known outside Japan (and are somewhat forgotten nowadays there too), they played a key role in manga in the 1930s and 1940s, and themselves became the manga establishment in the 1950s. Bringing otherwise obscure creators and developments in manga to light, and explaining how they fit together and led to the manga that people around the world love today, is the book’s project.

At the same time, this isn’t the page I would necessarily pick to sell readers on the book, even if it does reflect significant aspects of the whole. The Shinmangaha’s leading members achieved a kind of soft landing and were co-opted into the so-called New Order by the end of the 1930s; Kondō Hidezō became the central figure at Manga (1940-45), the state-approved manga magazine that was one of the few outlets in which publishing manga was permissible after 1940. Their experience was thus atypical of manga on the whole, which was censored nearly out of existence as many creators were drafted, blacklisted, or simply driven out of the profession in these years. In this straitened era, manga fans kept manga alive by avidly rereading older manga, either from each other’s personal collections or through used and rental bookstores—which laid down consumption patterns that exploded into new modes of manga entirely after the war. As one excerpt from a largely chronological account, page 99 is only a snapshot; there’s far more to manga history in the book than this one page contains, and readers will learn a lot more about many other people and developments in that history by picking up the book.

Visit Andrea Horbinski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan A. Stapley's "Holiness to the Lord"

Jonathan A. Stapley is an award-winning historian and scientist. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University and has been active in the field of Mormon History for two decades.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship, and shared the following:

In a famous line from “I Believe,” one of the catchiest songs from The Book of Mormon musical, Elder Price declares, “that God has a plan for all of us. I believe that plan involves me getting my own planet.” It’s funny. It is also a flawed caricature that largely does not map onto the beliefs of individual members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (more commonly called “Mormons”).

Latter-day Saints are constructing temples throughout the world. They excitedly take the public on tours of these iconic buildings once they are complete. But after the prayers of dedication, the public is excluded and church members make promises not to talk about what happens inside. The result is often awkward. Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship is a detailed explanation of the religious ceremonies that occur within these temples, their history over the last nearly 200 years, and an exploration of their religious meaning in the lives of church members. There is a bit of ritual theory and religious studies, but it is mostly history.

Page 99 notes how “it can be tempting to focus on the exotic beliefs” of nineteenth century Mormons. I write this after describing in vivid detail the religious cosmologies of Brigham Young—the leader of the church from 1844 to 1877—and perhaps his most prominent wife, Eliza Snow. Their beliefs about the afterlife and eternal destination of the human soul are the seeds for Elder Price’s goofy Broadway declaration. Page 99 deals with perhaps the most “exotic” elements of Latter-day Saint history. These beliefs are largely irrelevant to the lived religion and beliefs of the millions of practicing Mormons who worship in temples today. But they are also necessary to understand the trajectory of those beliefs and practices.

Page 99 fails at being representative of Holiness to the Lord as a whole. But it is still key for the book to represent the history of the Latter-day Saint temple as a whole.

Visit Jonathan A. Stapley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek Edyvane's "The Politics of Politeness"

Derek Edyvane is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. He was previously a lecturer and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York where he earned his PhD. He works on incivility, injustice, citizenship, and the ethics of political resistance and is the author of two books: Community and Conflict (2007) and Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil (2012). He was awarded the Political Studies Harrison Prize for his article 'Incivility as Dissent' (2020).

Edyvane applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Politics of Politeness: Citizenship, Civility, and the Democracy of Everyday Life, with the following results:

Politeness is often imagined as a stuffy affair of rigid conformity to social rules and conventions. But when we look more closely at how politeness actually works on the ground of everyday living, a much more interesting picture emerges.

Page 99 of The Politics of Politeness, which falls almost exactly halfway through the book and somewhere in the middle of Chapter 4, explores what happens when the usual norms of politeness are unclear or contested. In moments like these, politeness doesn’t retreat - it gets creative.

Taking the example of a shop-keeper who code-switches his manner depending on the customer, page 99 contends that this isn’t just savvy customer service, but rather a kind of social improvisation. In many everyday settings, politeness actually consists in the wisdom to depart from rigid etiquette and to adapt. It’s about crafting interactions that honour a deeper ‘civilizational’ ideal: the will to live decently alongside other people.

In this way, page 99 informs the reader of one of the book’s central ideas: its sense of the ritual-like nature of politeness and the suppleness of the ritual in the face of urban superdiversity. It also captures the book’s insistence on the embeddedness of the politeness ritual in a larger (and more controversial) civilizational bedrock.

Still, the Page 99 Test is not wholly satisfactory as a browser’s shortcut. It doesn’t quite capture the book’s core claim: that politeness is political. The book argues that the way we navigate politeness in daily life has real consequences for the health and vitality of democracy. And it argues that we can therefore use political theory to help us better understand the dilemmas of everyday civility.

That said, page 99 does offer at least a clue. After all, politics is often the art of negotiating difference and diversity. And what is politeness, if not a quiet, everyday way of doing just that?

Learn more about The Politics of Politeness at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maxim Samson's "Earth Shapers"

Maxim Samson is a geographer and the author of Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World. An award-winning educator and researcher, he has taught and presented keynote lectures at universities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Indonesia. In addition to working as an adjunct professor at DePaul University in Chicago, he is the immediate past chair of the American Association of Geographers’ Religions and Belief Systems research specialty group and serves as associate editor of the Journal of Jewish Education. In his free time, he enjoys long-distance running and exploring the culture and language of his favorite country, Indonesia.

Samson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, from the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way, and reported the following:

Page 99 brings readers about three quarters of the way through the third chapter, which examines how people have molded and remolded the planet to make travel more convenient. Specifically, the chapter draws attention to the somewhat controversial development and administration of the Panama Canal; the excerpt quoted below covers one of the final episodes before the USA handed over control to Panama:

And so, when insistent words and the withdrawal of economic and military aid failed to pressure Noriega to stand down, in late 1989 the United States opted to initiate its last assertive hurrah in Panama. Contending that democracy, US citizens’ lives in Panama and the very integrity of the Torrijos–Carter Treaties were all threatened by a military dictator who had turned the country into a loathsome hub of drug trafficking, President George H. W. Bush’s forces succeeded in chasing down and ousting a former ally in a matter of weeks, via a highly unorthodox method. Having learned that this notorious drug smuggler with a penchant for prostitutes was hiding out in the unlikely confines of the Holy See’s diplomatic offices in Panama City, the Americans’ successful strategy involved blaring out a playlist of rock anthems with a common theme: ‘Manuel, your days in charge are numbered’. Though many international observers were outraged by what they viewed as a flagrant violation of Panama’s sovereignty and international law – the invasion, that is, not the refrains of ‘No More Mister Nice Guy’ by Alice Cooper or ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ by Bon Jovi – and the United Nations General Assembly condemned the invasion by a vote of seventy-five to twenty, few in Panama seemed to care. Finally, Americans and Panamanians appeared to be on the same page, assured that with the strongman out of the picture, the connective infrastructure the United States had built and managed according to its own interests could now work to Panama’s benefit as well.

This excerpt offers readers only fragments of Earth Shapers’ central theme—how through our fashioning of geographical connections, humans have guided the course of history—as it focuses rather narrowly on one of the book’s eight case studies. One can learn far more about how the Panama Canal fits within the book as a whole by reviewing the following page, which commences the conclusion to this chapter. Even so, a reader of page 99 can glean certain insights about Earth Shapers, not least my (hopefully) accessible writing style and my commitment to finding surprising and intriguing events relevant to my book, as I portray the farcical story of US forces passive-aggressively playing rock music to smoke Panama’s controversial general Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican’s embassy. While the following page is more explicit about this point, page 99 also hints at the USA’s close interest in Panamanian political affairs, a reality that endures, albeit primarily now in relation to China’s geopolitical influence, to the present day.

Visit Maxim Samson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue