Peter Ekman's "Timing the Future Metropolis"

Peter Ekman teaches the history and theory of landscape and urbanism in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. He is a postdoctoral fellow at USC's Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, and at the Berggruen Institute.

Ekman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds us in the middle of a discussion of two curious works of urban analysis published in the first half of the 1960s: The View from the Road (1964), by Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John Myer; and Signs in the City (1963), by Appleyard and Lynch. There is also discussion of “Designing and Managing the Strip,” a 1974 working paper by Lynch and Michael Southworth. All three attempt to reckon with the changing forms of the American metropolitan region in the age of ascendant automobility — without simply writing them off as “formless,” although that vocabulary appears here — and to mark out strategies by which planners and architects might redesign cities and highways to enable more pleasing visual experiences at high speeds.

The View from the Road, a minor classic of postwar urban studies, employs colorful language, evoking mechanized movement in terms of various senses and media: quoted here, “episodes” of automotive perception are “like a magazine serial” or an “articulated but ‘endless’ composition, of the kind typified in jazz or medieval polyphony.” View was a publication of the Joint Center for Urban Studies, an interdisciplinary institution based simultaneously at Harvard and MIT, and this page occurs within a broader discussion of the group’s equivocal efforts to “go public” with their thinking, whether in greater Boston — then planning the ring road that gave rise to this study — or elsewhere.

Page 99 certainly does not encapsulate the book, but how it diverges from the rest of the text is diagnostic, both of some failures of the Joint Center, the group through which the book narrates a broader intellectual history of planning and urbanism in the U.S., and of my own path to the topic.

The tension between “basic” and “applied” urban research recurs across all six chapters, and the Center never truly resolved it to their satisfaction or anyone else’s — e.g. the Ford Foundation, their main funder, who sounded these notes repeatedly in their periodic reviews; ordinary residents of Boston, who bristled at the Center’s tentative forays into urban redevelopment; and the residents of Ciudad Guayana, in Venezuela, of all places, where the Center helped plan a city from scratch in partnership with a regional development authority modeled on the TVA. This last episode is the focus of my fourth chapter, and there we reencounter Appleyard and Lynch. Lynch visited Ciudad Guayana as a consultant; Appleyard analyzed its central avenue as a case study in “sequence design” and later published a whole book, Planning a Pluralist City (1976), on the New Town. It is in that context, not on page 99, that readers at last see some of the remarkable visuals from The View from the Road, which include diagrams of drivers’ projected sightlines and hand-drawn images of the landscapes those drivers would be seeing, frame by passing frame, from various points along Boston’s circumferential highway.

More fundamentally, the split between the styles of thinking represented by Lynch, a central figure in postwar urbanism who grounded all of his work in a deep concern for the physical form of cities, and the majority of Joint Center principals, who overruled him and drifted toward aspatial, less richly visualized, often quantitative approaches heavily indebted to the social sciences, represents another core tension in postwar intellectual life on which my book dwells. Although it is basically a work of intellectual history, I am a geographer by training. Geography has perpetually been riven by similar splits — between quality and quantity, absolute and relational space, materiality and representation, form and process. And, as I discuss in the book’s first chapter, the discipline was being downsized across the U.S. — following the all-important closure at Harvard in 1948 — precisely as the Joint Center and other “organized research units” oriented to “urban studies” began to take the place of academic departments of geography, which, I tend to think, might have done some of the same work more compellingly.

In short, the Page 99 Test works imperfectly, but this page nonetheless offers glimpses of the larger book and documents some possibilities for postwar urbanism that remained substantially untapped.

Learn more about Timing the Future Metropolis at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Cannell's "Blood and the Badge"

Michael Cannell is the author of five non-fiction books, most recently Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation. His previous books are A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc., Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling, The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit, and I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism.

Cannell has worked as a reporter for Time and an editor for The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications.

Cannell applied the “Page 99 Test” to Blood and the Badge and reported the following:

Page 99 of Blood and the Badge recalls a true story from the Brooklyn streets. On the late afternoon of September 3, 1987, a mid-level mafiosi named Frank Santora was walking down Bath Avenue in Bensonhurst, a quiet stretch of shops and well-kept homes, when a man crept up from behind and unholstered a .38 revolver. Santora was not the target. The shooter aimed instead at Santora’s friend, Carmine, a member of the Lucchese crime family. Carmine fell dead on the doorstep of the Bath Avenue Dry Cleaning and Tailor Shop. Meanwhile, Santora took two stray bullets in the torso. He dribbled a trail of blood as he stumbled to the doorway of a delicatessen, G & T Salumeria, but did not enter. Instead, he teetered and fell to the ground in an alley between deli and dry cleaner. He was pronounced dead thirty minutes later at Victory Memorial Hospital.

This lurid incident does not reflect the overall story of two decorated NYPD detectives who acted as double agents, and assassins, for the Mafia.

Santora’s accidental murder is, nonetheless, critical. It was Santora, after all, who connected his jailhouse friend, Burt Kaplan, an exalted drug dealer, with his cousin Louie, a corrupted cop, and his partner, Steve. Santora told Kaplan that Louie and Steve could do more than run license plate numbers or share sensitive information aboutwho the police surveilled and which Mafia soldiers had turned informant. The detectives would do anything, Santora said. Anything.

Visit Michael T. Cannell's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Limit.

The Page 99 Test: The Limit.

My Book, The Movie: Incendiary.

My Book, The Movie: A Brotherhood Betrayed.

Writers Read: Michael Cannell.

My Book, The Movie: Blood and the Badge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Smith's "Word across the Water"

Tom Smith is the Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. His work has been published in Diplomatic History, Historical Journal, and American Nineteenth Century History.

Smith applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Word across the Water: American Protestant Missionaries, Pacific Worlds, and the Making of Imperial Histories, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Word across the Water finds us at the opening of the book’s third chapter – the last of the book’s three chapters on Hawai‘i before the second half discusses the Philippines. The page describes how Native Hawaiians writing to newspapers in 1911 criticized descendants of Protestant missionaries in the islands who had denigrated the performance of hula dances as obscene and immoral. These Native Hawaiians instead defended the hula as a dignified tradition of historical narration. They argued that any perceptions that the hula was a corrupted or indecent activity resulted not from the hula itself, but from outsiders’ failure to truly understand it. At the same time, the page introduces the fact that some descendants of missionaries around this time were in fact breaking away from negative representations of the hula, coming to appreciate it as an aesthetic form.

The page illuminates many of the book’s key themes. The work as a whole explores how historical narration became an important mode through which US Protestant missionaries and their descendants working in Hawai‘i and the Philippines came to understand their relationship both to US empire and to the places in which they worked, around the time at which the United States colonised both island groups in 1898. It argues that, as we see on page 99, historical narration was contested terrain at these sites of empire as missionaries sought to establish the authority of the written word and of religiously inflected narratives over Indigenous forms of engagement with the past, represented on page 99 by the Hawaiian hula. The book also argues, however, that the distinction between missionary and Indigenous forms of historical narration was not as clear-cut as missionaries would have liked their audiences to believe. As they sought to style themselves as experts and authorities, missionaries and their descendants engaged with local traditions in ways that drew them away from an overarching sense of US imperial or historic purpose. The end of page 99 suggests how we see this in Chapter 3 – some descendants of missionaries who had grown up in the islands began to celebrate the hula and to style themselves as experts on it. They missed, or indeed deliberately obfuscated, the dance’s profound political and historical meanings for Native Hawaiians, but through supposedly objective study of it navigated their own anxieties about existing between the imperial and the local.

Learn more about Word across the Water at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Hewitt's "Darwinism's Generations"

Martin Hewitt is a Visiting Professor in the School of English, University of Leeds, and Research Affiliate of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnogaphy, University of Oxford. He was formerly Professor of History and PVC and Dean, Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, and Belcher Visiting Fellow in Victorian Studies at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, 2020-2023.

Hewitt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Darwinism’s Generations: The Reception of Darwinian Evolution in Britain, 1859-1909, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Darwinism’s Generations contains the larger part of two paragraphs discussing the extent to which there is evidence that readers of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 came to accept his arguments. Not just that they were profoundly influenced by them, but that they were convinced and so converted. The case of the Cambridge zoologist Alfred Newton (1829-1907) is used to show that retrospective professions of immediate acceptance are frequently not supported by correspondence from the weeks and months immediately after Origin’s appearance, and also to raise the possibility that figures like Newton, who later made great play of his Darwinian credentials, made deliberate attempts to weed their personal archives of material that might have contradicted their public position. Newton’s private papers, which contain tens of thousands of letters from across his life, are notably and even suspiciously thin for the years immediately after the Origin. But even so, the odd scattered remnant does indicate that despite his later claims he was not persuaded immediately, and was moved at first less by Darwin’s arguments than by the vulgar personal attacks of Darwin’s clerical opponents. The second case is that of the geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875). Lyell’s 1868 edition of his seminal Principles of Geology (first edition 1830-1833), has frequently been used to demonstrate the transformative impact of the Origin. The discussion here accepts that Lyell did go much of the way towards endorsing Darwin’s arguments, but points out that this was only after a decade of quite tortured doubt and intellectual struggle, notwithstanding his closeness to Darwin and his allies, and even though the earlier editions of Principles had themselves been an important part of the scientific foundations on which evolutionary theory was constructed. Lyell was an ideal potential convert, but his evolutionary beliefs remained narrowly providential in ways quite alien to Darwin’s own.

In one sense, then, readers dropping into Darwinism’s Generations at page 99 will be taken to the very heart of its specific purposes and methods. They are confronted with its central question: how individual beliefs were changed by the publication of the Origin; and with its fundamental proposition: that this change was more cautious and conflicted than is often thought. And they are presented with the sort of focused readings which are at the heart of the book’s method of ‘extensive reading’, the intensive sifting of the reactions in print and in private of a large number of subjects (over 2000 individuals in all).

What they will not immediately be confronted with is the book’s over-arching generational agenda. For the explorations of evolutionary beliefs are intended merely as a case study of a much broader phenomenon – the extent to which generational patterns shaped Victorian culture and its debates. Generational analysis is much in vogue; but largely across the last 100 years. Where it extends before 1914, it is more usually rooted in relations within family generations, of parents and offspring. Darwinism’s Generations has larger ambitions. While conceding that there were no stable generational identities in Victorian Britain, and accepting that the most widely-used generational theories tend to structure discussion in ways not which make the nineteenth century unpromising ground, the argument of the book is that generations, and indeed sociological rather than just familial generations, did matter in nineteenth century Britain. The response to Darwin’s Origin of Species shows this and offers many suggestions as to how and why.

Indeed it helps to demonstrate that Victorian cultural debate, while always a matter of exchange between classes, genders, races and religious and political positions, was also a conversation between generations. The viscerally hostile response of early Victorians, born c.1797-c.1813 to the Origin was quite different to the frequently easy and often enthusiastic acceptance of the generation born c.1830 to c.1845, the ‘high Victorians’, both in turn distinct from the sort of non-Darwinian evolution reluctantly accepted by the mid-Victorians (c.1814-c.1829), or the sectarian squabbles of the late Victorians (c.1846-c.1859). Both Newton and Lyell are marginal figures in this schema, born on the very boundaries of two generations, and not best placed to underpin this schema. And yet, as later discussions in the book of both of them illustrate, even their vacillations and uncomfortable compromises illuminates the cohering force of different generational standpoints.

Visit Martin Hewitt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Armston-Sheret's "On the Backs of Others"

Edward Armston-Sheret is the Alan Pearsall Fellow in Naval and Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Studies, University of London.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, On the Backs of Others: Rethinking the History of British Geographical Exploration, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, readers will discover two new things about the history of exploration. First, I examine the contributions of working-class naval sailors to meteorological research in Antarctica on Robert Falcon Scott’s final expedition (1911–13). I highlight the contributions of two men: Able Seaman Harry Dickason and Petty Officer Frank Browning to the scientific work of the expedition’s northern party.

Second, readers will learn about the use of violence by African explorers, including Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone. Both men used force to exert control on their expeditions Explorers held somewhat different attitudes to such violence. Stanley, for example, boasted about it to portray himself as an authoritarian commander, while other explorers often edited such incidents out of their published accounts.

These two examples do effectively summarise the central argument of my book. On the one hand, they show how Victorian and Edwardian explorers depended on the skills and labour of people often overlooked within mainstream histories of exploration. On the other hand, the page illustrates how such people were poorly treated by expedition leaders.

Page 99 also shows some of the complexities of writing about such individuals. Throughout the book, I wanted to try to bring to life the experiences and contributions of the often- overlooked people who made British expeditions possible. At some points this involved focusing on their agency and autonomy. Yet I also found it vital to write about the oppression and violence that some explorers carried out.

One thing I really learned in writing this book was that power relations often changed over the course of an expedition. For instance, they could be affected by the unexpected illness or injury of an expedition leader. Their control over expeditions was only partial. But they often sought to assert control by writing about their journeys in certain ways. The complex relationship between exploration and power is something I return to throughout the book and is a major theme in page 99.

Visit Edward Armston-Sheret's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate's "Reversing Deforestation"

Brent Sohngen is CFAES Distinguished Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. Douglas Southgate is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at The Ohio State University.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Reversing Deforestation: How Market Forces and Local Ownership Are Saving Forests in Latin America, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book, Reversing Deforestation, opens a new section of chapter 5 titled “Sustainable Forestry.” The text on the page illustrates how forests can be managed sustainably over the long-term using either “Maximum Sustainable Yield” (MSY) or “Faustmann” rules for the age to harvest trees. We begin by describing how these approaches were worked out in the 1700s by foresters who were worried about dwindling tree supplies as population and income started to rise in Europe. Both approaches are still used today. The MSY cutting cycle, as its name implies, maximizes the supply of timber from a site. It has been widely adopted by government agencies around the world, as well as some private landowners. Other private landowners, including those whose woodlands provide an increasingly large share of the world’s wood output, harvest at the Faustmann age. This regime optimizes land value, resulting in a shorter cutting cycle, a smaller annual supply of timber, and younger forests. Both approaches provide a sustainable supply of timber over the long run, although the forests under the two regimes will look different.

The text on page 99 absolutely captures a key theme of our book – that forests are in the habit of coming back after being cut or after land is used for food production – but it misses the broader context we offer about why and how sustainable forests will emerge from the last century and a half of deforestation in Latin America. Specifically, this book explores how trends in demography, markets, technology, institutions and ownership have influenced land use historically in Latin America. We then explain how changes in their future trajectories mean deforestation will diminish and reforestation will expand.

Chapter 5, where page 99 is found, provides important context about why slowing population growth combined with increasing crop yields mean that a reversal of deforestation is imminent in Latin America. The chapter begins with a description of the US, where forests have returned because real prices for corn and soybeans fell as yields increased and real prices for wood rose as old growth stocks were cut. Nearly all the returning forests there are on privately held land.

Forests have returned elsewhere, including two countries with a preponderance of private forests: Chile and Costa Rica. But even in Brazil, private forests have returned to provide energy for sustainable iron production. Local ownership also includes community forestry, which is thriving in Latin America. From ejidos established long ago in Mexico, to more recently established community forestry operations in the Maya Biosphere Reserve of Guatemala, Brazil, and elsewhere, local ownership resists deforestation.

Today, demography is heading in the right direction and deforestation is slowing across Latin America. Birth rates are down, and the total fertility rate of 1.9 births per female is well below the replacement threshold of 2.1. Population in the region will increase some, but will end this century about where it started, at 670 million souls. Food production is also heading in the right direction. Yields for corn and soybeans have continued to increase, and prices have continued to decline in real terms. These falling prices are a major disincentive for land conversion in the hinterlands. If institutions and property rights can be adapted to support local owners – be they communities or individuals – in places where deforestation remains problematic, markets will do the rest to reverse deforestation.

Learn more about Reversing Deforestation at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas H. Wolfinger & Matthew McKeever's "Thanks for Nothing"

Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. He is the author or editor of five books, as well as forty articles and chapters. His work has been published in The Atlantic, National Review, Huffington Post, and other outlets.

Matthew McKeever is Professor of Sociology and Department Chair at Haverford College. His research focuses on the structure of social inequality within a variety of institutional, cultural, and regional contexts. This work examines different theories regarding the distribution of education, occupation, and income, and how processes that determine the distribution of these resources vary regionally.

Wolfinger and McKeever applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood since 1980, and reported the following:

On page 99, readers will find Figure 4.17, which depicts the effect of family size on income. The figure is based on the multivariate analysis of 39 years of data from the Current Population Survey, a Census Bureau product that polls a nationally representative sample of U.S. families on their economic well-being. This particular figure looks at whether the presence of a pre-school-age child affects family income for married mothers (spoiler: it does not). It’s in chapter 4, which is devoted to exploring the predictors of income at different points of the income distribution. In the case of page 99, the question is whether the economic impacts of a young child are the same for more or less privileged mothers.

Despite the conventional wisdom that young children are a disproportionate drag on a mother’s income, the page 99 results show that having a young child in the house doesn’t affect income for married mothers. This is true for mothers at the top and at the bottom of the income distribution, and hasn’t changed between 1980, the beginning of our study, and 2018, the last year of data we looked at.

The figure on page 99 does convey a more general finding of our study, namely the growth of income inequality over the past 40 years. At the lower income quartile (i.e., the bottom 25 percent of incomes), family income for married mothers was about the same in 2018 as it was in 1980, about $57,000. In contrast, there was a big difference between upper quartile income in 1980 and 2018: upper quartile incomes rose over time from $105,000 (married mothers without young kids in the house) and $107,000 (married mothers with pre-school-age children) to $122,000 and $124,000. In short, only the top of the income distribution has witnessed income growth over the 40 years.

These results are based on multivariate analysis that accounts for major social and demographic differences between respondents: race, education, age, family size, and so on. And the sample size is immense, in the hundreds of thousands after all years of data between 1980 and 2018, inclusive, are pooled. The results depicted on page 99 capture a small slice of the multifaceted data analysis we undertake.

This page demonstrates both the futility of the page 99 test for a book that analyzes quantitative data, and the usefulness of maybe reading more than just one page. It’s nearly impossible to get a sense of the scope of our data analysis from this one graph. We’re quantitative scholars and like graphs and tables just fine, but Figure 4.17 offers nothing but a non-result, albeit one that goes against what some believe to be common sense. What’s more, it’s a non-result for our comparison group, not our population of interest. Thanks for Nothing is a book about the economics of single motherhood. Throughout the book we present data on married mothers as bases of comparison. It’s just dumb luck that page 99 is one of the comparison figures based on married mothers.

Consequently, if we were prospective book purchasers basing our decision on page 99 of Thanks for Nothing, we’d likely do more than simply not buy it: we’d tell others to eschew the book, perhaps likening it to the appendices of a Census report. It is, we’d aver, the academic answer to Atlas Shrugged or War and Peace, little but a somniferous doorstop.

At the same time, page 99 does capture one aspect of what is crucial to building a social scientific argument: namely, it’s important to look for possibilities that your argument is incomplete, even if it does mean demonstrating that certain things don’t matter. If readers just turn the page they’ll see two figures depicting data for single mothers—and these figures show larger effects of having a pre-school age child in the house. This, in the case of our book, a “page 99-101” test might prove more useful.

Figure 4.17, the focus of page 99, is a brick in a wall. Our book is a comprehensive investigation of how the economics of single motherhood have changed over the past 40 years, all in service of solving a mystery: in 1980, single-mother families were five times as likely to be poor as were two-parent families. More than 40 years later, single-mother families are still five times as likely to be poor. How can that be, given the gains in education and employment women have made over the past half century?

We’re not content just to put forth a hypothesis. Instead, we make the case systematically, with over 130 charts. If you have a question about the economics of single motherhood that can be answered with quantitative data, you’ll probably find the answer in our book. It’s just dumb luck that page 99 is one of the least interesting pieces of the puzzle.

This profusion of data—and our interest in the economics of single motherhood more broadly—didn’t emerge in a vacuum. For over 100 years Washington policymakers and public discourse has been concerned with family structure. Much of this discourse—too much in our estimation—has been moral rather than practical. Generations of politicians seem to have been guided by The Scarlet Letter, content to wag their fingers at fallen women. This tradition reached its nadir in Ronald Reagan’s anti-welfare invective and Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform legislation.

We contend that Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a better way. Starting in his famous 1965 report and continuing in his decades in the U.S. Senate, Moynihan identified family structure as an important topic for public concern. The legislation he championed would have bettered the lot of single mothers and, perhaps most notably, the future generations of Americans in their care. Those interested in the welfare of America’s children would do well to relearn these lessons.

Learn more about Thanks for Nothing at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katie Beisel Hollenbach's "The Business of Bobbysoxers"

Katie Beisel Hollenbach is a musicologist and graduate curriculum specialist at the University of Washington. She holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on popular music, technological mediation, and reception, and has appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies and Music and the Moving Image.

Hollenbach applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom, and reported the following:

The following excerpt comes from page 99, which is located near the conclusion of Chapter 3: Finding “the Voice” Organized Fandom as Political Platform.

This celebration of international fan relationships along with the ideas Sinatra’s fans expressed regarding equity and politics in the United States suddenly make media portrayals of teenage girls, such as Swooner Crooner, seem out of touch. While mass media coverage of Sinatra usually chose to focus on those fans who participated in mob hysteria at his live performances – and it is true that these mob occurrences did happen sometimes – the reality of most Sinatra fans was one of more nuanced fandom. Yes, these girls adored Sinatra, but the communities they created around this adoration were equally valuable to them as spaces where they could develop their personal ideas and values as American citizens living during World War II. In many ways, these fan communities helped to shape the identities of American teenage girls as they prepared to enter postwar adulthood.

Similarly, wartime media representations of Frank Sinatra as nothing more than a scrawny, sentimental idol of American girls only scraped the surface of Sinatra’s celebrity identity and influence.

Ford Madox Ford must have been on to something, as page 99 of The Business of Bobbysoxers includes a surprisingly thorough overview of the main themes and arguments of the book as a whole. The book aims to provide a new entrypoint into the history of American popular culture during World War II and one of the biggest icons in popular music, Frank Sinatra, by highlighting the wartime perspectives of his young and largely female fans, known as “bobbysoxers.” The book draws its source material primarily from texts made by American teenage girls who participated in Frank Sinatra fan clubs during the 1940s. These materials mainly include fan correspondence and fan club journals, which were written, produced, and distributed entirely by the teenage members of the clubs. These materials reveal that contrary to stereotypes that surrounded the bobbysoxers in American media - which suggested they were hysterical, frivolous, and blissfully disconnected from the realities of the war effort - these girls in fact used their mutual love of Sinatra to build communities in which they could discuss current issues such as the war, civil rights, and patriotism, as well as share creative contributions such as poetry, illustrations, essays, and reviews that shed light on their relationships with popular culture.

The values teenage fans of Sinatra demonstrated in their fan-made materials stemmed in part from Sinatra’s own views during the war, particularly surrounding racial and religious tolerance. Like his young fans, Sinatra was heavily scrutinized during the war in American media for reasons including his lack of military service and vulnerable persona in an era when perceptions of male strength was viewed as an important component in how the U.S. presented itself to the rest of the world. As page 99 suggests though, Sinatra was not only driving the bobbysoxers to swoon, he was also driving them to discuss important issues and share their personal desires and aspirations with their peers.

Visit Katie Beisel Hollenbach's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lydia Reeder's "The Cure for Women"

Lydia Reeder’s research and writing brings to light the stories of little-known or forgotten pioneers in their professions and daily lives. Her first book, Dust Bowl Girls, was a Junior Library Guild Selection, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the WILLA literary Award, and won the For the Love of the Game award from the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame. A regional bestseller in Oklahoma and Colorado, it was named as a 2017 top nonfiction book by Amazon, Bustle, Romper, and Bookbub, and optioned for film five times. A native of Oklahoma, Reeder now lives in Denver, CO.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book reveals the duplicitous behavior of surgeon Horatio Storer, MD toward Dr. Marie Zakrzewska and her women-run hospital, the New England Hospital for Women and Children. In 1863, Zakrzewska hired Storer, whose father was dean of the faculty of medicine at Harvard Medical School, as the attending surgeon at her hospital. It was a decision she came to regret. When the hospital’s board of directors put a stop to the dangerous experimental surgeries Storer had been performing, he resigned in a scornful letter that he also published in a popular medical journal. Page 99 discusses that letter:

Storer then bluntly revealed that he had been lying to them for years, and his tenure with the hospital had all been a deception. The entire time, he claimed, he had been performing an important experiment by “testing the ability of women to become fitted to practice as general physicians.” Overall, his conclusion was dire. 'It is sufficient for me to say,' he wrote, that because of their reproductive biology, 'women can never, as a class, become so competent, safe and reliable medical practitioners as men, no matter what their zeal or opportunities for pupilage." ...A woman's nature, far from being an asset, was an insurmountable liability." … Storer’s argument proved to be very persuasive, and its effects were far reaching. As a leading physician and one who had recently been elected vice president of the AMA, he had supposedly risked his entire reputation to conduct hazardous research in enemy territory.

The Page 99 Test works well to highlight the extent to which reputable male physicians resorted to personal opinion, threats, and innuendo to stop women from becoming doctors. It also depicts the growing claim by noted physicians that women were, by nature, biologically unfit for anything other than motherhood. The Cure for Women reveals the nineteenth century origin of this pseudoscience that connects all of women’s ills to her uterus.

Unfortunately, while page 99 highlights a significant theme, it does not mention the most important person in my book: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, who led the fight against this attempt to control women’s bodies and lives. She is absent from page 99 and from that entire chapter, which features one of her mentors, Dr. Zakrzewska. Jacobi’s research upended the false claims by doctors like Storer and led to the beginning of a paradigm change for women: that they have a right to be educated and choose their own destinies.

Visit Lydia Reeder's website.

My Book, The Movie: Dust Bowl Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hemangini Gupta's "Experimental Times"

Hemangini Gupta is Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics and Associate Director of GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is a scene from a startup “festival” in Bengaluru, intended to teach local people how to become entrepreneurial. As an ethnographer I attended the festival to understand this process and over four intense days of scheduled events and activities, I met entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and technologists from the city’s startup sector. Here’s the page:

The startup founder leant casually back in his chair and crossed his hands above his head. He began: “We [the two founders] were seated at a bar on New Year’s Eve and got talking about this crazy idea for a travel business. We scribbled our notes on the soggy napkin on which our beer was placed, and that was the start of the company.”

The audience was still. We listened in silence. The man next to me wore a black T-shirt that read “Superman”—the S was a dollar sign: $uperman. The entrepreneur continued. Those hasty notes made on a damp napkin possessed the two former “techies”—male, middle-class software engineers—laughing over a beer late one night, to spontaneously turn into tech entrepreneurs. My field notes continue with excerpts of the conversation: “interrogate your own assumptions,” “back your gut feeling,” “you have to interest the VC (venture capitalist) in the first 5–10 minutes to impress him,” “you have to diminish the distances between you and him; for Americans you need to be straight. With Brazilians you need to be chatty and friendly,” “you cannot be sentimentally foolish.”

Launch stories I heard in Bangalore resonate with those from elsewhere—the maverick entrepreneur, the inspirational idea hatched through collaboration at an unlikely venue, the risky jump away from a corporate job into the world of entrepreneurial innovation. These stories circulate as evidence of Bangalore’s new belonging in a global eco–system in which eccentric entrepreneurs take great risks from their garage–based startups.

Books and films like the biography of Steve Jobs (Isaacson 2011) or the film about Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg (Fincher 2010) crystallize classic entrepreneurial narratives of risk and create the figure of the startup founder as a maverick man who refuses stability and rejects middling success to pursue a wild and fantastical dream. As Deborah Piscione (2014) writes in a popular book about Silicon Valley and startup entrepreneurship, risk is “the most vital apparatus of our time” (10).

Page 99 is a great example of how the book is written: it offers an in-depth look at scenes of entrepreneurial life and introduces you, the reader, to memorable characters and moments. It then builds out to locate these snapshots within larger questions of caste, class and gender to rethink key concepts like risk and innovation. While the content on page 99 might seem to be at once from a nowhere and everywhere of entrepreneurship— a scene that could be Silicon Valley, California or Bangalore, India— I pick up these ethnographic moments from this Startup Festival to locate them in a particular story of the production of the entrepreneur as an upper caste man in India. Tracing the entanglements of caste and commerce historically, I show how upper caste Brahmin men came to access the markers of modernity (such as education and urban living) through specific routes that led to them being advantaged in professions like science and engineering. Thus, what seems like a “universal” moment of pitching to venture capitalists and hearing startup stories turns out to be in fact a historically specific route to this scene that unfolds at a festival in contemporary India.

Subsequent chapters adopt the same approach to understanding what I call “startup capitalism” through detailed ethnography and storytelling. Scaling out from the ethnography, the chapters offer a feminist reading of contemporary capitalism that approaches the widely circulating ethos of “Do What You Love” by asking how this adage is gendered and racialized, and how it is maintained in the face of precarity and ongoing technological automation.

Learn more about Experimental Times at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Victoria Sturtevant's "It's All in the Delivery"

Victoria Sturtevant is an associate professor of film and media studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of Marie Dressler and co-editor of Hysterical! Women in American Comedy.

Sturtevant applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, It's All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of It’s All in the Delivery explains how the decline of the Motion Picture Production Code and social changes of the 1960’s brought teen pregnancy and non-marital pregnancy to film screens for the first time, generally framing the issue as a moral problem to be solved. Film comedies, finally free to play with the visual joke of a baby bump on an unmarried woman, played it pretty safe through the first decade. They usually integrated the naughty premise of non-marital pregnancy into stories that ended with a nice respectable wedding, for example Lover Come Back (1961), Irma la Douce (1963), and the provocatively titled Doctor, You’ve Got to be Kidding! (1967) all end with last-minute marriage vows as the woman is in labor. Page 99 captures half of the book’s overall argument, because it places pregnancy stories in popular media alongside a larger set of social changes around reproduction. I argue that twentieth century moral panics over non-marital and teen pregnancy were misguided from their earliest days. The increased visibility of unmarried pregnancy in the 1960’s didn’t just reflect the ongoing sexual revolution; it also reflected a healthy decline in forced or coerced marriage for pregnant girls and women. This decline should be celebrated, a fact obscured by the social problem framing that—even to this day—treats non-marital pregnancy as a problem to be solved only by marriage, rather than by economic, social, or educational support for unpartnered parents (or indeed by contraception and abortion, subjects of other chapters). The half of my book’s argument that page 99 doesn’t capture is that—unlike these early examples—popular comedy often leads the way in puncturing conservative pieties like the idea that single pregnancy must be “solved” by a hasty marriage in the first place. Readers who continue for a few more pages will encounter examples like Funny Girl (1968), which uses the suggestion of unwed pregnancy as a defiant joke, and Stand Up and Be Counted (1971), which frames unpartnered pregnancy as a form of feminist self-creation. Later pages and chapters build on these examples to chronicle a rich history of media that use the toolbox of comedy to push back against widespread pregnancy myths, stigmas, and taboos.

Learn more about It's All in the Delivery at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Donald S. Lopez Jr.'s "Buddhism: A Journey through History"

Donald S. Lopez Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author, translator, or editor of more than twenty books, including The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life, The Story of Buddhism, and the award-winning Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism.

Lopez applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Buddhism: A Journey through History, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is the first page of a chapter called “Apocalypse.” It provides a capsule biography of Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965), who served as Secretary of Agriculture under Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1933 to 1940. When he is remembered positively today, it is for his efforts on behalf of destitute farm families during the Great Depression.

As noble as those efforts were, they would seem to have little to do with Buddhism until the reader turns the page and reads the first paragraph of page 100. There we learn that Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948 was derailed with the publication of a series of letters he had written that began “Dear Guru.” Wallace was a closet Buddhist. He believed that there would soon be an apocalyptic war in which a Buddhist army would sweep out of their kingdom deep in the Himalayas to defeat the forces of evil and inaugurate a golden age of peace and enlightenment. This war is predicted in a famous eleventh-century Sanskrit text called the Kalachakra Tantra, a text that remains of great importance to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In the text, the kingdom of the righteous is called Shambhala, the inspiration for “Shangri-La,” the Himalayan utopia in James Hilton’s 1933 bestseller Lost Horizon, later made into a film by Frank Capra. The Kalachakra Tantra and its fascinating history is the main topic of the chapter.

So, although page 99 itself initially seems to have little to do with Buddhism, that is exactly the point. It demonstrates something that I try to do throughout the book: to show that Buddhism is found in unexpected places around the world over the two and half millennia of its history. After a lengthy introduction that sets forth the teachings of the Buddha and the central doctrines and practices of Buddhism, the book invites the reader to journey across continents and centuries to learn how Buddhism has changed the world.

Learn more about Buddhism: A Journey through History at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Buddhism and Science.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kieran Connell's "Multicultural Britain"

Kieran Connell is a writer and historian based at Queen's University Belfast. His first book, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain, was shortlisted for the Whitfield Book Prize.

Connell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Multicultural Britain: A People's History, and reported the following:

Readers turning to page 99 of my new book, Multicultural Britain: A People’s History, will find an analysis of the fallout from the racist rioting that took place in August 1958 in Nottingham in the English Midlands. I show how, in spite of the fact the rioting consisted of dozens of white men roaming the streets of Nottingham and attacking Black passers-by, the idea that it was the local white population who were the real victims quickly took root. When the sentences of five of the perpetrators were read out in court, I write, ‘there were gasps and screams from the public gallery. One woman fainted, while another exclaimed “what about the dirty Black dogs? They have started all the trouble, but you can’t catch them”’.

My page 99 in many ways encapsulates one of Multicultural Britain’s central themes. From the end of the Second World War to the first decades of the new millennium, Britain became multicultural. Yet, at the same time as this, Britain’s stubborn, endemic problem with racism was never far away. It is telling, for example, that the UK Government’s response to the 1958 riots was not to attempt to address the issue of white racism. Instead, it introduced the first legislation designed to restrict the ability of citizens from Britain’s current and former colonies to migrate to the one-time imperial mother country. As the Home Secretary, R. A. Butler, explained to his colleagues, the legislation would “operate on coloured people almost exclusively”. The racism that powered the 1958 riots had in many respects become institutionalised. This tension between increasing ethnic diversity and ongoing racism – what I call in my book the ‘dialectics of multiculturalism’ – is perhaps the defining feature, I suggest, of the momentous story of how Britain became multicultural.

Visit Kieran Connell's website.

The Page 99 Test: Black Handsworth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keidrick Roy's "American Dark Age"

Keidrick Roy is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2025, he will be Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He has received national attention through media outlets such as CBS News Sunday Morning and the Chicago Review of Books and appears in the HBO documentary Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches. He has curated two major exhibitions at the American Writers Museum in Chicago on Black American figures, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Ralph Ellison.

Roy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism, and reported the following:

Page 99 examines the productive tension between W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1915 depiction of slavery as “American feudalism” and his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, which has become a foundational text in contemporary studies of racial capitalism. Juxtaposing these representations of slavery reveals an institution exhibiting paternalistic traces of medieval hierarchies on the one hand and an impassive system of economic exploitation on the other. The lens of “feudalism” and its associated concepts—which prominent African Americans intentionally used to describe their conditions during the nineteenth century—provides insight into aspects of slavery and prejudice that extended beyond economic domination. In particular, “racial feudalism” captures the varied theological, cultural, and philosophical commitments maintained by Southern enslavers and prejudiced Northerners that went hand-in-hand with their commercial interests in the subjugation of Black Americans.

Because racial feudalism is a central concept developed by American Dark Age, page 99 serves as an apt index of the larger purpose of the monograph. However—as this is a two-part book—the test did not reveal the second core theme of “black liberalism,” which I engage in subsequent chapters but will briefly outline here. In response to the ideology of racial feudalism promoted by Americans invested in a color-based hierarchy—what Frederick Douglass described as the “aristocracy of the skin”—several eminent Black Americans embraced and promoted (anti-feudal) liberal ideas such as individual freedom, political egalitarianism, moral universalism, and the possibility of progress in a slaveholding nation dominated by feudalistic hierarchies.

Though twentieth-century liberalism is often associated with selfishness and unfettered free markets, the early Black liberals I describe balanced their desire for individual freedom with commitments to the broader society. They were also more concerned with abolishing unnatural hierarchies that justified slavery, prejudice, and the financial pillaging of African American communities through force and fraud than deregulating markets for the sole purpose of maximizing personal profits. Ultimately, my book conceptualizes racial feudalism and antebellum black liberalism as useful ideas for understanding the development of American political thought, particularly in the wake of modern hate groups and violent extremists that continue to deploy feudalistic imagery and fanciful notions of a medieval past to justify their pernicious ends.

Visit Keidrick Roy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michelle Adams's "The Containment"

Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former codirector of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and elsewhere. She was born and grew up in Detroit.

Adams applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, and reported the following:

The Containment: Detroit, The Supreme Court, and the Battle of Racial Justice in the North tells the story of a legal decision that would have greatly reduced school segregation in the Northern parts of the United States -- if it had been allowed to stand. But just over fifty years ago, the Supreme Court struck that decision down.

On page 99 of my book, the reader will learn some of Roy Wilkins’ backstory. Wilkins was the executive director of the NAACP during the time the book’s action takes place (the early and mid 1970s). The page summarizes some of the criticisms that Wilkins faced from others in the Black activist community, but also presents evidence of his daring and bravery on behalf of the civil rights movement. On that page, the reader learns about Wilkins and the work the NAACP did during this era – which was extremely important. But that’s only one part of The Containment’s sweeping narrative.

The Containment is a book about the development of legal doctrine, but that rich story is told from the perspective of various characters, such as Roy Wilkins. My book asks how and why people make the decisions that they do. This was true of Wilkins. It’s also true of the white judge at the heart of the case I write about. Judge Roth, on the face of it, should not have been an ally of those seeking to desegregate schools in the Detroit area. But he was. Roth changed because he was open to being persuaded by the facts. A lesson that’s still so timely and important today.

Learn more about The Containment at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Vaughn Scribner's "Under Alien Skies"

Vaughn Scribner is associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Merpeople: A Human History (2020) and Inn Civility (2019).

Scribner applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Under Alien Skies: Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America, and reported the following:

I was thrilled to realize that page 99 of Under Alien Skies encapsulates not only the book’s major argument, but also overlaps with correlated research which led me to this project.

The first paragraph covers the much-anticipated, but ill-fated, arrival of Prince William Henry (along with a trio of warships) in British-controlled New York City in October 1781. Years ago, while reading through some British and Hessian soldiers’ accounts of Revolutionary New York City, I kept coming across references to “the prince” visiting the city. Upon deeper investigation, I realized that they were referring to King George III’s third son (and future King William IV), Prince William Henry (1765-1837): the first member of the British Royal family to step foot in North America. As I explored in two previous articles, in 1781 William was little more than a sixteen-year-old midshipman sent away by his parents in an attempt to teach their brat son manners. But to thousands of soldiers stationed in New York City, he represented a real hope; an opportunity to overcome their New World enemies, of which the natural environment reigned supreme.

Unfortunately Prince William Henry—and the British military in America—failed on all counts. As the rest of the page demonstrates, a horrible thunderstorm delayed the Prince’s warships, which were supposed to rush south to save Cornwallis in Yorktown. Instead, Cornwallis and his troops succumbed to the malarial swamps of Virginia, seemingly alone and forgotten.

British and Hessian troops, meanwhile, felt the wrath of nature’s fury in all its horrible spectacle. During the same storm that hindered the warships, lightning struck a gunpowder ship in New York City’s harbor. The explosion pummeled the city, shattering windows and knocking onlookers to the ground. Days later, soldiers stationed in the city were still picking up pieces of iron from the sunken ship.

This environmental calamity was one among many for those roughly eighty thousand British and Hessian troops, who sailed 3,000 miles away from home to wage war under alien skies; who steadily considered every encounter with a poisonous plant, horrible thunderstorm, or endless forest a brutal reminder of their own vulnerability. As one Hessian soldier remarked after the explosion, “heaven and all the elements are opposed to the King’s army.” Such feelings of physical, mental, and emotional anguish at the hands of Revolutionary America’s foreign, war-torn environment proved critical in the ultimate defeat of the British military.

Visit Vaughn Scribner's website.

The Page 99 Test: Inn Civility.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Albertus's "Land Power"

Michael Albertus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He studies how countries allocate opportunity and well-being among their citizens and the consequences this has for society, why some countries are democratic and others aren't, and why some societies fall into civil conflict.

Albertus applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in the middle of a chapter on how land power shapes gender inequality. It's the end of a vignette on India that demonstrates that link, and the beginning of a vignette on El Salvador. The last paragraph of the section on India reads:

Patriarchy did not originate in land reshuffles. The story of gendered inequality is much older than the shifts in land ownership that followed the Great Reshuffle. But decisions about who gets the land can sharpen a society’s sexism, and land power can entrench patriarchy nearly to the point of invulnerability. India offers a stark view of how land power can exacerbate the ugliest forms of gender inequity.

The next paragraph, which starts a new section, begins as follows: "Gendered land reallocation doesn’t just reflect conservative social intents and build on existing gender hierarchies. It can actually set women back by targeting them directly."

The Page 99 Test here reveals a central argument in Land Power, while demonstrating it only partially. These short excerpts reveal a key theme of the book: that land, and the power it confers to those who hold it, fundamentally structure society. That even extends into gender relations within families. Through the many upheavals in land ownership across the globe over the last two centuries – what I call the Great Reshuffle – governments have overwhelmingly assigned land to men within households. That tendency has reinforced and deepened patriarchal social norms in societies as diverse as India, El Salvador, Canada, and Colombia.

This point is part of a broader narrative in the book regarding how land shapes power – and how it shapes societies in turn along economic, social, environmental, and political lines. Who holds the land in society has long determined who holds power.

Visit Michael Albertus's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bethany Hughes's "Redface"

Bethany Hughes (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) is a performance scholar and cultural historian interested in how performance constructs culturally recognizable categories and offers possibilities to resist or remake those same categories. Her first book, Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity, draws on the fields of Native American Studies, Theatre, and Performance Studies asking questions about racialization, representation, authenticity, and authority.

Hughes applied the “Page 99 Test” to Redface and reported the following:

Page 99 of Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity describes the final scene of an 1886 comedic play by Welland Hendrick called Pocahontas. Pocahontas and a European female character, Ann, exchange coats to disguise themselves as one another and then dance with John Smith and John Rolfe in a marriage ceremony. Their true identities are revealed, and Pocahontas marries the true to history John Rolfe despite John Smith pursuing her. Smith ends up with the false to history Ann. The play presents Pocahontas as mixed race and European looking, which helps explain why a Native American character is so easily mistaken for a European character. The final paragraph on the page explains that this mix of racial identification, gendered identification, connections to historical accuracy (minimal though they might be), and legibility as an embodied “Stage Indian” are the ingredients of redface, a curatorial and collaborative process that links the idea of the racialized “Indian” to actual and historical Indigenous peoples. The last sentence of the page primes readers to understand the stakes of redface, the political impact of seeing “Indians.”

Reading page 99 of Redface would give readers a decent snapshot of the main project of the book. The book is interested in theatre history, “How did American theatre artists create, circulate, modify, and perpetuate the Stage Indian?” But it is more interested in the stakes of the Stage Indian, “What does a Stage Indian create for Native Americans and non-Native Americans?” This page provides a glimpse of how theatrical technologies like costume, dialogue, and plot work together to connect a racially homogenous idea of the “Indian” to a human being understood to be representing Indigenous peoples.

An important aspect of the book that page 99 doesn’t show is that of the essay, “Hinushi Inla,” which is interspersed throughout the book. Alongside the close attention to how commercial American theatre depicted and created the Stage Indian, the book argues that redface is not just a representational practice, it is a reading practice. The audience has to read a character as Indian in order for redface to work. “Hinushi Inla” is an invitation for the readers of Redface to practice reading differently. The short essay discusses Native American theatre artists and performers, their aesthetic and political work, and the ways in which Native American performance has always existed alongside the much more widely known redface.

Learn more about Redface at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas M. Jamison's "The Pacific's New Navies"

Thomas M. Jamison is Assistant Professor of Strategic Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School. His work has been published by the Journal of Military History and Technology and Culture.

Jamison applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Pacific's New Navies: An Ocean, its Wars, and the Making of US Sea Power , and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works pretty well for this book. In part because page 99 concludes one section and starts another, so it covers a lot of ground. It first deals with Chinese reactions to the Sino-French War (1883-1885). Leaders in Beijing saw defeat in the war as proof of the need for a bigger, better navy. The page hints at the scope and dynamism of that coming naval expansion, as well as its implications for Japan and the United States. Then, page 99 introduces a new section on the professionalization of U.S. naval intelligence in the 1880s, headlined by the founding of the Office of Naval Intelligence (1882). Naval officers and attaches fanned out across the world with a fresh mandate to document the effects of industrialization on foreign navies. Up to that point, intelligence on naval technology wasn’t much of a priority because sailing ships evolved slowly. Indeed, the topic was such a low priority Aflred Thayer Mahan (the most famous strategist in naval history) blew off his intelligence reporting requirements as a young officer–it’s one of my favorite sentences in the book. Because industrialization brought about a rapid and profound shift to warship design in the 1870s (via armor, steam propulsion, torpedoes), intelligence on new weapons became a core concern. Institutions, like the U.S. Navy, adapted accordingly.

The Pacific’s New Navies basically follows the themes set out in page 99: radical technological change, institutional politics, and regional competition. Overall, the book is a comparative story of war and naval racing in the Pacific, and how all that activity was, in turn, interpreted in the United States as a rationale for peacetime naval expansion. In the 1870s and 80s, the United States “Old Navy” demobilized (having won the Civil War, why not!?). That made for unlucky timing just as industrialization ushered in transformative changes in warship design and the makeup of navies: from wood to steel, sail to steam, and unarmored to armored. Many states (like China on page 99) took advantage of these paradigmatic changes to leapfrog generations of investment and development and construct technologically innovative and comparatively powerful fleets, almost overnight. I call these “newly made navies,” hence the book's title. All that was bad news for politicians and naval leaders in the United States. There was so much naval experimentation and development among small states in the Pacific (notably Chile, Peru, Japan, and China) that U.S. military and political leaders–and with them a large swath of the general population–felt compelled to build a “New Navy” of their own to catch up as a matter of security and civilizational prestige. Observation of foreign navies through intelligence officers (as seen on page 99) was key to that process. These officers brought home information from foreign conflicts, and synthesized their observations into professional intelligence products about the state of naval development. As they so often do, intelligence reports doubled as political weapons sharpened to convince skeptics in the United States about just how weak its navy had become relative to regional competitors.

Learn more about The Pacific's New Navies at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lucian Staiano-Daniels's "The War People"

Lucian Staiano-Daniels is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers During the Era of the Thirty Years War. As a historian, he is interested in the structural similarities in warfare between the early modern period and the present day. He comments on modern international affairs for magazines such as Foreign Policy.

Staiano-Daniels applied the “Page 99 Test” to The War People and reported the following:

From page 99:

...Articles of War and stuck to general phrases that could have been spoken by members of any denomination: “God have mercy on Victoria Guarde’s soul,” said Michael Steiner, after she was dead. The “on-the-job” neutrality about religion in this regiment looks less striking to us than to contemporary observers.

Armies were multi-denominational, but Saxon soldiers’ religion is difficult to track, since Saxon muster rolls do not list denomination. Sometimes it is clearer than others, like the men in Dietrich von Taube’s life company in 1634 who gave their origin by their Catholic parishes rather than their native cities. They were listed in a solid block, their names almost uninterrupted. These soldiers came from “Hofkirchenpfarr” in the bishopric of Passau; “Wolfsegger pfarr” (Wolfsegg, Bavaria); “Buerbacherpfarr,” the little town of Puerbach in northern Austria; and “Waizenkirchen pfarr,” right next to Puerbach, thirteen Catholics, all southerners, standing close together in the middle of a Saxon company.

Some men in Saxon service may have been Jewish. Jonathan Israel claimed that armies were less antisemitic than the rest of central Europe during the Thirty Years War, but this subject needs more research. Barbara Tlusty found evidence of numerous Jewish soldiers during the war. Entire companies of Jews fought in the army of Poland–Lithuania. In this context, the recorded surname of Martin Jude, a common soldier in Dam Vitzthum von Eckstedt‘s company in 1635, is interesting. He appears in the roll right next to a man named Barthel Bernhold, which means they may have stood together during the mustering: Bernhold came from the small community of Gleicherwiesen in Thuringia, which was about one-third Jewish.

The War People is a history from below of ordinary soldiers from Saxony during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the most destructive war per capita that Europe experienced. The Page 99 Test doesn’t work for The War People, but it works in one way for the war. The page would lead a browser to assume this book is about religious differences in Central European armies, whereas that’s only one part of the social interactions within ordinary companies and regiments. But this test introduces something I’ve been wondering: the relationship of Jews to armies in seventeenth-century Central Europe, and through this, the position of minorities in armies more generally.

In 1983, Jonathan Israel, cited in the excerpt, pointed out that harassing Jews was illegal in areas under military jurisdiction, and this was enforced. On the other hand, Hans Medick (2018) and Christoph Gampert (2024) argued that the attitude of military authorities toward Jewish civilians was consistent with the anti-Semitism of the time: officers assumed Jews were rich and demanded Jewish families pay contributions that in one case were twice as heavy as non-Jews. (“Contributions” means military requisitioning of money, which is one way armies were financed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.)

Israel’s older argument may have to be revised. Armies seem less anti-Semitic than other Central Europeans when officers make it illegal to mistreat Jews in occupied towns, but they seem just as anti-Semitic when they single out Jews for contributions. It’s possible that the question is orthogonal to the observed actions: armies view Jews as a potential resource. This produces protection in one case, and harsher treatment in the other. But as a resource is also how they consider their own men. This is why I've been wondering about the place of minorities in these armies more generally: if you're caught between multiple bad options of life in seventeenth-century Europe, being a resource might be better than being a target.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Stone Peters's "Law as Performance"

Julie Stone Peters is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Columbia Law School, and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University School of Law in London. A scholar of law and humanities and media history, she studies performance, film, digital, and legal cultures across the longue durée. Her publications include Staging Witchcraft Before the Law (2025), Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (2000, winner of the Harry Levin and Beatrice White Prizes), Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (co-edited, 1995), and numerous studies of drama, performance, film, media, and the cultural history of law.

Peters applied the “Page 99 Test” to her 2022 book, Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe, and reported the following:

At the top of page 99, a medieval philosopher named Thierry of Chartres is trying to defend lawyers against people who say they’re all snakes. He’s just told a story that originates with Cicero but that medieval theorists loved to retell: the story of the origin of law. At the beginning of the world, says Cicero, “men were savage and lived in the manner of beasts.” But a man “who was wise and eloquent” and knew that even savages were “open to persuasion” used his eloquence to drive out their “savagery,” bringing people together “to live by law.”

For Cicero, the point is that, while eloquence can be used for evil, it can also be used for good. For Thierry, the point is specifically about lawyers and judges: true, some are scoundrels, and this can have disastrous political consequences. But (he adds), just because there are corrupt lawyers and judges doesn’t mean we should give up on law: it means that good people have to fight harder for what’s right. (The “more shamefully a most honest and worthy profession [i]s abused by the folly and audacity of dull-witted and unprincipled men, ... the more earnestly should the better citizens ... put up a resistance to them.”) That is, we don’t have to kill all the lawyers (as Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher famously proposed): we just have to make sure the crooked ones don’t take over our courts, supreme or otherwise!

I quote Thierry on page 99 not just to get in another lawyer joke, but to support one of the central points of the chapter. Standard medieval legal history will tell you that medieval lawyers and litigants had no use for eloquence, —that ancient traditions of judicial oratory had become irrelevant in medieval courts, where autocratic Princes and Inquisitors weren’t “open to persuasion.” In fact (as I say on page 99), medieval theorists were centrally concerned with courtroom persuasion. They defined rhetoric as “the science of orderly and elegant speaking for persuading the judge.” They described the model “orator” as “advocatus” (i.e. litigator). One even says: if you know rhetoric, you already know law (by implication: no need to bother learning law, because it’s rhetoric, not law, that will help you win your case). To be a good lawyer, they said, what you needed was “eloquence”: not only verbal eloquence but what Cicero called “eloquence of the body,” that is, performance skills.

In some ways, page 99 would give browsers a good idea of my book. The heading there, “Courtroom Oratory, Forensic Delivery,” stands for one of the book’s central ideas: that courtroom oratory depended above all on “eloquence of the body,” sometimes called actio (acting, action), sometimes pronuntiatio (vocal expression), sometimes “delivery.” Early theorists never tired of an anecdote about the great orator Demosthenes: when someone asked him what the three most important elements of oratory were, he answered “delivery, delivery, delivery.”

Page 99 also represents my general methodology. It shows the abundance of historical sources I bring into play (10 medieval lawyers, philosophers, and rhetorical theorists on page 99 alone). It shows my use of short quote fragments, which allow figures from history to speak directly to readers with their own turns of phrase (without weighing down the text with long and ponderous block quotes). It shows how I push arcane scholarly debates into the footnotes (which take up half of page 99) to prevent the story I’m telling from getting lost in them. In short, it shows how I try to make serious scholarship fun to read.

However, there’s one thing that page 99 doesn’t represent well. That page appears in a chapter originally titled “The Body in the Courtroom: Indecorous, Leaky, Sublime, Obscene.” While page 99 is neither sublime nor obscene, the book contains many legal scenes that are: sublime, obscene, bizarre, histrionic, or hilariously funny. The book’s first pages tell the story of a trial by combat turned comic debacle. Later there’s an image of a woman named Calefurnia who—in protest against the rule that women can’t plead in court—turns her back to the judge, bends over, lifts her skirts, and moons him. These aren’t just entertaining stories: they offer an alternative legal history, —of law as theatre and anti-theatre, as force but also (sometimes) farce.

Much of what I describe is still with us today: for instance, in a judge’s protest that “this courtroom is not a theatre!” and our recognition that—in our world of 24/7 legal spectacle—it is. Like early legal spectators, we worry about whether law should be entertainment, whether lawyers should exploit theatrics, whether emotion helps or harms justice. Like them, we know that performance matters to how we make law and how it makes us.

Learn more about Law as Performance at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue