Mark Vernon's "Awake!"

Mark Vernon is a London-based psychotherapist, writer and former Anglican priest. A keen podcaster and a columnist with The Idler, he speaks regularly at festivals and on the BBC. He has a PhD in Philosophy, and degrees in Theology and Physics. His previous book topics include Dante, Plato and Christianity.

Vernon applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, Awake!, is in the middle of a chapter considering one of the myths about William Blake that I hope to nuance, namely that he was into free love. There is no doubt that the poet and painter was fascinated by the erotic and, at various points in his life, wrestled with its demands, particularly in the years of his youth. But as the heat of passion morphed into a wider love of life, he realised something crucial: youthful eros can expand into an appreciation that is both less fleeting and more connecting. There is a pleasure to be had in the immediacy of all the beings that surround us – be they animal, vegetable or mineral. There can be a realisation that they are each connected to the source of life itself, as indeed we are.

For this reason, in the middle of page 99, I quote some of Blake’s best known lines: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” Beheld with love, the humble grain of sand and the simple wildflower make the boundless tangible. These things become sacred, for as Blake elsewhere puts it: “Everything that lives is holy.”

So, Awake! passes the Page 99 Test. Dipping in on that page provides an excellent touch point for what I am trying to get across about Blake.

After all, he is often appreciated as a great artist or astute social commentator. But at the heart of his vivid perception of things lies a mystical vision: everything, in its own way, shines with the radiance of the divine.

The imagination is the faculty by which we can know that immanent transcendence, not because we have imagination, but rather because the imagination has us. “Nature is imagination itself!” Blake exclaims at one point. Learning both to trust and discern our imaginations is therefore key to his message, for that is an echo, reflection and sharing in the imagination that shapes all things and gives them life.

With the imagination, we can learn to overcome the alienation many today feel – alienation from the natural world, other human beings, even themselves and the divine wellspring. That way, Blake argued, politics might be renewed and individual people find lasting fulfilment.

Incidentally, he lived in immensely turbulent times. The American War of Independence and its aftermath erupted when he was an adult, as did the French Revolution and the subsequent bloody wars that raged across Europe, alongside other parts of the world. On occasion, affairs grew so dark that they felt existential for England and for Blake as well. But he never lost trust in the love of life that, through the imagination, can renew our relationship with everything and everyone around us. That is why Blake’s poetry and imagery can powerfully speak to us today.

Visit Mark Vernon's website.

The Page 99 Test: Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Ball's "Death to Order"

Simon Ball is professor of international history and politics at the University of Leeds. He is the author of a number of acclaimed books, including Secret History, The Bitter Sea, and The Guardsmen.

Ball applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination, with the following results:

Death to Order passes the Page 99 Test with flying colours. All the key elements of the book are to be found on the page.

Page 99 is devoted to the assassination of Zhang Zuolin, the Old Marshal, who had ruled Manchuria for nearly two decades at the time of his murder in 1928. The account of this particular assassination encapsulates the central argument of Death to Order: the state is at the centre of modern assassination, indeed that centrality is the core feature of the “modern”. This does not mean that powerful states are always behind assassination but it is their actions that shapes the importance of assassination for international politics. In the particular case of the Zhang Zuolin assassination, part of the Japanese state was most certainly behind the assassination. The killing was organised by Japanese military intelligence and carried out by a regular engineer unit of the Imperial Japanese Army using their high explosive munitions to blow up a train. The state reaction was such that the assassination was one of the most consequential, if now little remembered, assassinations of the twentieth century, responsible for the destabilisation of both Japan and China.

Page 99 also neatly illustrates Death to Order’s method of untangling assassinations. Death to Order argues that the analyst should pay attention to four aspects: the procurer, the assassins, the tools of the trade and the cover up. The cover up for the Zhang assassination was particularly rich, as it moved from Japanese military deception to a whole state effort, ‘an amalgam,’ as page 99 puts it, ‘of nearly every cock-and-bull story told: the assassination was a Japanese–Chinese conspiracy (false); the actual assassins were Chinese (false); the Japanese behind the assassination were the Secret Service Organisation (false); the chief Chinese conspirator was the Old Marshal’s chief of staff (false), subsequently murdered by the Young Marshal (true).’

Learn more about Death to Order at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine E. Rohrer's "Daughters of Divinity"

Katherine E. Rohrer is associate professor of history at the University of North Georgia.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Daughters of Divinity: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Making of a New Southern Woman, 1830-1930, and shared the following:

From page 99:

These southern evangelical women demonstrated particular concern for poor whites, Blacks, and immigrants in a number of urban locations throughout the South, including New Orleans, Nashville, Charleston, and Atlanta…. In such missions, southern women typically exuded an attitude of concern that, although often mixed with enforced deference and condescension, conveyed their interest in education, health care, and improved living and social conditions among the South’s poor and underserved.

I believe that page 99 does illuminate a key argument from this book. More than anything, Daughters of Divinity seeks to underscore that evangelical Protestant Christianity (what we would today refer to as “mainline Protestantism”) offered southern women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one of the very few outlets to experience educational and professional fulfillment. As mission workers engaged in domestic and foreign work, such women served in a multitude of roles. They were not only proselytizers, but educators, administrators, fundraisers, and even medical doctors, honing skills in such varied areas as public speaking, financial management, persuasive writing/recruitment, public health, and logistics. Southern society at large—men in particular—did not feel threatened by women’s participation in religious work; women likewise appreciated that engagement in mission work did not preclude them from holding the covetous, unofficial title of “lady.” Quite simply, mission workers could “have their cake and eat it, too.” Page 99 complicates this idealized narrative by underscoring that such southern women engaged in mission work did exercise some agency. However, while such women sought to reshape and expand conceptions of southern femininity in their favor, they used this same agency to reinforce a conservative and rigid racial- and class-based hierarchy.

Learn more about Daughters of Divinity at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Faisal Devji's "Waning Crescent"

Faisal Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence and Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea.

Devji applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, and reported the following:

A reader chancing on page 99 of my book would get a good idea of its argument. The book tells the story of how Islam came to be understood as a protagonist in history. From the second half of the 19 th century, it steadily lost meaning as a word describing Muslim acts of devotion to become a subject in its own right. Coinciding with the diminution of Muslim sovereignty within European empires, this new understanding of Islam not only displaced the political agency of Muslims but also the theological agency they attributed to God and Muhammad. On page 99 I deal with one way in which both these forms of agency were rendered impossible.

Unlike the generality of colonised intellectuals who sought to recover their sovereignty, Islamist thinkers were deeply suspicious of its unregulated violence in colonial and other modern states. Like the anarchists from whom many Islamists took inspiration, they wanted to deprive the nation-states succeeding colonial rule of the violent potential of sovereignty. And they did so by claiming that sovereignty, seen as the authority to create as much as suspend and override the law, could only belong to God. As such it could not be exercised by men, with the state having to conform instead to the divine law as interpreted by Muslim scholars who worked outside its remit and so represented society or rather social as opposed to political power.

Pakistan, which became the world’s first Islamic Republic in 1956, has therefore been extraordinarily innovative by abjuring sovereignty in all three of its constitutions. Rather than preventing its exercise, however, the refusal to vest sovereignty in any institution or, indeed, the people, ended up making it a free-floating possibility that has continued to haunt Pakistani politics. There it is manifested most frequently in the military coup, ironically the purest or most excessive act of sovereign power outside the law. The workings of Pakistani politics, of course, are not determined by this constitutional feature alone, but are nevertheless legitimised and make thinkable by it.

The constitutional history of Pakistan shows us how a sovereignty handed into God’s keeping is not only denied its citizens but premised upon God’s own expulsion from political life. For the divine law is meant to be seen as a form of self-governance by and within society and not the state. And it represents not the people, who are as liable to usurp God’s sovereignty as any politician or general, but Islam itself as the true subject of Muslim history.

Learn more about Waning Crescent at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Impossible Indian.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Marriott's "Land, Law and Empire"

John Marriott is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford and has published extensively on the nexus between London and India.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Land, Law and Empire: The Origins of British Territorial Power in India, with the following results:

Page 99 gives a brief account of the dramatic shift in the East India Company’s geopolitics of trade in India that occurred from the 1630s.

Uncannily, I can think of no other page in the book which provides a neater summary of the underlying narrative of the company’s quest for territory. Frustrated by what they perceived as the intransigence of Mughal authorities and rival European colonial powers at the port of Surat where they had first settled, company agents were impelled to explore other trading opportunities where the authorities would prove much less resistant to the acquisition of defensible territory. The Coromandel Coast, beyond the immediate control of the Mughal Empire, did just that, and so it was that a small, seemingly unpromising fishing village called Madras became their first permanent settlement. Under the company, Madras grew dramatically as a trading centre. With renewed confidence – and some chance – the company later acquired Bombay from the Portuguese, and toward the end of the century Calcutta. By then, although the amount of territory held by the company was minute, the ideological, legal, political and economic foundations had been laid for the great land grabs of the eighteenth century.

The book, which I hope is accessible and jargon free, provides a new account of the foundations of British rule of India. While researching it I was struck in particular by how pragmatic the enterprise was. Territorial power was not secured through a carefully crafted plan but through the decisions taken for the most part by a relatively small coterie of company agents working in India.

Learn more about Land, Law and Empire at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anderson Hagler's "Sins of Excess"

Anderson Hagler is Assistant Professor of World Religions and Cultures at Western Michigan University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sins of Excess: The Spatial Politics of Idolatry and Magic in Colonial Mexico, and shared the following:

Open the book Sins of Excess to page 99 and you will find that it corresponds to the first page of Chapter 4 “Geography and Popular Magic in New Spain.” As such, page 99 provides an outline of the chapter’s main argument which states, “This chapter emphasizes the cultural composition of geography to advance the argument that Native topographies became excessive in the minds of Spanish colonizers when Indigenous and African descent peoples revered them using non-orthodox rituals.” The next paragraph defines the use of geography noting:

Geography concerns the physical features of landscapes and the confluence of discourse with location.... Because labels used to describe Native landscapes and buildings were laden with ethnocentric understandings, the mere occupation of such spaces indicated wrongdoing. Consequently, Catholic priests and secular officials associated sophisticated non-orthodox rituals with Devil worship.

Funnily enough, the Page 99 Test works well for Sins of Excess. Page 99 does indeed provide a solid overview for much of the book. The project as a whole addresses the concept of “excess” as used by Spanish clergy and secular officials and notes its many negative connotations. I maintain that the use of “excess” as a derogatory label expanded over the years to include a wide array of crimes in colonial New Spain, including murder, theft (Chapter 1), idolatry (Chapter 2), shapeshifting, non-orthodox methods of healing (Chapter 3), sodomy, and bestiality (Chapter 5). The fourth chapter, which encompasses page 99, delves into the negative value judgements made regarding landscapes like mountains, caves, and rivers when Indigenous and African descent peoples inhabited them and performed magical rituals. Doing so shows that a mountain was not simply an inanimate object made of minerals. The terms used to describe what people saw, e.g. alp, sierra, summit, were intwined with cultural meaning. In this way, the mere inhabitation of space seemingly manifested sin when Indigenous and African descent peoples performed non-orthodox rituals therein. As such, the study of geography cannot be value neutral as often presented in educational institutions. All branches of knowledge are imbued with value judgements, including ethnography, science, religion, and history. It is my hope that Sins of Excess will help to highlight this observation and combat negative stereotypes made against Native and African descent peoples in rural areas.

Visit Anderson Hagler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bailey Brown's "Kindergarten Panic"

Bailey A. Brown completed her PhD in sociology from Columbia University. At Columbia, she previously earned a M. Phil. and M.A and was named Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology with minors in urban education and Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, a Leadership Alliance Fellow, graduated cum laude, and received top departmental honors for her senior thesis at Penn. Brown is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Spelman College. Prior to her position at Spelman, she was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

Brown applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Kindergarten Panic describes one mother’s search for a diverse New York City elementary school. Jaime attended schools in the southern United States that were integrated through mandated busing. This diverse educational experience serves as an important context for the school she desired for her son. As Jaime went on school tours, she came to the haunting realization that though New York City was diverse, the schools were heavily segregated and often tracked along racial/ethnic lines.

Jaime’s story appears in Chapter 3 "You Don’t Really Feel the Diversity" which discusses how parents considered the racial/ethnic makeup of schools. The chapter focuses on the concept of “racialized school decision-making" labor. I demonstrate that Black, Latina/o and immigrant families take on more labor to identify safe and racially-inclusive schools for their children. While most white parents did not express concerns about a school’s level of racial inclusivity directly, I include Jaime’s story on page 99 to offer a perspective on the few white middle-class parents who saw their resistance towards tracked and heavily segregated schools as an intentional “social justice” decision. For this reason, readers who open to page 99 would learn a lot about central themes in Kindergarten Panic, particularly how parents develop preferences for school and how the school search requires an investment of time and energy.

Landing on page 99 in Kindergarten Panic also highlights several important contributions of the book. Jaime's intensive and multi-method search strategy reflects that for all parents the school search requires labor. Further Jaime’s role as a mother also reflects key gender norms undergirding school search processes—that mothers take primary responsibility for the school search. At the same time, Jaime’s social position as a white middle-class mother is reflected in her ability to search more strategically for schools, research several school options and approach diversity not as a safety concern but instead as an added benefit. Jaime’s story broadly demonstrates that parents’ individual search experiences varied and that how parents are able to search for schools is shaped by gender, race, class and neighborhood.

Across Kindergarten Panic I argue that while the increase in school choice options in early elementary school was intended to broaden opportunities, these new school options place a greater burden on parents, increasing expectations to search for schools intensively and increasing the labor of school decision-making. Each chapter highlights how these factors differently shape parents’ school choice journeys. I conclude that school choice policy must take seriously persistent inequalities in school access in order to better design and restructure school choice programs to ensure greater equity.

Visit Bailey Brown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maria Corrigan's "Monuments Askew"

Maria Corrigan is an assistant professor in the College in the Visual and Media Arts Department and Comedic Arts Program at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Monuments Askew: An Elliptical History of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book is the last page of Chapter 3, which focuses entirely on the Factory of the Eccentric Actor's 1926 film, The Overcoat (Shinel'). Because FEKS founders Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg were mere teenagers when they began their artistic experiments, their work is often considered less mature than the more famous Soviet avant-garde films of the 1920s. In general, my book provides a cultural history of FEKS and its filmic output. On this particular page, I am concluding the chapter by summing up the group's remarkable and innovative approach to the adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's classic short story, focusing specifically on the collective's treatment of the strange protagonist, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, who is all at once eccentric, funny, and piercingly tragic:

In developing Akaky as an Eccentric protagonist, the directors introduce a conflictual play not merely among the tenets of Left-Futurism and the haunting images of Expressionism but also the easy comedic grace of American slapstick film, in which the major protagonists manipulate the objects around them both to make the audience laugh and to remake their environment in unpredictable ways. The audience feels safe laughing at slapstick protagonists because, despite their foibles and difficulty integrating themselves into the modern world, they are also unquestionably sympathetic and the hero of the tale. Akaky, in contrast, is barely the hero of his own close-up, and laughing at him is morally ambiguous at best because his audience runs the risk of identifying as the subject of his mournful plea, “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” From this perspective, the uneasy combination of genres is put to singular use, in the sense that the “Eccentric manner” of the kino-play offers a comedic approach to a tragic character. Moreover, the combination of perspectives offered by the multiple authors and influences—imperial, Soviet, Ukrainian, German, and North American—calls attention to how much is lost when one considers the project a national one rather than a contact zone for a collection of outsiders, immigrants, and eccentrics: Gogol, Kozintsev, Trauberg, Nosferatu, Chaplin, Akaky. From a national cinema framework, then, Eccentrism is best seen as a secondary or peripheral movement, the work of daring youngsters, Leningrad’s alternative to Moscow, one that offers another subject relation, vis-à-vis the Eccentric protagonist, to cities, monuments, canons, and genres.

Though it's not the most engaging introduction to my book, coming as it does at the tail end of a chapter, the passage, oddly enough, sums up the book's arguments quite well. My central claims are all at play here: FEKS was juggling genres, literary theory, inspirations, authors, and visions of a mythical city in a film that has somehow escaped sustained analysis. This excerpt hints at some of the formal analysis conducted in the chapter (how Akaky takes up space within the frame of a close-up) while also addressing the way the film uses cinematic devices to capture Nikolai Gogol's remarkable shifts in tone, style, and register. As it turns out, page 99 is an apt introduction to the Eccentrism that stands at the heart of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor.

If someone were to read page 99 alone, that reader would get a gloss on one specific Soviet film that requires greater cultural, theoretical, and formal analysis to be understood. On the one hand, I'm pleased that this experiment delivers a sample to the reader that is so clearly emblematic of the book's larger goal: that is, to give FEKS the kind of scholarly treatment that has been lavished upon the collective's contemporaries. On the other hand, if this reader were not already interested in the topic of Soviet silent film, then they would definitely miss out on some of the book's more enjoyable acrobatics: personal histories, creative disagreements, long forgotten diaries, archival discoveries, and gossip. Just by flipping the page, this reader would find themselves at the beginning of one of four of the book's "eccentric interludes," and smack-dab in the middle of a bitter break-up between FEKS founders, Kozintsev and Trauberg. These interludes reflect on why Eccentric history is so challenging to write: a collective is rarely in agreement. And when almost every member of a collective writes a memoir decades later, there are many competing claims to parse. I think I'd rather lure an unsuspecting browser in with page 101, but I'm not sure that's playing within the rules of the game.

Learn more about Monuments Askew at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Sattig's "How Time Passes"

Thomas Sattig is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Tübingen. From 2002 to 2005, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. Sattif has held tenure-track positions as Assistant Professor at Tulane University and at Washington University in St. Louis. He has been a regular Visiting Professor at USI, Lugano since 2019.

Sattig applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, How Time Passes, and shared the following:

As regards page 99. It is the first page of Part B of the book, in which I turn from the passage of time in the physical world to the passage of time in human experience. The page is the break of dawn after a dark night. At this point in the journey, it is clear that Part A's project of finding the dynamic aspect of time in the physical world has failed. We are about to embark on Part B’s project of locating the source of time's passage, which separates time from space, in our conscious experiences of the world. The latter project will turn out to succeed. But page 99 itself does not yet convey an idea of the new project. It just contains a summary of preliminaries.

That is, page 99 is significant. But its significance does not concern its content. Its significance concerns its physical location in the book. Does this mean that the Page 99 Test fails in this case? You tell me!

Learn more about How Time Passes at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maneesh Arora's "Parties and Prejudice"

Maneesh Arora is the Jane Bishop '51 Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. He is also a visiting fellow in the Reimagining Democracy program at the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center. He recieved his PhD in political science from UC Irvine in 2019.

Arora applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Parties and Prejudice: The Normalization of Antiminority Rhetoric in US Politics, and shared the following results:

Page 99 of my new book, Parties and Prejudice, drops readers right into one of its central claims: candidates who use overtly Islamophobic language tend to draw stronger support from Republican voters than from Democrats. This isn’t just about individual prejudice—it’s about how the two parties have developed very different rules, or social norms, for what counts as acceptable political speech.

Those norms didn’t emerge by accident. On the Republican side, several forces have worked together to shape them: conservative media outlets that amplify harmful anti-minority stereotypes and conspiracy theories, the growth of anti-minority hate groups within the far-right movement, widespread negative views of Muslims and other minority groups among Republican voters, and party incentives to appeal directly to those views.

In that sense, the Page 99 Test captures the book well. It shows how certain minority groups—notably Muslims and members of the LGBTQ+ community—face overtly hostile political rhetoric, and how the pushback against that hostility is often too weak to change the conversation. It also highlights how an inegalitarian norm environment, in which anti-minority rhetoric can be wielded unchecked, is politically useful to the GOP.

Donald Trump didn’t invent this inegalitarian political environment, but he knew how to use it. His rise shows how overt Islamophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia can take root when they’re not forcefully and categorically rejected. Parties and Prejudice explores how party politics and social norms combine to shape the political power of prejudice—and how that dynamic has reshaped the modern Republican Party and, more broadly, American politics today.

Visit Maneesh Arora's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam Cureton's "Sovereign Reason"

Adam Cureton is Lindsay Young Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He received a B.Phil. in philosophy from the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published widely on ethics and Kant, including a collection on human dignity and essays on respect, solidarity, and hope. He is also an internationally recognized scholar in philosophy of disability who published a book on respect for people with disabilities and edited several collections in this area.

Cureton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sovereign Reason: Autonomy and our Interests of Reason, and reported the following:

If a browser opened my book to page 99, they would land on what may be its most distinctive and provocative idea. Moralists from several traditions, especially those influenced by the 18 th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, have long thought that good people govern themselves through their own reason, living by reasonable standards they endorse for themselves rather than by mere custom, whim, habit, or selfishness. Yet such autonomy has often seemed illusory. Reason is frequently portrayed as a passive tool, a calculator of means or prover of logical theorems, that is better suited to serve our purposes rather than to rule over us.

Page 99 begins to upend this picture. I argue there that several of our mental powers are not mere abilities or instruments. They have built into them active dispositions, tendencies, desires, and other interests that move us to act. Our power of understanding does not simply wait for prompting; it pushes us to make sense of the world around us. Our power of judgment can itself acquire habits of thought that bias our thinking. Most importantly, our power of reason contains active elements that lead us to recognize moral principles, to hold ourselves accountable to them, and to resist doing what we know is wrong.

These “interests of reason” also extend beyond tendencies to govern ourselves by moral principles. As the book progresses, I explain that, as rational creatures, we have substantive interests of reason in expanding our knowledge, promoting freedom and justice, relieving the suffering of those around us, developing our natural talents, respecting ourselves and others, and cultivating friendships and other social bonds. To have reason, in this sense, is already to care about these things for their own sake.

The central theme of the book is that each of us is like a political state, with competing factions vying for power and influence. In an autonomous, well-governed person, reason holds the reigns, aligning our desires, beliefs, and actions with the demands of morality, and moving us to treat everyone with equal dignity and respect. Page 99 offers readers a first glimpse of that ideal.

Learn more about Sovereign Reason at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane S. Smith's "A Blacklist Education"

Jane S. Smith writes about the intersection of science, business, popular taste, and social history. She received her B.A. from Simmons College and her Ph.D. from Yale University and has taught at Northwestern University on topics ranging from twentieth century fiction to the history of public health. She lives in Chicago, where she works in a very small room with a very large window.

Smith applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Blacklist Education: American History, a Family Mystery, and a Teacher Under Fire, with the following results:

Page 99 of A Blacklist Education explores one of several surprising sources of the official anti-communist program to purge left-leaning teachers, many of them Jewish, from New York City’s public schools. In a time of Congressional hearings about possible communist synpathizers in government and in Hollywood, the Superintendent of Schools of the largest public education system in the county was also deeply influenced by arch-conservative members of the Catholic Church. New York’s Cardinal Spellman, politically reactionary and rabidly anti-Communist, arranged the election of a conservative Catholic layman, George Timone, to the Board of Education. Timone, whose earlier pro-nazi sympathies of the 1930s had morphed into a crusade against a perceived communist menace in the classroom, immediately began a successful campaign to bar unions, ban books, codify principles of guilt-by-association, and otherwise suspend civil liberties for school employees.

But this is only one thread in the story, and readers need to go beyond page 99 to see the full scope of the book. A Blacklist Education sets the multiple historical sources and continuing effects of Red Scare hysteria against the plight of an individual teacher--who stands for all the teachers, librarians, actors, writers, government workers, and other “suspect types” whose names were too often lost in the blanket firings of a repressive era.

It took over fifty years for me to learn that my own father was one of those hundreds of New York City teachers pushed out of the classroom, a discovery that led me down one of the bumpier rabbit holes in American history. Suddenly I was petitioning for access to restricted archives and reading transcripts of secret interrogations where teachers, ignorant of either their alleged crimes or their accusers, could only prove their loyalty to their country and their fealty to the Superintendent of Schools by accusing other teachers of subversion. Other archives held collections of alarmist anti-communist pamphlets and newsletters, the ancestors of today’s conspiracy-minded broadcasts. These relics of Cold War panic attacked everything from the United Nations to the socialist tendencies of school orchestras; sinister “indoctrination” by liberal teachers was always a theme.

As I studied the contrast between the tales of subversive teachers and the real lives of the victims, ordinary people just trying to do their jobs, apocalyptic warnings jarred against my own knowledge of family devotion to civic duty and memories of patriotic trips to historic sites. As happens today, the consequences of applying ideology to education were powerfully destructive, not only for those who were directly attacked and their students, but also for a society bent out of shape by a culture of suspicion and retribution.

Visit Jane S. Smith's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Garden of Invention.

--Marshal Zeringue

Doug Most's "Launching Liberty"

Doug Most is a veteran journalist in Massachusetts, a native of Rhode Island, the author of three books, and now the Executive Editor and an Assistant Vice President at Boston University. He's worked at newspapers in Washington, D.C., South Carolina, and New Jersey. He spent 15 years as magazine and features editor at The Boston Globe, and has had feature stories appear in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime Writing. His new book, Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War, tells the human story behind the epic race to build the Liberty ships of World War II. His previous book, The Race Underground, is the narrative history of Boston and New York struggling with dangerously overcrowded neighborhoods and desperately searching for relief through the painstaking construction of subway tunnels beneath their streets. That book was optioned for a PBS/American Experience documentary called The Race Underground. Most's first book, Always in Our Hearts, was a true-crime story based in New Jersey and Delaware about two teenagers who hid their pregnancy from their parents and killed their baby to avoid responsibility.

Most applied the “Page 99 Test” to Launching Liberty and shared the following:

When writing a book about World War II, the greatest challenge is finding an original, character-driven, human interest story that has not yet been fully told in narrative and historical depth. I hope Launching Liberty achieves that, zeroing in on a critical, defining aspect of the war that has been overlooked and underappreciated—the building of America’s Liberty ships, an emergency fleet of nearly 3,000 cargo ships that were needed to carry President Roosevelt’s famous Arsenal of Democracy to our troops around the world.

Page 99 is an important page in Launching Liberty, as it turns out, because it’s the start of a new chapter. Chapter Thirteen is titled “A Boy’s Dreams.”

Before the Liberty ships could be built, they had to be designed down to their last screw—and the boy in “A Boy’s Dreams” is a young child named William Francis Gibbs, who would go on to become the greatest ship designer in the world in the early to mid-20th century. But at the start of the chapter, he is just a boy, eight years old, standing in Philadelphia alongside his younger brother and their father on a blustery morning, November 12, 1894, to see the launching of the largest ocean liner ever built, the SS St. Louis. President Grover Cleveland was also there. The Gibbs boys watched as music faded and, the first lady, Frances Cleveland, smashed a champagne bottle across the 550-foot hull, and the ship slide down into the Delaware River.

I described the ship this way: “The St. Louis was almost as long as two football fields, built of steel, decorated from bow to stern with colorful flags from around the world, and powered by a pair of reciprocating engines that could propel her forward at a speedy twenty knots.”

Because page 99 is the opening of a new chapter, it does a great job of showing the reader how the book is really a narrative, built around dates and events and people, the characters who drive the story forward. There are no Liberty ships without William Francis Gibbs and his brilliant ship designs, and his inspiration for becoming a famous shipbuilder began on that blustery fall morning in Philadelphia, as a wide-eyed eight-year old boy.

Learn more about the book and author at Doug Most's website, Facebook page, Instagram home, and Threads page.

My Book, The Movie: The Race Underground.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe's "Growing Up Godless"

Anna Strhan is reader in sociology at the University of York. She is the author of The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism and Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals. Rachael Shillitoe is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood: Experiences of Worship in School.

Strhan applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England, and reported the following:

From page 99:

… children saw these lessons as providing opportunities to discuss whether there was evidence to support belief in God. Delilah described an RE lesson at Sunnybank in which she had raised these questions, stating, ‘we were learning about [the] Christianity God. I said, “Excuse me, how do you know that he’s real?” “It said in the Bible.” “Yes, but the Bible doesn’t have any proof though, does it?... It doesn’t show you that it’s real though.”’

Although the children encountered the term ‘agnostic’ as well as ‘atheist’ and ‘theist’ during these lessons, there was little emphasis on agnostic ideas about the limits of knowledge or ‘unknowability’ as desirable in how these lessons were taught, and no discussion of a subjectivist non-religious worldview which values individual experience as a way of validating knowledge (Lee 2015). Rather, the content and pedagogical techniques used in these lessons – with pupils evaluating statements on the basis of evidence – expressed a humanist emphasis on the knowability of the world, which then manifested in the children’s perception of religious beliefs as lacking evidence or as illogical, as we saw in chapter 1. The children’s comments sometimes revealed a lack of understanding of what theists would understand as ‘evidence’ in support of their belief, while also highlighting the significance of RE in potentially leading children to evaluate and reject belief in God. Minnie from Sunnybank commented, ‘when I was younger, my mum said God was real, so I believed in God then, but then when I started coming to school and learning about RE, I just thought maybe he isn’t real, because there isn’t a photograph of him.’ Her friend Amber responded, ‘there isn’t proper proof of God yet,’ to which Minnie replied that if proof was found, ‘obviously I’ll believe in God then.’ Thus, we see how the idea that the children were encountering in RE – that what is real is what can be evidenced – could feed into how the children articulated their atheism as related to empiricist ideas.

Becoming (Self-Conscious) Non-Believers

As well as contributing to the children’s narratives of their non-belief in God being due to their empiricism and belief in science, RE was also significant for many children in crystallizing their awareness of their non-belief and non-religious identities. In other words, while many children were non-religious and did not believe in God prior to RE lessons, with religion relatively absent in their everyday lives outside of school, RE lessons were one of the main ways in which they encountered religion…

I think the Page 99 Test mainly works. Growing Up Godless is about how and why increasing numbers of children are growing up to be non-religious and atheist, based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with primary school children (aged 7-10 years old), their parents, and teachers in different parts of England. The book shows how the children’s atheism is shaped by a pervasive humanist culture – with humanism here referring to a worldview that valorizes science, rationalism, and empiricism as ways of knowing the world and centres the agency, significance, and broad equality of humans.

We explore how this humanism is something the children are figuring out in relation to the way their parents are bringing them up, what they’re learning about in schools, through their friendships, and via the media and culture they’re engaging with. Page 99 is in a chapter focusing on how schools are implicitly making this humanist worldview available to the children, which was leading them to conclude for themselves that they didn’t believe in God. Like the rest of the book, this page includes the voices and perspectives of children on these issues and shows how the children had a keen sense of their own agency to question religious beliefs they didn’t agree with.

As well as considering why these children didn’t believe in God(s), the book also explores what they did believe in and found meaningful in their lives. Here, it was striking that they had a sense of meaning as rooted in this world – for instance, in relationships with friends and family, or love for animals and the natural world – rather than in a heavenly, transcendent realm. In this sense, the book challenges stereotypical narratives that the decline of religion has led to a loss of meaning and purpose. We also explored the ethics and values interwoven in their humanism, for instance, values of equality and respect, and how all of these things related to their parents’ perspectives.

Overall, we hope the book provides insight into not only non-religious children's values and beliefs, but also how wider processes of religious and cultural change take place in everyday practices in their lives, such as the conversations they're having with parents over dinner, the TV programmes they’re watching, and the games they’re playing with their friends.

Learn more about Growing Up Godless at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuel Rutherford's "Teaching Gender"

Samuel Rutherford is a historian of gender and sexuality, education, and the politics, society, and culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. He's a Lecturer in LGBTQ+ History/History of Sexuality at the University of Glasgow. Rutherford received his PhD in History from Columbia University in 2020, and was a Junior Research Fellow and tutor in History at Merton and Corpus Christi Colleges, Oxford from 2020 until 2024.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939, with the following results:

Page 99 of Teaching Gender tells the story of a long-running conflict between the University of Manchester's men's and women's student unions in the 1920s and 1930s. Academic life at Manchester had been fully gender-integrated since the university admitted women to degrees in 1897, and in the 1890s and 1900s women and men welcomed the opportunity to study alongside each other. But after the First World War, when ex-servicemen students returned to higher education in large numbers, they expressed a virulent misogynistic backlash against the women students who had remained in higher education during the war. In response, women student government leaders declined to participate in gender-integrated student life, despite pressure from university administrators to cooperate. At Manchester, after over a decade of tension between the two unions, the Women's Union responded to men students' vandalism of the Women's Union, and the Men's Union's refusal to include women students in decision-making about university-wide student events, by declining to contribute financially to university clubs and societies and to allow any men students to access their facilities. They rejected a proposal from university administrators to merge the two unions' facilities as part of a large-scale building renovation.

This example is indicative of the kinds of colourful stories about everyday university life that I tell in Teaching Gender, which is largely written out of the institutional archives of ten universities from across England and Scotland. It also helpfully draws out some of the book's key themes. The book shows that at a national and institutional policy level, the gender integration of UK higher education around the turn of the twentieth century was rapid and uncontroversial, driven by logics of efficiency rather than principled support for gender equality. But on the ground, the lived reality of gender-integrated social life was more complex, especially as it became inflected through the widespread cultural anxiety about relations between women and men and about the stability of the gender order that was characteristic of the post-First World War moment.

By page 99, the reader has had this problem explained to them, through examples like the one from Manchester. The book then goes on to describe the solution: students attempting to get on with one another in these gender-integrated environments landed upon heterosexuality as a useful set of scripts for navigating interactions across gender lines. They therefore established cross-gender sexual relationships that asserted the stability of the gender binary as normal, natural, and central to the purpose of university life. In the process, they marginalised alternatives—whether 'Platonic friendship' between women and men, or queer and trans subjectivities and intimacies. Ultimately, Teaching Gender is a book about how the UK's universities became a part of the UK state, and about how that process was a gendered one—thereby contributing to our understanding of the history of the male/female and the hetero/homo binaries at an especially crucial time for their emergence.

Visit Samuel Rutherford's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel B. Thorp's "Seeking Justice"

Daniel B. Thorp is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech and the author of In the True Blue’s Wake: Slavery and Freedom among the Families of Smithfield Plantation.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Seeking Justice: The Extraordinary Freedom Suits of an Enslaved Virginia Family, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Seeking Justice contains a description of the transfer from one county court to another of a law suit in antebellum Virginia by which an enslaved family sought to win its freedom from slavery.

Page 99 does capture one element of the book. Seeking Justice recounts the torturous path by which this freedom suit moved through Virginia’s legal system, and the five changes of venue it experienced along the way certainly help to explain why it stands as the longest-running such suit in Virigina history. But page 99 does not capture the central element of the book. Seeking Justice explores the active role that the enslaved plaintiffs in this case played in advancing their cause. The move described on page 99, however, was initiated by the presiding judge, not by the plaintiffs. The enslaved men and women central to the story appear on page 99 as passive objects rather than the active participants they really were.

The Page 99 Test is an interesting approach to deciding whether or not to read a particular book. In this case, it might work for those seeking a portrait of the legal system in antebellum Virginia. It does not work, however, for those seeking to understand the different ways in which enslaved African Americans actively challenged the social and legal systems holding them in bondage.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Raissa A. von Doetinchem de Rande's "The Politics of Islamic Ethics"

Raissa A. von Doetinchem de Rande is Assistant Professor of Religious Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School where she teaches classes on Islamic ethics, comparative religious ethics, Islamic thought, and ethical theory. She currently serves as President of the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics (SSME).

De Rande applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition, and reported the following:

Page 99 summarizes the central aspects of al-Fārābī’s (d. 950) hierarchical account of created human nature (or what is referred to as humanity’s fiṭra in the Qur’an). I highlight the interplay of people’s natural endowments, the promises of education, and the political roles someone might occupy as a result of one’s nature and nurture. As I note, while al-Fārābī emphasizes the role of natural endowments, he also believes in the crucial importance of education to further one’s endowments. Finally, it is not clear whether his viewpoint is socially conservative, meaning whether the natural/developed excellences the author posits correlate with existing social classes or allow for social mobility.

I was really surprised how well the Page 99 Test worked. While my book looks at four different Islamic philosophers and their conceptions of created human nature, page 99 gives readers a good sense of the central issues at stake: the importance of created, natural endowments, the role of education, and the political implications of the hierarchical ordering of human beings. So, while this page does not cover the entire range of the book in terms of actors, it does get to the heart of the issue of the political implications of hierarchical conceptions of human nature in an important corner of Islamic thought.

What the test misses out on is the historical breadth and conceptual depth of my book. First, I try to parse four different philosophers’ engagement with the idea of a created human nature and its political implications. Across al-Fārābī, Ibn Bājja (d. 1139), Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 1185), and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) we encounter numerous genres, accounts of human nature, and political imaginations. More importantly, my engagement with these classical Islamic philosophers is framed by their relation to the more well-known, scriptural approaches to human nature in the Qur’an and the prophetic literature, as well as an overall concern with the potential place of these philosophers in the contemporary study of religious and particularly Islamic ethics. Especially that last part, the relation to larger questions in the study of Islam and human values, is fully absent on page 99’s deep-dive into al-Fārābī. It is this framing, however, that should be most interesting to people interested in larger value discussions and the place of Islamic thought therein.

Learn more about The Politics of Islamic Ethics at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar's "Strictly Observant"

Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar is a senior lecturer at Sapir Academic College in Sderot, Israel, where she teaches courses on research methods, communication, religion, and gender. She is also a scholar at the Israel Democracy Institute, where she studies media usage among the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. In 2024-2025, she was a Ruth Melzer fellow at Katz center for advanced Judaic Studies at Penn University.

Neriya Ben-Shahar investigates mass media from the perspectives of religion and gender. Her research addresses the tensions existing between religious values and new technologies among women in Old Order Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Strictly Observant: Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media, with the following results:

From page 99:

from the strict censorship used throughout the community's media, together with the ban on external newspapers. Ultra-Orthodox women are fully aware, as is every community member, that their community's media is strictly censored. They appreciate and even welcome this censorship. Thus, the members of both communities know that their news input may often be missing critical details from both people and media, and they must therefore turn to more general channels. They create many methods for themselves, structured of different combinations of media and people, to obtain news that will provide them with the whole picture.

Many people in these communities lack the financial resources to buy communal newspapers and magazines, which are relatively expensive, as would be expected of texts targeting relatively small groups. This leads to their seeking news updates, at no cost, by word of mouth. The other free method of news transmission for the women in both communities consists of in-person social networks created to supplement their knowledge through sharing papers or reporting news to others. I observed women sharing newspapers and magazines, along with verbal recommendations, such as "You should read the story on page 9." The Ultra-Orthodox women, who refer to politics much more frequently than Amish women do, add commentaries, such as "That politician's behavior is shameful-you will see it yourself on page 2." This sharing process is much more than just the physical transfer of a newspaper, as it is accompanied by social aspects as well. The process itself includes a combination of media and people.

A final insight about the combination of media and people derives from the fact that these communities do not lack community connections, which depend on and stem from their small size and high density. Richardson et al. (1979) described Canadian communities that experienced disasters in the 1970S: "The housewives in smaller places may not know any more people, but the people they know are more likely to know each other, which makes possible a much more rapid diffusion of information" (p. 390). The Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women are similar to these Canadian housewives. Both communities are famous for their strong connections, which enable information to jump from farm to farm or from one Jerusalem apartment to the next. One Amish woman told me: "We always ask each other: What do you know about...? How do you make...? What should I do with...? This is the way word of mouth works for us." Although most Ultra-Orthodox women work outside their homes, the communal structure, the high number of children, and the social norms lead them to use the same methods of talking-consulting with their nearby friends about everything, from news to cooking advice. They use their strong connections to obtain information from one another, while simultaneously strengthening their connections through the process of getting information.

"OF COURSE THERE ARE NO DRUGS IN ISRAEL!"

I was raised in a strict religious National Ultra-Orthodox community. My parents turned off the radio when they thought that something in the news was inappro-priate. Taboo content included stories with sexual or violent matters and stories

This is an exciting test! If readers opened my book to page 99, they would get a good idea of the whole work’s main themes. Although the page focuses on news consumption, it also explores the relationships between women in religious communities and the media. Indeed, most of us get our news through a combination of personal interactions and media. However, in both the Amish and the Ultra-Orthodox communities, the people play a stronger role in the diffusion of the information due to their small size and high density.

The page includes only one reference (Richardson et al., 1979) that explains the diffusion of the information in small communities. I’m happy that the Page 99 Test shows that I tried to use as few references as I could (except for the literature review). Indeed, this is an academic book, but its primary goal is to give the readers a pleasant experience when they read about the amazing communities I study, not to show how many articles I read.

The page is cutting in the middle of my personal story about the news censorship I experienced as a girl in a strict religious community. This is a good example of my inside-outside location within the communities I study. As a feminist scholar in a secular academic college, I don’t experience this religious censorship anymore (even though I’m aware of the political and economic censorship that we all experience). However, what we experience as children is extremely powerful. Seeing these women care so much about the medium and the content their family consumes is not only an anthropological observation for me, but also a profoundly personal experience from my childhood and youth.

Learn more about Strictly Observant at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Mangrum's "The Comedy of Computation"

Benjamin Mangrum is Associate Professor of Literature at MIT and author of Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism (2019), winner of the Louis I. Bredvold Prize in 2019, awarded by the University of Michigan.

Mangrum applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence, and shared the following:

Page 99 is nestled within the book’s third chapter, which is titled “The One about Authenticity.” Each chapter in The Comedy of Computation examines the cultural history of the computer from a different vantage point. The third chapter shows how an "ethics of authenticity" has shaped public attitudes toward computing in the United States. I argue that this ethics appears in both anxieties about computing as well as enthusiastic support for the way the technology seems to give power to ordinary people. Page 99 is looking back to formative early moments in the development of authenticity as a moral and social ideal. I’m discussing how the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave moral weight to authenticity, contrasting this version of the ideal with later writers and philosophers. According to Rousseau’s version of the ideal, the modern individual ought to seek to come into intimate contact with his or her inner self and then live in a way that’s consistent with that interior knowledge. In the following passage, I’m distilling some of the ideas from the preceding pages:

Whether contact with the self is a secular virtue or a religious practice, the authenticity of that contact almost by necessity must be determined by the individual. This is a key element in the discursive structure of authenticity. Who else can determine whether I see the inner truth about myself? Who else could know my inner state? The modern ideal of authenticity envisions a condition of inwardness whose very structure invites, and often even privileges, a circularity in which the self serves as the measure of itself.

Here, I’m trying to identify a troubling circularity that tends to accompany an ethics of authenticity. This circularity goes back to Rousseau, but so many of the cultural sensibilities that surround the computer are also structured around it. This version of authenticity leads us to scorn or have suspicions about forms of mediation, which supposedly disrupt direct contact with our inner sense of self. The computer is, of course, a technology of mediation. Yet the basis for this skepticism about technological mediation is curiously circular. I find that circularity curious; it’s worth scrutinizing the problems and promises of these attitudes about authenticity—one among many aims of The Comedy of Computation.

I think the Page 99 Test fares pretty well with my book. On the one hand, if readers were to open my book to page 99 and encounter this line of argument, they’d likely be confused why a book about computing is talking about Rousseau. Readers would obviously need some context for this historical look backward. On the other hand, this is an important moment in the book's argument. I go on to discuss the paradox of authenticity in more detail, and I show how twentieth-century youth culture inherited and adapted an ethics of authenticity. I connect these historical trends to the cultural history of the computer in what I think are novel and under-appreciated ways. But the quoted passage above is one of the first moments where I begin to think critically about an ethics of authenticity. Is it a coherent moral discourse? What are the downsides to this ideal’s influence upon our attitudes toward technology and everyday life? I try to pose these questions in “The One about Authenticity,” and page 99 is a key moment in the development of that line of inquiry.

Learn more about The Comedy of Computation at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Land of Tomorrow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert W. Fieseler's "American Scare"

Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist investigating marginalized groups and a scholar excavating forgotten histories. A National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year and recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, his debut book Tinderbox won seven awards, including the Edgar Award, and his reporting has appeared in Slate, Commonweal, and River Teeth, among others. Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is pursuing a PhD at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow. He lives with his husband on the gayest street in New Orleans.

Fieseler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Approximately half a dozen Live Oak Klansmen posing as sheriff’s deputies kidnapped and tortured a local Black farm hand named Richard Cooks that June 1.¹ Klansmen tied thirty-five- year-old father of nine Richard Cooks to a tree beside the Suwannee River and whipped him for hours while threatening to feed him to the alligators and do the same to his children.² Two white ringleaders who impersonated deputy sheriffs during the abduction, local Klansmen Fred Sweat and Johnny Smith, later confessed their crimes to Sheriff Lewis.³ Yet after interviewing the victim, Sheriff Lewis declined to press charges against Sweat or Smith because Cooks, as he lay injured in bed, could not recall an exact enough description of his attackers to a standard that satisfied the lawman.⁴

Family members who witnessed Cooks’s kidnapping were not consulted by Sheriff Lewis as witnesses, and none of the whites present at the flogging could seem to remember who else was there. Determined not to capsize the lives of two local boys, Sheriff Lewis instead called upon Grand Dragon W. J. Griffin to internally discipline Sweat and Smith as errant Klansmen.⁵ Griffin continued at the hearing:

He [the sheriff] says, “Well, I wish you’d give them a good scolding. Somebody around here needs talking to.” He says, “We can’t put up with stuff like this.” I says, “I don’t blame you Sheriff.” I says, “If you know anything about it, why don’t you put them in jail?” He says, “Well, I know who done it, I know who did it.” He says, “I discussed it with them,” and he says, “They admitted it to me, the two of them.”⁶

When questioned by FLIC attorney Mark Hawes on the Cooks case, state attorney William Randall Slaughter, who’d called the 1955 grand jury that failed to indict Sweat and Smith, covered for Sheriff Lewis by repeatedly complaining about a lack of resources in his rural district.⁷

The scene of brutal white terrorism detailed on page 99 of American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, involving the abduction and torture of an innocent Black father named Richard Cooks by members of the Florida Ku Klux Klan, eerily encapsulates the stakes of southern lawlessness pushing our nation to the brink of a second splintering, a.k.a. my book’s major theme.

I yearned for American Scare to impart upon a 21st century reader, presumably living outside of a 1950s “Red Scare” mindset and not yearning for a nostalgic return, what racial apartheid meant from a standpoint of white advantage as well as the moral corruption of the human spirit. Writing and researching the Cooks kidnapping sequence was, in fact, so harrowing that something of its horror imprinted on my psyche, and I began to carry it bodily.

I couldn’t sleep without petrifying nightmares. My hair started falling out. I developed odd rashes and stomach ailments. Something had to change, or I knew I’d never finish the book. I decided to stop drinking and start meditating—to sunset my joyous New Orleans habit of happy hour cocktails. Just a sip of alcohol could spin my mind onto the specifics of what those Klansmen did to Cooks, and then I’d break down weeping.

Dropping my “social spirits” habit enabled me to finish American Scare in the clear-eyed manner that the book demanded, and then I got to like the “no hangover” lifestyle’s compatibility with trauma reporting. Other historians who’ve delved deeply into the mire of racial carnage have echoed to me that getting sober is a common byproduct of covering the so-called “lynching beat” (a term scholars privately use as a form of gallows humor to preserve their own sanity through inappropriate joking).

The cruelty of southern racial violence is simply too horrific, even when imagined, for a compromised mind to bear without cracking the foundations. Such tragedy is a mental weight that must borne, however, so that its effects and aftereffects are never written out of the American story.
_________________________
¹ June 1: “Collins Given Story of Negro’s Flogging,” Miami Herald, June 25, 1955, 2; “Live Oak Negro Bares Flogging,” Orlando Evening Star, June 21, 1955, 1.
² father of nine: Herbert D. Cameron, “Collins Asks Suwanee Official to Explain Flogging,” Tampa Tribune, June 22, 1955, 1; “Live Oak Negro,” Orlando Evening Star, June 21, 1955, 1;
³ Fred Sweat: W.J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958; “Flogging Details Refused,” Tallahassee Democrat, June 26, 1958, 1.
⁴ to a standard that satisfied: Hugh Lewis, Transcript of Testimony, June 26, 1958.
⁵ instead called upon Grand Dragon W. J. Griffin: W. J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.
⁶ “‘Well, I wish you’d give”’: W. J. Griffin, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.
⁷ who’d called the 1955 grand jury: “Grand Jury Called in Flogging,” Tampa Tribune, June 26, 1955, 1; William Slaughter, Transcript of Testimony, June 25, 1958.

Visit Robert W. Fieseler's website.

The Page 99 Test: Tinderbox.

Coffee with a Canine: Robert Fieseler & Chompers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kati Curts's "Assembling Religion"

Kati Curts is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Sewanee: The University of the South.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America, with the following results:

Page 99 of Assembling Religion shuttles readers into an analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856) as a harbinger of Ford’s white nationalism. It describes how:

In Emerson’s telling, the Anglo-Saxon in­heritors of England demonstrated “vigorous health” and “good feeding.” “They have more constitutional energy than any other people,” he wrote, and engaged in regular “manly exercises” as “the foundation of that el­evation of mind which gives one nature ascendant over another.” Such bold and brawny men, Emerson said, “box, run, shoot, ride, row, and sail from pole to pole” and “live jolly in the open air.”

Emerson’s theories of Saxon supremacy may seem an odd entry for a book about Ford Motor Company and its impact on religion in the twentieth century. In earlier pages I introduce more directly religious subjects, like Henry Ford’s techno-utopian understanding of machinery as “a new messiah” or how the Company institutionalized a social gospel. What a reader finds on page 99 is Emerson’s celebration of white masculinity, which he said was maintained through its “power of blood or race.” Ford found much to agree with in Emerson’s sentences, positing his own racialized theory of productive American manhood in a nation peopled with hearty frontiersmen of “pioneer blood.”

The Page 99 Test is thereby an apt entry into Assembling Religion. I include this analysis of Emerson between a description of Ford’s Americanization campaigns and an account of one of the first uses of the term “Fordism” (1926) by Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, a German economic historian who looked to Ford as exemplary of the kind of servant leader who would harken a “white socialism of pure, active conviction” (100). In the rest of the book, I delve into an extended analysis of Ford’s print and film productions and the industrial museum and historical village he built. In each, Ford promoted the pioneer as “a superior sort of man” for his spirit of adventure and innovation. A direct cipher for the Americans Ford most wanted to celebrate, the pioneer was cast as a character of right productivity, particularly in comparison to the “parasitic” specter of the “international Jew.” Never simply a nostalgia, the pioneer was a racialized imaginary that Ford said was “bred in the very fibers of our bodies.” (124)

If Emerson harkened the way, Ford mass produced its pioneering personification. What the Page 99 Test ultimately affords is a glimpse into the longer intellectual and relational histories upon which Ford manufactured and assembled his brand of racial capitalism.

Learn more about Assembling Religion at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hannah Frydman's "Between the Sheets"

Hannah Frydman is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures (French) at Harvard University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Between the Sheets, we find ourselves in the middle of an exploration of the Flachon affair (1911-1912)—in which it was revealed that Victor Flachon, director of the republican daily La Lanterne, and his mistress had purchased sex with minors from a pimp named Nitchevo who published ads in the newspaper—and its use by right-wing, monarchist journalists to critique the French Republic. The page begins with the conclusion of a section, detailing in several sentences how this right-wing critique drew the prominent politician Aristide Briand—a former director of La Lanterne—into the story, asserting that his work in the Chamber of Deputies largely consisted of doing Flachon’s bidding and referring to him as the “minister of Nitchevo.” After this, a new section, entitled “Advertising: A Republican Vice?” begins, zooming in on the fact that coverage of the scandal—which widely informed readers across the political spectrum of the “use of intensive advertising campaigns to attract clients in search of minors”—nonetheless never gives any sense of the content of these ads. This is despite the way they “stand out from the crowd as often long, complex, self-referential, and sometimes even funny,” such as the following ad, which ran in the Miscellaneous column:

Do you suffer from continual anxieties? incurable wounds? Do you have stains on your past? difficulties in the present? concerns about the future? Are you sad, worried, uneasy? Then come quickly to consult me. My business [maison] is not quayside, but on the mezzanine and near metro Villiers! Madame Nitchevo, 34, r. de Constantinople, Mezz. on left.

The reader who only reads page 99 would likely be quite confused: even the description of the page I provide above, which gives contextual information not contained on page 99, leaves many details unexplained, including why it matters that it “seems likely that someone well educated” wrote Nitchevo’s ads. That said, and however unceremoniously, the page does nevertheless throw the reader into many topics that are central to my book. Most importantly, a reader of this page would begin to see how concerns about sexual advertising became wrapped up in politics and lawmaking at a variety of levels, from the pages of the press to the halls of government. Between the Sheets more generally shows how classified ads placed by enterprising women like the so-called Nitchevo were at the center of a variety of political, cultural, and legal debates during France’s Third Republic (1870-1940). These conversations and the laws they inspired were spurred on by fears about a falling birth rate supposedly caused by abortion, women’s growing independence, gender subversion, and the supposedly ever-present danger of sex trafficking for innocent white women—all things that the classifieds were seen as encouraging and facilitating. As a danger to the republic and its foundation in sexual normativity, in the form of monogamous, reproductive couples, classified advertising sheds light on the sexual history of republican governance.

Visit Hannah Frydman's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue