Katherine Fusco's "Hollywood's Others"

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Katherine Fusco's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

David Obst's "Saving Ourselves from Big Car"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit David Obst's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ayoush Lazikani's "The Medieval Moon"

Ayoush Lazikani is a lecturer at the University of Oxford. A specialist in medieval literature, she is the author of Cultivating the Heart and Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, and an associate editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages.

Lazikani applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing, and reported the following:

If you open The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing at page 99, you will find a discussion of how surgical practice was influenced by the position of the moon. I discuss the works—or adaptations of works— by authors and surgeons such as Lanfranc (c. 1250-1315) and John Arderne (b. 1307), who stress the importance of knowing the moon’s position when undertaking surgical treatment.

This gives us a glimpse into the deep significance of the moon to medieval people: knowing about the moon and its position in the heavens even impacted healing practices. But because there was such a rich range of ideas about and attitudes towards the moon in the medieval world, page 99 can only indicate one aspect of the moon’s significance. The Medieval Moon explores a spectrum of ways in which the moon was important to medieval people: from its impacts on the tides and the growth of trees to its role as a place of adventure to its resonance for people in love. Its role in surgical treatment is only one dimension to its significance.

There is also another problem with attempting to see page 99 as representative of the whole book. The sources discussed there are in English. And The Medieval Moon seeks to take a global perspective of the medieval world, discussing sources in a range of different languages and from many parts of the world. The book does not do so perfectly, but this is its goal. Page 99 thus gives us only a fraction of the global perspective the book embraces.

In sum, I think page 99 offers us only a partial and fragmented view of what the moon meant to medieval people around the world.

Learn more about The Medieval Moon at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda Laury Kleintop's "Counting the Cost of Freedom"

Amanda Laury Kleintop is assistant professor of history at Elon University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War, with the following results:

The first thing the reader sees on page 99 is the heading “Compensation and the Limits of Constitutional Change.” The previous section, which concludes on the same page, explains how Republicans in Congress in 1866 added a section to the Fourteenth Amendment to invalidate former enslavers’ claims for compensation for enslaved people freed during the Civil War. It also notes that Republicans’ political opponents downplayed the financial and legal need for the section. The subsequent section begins, “Republicans opposed paying enslavers and successfully mobilized uncompensated emancipation as a political tool; however, their stance on emancipation and eminent domain remained ambiguous,” referring to previous discussions in the book.

The Page 99 Test works well for Counting the Cost of Freedom by dropping the reader into one of the book’s core arguments. It is in the middle of Chapter 4, the book’s narrative climax. Previously, the book demonstrates that many enslavers and their political allies insisted that the Constitution, doctrines of property law, principles of fairness and the need for regional economic stability dictated that they be reimbursed for the lost value of the enslaved people they legally held as property prior to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. However, there had been no doctrinal consensus on whether that was true in peacetime, let alone after the Confederacy seceded and lost a war over slavery. Chapter 4, and page 99 specifically, summarizes the congressional response to their claims.

If the Page 99 Test fails, it is because the reader will enter the book in the middle of the action. The drama and humanity of post-war politics is lost on readers who haven’t read Congressman John Broomall’s speech railing against paying enslavers, who “murdered two hundred and ninety thousand of our fellow-citizens.” He continued, “Let our political opponents call the dead to life. . . . We will then pay for their slaves.” This page leaves out other major characters in and outside of Congress involved in this debate.

It’s also difficult to gauge why section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment was so important or why “the limits of constitutional change” matter without understanding enslaver’s long-standing claims for compensation based on their self-proclaimed property rights in people. The Fourteenth Amendment invalidated former enslavers’ claims for compensation, but subsequent sections and chapters argue that Republicans stopped short at instigating lasting economic reform. Section 4 created a constitutional framework that retroactively expanded federal authority for immediate, uncompensated emancipation without suggesting that the US could permanently confiscate other forms of property. That enabled former enslavers to profit from other vestiges of slavery’s economic system. Eventually, the book argues, this ambiguity enabled Lost Cause propagandists to minimize the history of white southerners’ resistance to emancipation only after they had succeeded in focusing attention on what the nation owed enslavers, not what it owed the formerly enslaved.

Learn more about Counting the Cost of Freedom at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark LeBar's "Just People"

Mark LeBar is Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is the author of The Value of Living Well (2013), and the editor of Equality and Public Policy (2015) and of Justice (2018).

LeBar applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Just People: Virtue, Equality, and Respect, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book is a tough place to start, as it is the middle of a complex discussion. It considers the possibility of relying on the judgments of people who are far from virtuous to determine what is the right outlook for particular cases of injustice — say, the issue of the legal subordination of women in a society in which very few people see anything wrong with it. That really matters for the view I defend in the book, because an essential part of the case is that there is no standard beyond the judgments of virtuous people as to what being just people requires. Even if that is so, since the virtuous are scarce on the ground in the best of societies, is my account just a recipe for loss of hope in justice?

On the other hand, the passage on page 99 is a useful lens for engaging with the project of the book. The core aim of the book is to bring back into the foreground thinking about being just as something that we can and must undertake as individuals — entirely independently of the justice of our societies. Sometimes that means being a just person in an unjust society. On page 99 I defend the view that it is the judgment of the just and virtuous — even if they are thin on the ground — that matters, so that we can say that even in a society in which people see nothing wrong with slavery or the subordination of women, we have a metric that shows them to be wrong. All people impose obligations in virtue of what they are, that we are bound to take equally seriously, and to respect. That means our thinking about how to carry out our plans must take them into account as constraints. Being just people means respecting the authority of people equally, and that is something we can do irrespective of the dispositions of others. In that way the Page 99 Test is a useful lens for considering what my book is about.

Learn more about Just People at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast's "Wheat at War"

Rosella Cappella Zielinski specializes in the study of conflict with an emphasis on how states mobilize their resources for war. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University and non-resident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at Marine Corps University. She is the author of How States Pay for Wars (2016), winner of the 2017 American Political Science Association Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award in International History and Politics. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania and held fellowships at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin and the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. Paul Poast is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he specializes in alliance politics and the political economy of security. An award-winning author, he holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, a MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA from Miami University. He has taught at a variety of universities, including Rutgers University and The Ohio State University.

Zielinski and Poast applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War, and reported the following:

How do allies coordinate economically during war? What happens to their efforts once the wartime crisis is over? These are the big questions Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War addresses in the context of World War I. And, lucky for us, we passed the Page 99 Test! Page 99 provides an example of the nature of cooperation problems allies face during wartime (for page 99 its allied shipping).

Wheat at War explores how the allies (led by the British, French, and Italians) coordinated wheat and shipping during World War I. By 1915 the war had destroyed French and Italian wheat fields and cut off Russian wheat imports leaving the European allies in peril. Turning West, the allies had to rely on wheat from the Americas, yet this solution was not without its problems as German attacks on shipping made transporting tonnage difficult and crop disease in 1915 created additional shortages. Something had to be done. The British and French decided they must hang together or hang apart. By 1916 they solved this wheat crisis by creating an impressive organization, the Wheat Executive. Here a handful of bureaucrats were given the power to decide all aspects of grain purchases, shipments, and deliveries for countless countries and millions of people.

Page 99 lands right in the middle of the book and at the apex of our narrative. While the wheat crisis was solved, a new and bigger crisis emerged, shipping. In 1917 shipping was in increasingly short supply. In April 1917 one out of every four vessels that left the United Kingdom for a foreign port failed to return due to German attacks. Exacerbating the problem was American entry into the war. As Edward Hurley, who would become Chairman of the US Shipping Board, wrote in his memoir, “We realized that transportation was the life-blood artery of the Army, the Navy and of essential industries. The United States needed raw materials required for producing military supplies. Farmers demanded nitrates from Chile, and so did manufacturers of explosives. Steel plants wanted manganese ore from Brazil and chrome from Australia. The World had to be scoured for essential raw materials, which had to be carried in ships under our control. Every industry was crying for coal, which of necessity had to be carried by water so far as that was possible because of railway congestion” (quoted on page 99!).

How did the allies solve this shipping problem? Did they invoke the lessons and institutions of the Wheat Executive, or did they go another way now that Americans were now officially part of the coalition? Start on page 100 to find out!

Learn more about Wheat at War at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: How States Pay for Wars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Devoney Looser's "Wild for Austen"

Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author of several books, including Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës and The Making of Jane Austen. A Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar, Looser has published essays in The Atlantic, New York Times, Salon, Slate, and The Washington Post. She is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America and played roller derby under the name Stone Cold Jane Austen.

Looser applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, with the following results:

Unfortunately, page 99 is not a full page of text in Wild for Austen! It includes the final paragraphs to the book’s 9th chapter, which describes features of wildness in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). Page 99 concludes the chapter. It features musings on the little-known legacy of the novel's heroine, Catherine Morland, which start on the previous page of Wild for Austen.

In the 1970s, the name Catherine Morland was chosen as a pseudonym by the writer of two mass-market novels. The first one published was Castle Black (1972), with the melodramatic tagline, “Was her own unanswered past a part of their tragic family history—or was she just a pawn in their deadly game?"

Page 99 continues the exploration of the pseudonym Catherine Morland:

Morland turned author again in 1976 with a second gothic novel of suspense. Its cover blurb asks, "Was her brother-in-law’s death an accident . . . ? The terrible secret is revealed in The Legacy of Winterwyck." These novels joined the late twentieth-century vogue for cheap Gothic fiction.

I end the chapter (and page 99) by revealing the identity of this 1970s Gothic novelist:

I’m almost sorry to reveal that, once the veil was lifted from Catherine Morland’s Castle Black and The Legacy of Winterwyck, the pseudonymous author who wrote them turned out to be, in reality, John D. Schubert. I, for one, wish it had been otherwise, but I leave it to be settled by whomever it may concern whether such a tale of literary cross-dressing makes for a worse or a better outcome for this curious heroine. Or perhaps this chapter should end by riffing on the words with which Austen began Northanger Abbey: No one who saw Catherine Morland in her infancy would ever have supposed her born to be a man’s pseudonym.

The Page 99 Test is a partial success in revealing the thrust of Wild for Austen. It definitely gives readers some idea of the tenor and tone of the whole. It provides an example of the level of research involved in the book (uncovering this 1970s Catherine Morland’s identity) and provides a sense of the book's tongue-in-cheek tone.

But page 99 reveals only elliptically the theme of the book—exploring evidence for Jane Austen’s legitimate wild side through her writings, life, and legacy. Readers of page 99 wouldn’t know that the book includes 25 chapters, with one on each of Austen’s six major novels, her juvenilia, and lesser-known or unfinished writings.

Readers of page 99 wouldn’t know that the second section of the book goes into Austen's connections to wild relatives and a social circle that was lot more cosmopolitan, vibrant, and interesting than readers today may understand. I describe not only her aunt who stood trial for a capital crime. I describe her London acquaintance with an international spy and his opera diva wife, both of whom were ultimately assassinated. The book tells stories that overturn the myth of Jane Austen as the simple, sheltered figure we’ve long been sold.

The last third of the book is well previewed through the page 99 test. The final set of chapters in Wild for Austen explore Austen’s legacy--who’s gone wild over her--over the past two centuries. These chapters look her and her fiction in popular culture, through the first imagining of her ghost (in 1823) to the first known mention of her fiction in a court of law (1825). One chapter investigates the screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice that almost were, including the time Judy Garland was set to play Elizabeth Bennet in a big budget musical.

Taken together, Wild for Austen’s chapters—like its page 99—show us that we ought to move the dial from milder to wilder where Austen is concerned. There is hard evidence for overturning the story of Austen’s fiction, social circle, and afterlife as boring, prim, and proper. She, like most of her heroines, could be positively wild.

Visit Devoney Looser's website.

The Page 99 Test: Sister Novelists.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Vellend's "Everything Evolves"

Mark Vellend is professor of biology at the Université de Sherbrooke and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Theory of Ecological Communities.

Vellend applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics, and shared the following:

On page 99 of my book, Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics, there are two figures. The only text on the page is in the figure captions. The two figures contain graphs that illustrate different forms of evolutionary selection. In the simplest scenario (Figure 5.1), one type of entity (e.g., an iPhone or the Omicron variant of the virus causing Covid-19) has higher fitness than another (e.g., a BlackBerry or the Delta variant) because of some characteristic: the ease of internet access for cell phones and the ease of transmission for viruses. The second set of graphs (Figure 5.2) shows more generalized forms of selection. Directional selection is illustrated by the evolution of the shape of violin sound holes, which gradually changed from semi-circular to the now-familiar cursive f-shape shape, based on improved sound volume and quality. “Balancing selection” is when evolutionary fitness is greatest for intermediate trait values, in this case the size of cell phones: medium sized ones are more successful than tiny ones or very large ones. “Divergent selection” – maximum fitness of extreme trait values – is illustrated by bird beaks, which might be favored when small or large (if the seeds the birds eat are small or large) but not in between.

On the Page 99 Test, I would say that Everything Evolves gets a grade of C. If a reader opened the book to page 99, they would get a reasonably clear sense of one key argument in the book: Evolutionary processes – in this case selection – apply equally to cultural or technological change (cell phones, violins) as they do to biological change (viruses, birds). That said, gleaning this message would be difficult without some background in evolutionary science (provided in the book), and there is no indication of other evolutionary processes (variation generation, drift, movement), or of the arguments as to why generalized evolutionary science is important and historically underappreciated. So, on page 99 alone a reader would get some sense of one key aspect of the whole work, but little sense of other central themes. Not a failing grade, but a long way from an A+.

The study of violin hole shapes, communicated originally in a publication led by biomedical engineer Hadi Nia, is one of my favourite examples of cultural evolution. It’s always difficult to infer the precise nature of evolutionary processes that connect distant ancestors to specific present-day entities, but there is a compelling case here that major improvements were driven by trial and error based on random changes in hole shape that happen during production. Contrary to frequent assumptions, there was no genius violin maker that looked at a simple hole centuries ago and envisioned the elegant f-shape to maximize what researchers now call “air resonance power efficiency”. Rather, just like the way much of biological evolution occurs, improvements were discovered by random happenstance, accumulating gradually over a period of centuries.

On the flipside, biological evolution can involve processes often thought to be specific to cultural evolution, such as non-random variation generation and multiple pathways of inheritance. In short, while we might think of cultural and biological systems as evolving in fundamentally distinct ways, in fact they overlap on all possible axes we might think distinguish them. In Everything Evolves, I illustrate these axes by analogy using the “Evolutionary Soundboard”, which contains a series of dials that characterize the key processes that underly all evolutionary systems. Whether we’re considering the evolution of cells or cell phones, violins or violets, the same fundamental processes are at play.

Visit Mark Vellend's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Andersson Burnett and Bruce Buchan's "Race and the Scottish Enlightenment"

Linda Andersson Burnett is a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden. Bruce Buchan is a professor in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750-1820, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test is a useful exercise in opening up key themes in our book that connects the effervescent history of ideas in the Scottish Enlightenment during the middle to late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to intensifying European colonial engagements across the globe. Ours is a different kind of history of ideas attuned to the resonance of concepts, and especially race, beyond the familiar canon of published works by leading intellectuals, and outside the lecture theatres where they were first imbibed. Page 99 of our book presents one such study of how Scottish Enlightenment ideas travelled, within the walls of the university and far beyond to the islands of the Pacific ocean.

On page 99 we discuss the travels of a little-known naval surgeon and naturalist, William Anderson (1750-1778), with James Cook on two of his momentous expeditions to the Pacific between 1772 and 1780. What brought the two men together, and it seems Cook respected Anderson so much he made use of his journals to write up his own, was the nexus linking the study of medicine at the University of Edinburgh to the practice of natural history (the systematic observation of nature and humanity) aboard vessels of the Royal Navy, or in other imperial and colonial expeditions across the globe.

Our book traces a surprising number of lesser-known figures such as Anderson who exemplified these connections. What was particularly notable about this group of men was that they studied at one of the intellectual powerhouses of the Scottish Enlightenment, and in its famed medical school. At the University and in the city of Edinburgh itself, these students imbibed Enlightenment thought from many of its leading exponents (such as David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Alexander Monro, and others). Their education equipped them not just with medical and scientific knowledge, but also with ideas drawn from studying history, literary style, and moral philosophy. Anderson was no exception. On page 99 we explore his personal library which included key texts on anatomy and medical practice, as well as the latest French natural history, and an eclectic mix of Scottish thought such as Hume’s philosophy and history, Lord Kames on literary criticism, and Lord Monboddo’s speculations on the origin of language.

In microcosm, Anderson and his reading represent a far wider intellectual, social, and professional network. Running through it was a disposition cultivated in Edinburgh to employ the methods of Scottish Enlightenment thought to study nature, and humanity as part of nature, to identify the causes of what was called the “varieties of the human species”. Those varieties were both physical and social, corporeal and historical, but each was understood to have material causes subject to rational explanation, careful comparison, and systematic classification. By these means, men such as Anderson paved the way for the gradual emergence of the notion of race and the supposed separations and hierarchies of racial classification. The knowledge these men compiled on various travels, to America, Africa, Asia and far off Australia, was often communicated back to their professors and mentors at Edinburgh. Anderson sent specimens to his former teacher of anatomy, Monro. Anderson’s story thus opens a window into a little-known, and often fragmentary, but vivid trace of the genuinely global impact and colonial imprint of Scottish Enlightenment thought.

Learn more about Race and the Scottish Enlightenment at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hannah Kim's "Ties That Bind"

Hannah Kim is an associate professor of history and a co-coordinator of the social studies education program at the University of Delaware, Newark.

Kim applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Ties That Bind: People and Perception in U.S. and Korean Transnational Relations, 1905-1965, with the following results:

When opening to page 99, the reader would learn about Moon Lee who draped a Korean flag on the gate of the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C. in March of 1942, a few months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II. Lee was in the city attending the Korean Liberty Conference. Korea had become a colony of Japan in 1910, and an independence movement had been gaining momentum over the decades. Lee’s “hostile takeover” of the Japanese embassy by a Korean was reported in newspapers around the country and exemplified the efforts of Korean nationalists to persuade Americans and U.S. government officials to support Korean independence.

A reader opening to page 99 in the book would get a good sense of the monograph. The selection shows how Koreans tapped into anti-Japanese sentiments to garner sympathy for Korean independence. Moon Lee was not a famous person and nothing else is known about him. But Koreans like Moon Lee and other supporters rallied behind the cause of Korean independence and worked tirelessly to persuade the general public and people in positions of power to recognize Korean independence. The selection also shows the types of evidence that I used in my book and my focus on cultural history.

My one caveat is that a reader may misinterpret the book as being focused on Korean independence movement and Korean nationalism. While this is an important part of two of the chapters of the book, it is not a focus in the first chapter and does not appear at all in the last two chapters. The book is about how interested parties, including Korean nationalists, American missionaries, political pundits, and others, influenced American perceptions of Korea and Koreans over a larger span of time. This book is firmly in the field of U.S. history and shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a book on Korean history.

I found it interesting that some newspapers carried the same misinformation about Moon Lee being a naturalized citizen of the United States. This would have been nigh impossible in 1942 because Asians were forbidden from becoming naturalized citizens (this would not be overturned until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952). The only way for an Asian to be a citizen was to be born in the United States as was decided by the Supreme Court in the landmark case, U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898. I didn’t realize how newspapers used articles from news services such as UPI and AP. The same article could appear in the Grand Forks Herald or the Pasadena Star News with slight variations or different titles, depending on what the editor wanted to emphasize. I suppose when small local newspapers carried syndicated news, they didn’t have the time or resources to fact check the sources.

Learn more about Ties That Bind at the University of Nebraska Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenja McCray's "Essential Soldiers"

Kenja McCray is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Clayton State University and coauthor of Atlanta Metropolitan State College, a campus history.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership, and shared the following:

Page 99 highlights a central theme in Essential Soldiers, that women played fundamental, complex, and sometimes contradictory roles in Black Power cultural nationalist organizations. The section focuses on gender roles in educational programs and contains a “case study” of a single school told through the narrative of one African American woman activist. I assigned the pseudonym Imani Omotayo, because she wanted to remain anonymous. For context, Black Power activists faced ongoing threats of external state surveillance, harassment, and violence, as well as internal conflict among movement peers.

This specific page spotlights the Us Organization’s School of Afroamerican Culture, which was founded in majority-Black South Central Los Angeles in 1967. The school’s teachers and staff charged minimal tuition, offering academic lessons, cultural enrichment, meals, and a nurturing space in ways that earned community support. Rooted in Pan-African nationalist values, instructors combined the guiding Principles of Blackness (some of the Kawaida Principles) with expectations of academic excellence. While the school’s personnel fostered a sense of cultural pride and scholarly development in students, Omotayo noted that the curriculum also reinforced restrictive gender norms. Such values telegraphed a sex-based hierarchy that limited women and girls to secondary, “submissive” social roles.

The Page 99 Test might pique a browser’s interest. It will provide them with some information, but it is just an entry point. Of course, they would have to read more to get the full meaning, because the book’s premise is more complicated. Essential Soldiers examines how Pan-African cultural nationalist women who were affiliated with some of the most notoriously masculinist Black Power organizations utilized their agency to transform themselves and their environments. In doing so, I argue that they demonstrated a work-centered, people-centered, and African-centered form of service leadership. Exploring their activism in several areas, from the media to education, provides a new standpoint for considering Black Power leadership legacies. This is because scholars and popular commenters alike have tended to focus on male-chauvinistic, top-down, and authoritarian Black Power leadership models, in part because the women’s stories have been so obscured in the historical record.

If readers browsed backward in the book a bit and looked ahead just a few pages, they would find out that supplementary and independent Black educational programs (IBIs), like the School of Afroamerican Culture and others, were often developed, designed, and sustained by women, whose gender roles within the earliest days of Kawaida organizations were limited to domesticity and childrearing. As nationalist mothers, they were seen as the primary cultivators of a budding nation. As Pan-African cultural nationalist teachers, women filled roles that were essential to developing good citizens in the nation becoming. Many female cultural nationalist advocates challenged their secondary status, utilizing access to education and training to create leadership opportunities for women and developing programs like communal childcare, which helped mothers (and fathers) perform political work outside the home. IBIs and supplementary educational programs became some of the most important and longest-running endeavors that Black Power cultural nationalist organizations undertook in their communities, developing into outlets for women’s political work and incubators for their unique form of service leadership.

Visit Kenja McCray's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregory A. Daddis's "Faith and Fear"

Gregory A. Daddis is professor of history and the Melbern G. Glasscock Endowed Chair in American History at Texas A&M University.

Daddis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Faith and Fear: America’s Relationship with War since 1945, and reported the following:

What are the implications when you write a “moral tract on mass murder”? This was the question one reviewer pondered as he evaluated Herman Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War. Kahn, director of the Hudson Institute think tank in New York, had set out to challenge his readers, to force them to think about “the unthinkable” because, he surmised, nuclear war was not just possible, but statistically probable. In many ways, he succeeded. Well before the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, many Americans fearfully considered the prospect of nuclear Armageddon.

Kahn’s treatise took aim at more than just deterrence theory, the popular notion that nuclear weapons could serve as a global “stabilizing force” because the superpowers feared “retaliation in kind.” Rather, the physicist-turned-strategist was critiquing US policymakers’ deeper faith in war keeping their nation safe in an uncertain yet dangerous world.

As page 99 of Faith and Fear reveals, however, that faith in war sat in uneasy and constant tension with a fear of war and its consequences. Throughout the early Cold War years of the late 1940s and 1950s, a pattern emerged in how Americans conceived of their relationship with war. They held faith that they could adeptly manage military force to promote an ever-expanding foreign policy agenda while keeping guard against communist enemies seemingly hell-bent on world domination. Yet they also feared that war might bring chaos and destruction and, in the atomic era, the possible extinction of mankind itself.

Page 99 illustrates well the dysfunctionality of this relationship between faith and fear. Cold War “policymakers may have exuded confidence from their possession of nuclear weapons, yet their eagerness to pursue hydrogen bombs and a triad of delivery systems—intercontinental bombers, ballistic missiles, and submarines—intimated deeper fears about what the future might hold.”

These tensions between faith and fear matter because they endure. Americans continue to place faith in massive defense budgets keeping them safe from threats both real and imagined. And they fear, acutely so, that those same threats may lead to the end of the nation as they know it.

Back in 1960, Herman Kahn wanted his fellow citizens to think more seriously about their relationship with war. Sixty-five years later, his inclinations to challenge our martial assumptions about war and its value are as relevant as ever.

Learn more about Faith and Fear at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test:Westmoreland's War.

The Page 99 Test: Withdrawal.

The Page 99 Test: Pulp Vietnam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen B. Casey's "The Things She Carried"

Kathleen B. Casey is Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Professor of History at Furman University in South Carolina. She is the author of The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville.

Casey applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America, and reported the following:

If you open up The Things She Carried to page 99, you’ll likely be surprised to find a large advertisement from 1937 for Tampax tampons. The ad was published in Good Housekeeping and includes a black and white photograph showcasing a woman’s manicured fingers slipping a box of Tampax into the mouth of her purse. At the time, tampons were brand new products with which consumers were unfamiliar. Because advertisers were reluctant to show the actual product or discuss its use, they relied on more discrete images of their boxed products being placed inside women’s purses. The partial paragraph at the bottom of this page notes how terms like pocketbook and purse had become so associated with women’s bodies in the 1940s that, in some cases, they began to serve as euphemisms for women’s genitalia.

Because page 99 is almost entirely occupied by an image and it reflects one of six chapters exploring very different angles of the cultural history of the purse, it would likely intrigue and surprise readers more than represent the book as a whole. When most people think about purses, they think of fashion, but they don’t imagine how purses might be connected to women’s history and the invention of purse-sized personal hygiene products like tampons. This chapter of my book, “The Bag and the Body,” helps to explain why purses became increasingly linked to womanhood and femininity, to the point where American men now often shrink at the idea of touching a purse, nevermind carrying one of their own. The book is really about how purses are these seemingly mundane, ubiquitous objects that we have really underestimated. In reality, they were powerful toolkits strategically used by several generations of women across two centuries of American history.

In a way, the Page 99 Test works because this book is full of rather unexpected stories, connections, and images, which place the purse in surprisingly important roles in American history. Page 99 represents that quite well.

Visit Kathleen B. Casey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Baker's "Charlottesville"

Deborah Baker is the author of A Blue Hand and The Last Englishmen. Her biography In Extremis was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and her book The Convert was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in New York and Charlottesville.

Baker applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Charlottesville: An American Story, with the following results:

Page 99 describes the January 16, 2017 Charlottesville City Council vote on the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a local park. Here is a paragraph describing the mayor's thinking at that moment.

Until [vice Mayor Wes Bellamy] brought up King's definition of the white moderate from his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Mayor Mike Signer felt certain he had persuaded him to keep the Lee statue in Lee Park. This was a measure of the high value he placed on his own thinking and powers of persuasion. Signer prided himself on his results-oriented approach to the statue question. He arrived that evening prepared to expound on this at great length. In his prefatory remarks, he took pains to express his own "abhorrence of slavery" and his desire to "create bridges rather than divisions." But what was the practical effect of moving the Less statue he asked, vis-a-vis advancing the cause of racial justice? Not seeing any material benefit, he concluded it was an empty political gesture. He voted no on removal, yes on contextualizing it and renaming the park.

Page 99 comes in the final chapter of Part 1 of my book, Charlottesville: An American Story. Part I is prefaced by the 1924 ceremony that accompanied the installation of the Lee statue in Lee Park. A reader opening page 99 would get a good idea of what the book was about and my style of reporting. What would be missed is my deeper dives into Virginia and Charlottesville's history; the Lee statue's installation ceremony, for example, was presided over by a prominent Klansman, who was also a Grand Commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Even before this city council meeting, the statue had become a subject of controversy. Neo-Confederate groups had staged rallies to defend it. The council had convened a Blue Ribbon Commission to study the question. When the commission's conclusions were less than conclusive, it was left to the city council to make the final call on its fate. That evening it wasn't yet clear how individual council members would vote. Council chambers were filled with people carrying signs, there was a woman in a hoop skirt who'd driven all the way from Maryland. Four days before Donald Trump's swearing in, emotions were running high.

It was the council's 3 to 2 vote to move the statue elsewhere that put Charlottesville in the nation's crosshairs. Only then did Richard Spencer, who had been milking his notoriety during the lead up to the election of Donald Trump, decide to make this local controversy a national flashpoint for his brand of white nationalism. Eight months later he and over one thousand white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klan members, far right internet trolls, podcasters, and influencers showed up in Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally. Before the day was over a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a crowd of counter protesters, killing Heather Heyer and critically injuring dozens of others.

Visit Deborah Baker's website.

Writers Read: Deborah Baker (December 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah James's "Clawing Back"

Deborah James is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Faculty Associate in the International Inequalities Institute. She is the author of Money From Nothing (2015).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Clawing Back: Redistribution In Precarious Times, and shared the following:

“People will come in with one issue, but it usually turns out to be several”, says London-based volunteer adviser Yusuf, a few lines down on page 99. People needing help because they are in debt or have lost a job, or because a state benefit is not forthcoming or has been withdrawn, seek help from intermediaries and volunteers working in a range of charities. Page 99 discusses the interaction between these tangles of diverse issues (called “problem clusters” by those working to help UK residents in the low-wage sector), and shows how advisers like Yusuf separate them into discrete strands. The term “clusters” suggests an embroiled knot, the solution to which requires pulling apart its component parts. In the process, advisers help clients— in order not to feel overwhelmed—demarcate resources as separate from one another. What prompts a person to seek help may appear to consist of just one of these strands. Often it is not the most serious, but it is the one that causes them most fear or anxiety.

Adviser–advisee encounters involve sifting through letters from creditors or different welfare departments and agencies, often in search of a single all-important document that, if left undetected, would undermine the fine balance between constantly readjusted sets of income and outgoings. In a face-to-face encounter with a client, the adviser lists the client’s expenses and establishes what her income is. This includes ascertaining which welfare payments the client is receiving (and at what levels), suggesting others that might supplement that income, and liaising with agencies that may have failed to fulfil their obligations in providing these. If the client is in debt, she may be referred to a debt specialist. The adviser seeks to help the client compartmentalize problems, but without ignoring what caused them to “cluster” together. These intersections shape, and are shaped by, the complex interdependencies of householding, but knowing when to pull them (and keep them) apart is key to the boundary work that advisers do. And, in turn, advisers also know how and when to recombine these elements, creating a holistic picture of householders’ quandaries and recognizing them as real people with families.

This page gives a partial, but important, glimpse into the book. Clawing Back is about how householders in both the UK and South Africa make a living by patchworking together these three income sources: work, welfare and debt. Each on its own can appear as providing an important resource, but in combination they often turn into “problem clusters”. What is as important as earning a wage, getting paid a benefit, or securing a loan, is seeking to avoid having one or all of these taken away, once procured. “Clawing back” often involves sidestepping automated repayments that use high-tech financial instruments. In South Africa, people often find themselves involuntarily subjected to the settling of loans provided by private creditors, while in the UK it is often to the public welfare benefit system that they owe money, because of what are called “overpayments”. As page 99 shows, people in the UK are able to seek expert (if often unpaid) advice in dealing with one or all elements in these “problem clusters”. In South Africa, the other case study, those with similar difficulties face a more uncertain advice landscape, with unevenness between areas that are well-served by paralegals and those where people are often left to their own devices: “I advise myself” as one woman told me.

The book gives an ethnographic accounts of how this happens, illustrating how “distributive labour”, as it was called by the late lamented James Ferguson, has become increasingly important. If by “labour” we mean strenuous activity and effort in negotiating socioeconomic relations, then the endeavours undertaken by people in these low- income settings certainly qualify: they are time-consuming and relentless. In an era where the boundaries between (public) welfare and (private) debtfare are increasingly blurred, people (and women, in particular), must exercise ingenuity in seeking access to resources that support their reproduction and their future plans for greater stability and well-being.

Learn more about Clawing Back at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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