Daniel Eastman An's "Fear of God"

Daniel Eastman An is Assistant Professor of Church History at Yonsei University in Seoul.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fear of God: Practicing Emotion in Late Antique Monasticism, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Fear of God: Practicing Emotion in Late Antique Monasticism is part of a discussion centering on prayer spaces in Egyptian monasteries in late antiquity. At the top of the page I’ve just introduced the concept of “surface figuration” as a collective designation for the various texts, images, and other markings painted and inscribed on the walls and floors of the (now destroyed) Monastery of Apa Jeremias outside modern Cairo. The page goes on to state the argument of the book’s fourth chapter: by guiding what monks saw and how they moved their bodies while praying, the monastery’s surface figuration “afforded a particular set of relationships (and hence emotions) for its inhabitants, centering on the idea of intercession. While the overarching relational paradigm between the monastery’s inhabitants and their God remained one of future judgment, the surface figuration afforded a host of subsidiary interactions between monastics (both living and dead) and the intercessory figures whose aid they sought.”

While I can’t say that this accurately encapsulates the entire book, it is a fair representation of the book’s penultimate chapter, “Spaces of Judgment and Mercy,” which focuses on the emotional lives of monks at two monasteries in Egypt in the period between the fourth and seventh centuries. The above quotation also hints at the conclusions of the book’s two main preceding chapters. First, “The Psalter as Emotional Lexicon” explores the varying emotional vocabulary of the relationship between humans and God across three ancient translations of the psalms (Greek, Coptic, and Syriac), concluding that monks reciting the psalms in all three languages (but especially Greek) encountered a vocabulary that strongly emphasized human fear over against divine pity or mercy. The other main chapter, “Scenes of Judgment,” shows how monastic writers made sense of these two emotions through the relational paradigm of judgment, leading them to foreground God’s role as eschatological judge in their writings for other monastics. These textual analyses preface the book’s engagement with monastic material culture, which shows rank-and-file monastics reacting to the fear of eschatological judgment by establishing networks of intercessional and penitential prayer on behalf of themselves and one another.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway of the book is the idea that emotions—even supposedly ineffable emotions like those involved in relationships with the divine—are thoroughly shaped by the variables of language, culture, and physical environment. Context matters. Together with this is the idea that emotions in one relational domain tend to influence emotions in other relational domains. While the book begins with the concept of fear of God, it ends with the realization that that fear itself generated profound mutual love among the members of some monastic communities in late antiquity.

Learn more about Fear of God at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ladelle McWhorter's "Unbecoming Persons"

Ladelle McWhorter is the Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Emerita at the University of Richmond. Her books include Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy.

McWhorter applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self, with the following results:

Page 99 of Unbecoming Persons is near the end of Chapter 3, “Imposing Personhood: African Enslavement and Indigenous Resistance.” It describes US government efforts to force the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole peoples to abandon their traditional relationship with the land either by accepting individual (male) landownership or by leaving their native territories and relocating to “Indian Country,” what is now Arkansas and Oklahoma.

In 1819, President Monroe’s Secretary of War John C. Calhoun negotiated a dubious treaty with a small group of Cherokee men in Washington that rewarded those who “had demonstrated an adoption of ‘American life-styles’” (plantation agriculture and slaveholding) with 640 acres each and a path to US citizenship. Meanwhile, the government continued to press for removal of all who refused to abandon tribal relations with land. In 1830, President Jackson signed the controversial Indian Removal Act (which had passed Congress by only five votes) and began a formal process of dispossession and relocation. The Cherokee sought legal recourse for several more years, as did the Creek until 1832. Although thousands eventually made the trek west, some hid in the mountainous backcountry or fled south to join the more militant Seminole resistance.

No single page could possibly capture the central idea of Unbecoming Persons for the simple reason that the book is more a process of discovery and of dismantling assumptions than it is the development of a single thesis. However, page 99 does present a very significant step in that process. Earlier chapters demonstrate that the modern concept of “person”—with its strong Roman legal ancestry and the moral, political, and epistemological meaning it acquired in the work of John Locke—is inextricably bound up with proprietorship. The modern person is the owner of its thoughts, actions, and labor and as such can also own material and intellectual property. This concept of personhood was a tool of British colonization. As Locke insisted, Indigenous people, like European people, are to be judged as individual persons; persons who do not manage and cultivate their resources properly are to be punished with dispossession—precisely because, as individual persons, they are morally responsible for their failure. When Indigenous people refused to treat land as property, they refused Lockean personhood as well.

The first chapters of Unbecoming Persons present a genealogy of the concept of personhood with special attention to Roman law and Christian Trinitarian theology and the ways those lineages come together in social contract theory. It shows how personhood emerged at the turn of the 18th century as a mechanism for enforcing regimes of private property and forcing European peasants into wage labor or workhouses and how it was used to justify colonization and slavery. The final chapters of the book explore a variety of possibilities for resistance to personhood’s most dangerous aspects and for creating and leading good lives beyond the strictures of post-Lockean propriety.

Learn more about Unbecoming Persons at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Blaxland (ed.), "Mobilising the Australian Army"

John Blaxland is Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University and a former military intelligence officer.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new edited book, Mobilising the Australian Army: Contingencies and Compromises Over More than a Century, and reported the following:

My edited book, Mobilising the Australian Army: Contingencies and Compromises over more than a Century, draws on contributions to an Army History Unit conference held in Canberra a couple of years back. Page 99 of the book sees Carol Fort explain commercial sector munitions production for the Australian Army during the Second World War. But the book spans a much wider scope of Australia's martial history ranging from Federation through to the early 2020s. The Second World War features prominently, to be sure, noting that it stands out as the greatest mobilisation of the Army in the nation's history.

Fort's chapter is the fourth and final chapter of 'Part 2, entitled 'Mobilsing Resources for War: Early Twentieth Century'. Part 2 spans work by Meighen McCrae on resource decision making to win in the First World War, Douglas E. Delaney's comparative study of inter-war Canadian and Australian army mobilisation planning, and Andrew T. Ross's chapter on industry, industrial mobilisation and the Australian army in the Second World War. This is a rich part full of useful historical pointers on how to overcome challenges of rapid industrial and force expansion.

Part 3 covers women and force expansion during the Second World War and beyond. It includes a chapter by Clare Birgin discussing the employment of women in signals intelligence in the lead-up to and opening phases of the Second World War, acknowledging their excellent work went largely unheralded because of the secretive nature of the organisations they work for. It also includes a chapter by Karen D. David and Philip McCristall, once again comparing the Canadian and Australian experience, but this time focusing on women in the military, reflecting on the past and shaping the future.

Part 4 'Alliance and Concurrency Pressures', discusses Cold War and post-Cold War challenges in four chapters. In the first one, Amanda Johnston describes some of the constraining effects of concurrency pressures faced by the Australian Army today. Sue Thompson examines alliance security planning in Southeast Asia during the Cold War, reflecting a surprisingly longstanding interest in and engagement with Southeast Asian partners. I have chapter in this part which reviews the Australian Army's growing concurrency pressures in the years from 2003-2010, demonstrating how it was a near run thing. Then Dan Marston reviews the difficulties of resourcing coalition operations with UK and US forces in the war in Iraq. All four chapters present complementary perspectives from different operational settings but with enduring pointers for the contemporary Australian Army.

Part 5 covers force preparation and utilisation of the Reserves. This includes a chapter by James Morrison on the home reserve and the militia in Australia during the Second World War, exploring some of the political and administrative challenges experienced. James Kell's chapter reviewing the post 1945 national service schemes points out the different rationale and purposes for the two schemes introduced successively in the early 1950s and mid 1960s. Part 5 concludes with Renée Kidson's chapter on reserve mobilisation for domestic contingencies, notably Operation Bushfire Assist and Operation Covid Assist. This is rich in fascinating observations on challenges and innovative responses.

Part 6 explores deployment challenges from the 1990s onwards. It starts with an illuminating chapter by Bob Breen on rehearsing mobilisation and force projection during the Kangaroo Exercise Series from 1989 to 1995. Bob has a second chapter auditing the Australian Army's performance in a number of operational deployments from 1987 to 2003 - including off the coast of Fiji, Somalia, Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Timor L'este. The third and final chapter in this part is by Rhys Crawley who examines the case studies drawn from Australia's Afghanistan commitments from 2005-2006, drawing important pointers for future reference. Once again, a range of operational settings provide some fascinating insights into the challenges of raising, deploying and sustaining forces - many of which are of enduring significance.

In the concluding part, I offer some reflections on mobilisation in the past and offer some pointers for the future - including a proposed voluntary but incentivised scheme for national and community service intended to help the nation face a spectrum of security challenges ranging from great power competition, looming environmental catastrophe and a spectrum of governance challenges in the region. This complements the introductory overview of the book provided by Iain Langford, which acts, in effect, as an excellent synopsis of the book. It also caps off the insights offered in the first part of the book, written by Jean Bou, who provides the contemporary and historical environment to the concept of mobilisation and its intellectual history.

All this to say that Carol Fort's observations on page 99 stand on their own, to be sure, but they make more sense in the context of the broader span of issues covered by the other chapters in the book. In the end, Mobilising the Australian Army is a timely and worthwhile reflection on the Australian Army's experience with mobilisation and what it means for today. This applies not only for contemporary military planners, policy makers, and strategists but also for politicians and the informed Australian voter contemplating what it might take to make a significant and rapid expansion of military capability in the event of an existential crisis.

Learn more about Mobilising the Australian Army at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen M. Koeth's "Crabgrass Catholicism"

Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C. is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is an urban, religious, and political historian of twentieth-century America. His research focuses on U.S. Catholic involvement in postwar metropolitan development, including urban renewal projects, public housing, and suburbanization, and the effects of these interactions on Catholic faith and politics.

Koeth applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Crabgrass Catholicism begins by situating the reader in the Diocese of Rockville Centre in suburban Long Island. Established by the Vatican in 1957 to serve the Catholics of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, the diocese was hailed as the first entirely suburban diocese and is therefore the perfect place to fulfill the aim of Crabgrass Catholicism: to examine the effects of postwar suburbanization on American Catholic practice and politics.

The first paragraph of the page focuses on the 1980s and the Diocese’s efforts to encourage fallen-away Catholics to return to the practice of the faith. The phenomenon of religious disaffiliation which became especially prominent in the 1970s and beyond is not the focus of my study. I do, however, conclude Crabgrass Catholicism by arguing that disaffiliation is one long-term effect of the changes that suburbanization ushered into the Church.

Still, the Page 99 Test largely succeeds: the remaining two paragraphs of page 99 serve as a conclusion of Chapter Three and are an apt summary of one of Crabgrass Catholicism’s principal arguments. Namely, that postwar suburbanization “made private spaces, especially the family home,” the “center of prayer and faith formation” undermining the centrality and communality of the parish and heightening the laity’s sense that religious practice was just “another life choice made amid a panoply of social possibilities.”

The urban ethnic parish, established amid late nineteenth century mass immigration, “wove geography, education, culture, family, and faith” into a “highly successful means of providing for immigrants, perpetuating ethnic culture, and passing the faith on to future generations.” But the suburban parish, “formed by rapid population expansion” in the postwar period, lacked not only the physical spaces in which the faithful could gather to “form community, practice charity, and pass on the faith,” but also crucially lacked “the binding forces of ethnic religiosity.” This radically altered not only the Catholic understanding of the parish, and how youth were instructed in the faith, but even how Catholics participated in American political life.

Visit the Crabgrass Catholicism website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tim Seiter's "Wrangling Pelicans"

Tim Seiter is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Tyler, specializing in colonial Texas with an emphasis on Spanish and Native histories.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios, with the following results:

When a reader opens page 99 of Wrangling Pelicans they will find themselves in the book’s fifth chapter entitled "A Most Dangerous and Desirable Profession." For some context, Texas throughout the eighteenth century is firmly controlled by Native peoples, even if the Spanish empire claimed otherwise. Being a Crown soldier in this space, then, was incredibly dangerous. By today’s standards, it would easily rank as the most dangerous job in the United States, if not the world. Why, then, would men be willing to risk their lives in signing up as a soldier? Page 99 of my book answers that question: by enlisting in the presidio, mestizo, mulatto, and Indigenous men of the region could be legally classified as españoles (Spaniards) and gain all the advantages that came with that status.

Race mattered a great deal in the Spanish empire. As I write in the book, "those perceived as having limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) received additional protections under the law, had more opportunities for employment, and experienced little to no social ostracism." For instance, municipal codes from places such as San Antonio reveal that Indigenous offenders could be sentenced to as many as 200 lashes "with a rope about [their] neck," whereas white offenders typically paid a fine and spent a few days in jail.

On colonial Mexico’s northern borderlands, the Spanish Crown faced a fundamental problem—it could not find enough “clean-blooded” españoles to fill its military ranks. Few white Spaniards had any incentive to relocate to the empire’s fringes, where they would find limited opportunity but limitless amounts of danger. With manpower in great need, the Crown solved this problem by turning their mixed race soldiers white on paper, thereby creating a phenomenal recruiting tool. Despite its danger, mixed race men increasingly flocked to the presidios to acquire this social status.

Alas, the Page 99 Test does a great job of summarizing one of the main arguments I make in Wrangling Pelicans. In short, men and women in borderland spaces were willing to be part of the Spanish Crown’s imperial projects if they received tangible benefits for themselves, in this case whiteness. But ultimately, throughout the rest of the book, we learn that when residents of these remote regions perceived no personal advantage, they readily violated Crown laws.

Visit Tim Seiter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin Revier's "Policing Pain"

Kevin Revier is an assistant professor of criminology in the department of sociology/anthropology at the State University of New York at Cortland.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Policing Pain: The Opioid Crisis, Abolition, and a New Ethic of Care, and reported the following:

Page 99 begins with a quote:

“Because we know that when addicts go to jail, if they don’t get treatment, if they don’t start on something, they go out, and they have such a high rate of dying the next time they use, because their bodies aren’t used to—because they haven’t used, and then they go use again, and they think they can use as much as they—and then they die.”

This is from my interview with the DSS/mental health commissioner in Broome County in Central New York. She comes after a string of quotes, where I cite the county’s district attorney and the emergency medical services coordinator who cited the same condition: people who use drugs are being locked up, they do not have treatment access inside the jail or upon release, and they overdose.

Yet, while officials discussed the risks involved for incarcerating people who use drugs, their solutions remained largely carceral-focused: add treatment to the jail and in reentry services.

Page 99 indeed represents the crux of Policing Pain: that while seemingly a reversal of the lock-em-up approaches to the drug war, public officials’ calls for treatment have tended to centralize treatment within jails, drug courts, and police programming. This creates harm, as jails, as this chapter discusses, are fundamentally places of degradation and abuse, both in terms of interpersonal violence by correctional officers and institutional violence, such as strip searches.

Importantly, page 99 also marks a shift in the book, where I move from an overview of what I deem as carceral care in police, courts, and jail treatment to envisioning what a new ethics of care looks like, abolitionist care.

Visit Kevin Revier's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helen Fry's "The White Lady"

Historian and biographer Helen Fry is the author of The Walls Have Ears, Spymaster, MI9, and more than twenty books on intelligence, prisoners of war, and the social history of World War II. She appears regularly in media interviews and podcasts and has been involved in numerous documentaries.

Fry's new book, The White Lady: The Story of Two Key British Secret Service Networks Behind German Lines, provides a comprehensive history of two of the most important British secret service networks in Belgium in two world wars.

Fry applied the “Page 99 Test” to The White Lady, and shared the following:

From page 99:

‘With my pillow I fixed up a dummy to make the bed appear occupied. I placed some of my clothes on the chair, as if I had just taken them off. At eight o’clock, Maryan, the insider who agreed to help us, opened the cell.’ (Fauquenot).

Creusen was already waiting for Fauquenot and hiding in a store cupboard, having been smuggled out of his cell by Maryan. Maryan gave them a small hammer and an iron spike, then wished them luck and disappeared. Fauquenot and Creusen made their way to the chapel, climbed a spiral staircase into a loft and then onto the roof of the prison.

At 9pm, Chauvin asked Dewé if he had heard a whistle. Then a silhouette of a figure appeared on the prison roof and promptly disappeared. ‘Did you see him?’ Chauvin asked Dewé, but Dewé had not. A different shadowy figure suddenly emerged from the darkness of the street. It was one of their own agents, Juliette Durieu. She informed them that Maryan had safely reached the safehouse, ahead of Fauquenot and Creusen…

Meanwhile Fauquenot fastened a sheet to the skylight and began to slide down to the gutter, as he recalled: ‘The roof was slippery and much steeper than I had imagined. From the gutter, I let out the sheet. To my horror, it was too short to reach anywhere near the prison wall. I pulled myself back to the skylight, and whispered the tragic news to Creusen, who was still in the loft… Then I heard a hiss from Creusen: “The pile of sheets, I’ll go back and get some.”’

Creusen soon reappeared with a bundle of sheets and tied them into a long rope. Fauquenot slid swiftly down the drain pipe to the ground and ran towards Dewé and Chauvin. He gave the password, Joan of Arc.’ Just as they enquired about the whereabouts of Creusen, his head appeared over the wall.

‘The two Collards?’ asked Dewé and Chauvin asked simultaneously.

‘They are in a different wing in solitary confinement.’

If browsers open the book at page 99 they won’t have a sense of what the White Lady network was about, but they will be curious as to why two agents (Fauquenot and Creusen) were being broken out of jail in the middle of the night. It all feels very cloak and dagger. The double break-out is one of the few known incidents of a planned escape from a Belgian prison in the First World War. The agents were working for ‘The White Lady’ network (‘La Dame Blanche’) and had been arrested at Villa Les Hirondelles on the river Meuse when German field security police in civilian clothes raided the property and arrested them. The villa was a main centre for collecting military intelligence reports from the different sectors of the spy network in the region. Two other pivotal figures in the network, the Collard brothers, were arrested in the villa at the same time. Only in their early twenties, they were shot for espionage by a German firing squad on 18 July 1918.

The reader will be drawn to read more about a world in which heroic Belgian men and women risked their lives to gather intelligence for the Allies from behind enemy lines and smuggle it out of German-occupied Belgium. Couriers took the reports to undercover British intelligence officers in Rotterdam, Holland. The network was so successful that it was described in the official MI6 history as ‘the most successful single British human intelligence operation of the First World War’. What an accolade. It became the model for a successor network in the Second World War called the Clarence Service, led by the same men and women who developed all kinds of fascinating spycraft.

Visit Helen Fry's website.

The Page 99 Test: The London Cage.

The Page 99 Test: The Walls Have Ears.

The Page 99 Test: MI9.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek S. Burdette's "Miraculous Celebrity"

Derek S. Burdette is an assistant professor of art history in the School of Art + Art History at the University of Florida.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Miraculous Celebrity: The Christ of Ixmiquilpan and Colonial Piety in Mexico City, with the following results:

My book, Miraculous Celebrity: The Señor de Ixmiquilpan and Colonial Piety in Mexico City, reconstructs the history of one of colonial Mexico’s most important miraculous statues. The Señor de Ixmiquilpan (sometimes called the Señor de Santa Teresa) was a life-sized crucifix made around 1545, which fell into disrepair at the end of the century before being “miraculously renovated” in 1621. After this remarkable event, the statue was enshrined in the Carmelite convent in Mexico City and promoted as a powerful figure that could help people in their times of need.

The Page 99 Test works perfectly on my book! Readers who turn to page 99 will find themselves near the end of my analysis of painted and printed representations of the statue. Page 99 is divided in two. At the top, readers see a black and white photograph of a small devotional pamphlet printed in the statue’s honor in 1784, now housed at the John Carter Brown Library. The pamphlet’s binding has been completely ripped apart, revealing the prayerbook’s antiquity the toll that years of use took on the object. On the lower half of page 99, readers can learn more about the prayerbook itself and how it was intended to be used. I explain that the prayerbook’s author, Domingo de Quiroga, instructed devotees to begin their prayers once they were “prostrate on your knees in front of the Sacred Renovated Image of the Holy Christ, or any copy thereof.” I go on to argue that “Quiroga’s instructions to complete the prayers in front of the Cristo Renovado [the Señor de Ixmiquilpan] must surely have driven some to the Carmelite church, where they could complete the prayers in the presence of the miraculous statue. Quiroga himself seems to recognize, however, that for most people this might not have been possible. Instead, readers would deploy a printed portrait as a substitution for the original.” Thus, on page 99 my readers find evidence of one of my central arguments in the book: printed portraits of the Señor de Ixmiquilpan circulated throughout Mexico, both inside and outside of prayerbooks, and offered devotees tangible points of connection with the miraculous statue that reinforced its cultural importance. Remarkably, if this page was all you read, you would have a pretty good sense of what my book is all about!

Learn more about Miraculous Celebrity at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brahim El Guabli's "Desert Imaginations"

Brahim El Guabli is an associate professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and an associate professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences, and reported the following:

I wrote Desert Imaginations to explain why what happens in deserts is almost expected to unfold in them. Given that the abundant literature about arid lands has not really been able to furnish a concept that can connect its variant threads, I have defined Saharanism as the ideology that undergirds the myriad ways deserts are perceived and acted upon. Accordingly, Saharanism is always at work in the manner deserts are talked about and (mis)used whether we are thinking about their exploitation for extractive industries and their use for storage of lethal waste or whether our attention focuses on approaching them as loci for experimentation with new technologies or as areas outside the realm of law and ethics where anything can be undertaken.

Interestingly, this except from page 99 is the start of my chapter on “Experimental Saharanism,” which an important theme that runs throughout the book:

In April 1927, botanist Walter T. Swingle, who worked for the US Department of Agriculture, was invited by French authorities to participate in an investigation into Fusarium oxysporum’s infestation of palm groves in the Moroccan desert. Swingle, who happened to be affiliated with the University of Lyon, was asked by his French contacts to accompany them to Figuig and Boudnib, which had a reputation for the high quality of their dates, but whose groves suffered from this illness that made palms wilt and die. This proved to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Swingle to set foot on what he called “the single date planting place in all Africa.” In addition to learning about Bayoud disease, Swingle observed how local people tended to the groves, pollinated the trees, and cleaned them in preparation for the harvest season. During his time in Boudnib, he met a tribal leader who gave him eleven Medjool palm offshoots that he sent to Washington, DC. Once there, the offshoots were quarantined on a Native American reservation in the Nevada desert for a period of two years. A hundred years later, Swingle can be said to not only have imported a new plant but also to have placed the Sahara at the heart of the multibillion-dollar Medjool (pronounced Mejhoul/ljihl in Morocco) date economy in the US. Swingle’s story is only one manifestation of a practice that I propose to call “experimental Saharanism,” which subsumes all endeavors to test new ideas and undertakings in desert spaces.

Page 99 of Desert Imaginations gives a clear idea about what the book is about in two ways. Firstly, it demonstrates the extractive and experimental as well as the inter- desert nature of Saharanism through Swingle’s and his contemporaries’ endeavors to transplant plants and husbandry from other deserts to the American west. Secondly, the passage takes us to France, Morocco, Algeria, and the United States, indicating the imbrication of histories of Saharanism and the existence of an trans-desert grammar that the book delineates to help readers understand why deserts across different geographical

Learn more about Desert Imaginations at the University of California Press website.

Read an interview with Brahim El Guabli about Desert Imaginations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Adamson's "Projecting America"

Patrick Adamson is Associate Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Editor at Open Screens, and Assistant Editor at Film Journal.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Projecting America: The Epic Western and National Mythmaking in 1920s Hollywood, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds me moving between two major case studies from Chapter Two of Projecting America, wrapping up a discussion of North of 36 (1924)—a film that looked to present the first post–Civil War cattle drive from Texas to Kansas in 1867 as a decisive episode in America’s national story—and beginning one centered around The Pony Express (1925)—which looked to do similar for the eponymous mail service. A heading, “‘Saving California for the Union’: The Pony Express (1925)”, divides the two and hints at what they look to do with their respective topics. As is indicated here, both the cattle drive linking the postbellum South with markets to the north and the express riders racing west to California against the backdrop of a looming Civil War are presented on film as episodes where “the very course of national history is at stake”. In turn, page 99 signals why 1920s Hollywood was attempting to contribute to, and even reshape, popular understandings of what was then widely seen as the most important period in American history, quoting Billboard magazine’s assessment of North of 36’s success: “That the public is not supporting socalled [sic] sex pictures, society dramas, stories of beer-drinking revels, petting parties and whatnot overloaded with Boccaccio frankness is borne out in blazing proof.”

Here we see why the Page 99 Test works well for Projecting America. One of my book’s larger arguments is that silent-era Hollywood turned to epic Western production in a moment in which the morals of its films and stars were under scrutiny, and the chapter this page comes from is a detailed exploration of what this actually entailed in terms of film production and promotion. My quotations and framing here give a sense of how this effort was received and what the intent behind it was: by linking the nation’s most pervasive form of mass entertainment to a stated aspiration to educate the public, the new American film capital positioned their historical films about the frontier as interventions in the period’s pressing debates around cinema and, in particular, its social influence.

The result was that epic Westerns were acclaimed by many at the time as a new, distinctly American way of engaging with history that could unite diverse filmgoers via inspiring lessons in the “making” of the nation. What the Page 99 Test highlights is that, in doing this, the film industry of the 1920s actively looked to expand standard narratives of Westward expansion, presenting those responsible for the Texan cattle drive and the express riders delivering news to the frontier as “pioneers” comparable to those who had traversed the Oregon Trail in The Covered Wagon (1923)—the film that inaugurated the cycle. This was a major aim of my study. While it is tempting to assume that the film industry simply restated the favorite myths of American audiences, the idea that cinema could offer a new way of engaging with history—visual, wide-reaching, and understood across linguistic and national divides—was a crucial part of these discussions. Revisiting this page brought me back to the simple questions that first guided my research: what did it mean to make a successful historical film in the first decades of Hollywood, and why did it matter?

Learn more about Projecting America at the University of Oklahoma Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert E.C. Davis's "Lieutenants and Light"

Robert E. C. Davis spent twenty-five years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps and retired in 2008 as the colonel of an artillery regiment. He holds a BS in geography from the University of Utah, an MA in national security and strategic studies from the College of Naval Warfare, an MS in geographic information systems technology from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in remote sensing and earth observation from Penn State University. He is certified as a mapping scientist by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

Davis applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Lieutenants and Light: Mapping the US Army Heliograph Networks in Late Nineteenth-Century Arizona and New Mexico, with the following results:

On page 99 there is a map of the Lyda Spring heliograph station. On the map, the station is located on elevated terrain west of the small village of Mule Creek, a village that still exists. A single sightline connects the station to the heliograph station at Siggins’s Ranch. Nearby features include Mule Spring and the Lyda ranch house, both situated along Mule Creek. Present-day Highway 78 is labeled to the north. An inset map shows the station’s position within the broader heliograph network.

The Page 99 Test reflects the character of the book. The map shows how a remote corner of New Mexico fit into a broader system of military communication and introduces the heliograph, a form of wireless communication that uses reflected sunlight to send messages. It also underscores a central feature of the project, since much of the book focuses on mapping each station and interpreting its role within the wider network. Page 99 offers a small view of the system, yet it represents the larger story.

The Lyda Spring (also called Mule Spring and Lydia Spring) was one of the most difficult heliograph stations for me to find (even then, its location is only speculation, but based on the best available data and analysis). This station is part of a group of heliograph stations extending up the San Francisco River valley, all emplaced in late August 1886. Alone and off to the west, the Lyda Spring station was placed almost three weeks later after considerable difficulty and effort by the soldiers tasked to establish it. I surmised that the connecting station at Siggins’s Ranch was not positioned to support a station to the west, which likely would have been the case if this site had been part of the original plan. Nevertheless, this station, emplaced on September 15, 1886, eleven days after the surrender of Geronimo, as well as another complete line of stations running to the east from nearby Fort Bayard to Fort Stanton, built by Lieutenant John J. Pershing in November, shows that the Army’s interest in the heliograph networks did not wane as the Apache War ended. The heliograph networks emerged from the 1886 campaign as an important communication tool that enhanced the Army’s ability to effectively command and control tactical forces and secured a lasting place within the Army’s field practices into the early twentieth century.

Visit Robert E.C. Davis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Al Filreis's "The Classroom and the Crowd"

Al Filreis is Kelly Family Professor of English, founding faculty director of the Kelly Writers House, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, codirector of PennSound, and publisher of Jacket2 magazine, all at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent books include 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (2021), and he is the host of the podcast PoemTalk.

Filreis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book happens to be the final page of a chapter about a massive open (free) online course (a MOOC, called “ModPo”) that drew tens of thousands of people to it during the lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why did they come? What did they want from this (already existing) online community set up for the purpose of collaborative close readings of poems? (Yes, poems!) Well, they came because they were lonely. Because (for those in schools at the time) classrooms didn’t or didn’t yet know how to accommodate remote, quarantined citizens. Because they needed the kind of connection some of them were used to having in conversational spaces (living rooms, restaurants, coffee shops, and seminar rooms). Page 99 describes and defines a variation of MOOC—the weird and iconoclastic “bMOOC.” The bMOOC pushes back against instruction-led learning. In bMOOCs the learners shape the material from which they are to learn. Ken X., one of the 90,000 ModPo people, was alone one night. He entered the ModPo discussion forums and was worried that no one was there. It was late. He needed to talk. He pondered the meaning of loneliness, and the poem he chose to discuss, seemingly by himself, was about loneliness. The primary teaching choice of teachers who set up bMOOCs is to create a learner-centered course that includes content meant to disorient learners. Ken learned to live with disorientation. And, by the way, he wasn’t alone. I was there that night too. We talked. To this day, I don’t know where he was located, nor what his personal situation was. Nonetheless, I felt a connection to him, because…weren’t we all at least a little bit lonely. In a successful online community, no one is lonely for long. ModPo is not truly a bMOOC but on page 99 we happen to encounter an example of what an open online course could look like if we all took seriously the idea that a crowd can not just fit into a classroom but indeed can assume the role of teacher.

Learn more about The Classroom and the Crowd at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rebecca Jumper Matheson's "Artisans and Designers"

Rebecca Jumper Matheson is a fashion historian. She is the author of The Sunbonnet: An American Icon in Texas and Young Originals: Emily Wilkens and the Teen Sophisticate, among other publications. She is an instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in the Fashion and Textile Studies MA program.

Matheson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps is part of a discussion of Phelps Associates’ 1944 American Fashion Critics’ (Coty) Award win, and their contribution to the fashion show during the awards ceremony.

About three-fourths of the page is Figure 4.3, a page from the Coty Awards program, with my caption and the image credits to the Coty Archives and the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Special Collections and College Archives (SPARC). The awards program shows photographs of the Coty Award statue by Malvina Hoffman, as well as photos and bios of the award winners: “Claire McCardell, Casual Clothes Designer,” “Sally Victor, Millinery Designer,” and “Phelps Associates, Accessory Designers.” At the bottom of the program, there is text explaining the award criteria, “These Awards are made to the most outstanding American fashion designers who, in the opinion of the Jury, have best interpreted the fashion trend in 1943, under the restrictive influences of war-time economy.”

At the top of page 99 there are two partial paragraphs of my own text about the types of bags that Phelps Associates showed at the Coty Awards, including a bag “of worsted surcingle webbing with llama hide gussets,” with my observation that this combined a woolen textile used in horse harness with leather not in demand for military use. The second paragraph begins a discussion of how the Coty Awards publicized Phelps Associates’ production of leather shoulder bags that met the WWII-era women’s uniform specifications for branches of the US military, including WACs, WAVEs, SPARs, and Marines.

Between my text, and the text and images of the Coty Awards program that is reproduced on page 99, readers are introduced to several important themes in the Phelpses’ work and in Artisans and Designers. Firstly, the working partnership between Elizabeth and William Phelps is evident in their joint award, photo, bio, and even the name of the business. This page also highlights the Phelpses’ work in leather shoulder bags inspired by historical military forms and the hands-free freedom these bags give their wearers. Another theme is the way that Phelps Associates reused vintage metalwork in their pieces—a concept that was an innovative way to handle wartime scarcity, but also resonates with today’s interest in sustainability. Readers will also learn about the influence of hand-worked horse harness on the Phelpses’ work, and the related theme of the Phelpses’ interest in hand craft traditions from both the US and Europe. Finally, the page emphasizes that William and Elizabeth Phelps designed from the perspective of being makers themselves, and that they personally worked out the initial design samples for their accessories.

However, 1944 is only at the beginning of William and Elizabeth Phelps’s years in American fashion. Reading page 99 alone, the reader would not know about later developments in their careers, from workshop moves (New York to Pennsylvania to North Carolina) to the introduction of sportswear in the post-war period.

In terms of my methods, what the reader can see from this page is research using archival materials such as ephemera, but readers would miss out on the object-based research that is also key to the book. Each chapter of Artisans and Designers is anchored by an introductory object or objects—extant garments or accessories that I have studied in person, each object telling more of the story of Phelps Associates and their clients.

Learn more about Artisans and Designers at the The Kent State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Edward Huth's "A Sense of Space"

John Edward Huth is the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard University. He has done research in experimental particle physics since 1980 and is currently a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). He participated in the discovery of the top quark and the Higgs boson and is the author of The Lost Art of Finding Our Way.

Huth applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Sense of Space: A Local's Guide to a Flat Earth, the Edge of the Cosmos, and Other Curious Places, with the following results:

Page 99 in A Sense of Space is the close of chapter 5 on spatial and cultural/social connections in Dante's Divine Comedy. It represents a segue from the end of that chapter to the next chapter on the concept of extraterrestrial intelligence that emerged with the invention of the telescope.

Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already—like
a wheel revolving uniformly—by
the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

(Par. 33 133–45)

Here, we have the final writing of le stelle.

Three centuries after Dante, the telescope was invented and revealed structures associated with the planets, like the rings of Saturn, phases of Venus, and the moons of Jupiter. Observations triumphed where pure reason could not solve riddles, which spelled the end of Aristotle’smodel of space.

But our inclination to project human-like qualities onto space persisted. Where Dante populated the heavens with virtuous souls, some astronomers contemplate whether the universe could be home to intelligent beings like us.

This captures the theme of the book quite well: that social concepts are interwoven with spatial concepts. Here is an additional detail. Dante was very taken by astronomy, and the last word(s) in each of the books (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) is "the stars" (le stelle). I wove this into A Sense of Space as well. The first words are "the stars" in my preface and "the stars" at the end of the concluding chapter. Stars also feature prominently throughout the book in various guises: Ancient Greek astronomy, astrology, cosmology, and the fundamental forces of nature.

The book examines the interplay between visions of space and associated social/cultural manifestations over the eons from the Ancient Egyptians to modern physics and cosmology. I lead off with the cognitive psychology underpinning the interplay. Dante adopts Aristotle's model of the universe, with the earth at the center and spheres of the moon, sun, and planets in the heavens surrounding. I explore his spatial/cultural connections in the context of the Divine Comedy. Likewise the astronomers later speculated on whether the planets were home to intelligent beings. HG Wells, partly inspired by an astronomy report of a strange light from Mars, wrote War of the Worlds, which was a jump-off point of our modern culture of extraterrestrial aliens.

Learn more about A Sense of Space at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rob Miller's "The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low"

Rob Miller is the cofounder and former co-owner of Bloodshot Records.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low: A Curious Life in Independent Music, and reported the following:

I think Mr. Ford Madox Ford would be reasonably pleased with his hypothesis in this instance.

Page 99 finds the reader in the latter chapters of the first half (or, as I call it, this being a book about music, “Side A”) as I stumble along the circuitous path that led me to start an independent record label, Bloodshot, that became internationally known as a home for a curious blend of punk and roots music. Jumping back and forth in time between an adolescence in the 70s that looked upon what is now “classic rock” with a mixture of horror and boredom, and the origin story of the label in mid-90s, the book to this point devotes itself to the important idea of finding freedom, identity, and community in the music of the underground. In my colossal leap from comedy records and AM radio baseball, to hardcore punk rock---skipping any incremental steps in between, I discovered an openness to exploration, without foreknowledge or judgement. It was in this manner that I started to hear whispers and echoes of the music that came before, the weird underbelly of Americana. One particular band that had a powerful impact was The Cramps and their song “Human Fly.”

The Cramps were the mysterious distant uncle I secretly wished would come to family reunions. He’d tell stories about knife fights and scoring with showgirls, hand me a shrunken head he bought at a bazaar somewhere in the East and then wink, give a boozy, smoky laugh, and let me take a pull off his flask if Mom wasn’t looking. And while both sides of the family of rock and roll sang about the virtues of wanting to kiss your sweet lips, the Cramps aimed a little lower, and a little closer, to the truth than most spoke of in decent company. “Human Fly” was a baptism in the murky waters that course past us unseen, but not unfelt. Thanks to that pulsing, aural equivalent of an opening rusty crypt door, I have taken the road more strange and less popular, and that has made all the difference.

After an ornamental section divider in the middle of the page, I describe the insidious creep of tribalism and intolerance I started to experience in the punk rock scene, the very qualities I was trying to escape in the first place.

By the end of high school, the bloom had, as they say, fallen off the rose of much of punk’s promise. A friend of mine once remarked that hardcore had the shelf life of unpasteurized buttermilk, and many aspects of a scene that had arisen from a dissatisfaction with conformity quickly slid into the age-old traps of tribalism and self-destruction. One orthodoxy was traded for another; boots and braces became the new IZODS and boat shoes. Hair too short at school was now not short enough at shows. I’d been to this movie before, and I didn’t get into punk and hardcore only to feel out of place again.

At the bottom of page 99, I draw a throughline from my distaste for conformity and the stifling expectations of codes and rules to my reflexive impulse to blaze my own trail.

Worse, there was an emerging absolutism regarding the music itself. It was hardcore or it wasn’t. There were “right” albums to have, and “wrong” albums to have, “right” shows to go to and “wrong” shows to go to. Wearisome What is versus What is not arguments of authenticity--which I’d encounter ad nauseum in a different context later with Bloodshot--overtook the conversation with Talmudic gravity.

While page 99 does not deal with the any of the specifics of the growth and development of Bloodshot Records, nor the issue of the business of independent labels in general that takes up much of “Side B,” it is an informative glimpse into the tone and beating heart of the book, and highlights a theme that reverberates throughout. That is, as another band I cite as an influence, Crass, put it, “if you don’t like the rules they make, refuse to play their game.” Be it in the usual pairing of punk and country, or in the way I chose to run the business.

Visit Rob Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arnoud S. Q. Visser's "On Pedantry"

Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history. His books include A Cultural History of Fame in the Renaissance, Reading Augustine in the Reformation, and Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image.

Visser applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All, and shared the following:

Pardon the pedantry, but my answer is both yes and no.

Yes, page 99 does capture the heart of the book: the idea that flashy displays of knowledge and cleverness have often provoked intense irritation. On this page, we find ourselves in medieval Europe, where the tensions between Christianity and classical learning come into focus. We meet Vilgard of Ravenna, a grammar teacher living around the turn of the millennium, who was so enchanted by the Latin classics that it cost him his life. His studies had made him obsessive and arrogant. One night, demons appeared to him in his sleep, disguised as his literary heroes Virgil, Horace and Juvenal, promising him a share of their glory. From then on, Vilgard could not stop preaching the virtues of the ancients. He was swiftly condemned for heresy and reportedly burned at the stake. Beyond its historical interest, the story of Vilgard also reflects the book’s style. Anecdotes, vignettes and images show in a lively and hopefully entertaining way how “know-it-alls” have been mocked and feared, resented and punished over the centuries.

Still, there’s also a case for “no.” Page 99 does not show the book’s historical range. Know-it-alls come in many forms, not just teachers obsessed with grammar or classical literature. The bigger picture is about how intellect and irritation have always gone together. Beyond religious motives, there are social and economic reasons at play too. On Pedantry aims to offer a kind of historical therapy, making its readers aware of enduring patterns. Seen across the long sweep of history, these patterns help us understand why hostility to intellectuals is still so familiar today.

Learn more about On Pedantry at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Hall's "Power and Powerlessness"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan S. Jones's "Opium Slavery"

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Jonathan S. Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Justin Randolph's "Mississippi Law"

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Mason's "Seeking the High Ground"

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Pamela Walker Laird's "Self-Made"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Page 99 Test: American Founding Son.

The Page 99 Test: Washington's Heir.

--Marshal Zeringue