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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Lucian Staiano-Daniels's "The War People"

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

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

From page 99:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Stone Peters's "Law as Performance"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Todd McGowan's "Pure Excess"

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Embracing Alienation, The Racist Fantasy, Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, and Only a Joke Can Save Us, among other books. He is also the cohost of the Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley.

McGowan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity details the example of the iPhone and how it functions as a commodity. As a result, the test works quite well for this book because it hits on a paradigmatic commodity of the contemporary age that allows us to make sense of the role that pure excess plays in capitalist society. The iPhone has value for those who purchase it not because of the useful functions it performs but precisely because of its uselessness—its qualities that exceed utility. The overall argument of the book is that capitalism as a system identifies value as the production of pure excess and not as the production of useful things. Companies aim at discovering a site of excess to profit from, just as consumers search for an excess that they can enjoy. As the iPhone demonstrates, utility always comes as a supplement, as an aftereffect of excess, which is where the primary aim of capitalism resides. This is because excess, what goes beyond use, is the only source of value in the capitalist universe. At the same time, capitalist society constantly tells us that it provides us with useful things, with things that will make our lives better. We invest ourselves in commodities such as the iPhone (explained on page 99) insofar as we believe in their utility, but as consumers, we enjoy their inutility—not the ability to call to make doctor appointments, but the attractive design, the unused technological capacities, and even the white box that the iPhone arrives in. Excess is the source of profit for the producer and enjoyment for the consumer. It is the engine that drives the capitalist system and what prevents us from arresting the production of more and more in the face of the destruction of the earth’s habitability. Thinking about the role of pure excess in capitalism enables us to reconsider the most urgent problems that we face today.

Learn more about Pure Excess at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Capitalism and Desire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Povich's "Rules to Infinity"

Mark Povich is Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at University of Rochester. He has published articles in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Erkenntnis, Mind, Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Synthese, among others.

Povich applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rules to Infinity: The Normative Role of Mathematics in Scientific Explanation, and reported the following:

On page 99, I am in the middle of developing my theory of distinctively mathematical explanation. Distinctively mathematical explanations are scientific explanations of natural phenomena that differ from standardly mathematical explanations in that mathematics plays a special role in the former that it doesn't play in the latter. In distinctively mathematical explanations, mathematics itself is, in some sense, what explains natural phenomena. A central task of the book is to specify what this sense is and to develop a theory that tells us when an explanation is distinctively mathematical and when it isn't. Specifically, on page 99 I am struggling to find counterfactuals that correctly distinguish phenomena that have distinctively mathematical explanations from those that do not. I am concerned with this because I hold that counterfactuals are essential to scientific explanations generally: to explain a natural phenomenon P is to find other phenomena p1,...,pn on which P counterfactually depends. This means that if the phenomena p1,...,pn had been different, then P would have been different. I argue that the counterfactuals given on page 99 will not work to correctly distinguish phenomena that have distinctively mathematical explanations from those that do not, but on the following pages I suggest amendments that fix them.

The Page 99 Test works well, but not great, for my book. It works well because my theory of distinctively mathematical explanation is a core thesis of my book, but it does not work great because that theory is not the only core thesis of the book.

In much of the rest of the book, I am concerned with the nature of mathematical objects and of mathematical necessity. I am concerned with this because my theory of distinctively mathematical explanation appeals to mathematical objects and mathematical necessity. What are numbers? What explains why mathematical truths are necessary, i.e., why they could not have been false? My answers to these questions stem from the conventionalist tradition in philosophy. I call my version of conventionalism "normativism." According to conventionalists, the nature of mathematical objects and of mathematical necessity is explained by convention, specifically semantic conventions governing our use of mathematical terms. Although conventionalism is intuitive, it is subject to many influential objections. Answering those objections and engaging with contemporary opponents (and allies) takes up most of the rest of the book.

Visit Mark Povich's website. Rules to Infinity is an open access title: read it here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gitanjali Surendran's "Democracy's Dhamma"

Gitanjali Surendran is Professor of History at Jindal Global Law School and Executive Director of the Centre for Research in History.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Democracy's Dhamma: Buddhism in the Making of Modern India, c. 1890–1956, and reported the following:

Page 99 of this book is about an interesting episode in India's modern tryst with Buddhism. It describes the English East India Company's first effort to reach out to the political leadership in Tibet in 1774-5. A man named George Bogle with the help of an Indian trader monk named Purangir became friendly with the Panchen Lama. But before any sort of trade or diplomatic agreement could be signed, the Panchen Lama died of small pox on a visit to the Qianlong emperor in Beijing and Bogle drowned in Calcutta. Thereafter, Tibet remained closed to British entreaties for almost a century until a British Indian secret agent named Sarat Chandra Das made his first trip to Tibet in 1879. He made friends in high places including the then Panchen Lama's prime minister. He studied Tibetan and Buddhism and in turn taught his Tibetan friends arithmetic, Hindi, about scientific instruments and camera and telegraph technology. The subsequent pages of this section tell the story of Das and his influence on thinking about Buddhism in modern India.

I think this page encapsulates reasonably well what I try to do with the book. Usually, Buddhism is said to have died out in India by around the 12th century and then returned to India in the 19th and 20th century through the activities of a succession of British (or at any rate colonial) Indologists, Orientalists, archaeologists and historians and later through mass dalit conversions to Buddhism in the 1950s sparked by B.R. Ambedkar, better known as the chief architect of independent India's Constitution. I try to show in the book that Buddhism in modern India is not merely a British project but one involving educated Indians across the country in emerging universities, institutes of learning, studies circles and eventually in the highest echelons of anti-colonial politics. Indians took up Buddhism across the political spectrum too as Buddhism had something to offer them all. It is through their endeavours in the arena of nationalism, religious universalism, socialism, Gandhianism and anti-caste radicalism that Buddhism emerges as a religion of democracy, or the 'dhamma' of democracy, 'dhamma' being the Pali word for the Sanskrit 'dharma' which in turn means a code that guides moral, ethical and spiritual conduct (loosely 'religion').

Page 99 reveals a crucial aspect of this journey of modern Buddhism in India and that it was deeply entangled with its Buddhist neighbours and more broadly with Buddhist Asia. While India, both the colony and the independent nation had only a small number of people who referred to themselves as exclusively Buddhist, Burma, Sri Lanka and Tibet were all primarily Buddhist societies. As were Thailand, China, Korea, Japan and Cambodia further afield. But by the 19th century, academic investigation had definitively revealed that the Buddha had been born, lived and died in India which refocused the spotlight on India's Buddhist heritage but also on Buddhist pilgrimage sites in India as they were being unearthed by colonial archaeologists. So we have the well known Sri Lankan Buddhist activist Anagarika Dharmapala establishing the Mahabodhi Society in Calcutta to promote Buddhism in India and Buddhist pilgrimage to India. We have Burmese, Japanese and Chinese monks coming to India as pilgrims, spies, scholars and more, often carrying back to their communities different ideas about Buddhism.

Here Das is important because his was an early foray into a forbidden Buddhist land which was very present in the global imagination of Buddhism. In gathering information on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, he became a prime informant for Calcutta's literati which was fascinated by Buddhism and by Tibet. He was a close associate for a time of Anagarika Dharmapala too whom he advised on the latter's campaign to revive Buddhism in the land of its birth. But if you want to know how all this ties together, you’ll have to go past page 99!

Learn more about Democracy's Dhamma at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christian Warren's "Starved for Light"

Christian Warren is professor of history at Brooklyn College. He is the author of Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Starved for Light: The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Starved for Light follows conversations between researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the corporate and institutional funders of a recent clinical trial testing vitamin D-fortified evaporated milk as an “agent for the cure of rickets in negro infants.” The Carnation Milk Company was pleased with the research; in fact they had started promoting the special milk on their national radio program, the Carnation “Contented Hour.” Now they wanted additional research undertaken “with white children to see what the susceptibility of the dominant race is when compared with the colored race.” They went as far as to specify that “all babies used are to be white babies even omitting any that are Italian.” This new study was different from the first one in important ways. First, it sought to test only prevention, not cure; and unlike the first study, the subjects were not placed in a dark ward and given no rickets preventive foods, conditions sure to induce rickets. While in the new study most of the infants were kept in darkness, all received one of two vitamin D-fortified milks (whole fluid or evaporated). The study found that both milks prevented rickets; it was extended in time and space, morphing into a multi-ethnic out-patient study of dozens of infants.

This page comes at a climactic point of two chapters focusing on “The Science of Rickets.” It presents evidence for three topics that are central to the book: the presumed importance of race in understanding rickets; the interaction between “pure scientists” and commercial interests; and the ethical lapses they made in conducting their research. I think this page would be tantalizing to browsers, who might want to know more about the experiment mentioned here, which never would have been permitted just decades later, under the Nuremberg Code.

However, reading this page alone might give the false impression that Starved for Light’s focus is on clinical or laboratory science, when in fact its scope is far wider, examining the vitamin’s role in evolution, the role of such factors as climate, urbanization and migration in producing vitamin D deficiency; and the role rickets played in important developments in medical history, from obstetrics to orthopedics, nutrition science and experimental ethics. Early chapters explore rickets’ burden in the cities of Europe during the Industrial Revolution and in the slave quarters of the Cotton South. It also takes a light-hearted approach to the serious business of providing anti-rickets agents, from foul-tasting cod liver oil of old, to irradiated milk and UV lamps, to today’s Flintstone’s vitamin gummies and—old things new again, “Artisan Extra-Virgin Cod Liver Oil!”

Learn more about Starved for Light at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deondra Rose's "The Power of Black Excellence"

Deondra Rose is the Kevin D. Gorter Associate Professor of Public Policy and Associate Professor of Political Science and History at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on U.S. higher education policy, political behavior, American Political Development (APD), and the politics of identity, particularly in relation to gender, race, and socioeconomic status.

Rose applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Power of Black Excellence: HBCUs and the Fight for American Democracy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Power of Black Excellence provides an account of the background behind the speech that legendary civil rights activist, then-future congressman, and HBCU alumnus John Lewis delivered at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington. Lewis, who was the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had shared a draft of the speech with the White House, religious leaders, and the march’s organizers who urged him to tone down his fiery rhetoric. In one passage, he asserted that:

“The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently.”

Leaders feared that such language would only impede the progress that civil rights leaders had made. Lewis ultimately moderated his rhetoric, but his impatience with the slow pace of movement toward racial justice exemplified the frustration of many Black youth who fought on the frontlines of the civil rights movement and who desired bolder efforts to demand justice and Black liberation. As the example of John Lewis illustrates, HBCU students, their alumni, and their campuses played a central role in the civil rights movement. While this snapshot on page 99 does not offer the best microcosm of the entire work, it does illustrate the energy, deliberation, and purpose that so many HBCU alumni have brought to the long fight for Black liberation and multi-racial democracy.

Visit Deondra Rose's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meryl Gordon's "The Woman Who Knew Everyone"

Meryl Gordon is the director of NYU’s graduate Magazine and Digital Storytelling program. A graduate of the University of Michigan whose work has appeared in New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and the New York Times, she has written four biographies about influential, talented and wealthy women, all born at a time (ranging from 1892 to 1910) when women’s opportunities were limited.

Two of her books -- Mrs. Astor Regrets (2008) and Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend (2017) -- were New York Times bestsellers.

Gordon applied the “Page 99 Test” to her newest book, The Woman Who Knew Everyone: The Power of Perle Mesta, Washington's Most Famous Hostess, and reported the following:

On page 99, Perle is giving a 1948 party in honor of President Harry Truman at the gloomy Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, a time when everyone thought Truman would lose the election. She would go on to raise money that fall for Truman at a crucial moment, helping keep his campaign afloat, and he beat Thomas Dewey in an Election Night shocker. (The Chicago Tribune was so convinced of the likely outcome that an early edition ran the erroneous headline: Dewey Defeats Truman.)

At the Philadelphia party (page 99) Perle declared, “This is no wake. I’m tired of this kind of talk. This is a victory party.” She welcomed an NBC camera crew, the first time the networks had covered a convention. With the Democratic Party bitterly at odds over civil rights and segregationalist Southerners threatening a walk-out, one of the few Black delegates was invited to and attended Perle’s party. Noted on page 99, “As far as Perle was concerned, he was a Democrat, he was a delegate and he was welcome.”

The Page 99 Test gives a flavor of Perle’s commitment to Harry Truman and her support of Civil Rights. She was not a crusader but believed in quietly leading by example, consistently including a diverse array of people at her own parties and those she organized for the Democratic Party, such as co-chair of the 1949 Inaugural Ball.

Visit Meryl Gordon's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Phantom of Fifth Avenue.

Writers Read: Meryl Gordon (October 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Bunny Mellon.

My Book, The Movie: Bunny Mellon.

My Book, The Movie: The Woman Who Knew Everyone.

Writers Read: Meryl Gordon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Mansker's "Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France"

Andrea Mansker is the David E. Underdown Professor of Modern European History at Sewanee: The University of the South. She is the author of Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France. Her research on matchmakers has appeared in Histoire, Économie & Société, French Historical Studies, and the Annales historiques de la Révolution française.

Mansker applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France, and reported the following:

Page 99 analyzes an epistolary exchange in a personal advertisement section of the Parisian classifieds that captured the public’s attention during the Napoleonic Empire. The early commercial matchmaker, Claude Villiaume, had invited his male and female clients to communicate their personalities and preferences for a spouse directly to the newspaper’s readership in a column he mediated. Villiaume’s first batch of published letters included an intriguing missive penned by a young, wealthy, unwed mother he dubbed “Emilie.” Emilie requested a platonic marriage with an aging nobleman who had been “ruined” by the French Revolution. Page 99 features some of the published correspondence surrounding Emilie’s unusual entreaty and makes a few points that are central to the book’s argument.

First, I suggest that one of the most attractive elements of Emilie’s advertisement for male readers was her “self-representation as a sentimental heroine,” which she likely modeled on the celebrated eponymous protagonist of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bestselling 1761 novel, Julie, or the New Heloise. Her case demonstrates that the matchmaker’s anonymous love seekers adopted a writing style that confused fantasy and reality and drew inspiration from the cult of sentimentality when shaping their marriage ads. Emilie’s male suitors responded to her in the guise of Julie’s marriage prospects in the novel. Using a work of fiction as their blueprint, her respondents and the publication’s readers could imagine themselves as characters who had come to life. Page 99 thereby suggests that advertisers used the early personals to experiment with unconventional matrimonial strategies and embrace various personas that may or may not have been rooted in reality.

Second, page 99 also emphasizes the matchmaker’s “formative role in shaping [Emilie’s] story.” Since Villiaume had editorial control over the ads and his client letters exist only in published form, the book argues that we should maintain skepticism concerning the authenticity of these inserts. Rather than attempting to uncover the reality behind these client communications, I ask about the function of these “media fictions” for contemporaries. Why did the public respond to these stories so enthusiastically and how might readers have used Emilie’s tale of forbidden love and revolutionary loss to “make sense of the unexpected” during the First Empire?

The Page 99 Test thereby works rather well to highlight a few principal themes of the book. Matchmaking and the Marriage Market queries how the first commercial matchmakers and their correspondents imaginatively shaped the meaning, format, and allure of the personal ad in an era when the press invited individuals to express their private desires in a newly commodified medium. Like dating apps today, Villiaume’s marriage column blurred the lines between fact and fiction and reproduced the distinctly urban experience of imaginative spectatorship and voyeurism by featuring letters from seemingly real but unidentified authors.

Visit Andrea Mansker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Shoemaker's "The Architecture of Blame and Praise"

David Shoemaker is a Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. He is the author or co-author of over sixty academic papers, four monographs, and an introductory philosophy textbook. He is also the ongoing series editor of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. His publications have been about numerous topics in agency and responsibility, moral philosophy, moral psychology, the philosophy of humor, political philosophy, and personal identity.

Shoemaker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Architecture of Blame and Praise: An Interdisciplinary Investigation, and reported the following:

The Architecture of Blame and Praise is an interdisciplinary investigation into the nature of those responses we have to one another that, in some way, pertain to our exercises of responsible agency. Two oddities motivate the book.

The first is that, until recently, philosophers have focused on trying to understand just blame, assuming that praise is simply its positive symmetrical counterpart. But that assumption seems belied by work in moral psychology suggesting that our actual patterns of blame and praise reveal asymmetries between the two. For example, people tend to reduce their blame of those who do bad things overwhelmed by emotion, but they don’t reduce their praise of those who do good things overwhelmed by emotion. Of course, the psychologists don’t tell us whether these responses are justified or what their connection with responsible agency is supposed to be.

My book aims to incorporate what’s right about both strands while avoiding their problems. I start by explicating a functionalist account of our blame and praise system, and then I go on to show that there is actually an overarching symmetry between blame and praise, but we can see it only after I’ve revealed a crucial but previously unrecognized form of blame: mockery.

This discussion of this point actually begins on page 99, which makes the Page 99 Test an excellent one for its glimpse into an essential part of my overall argument. I claim on the page that mocking’s positive pair is complimenting, and so it starts by saying that both responses are, “paradigmatically, responses to performances relative to some … standards, including aesthetic, athletic, culinary, epistemic, prudential, philosophical, and many more.”

So what is mockery?

[T]o mock someone is to make fun of them for some failure, in a way that could foreseeably result in their feeling the sting of embarrassment, shame, or even humiliation.

And what makes it appropriate?

The first condition is truthiness: the target of mockery must have…the quality for which they are being mocked. I can’t aptly mock the fast for being slow, or the heroic for being cowards. The second condition…is publicity…. It’s in having that flaw exposed that one’s embarrassment is triggered, so the mockery, in order to be apt, must both be expressed and the aimed at that exposure…. A third condition of apt mockery is…that these flaws or failures be significant, that is, ridiculous. If you’ve come in second place in the Olympic finals of the 100-meter dash by 0.001 seconds, you’ve failed to win, but there is nothing at all mockable about your performance. However, if you’re entered in the 100-meter dash at the local charity event, and you trip coming out of the starting blocks and roll head-over-heels into the long-jump pit, then your failure is ridiculous enough to render you mockable.

Mockery and its positive counterpart, compliments, are one symmetrical mode of blame and praise, typically nonmoral in nature, Moral blame and its symmetrical counterpart of moral praise tend to consist, respectively, in anger and gratitude. I then go on to defend the appropriateness of the whole range of responses in a way that does not appeal to whether people deserve these responses. The presumed need for desert as a moral justification for the sting of blame is what has led most philosophers who theorize about it to argue that we need a robust capacity for free will to do so. If I am right, this entire enterprise has been a mistake: we don’t need desert or free will to justify our blame/praise responses to one another.

Learn more about The Architecture of Blame and Praise at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Denbow's "Reproductive Labor and Innovation"

Jennifer Denbow is Associate Professor of Political Science at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and the author of Governed through Choice: Autonomy, Technology, and the Politics of Reproduction.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is in a chapter dedicated to examining non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT) as an example of the “tech fix” in the book’s title. On this page, I analyze how makers of these tests market them as a salve for reproductive anxiety that covers over the root of that anxiety. Here is a quote that encapsulates the page’s analysis:

As the producer of the MaterniT test warns, “anyone can have a pregnancy with a chromosomal abnormality—healthy women, mothers of all ages and all ethnicities can be at risk.” These [NIPT] companies stoke fears about “abnormal” fetal development, even in low-risk groups, and subsequently offer products to ease the very anxiety that they played a role in creating. Thus, while it is true that many people experience anxiety about conception and pregnancy, the idea that a prenatal test can fix this problem obfuscates the industry’s role in fomenting this anxiety. It also covers over the deeper structural issues—such as climate chaos, financial instability, and the crumbling of public infrastructure—that have contributed to an uptick in anxiety for parents and nonparents alike. This reproductive innovation, then, sustains the innovation/reproduction binary’s papering over of structural injustices in favor of “solutions” that bolster the wealth and influence of the biotechnology industry and venture capitalists.

This page does represent a key thesis of my book: that although the state, investors, and companies sell innovations as a cure-all for all sorts of personal and social problems, technoscientific innovations in fact tend to obscure the roots of those problems and often make them worse. This page captures how this works with regard to one technology aimed at reproduction, while other chapters look at other technologies such as digital care work platforms and emerging reproductive biotechnologies like making gametes from stem cells.

Page 99 also provides a good sense of my book in that it briefly explains the book’s main argument regarding the “innovation/reproduction binary.” The book is dedicated to understanding how the overvaluation of technological innovations in the United States has come at the expense of addressing structural problems and valuing reproductive labor: the feminized work of caring for each other and sustaining society. In the case of NIPT, instead of offering collective support for caring for children, including disabled children, we are offered a technology to try to control what our offspring will be like.

Learn more about Reproductive Labor and Innovation at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mariana Chilton's "The Painful Truth about Hunger in America"

Mariana Chilton is Professor of Health Management and Policy at Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She served as the Co-Chair of the bi-partisan National Commission on Hunger. The commission was tasked with advising Congress and the United States Department of Agriculture about how to end hunger in America. She has testified before the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives numerous times and has served as an advisor to Sesame Street and to the Institute of Medicine.

Chilton applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know--and Start Again, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the crux of the Painful Truth About Hunger in America. It’s the culmination of three chapters that carefully bring the reader to understand how trauma is underneath hunger. My narrative moves from people’s lived experiences revealing the transfer of violence and hunger across the generations to a segment called “violence in numbers.” I show how qualitative and quantitative research intersect and support each other to provide the incontrovertible proof that the greatest adversity at the root of hunger is lovelessness. It’s true that page 99 is the best single page to land. But be careful. I’ve invited you to the edge.

The page is like a simultaneous prism and contraction. It is a prism that shows how generations of adversity can land in a single interview at a single moment in time. I refer people to the appendix that shows an image of how a family’s five generations of adversity land in a single report of hunger. I explain,

This depth of experience that people described helps us to begin to see that violence across the generations is associated also with historical, social, and political experiences, which I address in the following chapters.

It is also a contraction, where I show how quantitative research, which reduces people’s experiences to numbers, can sometimes squeeze out people’s humanity. Describing how our quantitative interviews work in the emergency room at the children’s hospital, I say

Often, full stories emerge; sometimes there are tears—mom’s tears or the baby’s—but the survey instrument is a tight mesh sieve, straining out anything quantitative researchers consider extraneous, tears included.

Here, I demonstrate that the suffering of hunger often gets missed or disregarded, because people focus on food access rather than listen for deeper clues. Or they refuse to understand people’s pain. What I found in the numeric research was that people who reported they were depressed and had multiple adverse childhood experiences such as abuse, neglect, or family hardship, are more than thirty times as likely to report hunger.

That contraction creates tension that pushes people to turn the page, where one drops into the middle of the book to learn that one adversity in particular, emotional neglect or feeling unloved, was most associated with hunger.

Because of that lovelessness, we are summoned to find great inner strength and collective courage to bring more love into the world. We can do this through political approaches, such as reparations for slavery and universal basic income, through personal work, by ending our tendency to try to dominate or discriminate against people, and spiritual growth, where we strive to act with compassion and equanimity.

So, yes, please come to the edge with me on page 99. We can leap into action from there.

Visit Mariana Chilton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael McKenna's "Responsibility and Desert"

Michael McKenna is Professor of Philosophy at University of Arizona, having arrived in 2012. He taught at Ithaca College from 1994-2006, and Florida State University from 2006-2012. He has held visiting appointments at University of Colorado, Boulder, and Bryn Mawr College. McKenna works primarily on the related topics of free will and moral responsibility, but also in ethics, moral psychology, action theory, and metaphysics. His book Conversation & Responsibility appeared in 2012, and Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction, coauthored with Derk Pereboom, appeared in 2016.

McKenna applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Responsibility and Desert, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my 2024 book Responsibility and Desert takes up a potential challenge to my proposed theory of punishment. I argue that a justified form of punishment aims to elicit appropriate guilt from the criminally culpable, and that the pain of guilt for the deserving is noninstrumentally good. (Something is noninstrumentally good if its value is not just in the service of something else that is good.) In The Ends of Harm (2011), Victor Tadros argues that aside from instrumental value, it is never good that one feel badly about one’s own wrongdoing. But even if it is, Tadros argues, punishing a person in order to bring about the (supposed) good of their feeling guilty is never itself good. On page 99 I set aside Tadros’s first point for a later chapter devoted to deserved guilt. But I respond to Tadros’s second point. Tadros thinks of the punishments delivered to the criminally responsible as mere deprivations of the goods that the punished would otherwise have access to. In response, I argue that the only harmful forms of punishment the culpable deserve are those that facilitate an appropriate response of guilt for wrongdoing. Mere suffering or harming has no justification. It is, I argue, only punishment serving to communicate to the culpable an expectation of the sort of attitude of guilt they ought to experience. And the guilt they ought to experience should be fitted for the particular harms they have wrongly caused others. No more. As I note, the crude forms of incarceration in current penal systems like the United State are not equipped to dispense such subtle forms of punishment.

Page 99 does not reveal the quality of the whole of Responsibility and Desert. Instead, it narrowly focuses on one potential objection to one particular point about how to justify punishment. Nevertheless, it’s relation to the whole is telling. This book develops a conversational theory of moral responsibility, wherein both blame and punishment are conversation-like responses to culpable wrongdoing. The conversation theory treats blameworthy conduct as having a meaning revealing the quality of the will (the attitude) of an agent when she does wrong. This meaning can be treated on analogy with a speaker who initiates a conversation with other speakers of a shared language. When others blame or punish the wrongdoer, their responses can be understood on analogy with a conversational response to the meaning of the speaker who initiated the conversation. So, blame and punishment, as well as emotional expressions like anger or indignation, have a communicative and conversational character.

But when are blame and punishment justified? The most common justification is cast in terms of desert; the culpable deserves blame, and in more egregious cases punishment. The central argument of Responsibility and Desert is that what a culpable agent deserves is that others communicate their demands and expectations by way of blaming or punishing. If so, what is deserved has to have the right conversational meaning as a fitting reply to the wrongdoer. Mere eruptions of hostility directed at the culpable, or punishments just in the form of dispensing any sort of suffering, convey no meaning of the distinct wrong done. Moreover, for the wrongdoer to appreciate what is conveyed, she must adopt an appropriate—deserved—response. Plausibly, the response involves accepting and experiencing fitting guilt—guilt tailored to the unique nature of the moral infraction.

Many object to desert as a justification for blame and punishment because it is committed to the noninstumental goodness of harming the guilty. Harming any person, it is argued, is never in itself good. I argue that, indeed, desert implies the noninstrumental goodness of harming the culpable. But, I argue, once one appreciates the limited kinds of harms, the seemingly barbaric character of the thesis disappears. What is good, for instance, is that a wrongdoer feels badly about the harms she has caused others. That’s not objectionable. It’s a better world that one feel badly for wronging others as compared to a world where one does not.

Visit Michael McKenna's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric S. Haag's "The Other Big Bang"

Eric S. Haag is professor of biology and director of the Biological Sciences Graduate Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has conducted research on the evolution of sex and reproduction in animals such as sea urchins, roundworms, and hermaphroditic fish for three decades.

Haag applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Other Big Bang: The Story of Sex and Its Human Legacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the second page of Chapter 7, “Land Ho.” Its first paragraph reads:

[As] I rounded a bend, what was left of a puddle a few feet across came into view. I bent down to discover a sad tableau of mass tadpole mortality. One hundred or so whip-tailed, jet-black blobs were cradled in the drying mud, dead or dying and on their way to becoming pollywog jerky. They were optimistically produced by a pair of red-spotted toads a couple of weeks before, and a few even had managed to start sprouting their hind legs before the dry warm air, breezes, and lack of more rain doomed their bid.

While unlucky tadpoles may seem to be unrelated to sex, by the end of the page we learn how the evolution of a different way of reproducing strongly conditions how humans experience sexuality. So, I’d argue that The Other Big Bang passes the Page 99 Test with flying colors.

The passage, recounting a hike in the Mojave Desert, underscores how the need for standing water limits where amphibians can live. It is frankly amazing that any of them succeed there. The vignette sets up the rest of the page, which introduces the evolution of a new type of vertebrate, the amniote. Amniotes include familiar desert animals like lizards, rattlesnakes, tortoises, roadrunners, jackrabbits, coyotes, and other mammals (including humans). They became the dominant land vertebrates by evolving new anatomies that allow internal fertilization (e.g. penises) and new protections for embryos (membranes and the egg shell). With such “reproductive superpowers” amniotes could reproduce virtually anywhere, including very arid or very cold places.

Before amniotes, males and females often differed only in gamete type: males make sperm, and females eggs. In present-day fish the sexes cannot be distinguished until months after hatching, and even then only by closely examining the developing gonads. Fish and amphibians generally lack external genitalia, and the ducts that carry sperm or eggs to the outside are shared between the sexes. Any sex differences in color or body shape develop only with adulthood, under the control of hormones. In the laboratory, adult fish can be easily sex-reversed with hormones. For example, females can be permanently converted into fertile males by adding testosterone to their water. Outside of the lab, hundreds of fish species naturally change sex over their lifetime, with individuals living as both fertile female and fertile males.

In contrast, amniotes develop sex-specific tissues, inside and out, early in embryonic development. At birth it is easy to tell male and female apart (rare intersex cases excepted). This early developmental divergence is associated with the loss of the sexual plasticity found in our ancestors. Like it or not, much of how we experience sex and gender directly connects to these anatomical sex differences, differences that first evolved in our ancient amniote ancestors. Imagine what it would be like if, instead, we humans retained the sexual plasticity of fish. From this one page, the broader message of The Other Big Bang is apparent: we understand ourselves and our human predicament better when we know how we got here.

Visit Eric S. Haag's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's "America Under the Hammer"

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values, and reported the following:

In 1786, lawyer John Antsey was sent by Britain’s Loyalist Claims Commission to the new United States of America on a mission of value. During the war, patriot governments had seized property—land, livestock, clothing, enslaved human beings—from men and women accused of being loyal to Great Britian and auctioned it off to their neighbors. Now in exile with the war over, loyalists demanded that the British government reimburse them for their suffering. Unsurprisingly, they often lacked proper receipts and made questionable assertions about their property’s value. Antsey’s charge was not only to find out how much the goods had sold for, but also to figure out what they had really been worth. Page 99 captures his frustrated conclusion about the relationship between value and price: “The Answer is always in a Circle, it will bring as much as it is worth—and it is worth as much as it will bring.”

Page 99, by summarizing Antsey’s dilemma, highlights one of the central arguments of America Under the Hammer—that value is a social and historical problem, not a number determined by the impersonal forces of the market—and in this way the test works. Antsey could discover the price paid for property, but he knew this was hardly the last word on its value. Rather, it was a product of dozens of forces that my book brings to light. Bids reflected community beliefs, personal jealousy, side conversations, pragmatic deal-making, misinformation, and many more social considerations. Auctions themselves were structured around legal conventions that were designed to uphold social hierarchies, relegating participants to the roles of bidders, bystanders, or property themselves. The shocking notion that a person could be sold in the same way as a chair fundamentally shaped the modern capitalist idea that everything has its price and that price is the measure of value. That modern understanding of markets conceals a long history of sorting out what value itself could or should mean. As they debated the nature of value in everyday life, early Americans deployed auctions to convert familial, labor, and diplomatic relationships into exchanges of goods for money.

In order to trace the history of market-oriented ideas about value, my book investigates many more types of auctions than the loyalist sales discussed on page 99. Auctions in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North America took place on street corners, courthouse steps, and even jail cells, and they trafficked in a wide variety of new, used, and living “goods.” Chapters discuss the fraught public sales of land seized from Indigenous Americans, the bargain auctions of imported overstock by which female retailers stocked their shelves, and the desperate tragedy of slave auctions. The result is a history of early American capitalism that places complex human relationships at its center.

Visit Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue