Catherine Hartmann's "Making the Invisible Real"

Catherine Hartmann is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wyoming. She primarily works on the intellectual history of Tibetan pilgrimage, and also writes about karma, Buddhist ethics, and Buddhist approaches to addiction and recovery.

Hartmann applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Pilgrimage, and reported the following:

Readers who open Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Pilgrimage to page 99 will learn about a 17th century Tibetan Buddhist author named Chökyi Drakpa, whose Guidebook to Gyangme: Vajradhāra's Feast is the focus of that chapter. Page 99 attempts to establish a date of composition for the text and gives background on the author and affiliation with the Drikung Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism.

Readers of page 99 might worry that the whole book is going to be boring and technical, but the rest of the chapter analyzes Vajradhāra's Feast itself, which narrates Chökyi Drakpa's adventures "opening the doors" of a holy mountain. According to Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage tradition, holy mountains like Gyangme possess great numinous power, but this attracts fierce demons who try to keep the "doors" to the mountain closed to outsiders. To "open" the mountain and make it safe for pilgrims, a powerful master (the "vajradhāra" of the text's title) must go to the mountain, interpret the mysterious geomantic signs, defeat the demons with tantric magic, and obtain a vision of the mountain's true identity as a mandala–a holy palace for a tantric Buddha. Vajradhāra's Feast is Chökyi Drakpa's claim to have done all this and lived to tell the tale.

The book explores this and many other texts about Tibetan pilgrimage to holy mountains, such as advice texts, guidebooks, philosophical debates, diaries, and founding accounts. I'm interested in the goal that they share: transforming pilgrims' perception of the holy mountain. These texts tell pilgrims to overcome their ordinary perception of the mountain as rocks and snow and instead learn to see it as a divine mandala. Transforming perception is a difficult goal! The tradition knows that, and so I examine the methods the Tibetan pilgrimage tradition has developed to try and overcome these difficulties and learn to see the ordinarily invisible realities.

This may seem like a niche concern, but religious traditions from many times and places have shared similar goals of learning to perceive ordinarily invisible beings or realities. My book hopes to help us understand how that works.

I would say that my book fails the Page 99 Test in that page 99 deals with boring historical dating and doesn't give much sense of the overall flavor or argument of the book, but you wouldn't want a history book without all the dull legwork!

Visit Kate Hartmann's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

A. Tunç Şen's "Forgotten Experts"

A. Tunç Şen is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450–1600, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Rukn al-Amuli contends that the astrolabe is the best instrument for executing these astronomical operations, which are essential for casting horoscopes and practicing electional astrology. He nonetheless posits that this craft, along with the mathematical sciences more broadly, is a type of intellectual endeavor that cannot flourish without “the support of rulers and statesmen.” For the past twenty years—since he completed his zij (astronomical handbook with tables) and another treatise on the celestial globe that has yet to be discovered—Rukn al-Amuli laments that he has been bereft of royal support. Notwithstanding possible exaggeration as a plea to his new patron, Abu’l-Qasim Babur Mirza (d. 1457), the Timurid ruler in Khurasan, to whom he dedicates his treatise on the astrolabe, al-Amuli’s life over the past two decades seems to have devolved into an unmitigated disaster. He details a series of afflictions that beset him, not the least of which was his prolonged separation from loved ones and constant relocations to distant places. More recently, his odyssey took him to India and Kerman, during which he was plagued by political turmoil, massacres, and famine.

The Page 99 Test works intriguingly well for my book, which traces the lives of several astral experts—known as munajjims—from the Ottoman and broader Persianate worlds of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These experts shared similar life trajectories: they were well versed in mathematical and astral sciences, constantly sought the patronage of powerful figures, asserted their intellectual superiority over peers and rivals, and offered vital services to audiences eager for interpretations of the heavens. Yet despite their enduring presence and significant contributions, they were largely forgotten—not only in modern times, but even in their own.

There are various reasons why they fell into oblivion. Their expertise over the workings of the heavens is perhaps best characterized by its ambivalent nature. It was a kind of expertise both transmitted and omitted, prized and stigmatized. Munajjims demonstrated technical proficiency in the mathematical sciences, astronomical knowledge, and astrological techniques but were often criticized, even caricatured—both in the medieval and early modern periods and in contemporary times—as simpletons lacking reliable bodies of knowledge. The knowledge required to practice their profession, especially as related to astrology, was text-centered and openly circulated, yet it was not commonly taught within the formal educational institutions of madrasas. While munajjims’ services—such as calculating auspicious hours, casting horoscopes, producing annual almanacs, and providing on-site astrological counsel—appealed to royals and the general public alike, they also faced skepticism from various segments of society, and sometimes even harbored their own doubts about the limitations of their science. Finally, munajjims were not the sole experts in the domain of predicting the future. They operated alongside, and sometimes in competition with, other figures—so-called occult practitioners or masters of esoteric arts—such as dream interpreters, geomancers, experts in the science of lettrism, and mystics claiming to possess mantic powers, whose authority relied upon distinct bodies of knowledge and hence occasionally came into conflict with munajjims’ expertise.

Learn more about Forgotten Experts at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Gubser's "Their Future"

Michael Gubser is professor of history at James Madison University. He has published three books on European intellectual history and international development.

Gubser applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Their Future: A History of Ahistoricism in International Development, with the following results:

The ninety-ninth page of my new book Their Future: A History of Ahistoricism in International Development provides an interesting angle on the whole work, but I think it suggests that the book is more persistently theoretical than is in fact the case. It occurs early in the fourth chapter, which is entitled “The History Wars.” The chapter discusses two major mid-century development theories: modernization theory, which emerged in the United States, and structuralism, pioneered in Latin America. In particular, page 99 summarizes one of the most famous theories in the recent history of development: Walt Rostow’s Five Stages of Economic Development (1960). Drawing on the history of Western industrialization, Rostow argued that the evolution from traditional agrarian societies to the modern industrial ones always passed through the same five historical stages. Unless they were somehow stalled along the way (by, for example, a war or a communist takeover), all developing societies would follow the path blazed by the West and would eventually come to resemble the modern USA. Thus, while his five-stage model was a historical theory, it denied the value and relevance of actual historical experiences outside Europe and the US – and even Western history was radically simplified into a five-step schema. I call this approach historical ahistoricism – the use of an abstract history to deny the detail and variety of actual histories. The suppression of local history and experience is a central theme of my book. Rostow himself went on to advise John F. Kennedy and support the Vietnam War, partly in the name of modernization. And his modernization theory was revived and updated at the end of the Cold War by Francis Fukuyama in a famous article on the end of history.

But Their Future discusses more than theories of development. It also examines development projects and practices in several countries and continents, most notably Guatemala, Zambia, and Bangladesh. So the page 99 focus on a key economic development theory accurately reflects parts of my analysis, but it misses the book’s geographic range as well as the many discussions of local projects and histories around the globe.

Learn more about Their Future at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Hartman's "Karl Marx in America"

Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars and Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times.

Hartman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Karl Marx in America, and reported the following:

From page 99:

… course, since the AFL had the most to lose to it. But even some within SLP ranks condemned the strategy.

A group of SLP dissidents led by Morris Hillquit revolted in 1899. These “kangaroos,” as DeLeon loyalists nicknamed them—a nineteenth-century political term of derision for a crook—opposed both dual unionism and DeLeon’s regime. At the annual SLP meeting, the kangaroos attempted to take physical possession of the party’s printing press. A brawl broke out, but the Hillquit group failed to dislodge the DeLeon stalwarts. The rebels then took the matter to court, where they sued for the name and property of the SLP, only to lose. DeLeon maintained control, but he and the party were damaged by this schism. DeLeon and the SLP fell from their perch atop the socialist movement, replaced by Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party of America that formed in 1901.

Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party

If anyone in history personifies American Marxism, it is Eugene Victor Debs. He rallied more Americans to the cause of class struggle than anyone else. Yet Debs was not always a fire-breathing class warrior. The Indiana-born revolutionary started his political career promoting the idea of a “grand cooperative scheme” that would allow people to “work together in harmony in every branch of industry.” Rather than a working-class struggle over the means of production, the young Debs called for the creation of utopian colonies modeled on a Christian vision of a city on a hill. The future of socialism, for him at the time, lay in the vision imagined by Robert Owen. Debs believed that a rapacious form of capitalism had betrayed the spirit of brotherhood—a spirit that had long animated Americans—and that the moral example set by the utopian community would help convince others to live up to their highest ideals.

Sinclair Lewis called Debs the John the Baptist of American socialism. Daniel Bell described him as “the man whose gentleness and…

Page 99 of Karl Marx in America does indeed convey something central to the book, where I argue that Marx’s thought was more important in shaping American political discourse than most people realize. Page 99 is part of Chapter Two—“Working Class Hero”—about how the militant labor and socialist movements of the Gilded Age took up Marx as inspiration and as strategic guide to fighting against the emergent industrial and corporate capitalism that had taken shape in the United States and had made the lives of millions of workers pretty miserable.

Page 99 represents a transition in the chapter from discussing the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) led by the explicitly Marxist Daniel DeLeon, which ultimately failed to capture the hearts and minds of most radical workers, to discussing the Socialist Party of America led by the incomparable Eugene Debs. Although Debs, much more so than DeLeon, was immersed in longstanding American political traditions like Christianity, republicanism, and populism, his experience with the labor movement and even more so, capital’s repression of the labor movement, made him more amenable to Marx’s ideas. And when he read Marx while in prison in 1894, he was converted to Marxism and took American socialism down the Marxist road. The Gilded Age was thus one of what I call the "Marx booms," periods in US History when lots of Americans read the bearded communist philosopher favorably.

The book consists of nine chapters, chronologically ordered from the US Civil War to the present, which dig deep into how Marx interpreted the United States (the focus of Chapter One—“American Revolutionary”) and even more so, about how Marx’s ideas came into contact with people working out political problems in America. Out of what might be called “the Marx-America dialectic,” three distinct versions of Marx emerged: the Marx who famously centered labor as the driving force of value in a capitalist society; the Marx whose ideas mixed with other American political traditions to form hybrid political tendencies; and the Marx whose repulsive theories helped liberals and conservatives work out their own ideas about America.

Learn more about Karl Marx in America at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A War for the Soul of America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frank Krutnik's "Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers"

Frank Krutnik is an emeritus reader in film studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton. His publications include Popular Film and Television Comedy; In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity; and Inventing Jerry Lewis; and he is coeditor of Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era.

Krutnik applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers: Radio and Film Noir, and shared the following:

Page 99 concludes the chapter “The Transmedial Seriality of Michael Shayne #1: From Book to Film”. The page wraps up the discussion of the low-budget B-film series in which the Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) cast Hugh Marlowe as Brett Halliday’s private eye Michael Shayne. Even though reviewers complained that the PRC series was hampered by budgetary restrictions, with verbal exposition often substituting for dramatized action, these films were more faithful to Halliday’s version of Michael Shayne than the earlier Twentieth Century-Fox series, in which Lloyd Nolan took a broadly comic approach to Shayne.

The final paragraph summarizes the differences between these two film series and the common conception of what a film noir is and does. These series films “are modest in their budgets and their ambitions, never engaging seriously with the implications of the murderous activities their detectives investigate”. Unlike many cherished noir movies, they avoid complex storytelling strategies or an emphasis on the ‘fallen world’ of American modernity. Even so, such B-film series performed a valuable role in contributing to double-feature programming and the studios’ obligation to theatre owners, as well as representing “significant developments in the Michael Shayne media franchise”. At the same time as audiences were able to watch the PRC films in cinemas, they could also listen to the detective’s adventures on the radio, courtesy of a popular series from the Mutual Broadcasting System, as well as engaging with Halliday’s ongoing book series. The various media “produced widely differing versions of Shayne, but they were recognizable iterations of an established cultural figure, the hard-boiled private eye, that had achieved substantial familiarity across U.S. popular culture by the late 1940s”

The Page 99 Test does not really provide a successful snapshot of the book as a whole. It certainly illustrates one of its key themes - the questioning of conventional approaches to (film) noir - but there is no mention of the central topic of radio drama. It is the following chapter that examines in detail the various appearances of Michael Shayne on the airwaves, including a convincingly noir approach to the detective by Jeff Chandler.

Visit Frank Krutnik's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas A. Tweed's "Religion in the Lands That Became America"

Thomas A. Tweed is the Harold and Martha Welch Professor of American Studies and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. A past president of the American Academy of Religion, he is editor of Retelling U.S. Religious History and author of Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion and Religion: A Very Short Introduction.

Tweed applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History, and shared the following:

Page 99 falls in chapter three, “Imperial Religion: Agricultural Metaphors, Catholic Missions, and the Second Sustainability Crisis, 1565-1756.” The preceding chapters chronicled religious history, from a rock shelter ritual in 9200 BCE attended by an ancient foraging community in present-day Texas to Christopher Columbus’s first encounters in 1492 with Taíno fishing-farming communities in the Caribbean. I set up the page 99 section about “Mexico and Peru” on the previous page, where I note that “the religious history of the Spanish colonies north of the Rio Grande starts in the Caribbean and Latin America, because that’s where the patterns were set that would shape the first settlements and missions in the lands that became the US.” Those patterns included importing enslaved Africans and displacing local Natives, as when Columbus, who returned in 1493, built a church cemetery on an earlier Taíno burial ground, thereby building the first colonial metropolis on “a Native necropolis.”

Page 99 suggests that “Native maltreatment continued in the Aztec ceremonial center in the Valley of Mexico and the Incan ceremonial center in the Andes Mountains.” I describe a Spanish attack during an Aztec ceremony in Mexico City’s Great Temple in 1521, when, as a Native witness reported, “the blood flowed like water and gathered into pools.” I then note that some Spanish Catholic clerics in the Caribbean and Latin America protested the horrific maltreatment of Indigenous Peoples, as when one pious critic reported that “Christians grilled shamans until they ‘howled in agony.’” The protests reached Rome, where in 1537 the pope declared that Natives were “truly men” who should not be deprived of their liberty. I end the section with a comment: “It might seem astonishing that a church leader believed it necessary to declare Natives were human beings, but apparently it needed to be said.”

Ford Madox Ford’s Page 99 Test works well in at least two ways.

First, it shows how my account differs from the classic scholarly stories of American religion, which focused on theological ideas and Protestant churches and traced the rise and fall of Protestant public power. Page 99 illustrates the book’s animating aim—to craft a new plot by changing the story’s temporal span, spatial scope, and organizing themes. The page expands the geographical scope to Central and South America, just as earlier chapters had extended the chronological span to 11,100 years before the present. English Protestants, who are central characters in other stories, aren’t the focus on page 99, and, when they appear in the next chapter, the narrative doesn’t employ the usual motifs to recount a tale about the rise and fall of Protestant influence.

Second, the Page 99 Test offers a glimpse of the book’s main arguments—about “sustainability crises” and religion’s role. I chronicle three social and environmental crises in the lands that became America: the Cornfield Crisis (1140-1350), the Colonial Crisis (1565-1776), and the Industrial Crisis (1873-1920). The first crisis, discussed in the preceding chapter, was resolved as stressed farming communities moved away, scaled down, and reduced hierarchy. The other two crises remained unresolved and were bequeathed to subsequent generations. The Industrial Crisis is the topic of a later chapter, but the Colonial Crisis is introduced in the chapter that includes page 99: “As isolated settler outposts became interconnected imperial provinces a second crisis of sustainability flared up between 1650 and 1750, when empires’ emissaries sanctioned the displacement of Natives and the enslavement of Africans.” Page 99 includes details about the spiritually-sanctioned processes that, when redeployed north of the Rio Grande, generated socially and environmentally stressed niches like the slave plantation and the Indian reservation. Finally, page 99 identifies both atrocities and protests and, thereby, reinforces another of the book’s main points—that in the long history of the lands that became America religion both made things better and made things worse, sometimes inhibiting and sometimes promoting individual, communal, and environmental flourishing.

Learn more about Religion in the Lands That Became America at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: America's Church.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greta Lynn Uehling's "Decolonizing Ukraine"

Greta Uehling is an anthropologist who specializes in the study of war, conflict, and population displacement. A professor at the University of Michigan, she teaches seminars on human rights and humanitarianism for the Program in International and Comparative Studies.

Her new book, Decolonizing Ukraine: How the Indigenous People of Crimea Remade Themselves after Russian Occupation, shows readers how understanding Crimea is essential for understanding Ukraine — and the war with Russia — today.

Uehling applied the "Page 99 Test" to Decolonizing Ukraine, with the following results:

Page 99 finds me, the author, sitting on a rough-hewn bench in the back room of a community center, interviewing singer songwriter and Eurovision winner, Jamala. Her winning song is about her people’s 1944 deportation according to an order by Stalin.

The lyrics describe her great grandmother’s realization that her infant daughter has died in the crowded deportation train car. The song broke a previously enforced silence surrounding deportation and raised awareness about the event, now recognized by the government of Ukraine as genocide.

Page 99 is part of an entire chapter devoted to Jamala because as a representative of a Muslim Indigenous group, the Crimean Tatars, she was a major catalyst in the process of Ukrainian national identity becoming more accepting of ethnic and religious diversity.

The victory was significant, I explain, because it provided an opportunity to collectively acknowledge past injustices and grieve human losses in ways that had been impossible before. Music harnesses the power of empathy to heal communities and build empathy.

I link my discussion of Jamala to processes that took place in the United States following the murder of George Floyd, which led Americans to more deeply reckon with racial hierarchies and discrimination in the United States.

This discussion, grounded in philosopher Charles Taylor’s adaptation of Hegel, highlights that recognition of one’s identity by others is a vital human need.

A reader opening to page 99 would gain a clear sense of the style and methodology of the work as a whole. They would quickly see that my approach relies on primary sources. As a cultural anthropologist, I conducted 90 one-on-one interviews over a three-year period in locations across Ukraine to write the book, and my interview with Jamala is one of them.

A reader would also observe that the book interweaves my personal experiences of conducting fieldwork into the broader narrative. As an ethnographer, the process of uncovering the story is itself an integral part of the story I tell.

This page explores the power of collective grieving as a catalyst for social solidarity, a theme that resonates throughout the book, where emotions are central to the analysis. In other chapters, readers encounter emotions such as fear, hatred, and empathy, each playing a critical role in shaping political and social dynamics.

Finally, the page introduces the concept of recognition, emphasizing its significance in Indigenous struggles for self-determination, which have largely been framed through the lens of being seen, heard, and acknowledged.

A reader turning to page 99, however, would not encounter the book’s overarching argument. They would also lack essential contextual information—such as who the Crimean Tatars are, what it means to be Indigenous, and why Indigeneity holds particular significance in contemporary Ukraine.

In summary, the browser’s test offers a certain degree of usefulness, particularly in giving readers a glimpse of the book’s style, methodology, and thematic concerns. However, it does not convey the overarching argument of the work, nor does it provide key background information necessary for fully understanding the broader context and significance of the narrative.

Decolonizing Ukraine brings readers into the lives of the Ukrainians, Russians, and Crimean Tatars who opposed Russia’s takeover of Crimea, many of whom fled for government-controlled Ukraine. I focus in particular on the Crimean Tatars because they were disproportionately affected by Russian occupation, and I believe their experiences offer a unique vantage point on Ukraine.

As a whole, the book opens a window onto how a historically disadvantaged group, that had been vilified and demonized for centuries, not only survives repeated episodes of ethnic cleansing but succeeds in transforming how they view themselves and how they are viewed by others, thereby gaining more meaningful social inclusion and political power in Ukraine.

Visit Greta Uehling's website.

The Page 99 Test: Everyday War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin M. McGeough's "Readers of the Lost Ark"

Kevin M. McGeough is a Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Geography & Environment at the University of Lethbridge, where he holds a Board of Governor’s Research Chair in Archaeological Theory and Reception. He co-directs archaeological excavations in Jordan and in Canada.

McGeough applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Readers of the Lost Ark: Imagining the Ark of the Covenant from Ancient Times to the Present, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Readers of the Lost Ark introduces the Parker Expedition, an expedition in which British explorers sought to recover the lost Ark of the Covenant from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Ark of the Covenant is the chest that God instructs Moses to have built, and, according to the biblical account, had dangerous properties and powers. The Parker Expedition sought to find the Ark, and they had raised money for the expedition believing that its discovery could be quite profitable. Working surreptitiously in one of the most religiously and politically contested spaces in the world, the team’s excavations near and on the Temple Mount eventually set off a riot in Jerusalem from which they had to flee for their lives. Page 99 introduces the main characters involved in this expedition: Lt. Montague Parker, formerly a British soldier, and Valter Henrik Juvelius, a Finnish mystic who believed that he could decipher hidden messages in the Bible, especially those related to the Temple of Solomon. Juvelius’s decipherment was not a traditional translation but involved a reimagining of biblical history from that presented in the Old Testament. Juvelius, interacting with ancient Rabbinic accounts, offered a new version of history where King David hid the Ark of the Covenant in a secret location in Jerusalem, from which it was later removed by King Hezekiah. Parker and Juvelius thought that they could find this secret hiding spot.

The Page 99 Test works really well for my book (and in fact the publisher and I had decided to make this chapter the free preview chapter well before I thought to check page 99). Most readers will know of the Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones film (the name of which inspired the name of my book), in which the fictional archaeologist races the Nazis to discover this ancient biblical weapon before they do. Page 99 introduces this curious story about a real-life quest for the Ark, one rooted just as much in fantasy interpretations of the ancient relic as Indy’s story. For the Parker Expedition was not based in the scientific study of the Bible or the archaeology of Jerusalem; it invoked mystical thinking driven by impulses to find lost treasure. It was not a typical archaeological expedition; it was the attempt of untrained amateurs to use psychic techniques to decode supposed secret messages in the Bible in order to find lost treasure. This specific example well captures what my book is about, which is not so much what the Ark of the Covenant actually was (although I do address that) but more how the Ark has come to be meaningful for different communities in different contexts. Readers of the Lost Ark explores how the biblical accounts of the Ark are ambiguous enough to inspire all sorts of different interpretations of what the Ark was, what it was used for, and where it could be now.

Learn more about Readers of the Lost Ark at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tiffany D. Joseph's "Not All In"

Tiffany D. Joseph is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of Sociology and International Affairs Program at Northeastern University. She is the author of Race on the Move: Brazilian Migrants and the Global Reconstruction of Race.

Joseph applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare, with the following results:

From page 99:

[The explicitly racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric of the] …past decade has generated a climate of fear that has diminished Latinx and other immigrants’ willingness to seek health care around the country and even in Boston. These themes surfaced among the individuals I interviewed in 2012–2013. They encountered language-based difficulties in making and scheduling appointments and obtaining transportation, suffered from providers’ implicit and explicit discriminatory treatment, and feared being profiled and detained on the way to appointments, which could lead to their arrest and deportation. Thus, racialized legal status discrimination was pervasive in Latinx immigrants’ experiences with the Boston healthcare system.

How Language Hinders the Medical Encounter

Limited English proficiency (LEP) hindered immigrants’ communication with healthcare providers, which intensified all the other forms of discrimination they might encounter. For the estimated 25 million individuals in the United States with LEP, language presents a huge structural barrier to obtaining health care, from scheduling appointments and seeing providers to filling and accurately taking prescriptions. While the inability to obtain necessary information in one’s primary language may seem an inadvertent consequence of migration, it represents a violation of anti-discrimination law. As I discussed in Chapter 1, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects the right of individuals to receive language-appropriate information and assistance in federally funded institutions. Consequently, the inability to receive such assistance is a form of racial discrimination, which compromises LEP individuals’ engagement with meso-level institutions. Like many primary English speakers, I previously took for granted the privilege of making appointments and communicating with healthcare professionals in my primary language. As I interviewed stakeholders, I realized how many patients ran into these racialized legal status barriers when attempting to obtain health services.

I asked Brazilian and Dominican respondents about the quality of their interactions with medical providers. Francisca, the Brazilian who complained that the government made it difficult to apply for coverage,…[described the problem her family faced when getting care].

The Page 99 Test definitely applies to my book and gives a reader a good idea about the central themes of Not All In with regard to how racial and anti-immigrant discrimination negatively shape immigrants’ healthcare access. This page references how language, specifically having Limited English Proficiency (LEP), is a tremendous barrier to all aspects of navigating the healthcare system. First, having limited English proficiency (LEP) makes it difficult to schedule appointments. Second, language differences limit effective patient-provider communication and may result in longer waiting times if medical interpreters are unavailable. In both cases, immigrants reported feeling that providers mistreated them or were inpatient when additional language resources were needed. Thus, language – either not speaking English or speaking with an accent – was a crucial factor that sometimes contributed to immigrants’ experiences of discrimination in the healthcare system and their broader lives.

Not All In confirms a stark truth about our healthcare system: health coverage does not guarantee access to health care. Obamacare was a historic reform, but everyone has not benefited from it due to policy design (for immigrants) or lack of policy implementation (for Americans in states that did not expand Medicaid). But, even when people have coverage, like most immigrants I interviewed in the book, they experienced significant barriers to enrolling in coverage and then getting care with that coverage. Their limited English proficiency made it difficult to schedule appointments and effectively communicate with providers, particularly if medical interpreters were not available. Beyond that, long-standing documentation status restrictions in health policy alongside structural racism in the healthcare system meant immigrants experienced discrimination based on their racialized legal status – the intersection of race, ethnicity, and documentation status. Fears of being pulled over by police or immigration enforcement in route to obtaining care also made immigrants afraid to see their providers. Though the book focuses on immigrants, most of us can relate to not understanding complicated insurance lingo, finding a primary care provider taking new patients or with certain insurance, or effectively communicating with our doctors. But the most marginalized among us must contend with explicit and implicit discrimination that make it more difficult to obtain the best quality health care we can get.

Visit Tiffany D. Joseph's website.

The Page 99 Test: Race on the Move.

--Marshal Zeringue

Justin Eckstein's "Sound Tactics"

Justin Eckstein is Associate Professor of Communication, Media, and Design Arts at Pacific Lutheran University and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. He is the coeditor of Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production.

Eckstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sound Tactics: Auditory Power in Political Protests, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book opens within a case study of HU Resist, a student activist group at Howard University, at a moment of intensification. It documents their shift from a localized student protest to a broader civic movement, interweaving historical resonance, digital amplification, and material solidarity. On this page, readers encounter HU Resist not merely as agitators but as archivists of Black student resistance, building an audiovisual, participatory infrastructure grounded in both community and critique. Their tactical soundwork—chanting, video, and responsive surveying—creates a scene of deliberative listening as much as vocal protest. The page concludes as a financial aid embezzlement scandal breaks, layering institutional critique atop historical commemoration.

The page does not function as an uncanny synecdoche of the book, but it does pulse with its dominant rhythms. A browser landing here would glimpse the book’s commitments: a study of how student sound and speech shape publics, how institutions get narrated from their margins, and how protest reorganizes the auditory. Yet, absent is the theoretical scaffolding that situates HU Resist within broader arguments about heckling, voicing, and institutional aurality. Without that framework, one might misread the work as primarily ethnographic rather than rhetorical. Still, it is a good shortcut—just not a complete one.

The HU Resist case sits at the heart of the book’s wager: that sound—both as noun and adjective—offers a tactical vocabulary for those operating under constraint. Sound as a noun refers to the material vibrations that are heard and felt; sound as an adjective connotes practical judgment, a sense of fittingness within a given situation. Earlier in the chapter, HU Resist had discovered the improvisational force of the heckle, using it during a campus convocation to call out institutional complicity. When the financial aid scandal surfaced, they recalibrated, turning to Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” as a sonic indictment of administrative failure. Their ability to pivot, remix, and reframe in response to evolving institutional conditions exemplifies the logic of “sound tactics”: using auditory presence to reorganize what counts as sayable, audible, and actionable within public space.

HU Resist exemplifies the book’s broader claim: that protest sound is not ambient noise but deliberate, moral argument. Across case studies—from student walkouts to urban casseroles—Sound Tactics theorizes how constrained groups use auditory forms to render demands urgent, affectively charged, and institutionally disruptive. These are not just sounds; they are sound judgments. Protesters deploy pitch, rhythm, and repetition as rhetorical resources that compel recognition

Learn more about Sound Tactics at the Penn State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew F. Schmader's "Uncovering America's First War"

Matthew F. Schmader has been conducting archaeological research in central New Mexico for more than forty years. He has conducted research on sites of every major cultural time period in New Mexico and served as the Albuquerque City Archaeologist for ten years. He is currently an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.

Schmader applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Uncovering America's First War: Contact, Conflict, and Coronado's Expedition to the Rio Grande, and reported the following:

My page 99 is actually very important but is on a topic not quite within the main theme of the book. The best quote is: “The scale and pace of other changes (such as architecture and settlement patterns) in the late pre-Contact era of the middle Rio Grande pueblos is paralleled in the ceramic record.” Here I describe that the Ancestral Pueblo world was going through substantial and systemic change in the century or less before the arrival of the first Europeans and outsiders in 1540. This was quite consequential, because those changes in fact helped strengthen pre-Contact Pueblo social organizations to a degree that helped it withstand a major impact from the outside. Without these changes, the Pueblos may have been less resilient to great external stresses.

The main storyline of the book is about the collision between the world’s greatest superpower at the time—the burgeoning Spanish empire—and the most populated area of the American Southwest, which was located in the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico. The book details material signs of conflict, of battles fought between not only Europeans and Pueblos, but also involving hundreds of Mexican Native soldiers brought to bolster the European ranks. The stand-off was epic, a life and death struggle for the very survival of Indigenous cultures versus the forces of European expansionism. The Ancestral Pueblos succeeded where other societies went extinct, and the Europeans came up empty in their quest to find Asia. What emerged instead is a blend of cultures unique to the American Southwest, with syncretism in religion, intermarriage, and unique lifeways. It was a painful birthing process, marked by constant Indigenous resistance and by Spanish determination to establish some sort of colony. As often happens in history, nobody got everything they sought and the outcome produced unexpected results—in this case, New Mexican culture.

Learn more about Uncovering America's First War at the University of New Mexico Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joan C. Williams's "Outclassed"

Described as having "something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is an award-winning scholar of social inequality. She is the author of White Working Class, and has published on class dynamics in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic and more. She is Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair (emerita) at University of California College of the Law San Francisco.

Williams applied "the Page 99 Test" to her new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, and reported the following:

If one turns to page 99 of my book, they will learn a lot about why people believe in conspiracy theories. While this is good reading, it’s only a very small sliver of what I write about, so I don’t think the Page 99 Test works for my book.

I spend a few pages talking about conspiracy theories, and why people like them, because they are an important element of the distrust in government that has been building over the past several years in America.  My book, overall, is about how the Democratic Party lost working class voters—and the cultural competence people on the Left are going to have to learn if they want to woo these voters back. The working class has felt powerless for too long when it comes to our government and the decisions it makes. Believing in a conspiracy theory, or declaring that you are going to “do your own research,” on a given topic feels empowering. It’s a welcome feeling for the believer; for everyone else, it should be a sign that inequality is eroding the social fabric of our nation.

Most of the rest of Outclassed walks readers through how we got to a point where the working class is more aligned with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, and the many ways that activists and leaders on the Left make unforced errors in their outreach to those working-class voters. College-educated voters need to understand the ways working-class attitudes towards religion, immigration, and traditional gender roles reflect the material conditions of working-class lives. The final section provides a detailed roadmap on how the Left can forge cross-class coalitions on climate, guns, and more. These conversations are the key to winning back working- class voters from the far Right; without these conversations that cut across party lines, we can’t hope to make change in our nation.

Visit Joan C. Williams's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Foss's "The Importance of Being Different"

Chris Foss is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington and co-editor of the 2016 essay collection Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives.

He applied "the Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, with the following results:

The Good Soldier is one of my all-time favorite novels, so I was really hoping to be able to fall in with Ford on this, but in general I would have to say that the Test does not work particularly well with my book. My page 99 is the second page in the fourth and final content chapter, which offers a close reading of Wilde’s famous fairy tale “The Happy Prince.” This page consists primarily of the chapter’s second paragraph (framed by the last 7 ½ lines of the opening paragraph and the first 4 lines of the third paragraph). This 24 ½-line paragraph exclusively serves as a summary of a critical essay written by Julia Miele Rodas on the character of Bertha Plummer from Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth, so there is no mention of Wilde or his fairy tales anywhere in this paragraph. It does serve as a hat tip to one of the book’s features, which is that all six chapters contain their own different Dickensian connection, each briefly relating some aspect of my take on that chapter’s Wilde work to a new Dickens novel, but if readers were to go by page 99 and the sheer number of its lines devoted to Dickens, they could not be blamed for assuming this is yet another book on Boz.

That being said, there are some snippets from the partial paragraphs that do provide a snapshot of the book’s concern with Wilde’s fairy tale. The end of the first one acknowledges the tension in “The Happy Prince” between the era’s more typical renderings of disability as a form of martyrdom and the story’s disability-aligned protagonist who stands out as an agential provider of succor who slots into the role of benefactor rather than recipient of such aid. The start of the third paragraph then raises the important issue of Wilde’s relation to the peculiar protagonists he features in these texts and the extent to which he is self-consciously spoofing sentimentality and/or more earnestly engaging in a form of utopian re-visioning of the importance of being different.

Learn more about The Importance of Being Different at the University of Virginia Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pancho McFarland's "Food Autonomy in Chicago"

Pancho McFarland is a professor of sociology at Chicago State University. His latest work includes the coedited volume, Mexican-Origin Food, Foodways and Social Movements; Toward a Chican@ Hip Hop Anti-Colonialism; The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje; and Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio. Since 2008, he has worked in the decolonial food movement as executive director of the Green Lots Project. He is a certified permaculture designer and became director of The Permaculture Institute of Chicago in 2020.

McFarland applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Food Autonomy in Chicago, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Food Autonomy in Chicago is from the chapter, “Learning from the Land: CommUnity Pedagogy in Place.” This chapter describes pedagogical approaches used by members of the sector of the Black food autonomy movement of which I have been a part for the past 18 years. The discussion about the land as teacher found on page 99 extends from the previous page:

The students not only learn about the historical genius of African, Indigenous, and diasporic foodways but also how to employ this genius in their own lives. In Indigenous food systems throughout the world complementary planting is used as a technique to improve plant growth, resist disease and pests, and develop soil. ‘Las tres madres’ teach students a practical lesson they can employ in their plots as well as further illustrate the genius of Indigenous people. Along with teaching complementarity, soil conservation, and polyculturalism, las tres madres teach survival, subsistence, and spirit…Through touching the seeds and lovingly tending them, we learn the deep lessons of reciprocity that they teach. We see how they provide a model for human relationships and the values of respect and interdependence central to Indigenous social organization. We see how the uniqueness of each is nurtured when they grow together. The mothers teach us that life requires diversity to thrive as their yields increase in direct proportion to their cooperation.

Page 99 is a good place to land if you want to get a general understanding of the book. It captures a lot about what the book is about. The browser will read words like Indigenous, Indigenous Knowledge, land as teacher, reciprocity, responsibility, in lak’ ech, and maiz narratives. Thus, The Page 99 Test is a generally good ‘browser’s shortcut.’ However, it misses a few things that might mislead the reader who happens upon this page. You won’t read about important concerns of the book such as Black American traditions and identity, Indigenous/Black anarchism, gender and race. The browser might miss that the book is an analysis of a primarily Black food movement in Chicago.

The book is an autoethnographic account of my work and that of my camaradas. Primary amongst our concerns is teaching Indigenous (including African and Black American) lifeways in our movement spaces especially gardens and small farms. We have developed a set of ever-evolving pedagogical practices that center elders and the land as our primary teachers. I call these practices CommUnity Pedagogy. This discussion of how ‘las tres madres’ (corn, beans and squash) teach with the assistance of the ‘fourth mother’ (or gardener) is a great example of all that we try to do in this movement; teach sustainability, reindigenize our identities and practices, solve food and health related problems, resist current systemic abuses to Black, Indigenous and other people of color, and work collectively to create a new world. This discussion provides the reader with a glimpse of how we creatively imagine and cultivate a “world in which all worlds fit” using Indigenous Knowledge modified to take on contemporary challenges, technologies and circumstances.

Learn more about Food Autonomy in Chicago at the University of Georgia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Gowler's "Thoughts that Burned"

Steve Gowler is Chester D. Tripp Chair in Humanities Emeritus, Berea College, where he taught from 1993 to 2024. His articles on nineteenth-century religious thought and literature have appeared in the New England Quarterly, Church History, the Anglican Theological Review, and Southern Humanities Review.

Gowler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thoughts That Burned: William Goodell, Human Rights, and the Abolition of American Slavery, and reported the following:

Readers dropping into Thoughts that Burned on page 99 find themselves amid revolutionary ferment in Rhode Island in 1841-42. The Dorr Rebellion pitted Charterists, who supported only modest changes to the state’s Royal Charter of 1663, which allowed only propertied white men to vote, against Dorrites (named for their leader, Thomas Wilson Dorr) who pushed for a new constitution that would expand the franchise to landless merchants and mechanics. A former resident of Providence, RI, and a proponent of radical democracy, the abolitionist William Goodell, the subject of Thoughts that Burned, followed the events in Rhode Island avidly. He instinctively supported the Dorrites, though he lamented their refusal to extend the vote to Black men. When he visited Providence in the late spring of 1842 the air was charged with the threat of violence.

From page 99:

As usual, Goodell’s pen was at the ready. He wrote an article for Joshua Leavitt’s Emancipator and Free American, titled “Lessons of a Single Day, or Sketches and Musings of Twenty-Four Hours in Rhode Island,” which focused on the Charterists’ bad faith in denying the natural rights of most of Rhode Island’s population. Over the next several months, Goodell continued to reflect on the implications of Dorr’s push toward a more democratic polity for his state. In the fall, Goodell published The Rights and the Wrongs of Rhode Island, arguing that the Rhode Island Charter contradicted the United States Constitution and proclaiming that the Declaration of Independence was the “grand expositor and father of Constitutional law.” This claim that the Declaration is the hermeneutical key to the Constitution would be crucial to the legal arguments he developed in the coming years.

This passage mentions Goodell’s signal contribution to the abolitionist movement: his radical antislavery reading of the U.S. Constitution. Along with Gerrit Smith, Lysander Spooner, Alvan Stewart, and, most famously, Frederick Douglass, he argued that the Declaration of Independence was the Rosetta Stone of constitutional interpretation, the lens through which the Constitution was revealed to be, in Douglass’s words, “a glorious liberty document.” Douglass credited Goodell with being one of the most important influences on his understanding of the Constitution and his conversion to political abolitionism.

Page 99 offers a glimpse of an essential aspect of Goodell’s thinking and provides an example of his gravitational attraction to democratic reform; however, it is silent about the book’s other leading theme: the formation of an abolitionist household. Goodell’s wife, Clarissa, and his remarkable daughters, Maria and Lavinia, are frequently on stage in this biography, but on page 99 they remain in the wings.

Visit Steve Gowler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lindsay O'Neill's "The Two Princes of Mpfumo"

Lindsay O’Neill is Associate Professor (Teaching) of History at the University of Southern California and author of The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World.

She applied the “Page 99 Test to her latest book, The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery, and reported the following:

The last full sentence on page 99 alludes to the tragedy at the heart of this book. It states “When the men arrived in Exmouth, Prince James was already persona non grata, and during their stay nothing altered.” Three pages later Prince James will be dead by his own hand. We will never know exactly why he made this choice.

The suicide of Prince James also catches us by surprise. Much of the text shows us two African princes who were savvy survivors who pushed and prodded to make their way home. Prince James and his brother John had left their homeland of Mpfumo, where the capital of Mozambique now stands, on an English ship in 1716 to help raise the status of their kingdom by establishing trading ties with the English. They were enslaved, but they managed to free themselves and make their way to London. There they were minor celebrities and there they managed to convince the English to take them home. When their ship home hit a storm and went into port for repairs in Exmouth, it seemed like it would be a short setback on a triumphal journey home.

In fact, most of page 99 is about connections between people, rather than ruptures. It details how the institutions that supported the princes used their networks to help the men and support their voyage home. Men were found to repair the ship and to show the princes the sites of the city. In fact, even the dark story of Prince James’ suicide has moments of hope. Two pages later, in the midst of his crisis, he went door to door in Exmouth looking for someone to let him in, but it was nearing midnight and no one was awake. If he had knocked a few hours earlier, perhaps things would have ended differently. But the reality of the suffering these men faced, the ever present taint of racism, always lurks in the background of their story. So it is fitting the page ends this way and, as a whole, contains both the light and the dark side of the princes’ tale.

Learn more about The Two Princes of Mpfumo at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin M.B. O'Halloran's "East of Empire"

Erin M.B. O'Halloran is Marie Sklodowska Curie European Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

She applied the “Page 99 Test to her new book, East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars, and reported the following:

Conveniently, page 99 begins with the opening of a new sentence, albeit in the middle of a thought. The page is situated toward the end of a chapter on Indian and Arab reactions to Italy’s highly illegal invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, often referred to in the historical literature as the Abyssinian Crisis. The invasion, which violated the League of Nations Charter, provoked widespread outrage across much of the world (East and West), and is often identified as the moment at which the post-WWI international legal order began to cave in. The subheading of this particular section is “Enemies in Common”.

As the page opens, we are discussing the small but important minority of Indian and Arab anti-colonial leaders, thinkers and activists who warmed to Mussolini in the mid-1930’s: men like Shakib Arslan, Subhas Chandra Bose, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and Anis Daoud. In the middle of the first paragraph I introduce another sub-set of Mussolini’s Middle Eastern admirers: the ‘Revisionist' Zionists led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. At the height of the crisis in late 1935, page 99 recounts, "the rightwing movement’s official newspaper, HaYarden, published multiple editorials celebrating the prospect of 'an Ethiopia conquered by Italy, which would thrive and prosper like any other European colony', and warning that reversals in policy would amount to 'a failure for the white race’.”

The next paragraph contrasts the cynical manoeuvring of fascist Italy and its Arab, Indian, and Jewish nationalist allies with the Eastern humanism of the Egyptian author Muhammad Lutfi Goma’a, who rallied his countrymen to the Ethiopian cause, and Indian Muslim internationalists like Shawkat Ali, who had called for the Army of India to intervene against Italy's aggression.

In the page’s final paragraph, I evoke Mattias Olesen’s observation that "the Abyssinian Crisis became a ‘quilting point’ at which national and transnational debates over liberalism and fascism, nationalism and pluralism, and the ongoing struggle against colonialism converged.” I argue that the crisis created a common front across a wide range of Arab and Indian thinkers, "whether expressed in the language of anticolonialism, antifascism, antiracism, or universal ethics. Mobilized in defense of Christian Africans, this was the East at something approaching its most expansive, universal-humanist frontiers. It was equally telling who fell beyond the Eastern consensus: a minority of Islamists, anticolonial nationalists and militant Zionists all perceived in the Italian invasion a classically Machiavellian opening for advancement of narrower agendas.”

The Page 99 Test is pretty successful. Page 99 gives readers a decent overview of some of the key themes and arguments my book makes about Easternism and its discontents. My one reservation is that page 99 might give readers the impression that East of Empire is mostly engaged in text analysis or parsing out competing strands of political thought. I’d like to think there is much meatier storytelling going on in most of the book than you happen to encounter on this particular page.

Intriguingly, several readers have recently told me that Chapter Four, where page 99 is situated, is when the book “really takes off”. This is gratifying, as for some time during the drafting and review process, my editor and I were both less than certain what it was “doing” for the overall argument. That changed in the fall and winter of 2023-4, as I sat down to revise the manuscript. Suddenly, I felt I had new, visceral, and to my mind much more compelling set of insights into what the Abyssinian Crisis meant. The research, the material was all already on the page, and had been for years. But now I finally understood why it mattered to the rest of the story I was telling.

Visit Erin M.B. O'Halloran's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie N. Baker's "Abortion Pills"

Carrie N. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor of American Studies and the Chair of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Her books include The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment and Fighting the US Sex Trade, and scores of peer-reviewed scholarly articles on gender, law, and social movements for women’s rights. She is a regular writer and contributing editor at Ms. magazine, covering reproductive rights, discrimination in employment and education, sexual harassment, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Baker applied the “Page 99 Test to her latest book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics, and reported the following:

#FreeTheAbortionPill

At page 99, The World Health Organization had just declared that the COVID-19 outbreak was a global pandemic. State and local governments began issuing stay-at-home orders to combat spread of the disease. Many schools and businesses shut down and governors issued orders delaying non-essential medical procedures to preserve protective gear for medical workers. In several states, including Texas, Alabama, Iowa, Ohio and Oklahoma, governors declared abortion was a non-essential medical procedure. In response, reproductive freedom advocates called on Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remove longstanding in-person dispensing requirements for the abortion pill mifepristone so that people could obtain abortion pills without having to travel to abortion clinics to pick them up.

Page 99 describes the National Women’s Health Network’s social media campaign called “Get the Pill Where You Take It—At Home!” with the hashtag #FreeTheAbortionPill, a video, a petition, and digital billboards. “There are more complications and deaths associated with Tylenol than mifepristone,” said Dr. Jamila Perritt of Physicians for Reproductive Health. Page 99 also quotes NWHN’s executive director Cynthia Pearson later reflections on the campaign: “We might not have even tried without the pandemic. But it was just the moment. Things were really different. We realized we could do things now that we couldn’t have done two to four months ago.” Page 99 also quotes New York attorney gender Leticia James: “As the coronavirus spreads across the country and residents are asked to stay at home, the federal government should be doing everything in its power to ensure … that no woman is forced to risk her health while exercising her constitutional right to abortion.”

In the third of six chapters, page 99 (of 237) describes a dramatic turning point in the decades-long fight to increase access to the abortion pill mifepristone. By quoting activists and government officials, page 99 gives browsers a good idea of the whole work. For the book, I conducted interviews with over 80 activists, researchers, policymakers, lawyers and people who have used abortion pills. The book is full of the voices of these folks. In addition to sharing several powerful statements from these interviews, page 99 draws on information from a press release, a newspaper op ed, and a letter written to the FDA from 80 women’s health organizations. By using a broad range of sources and demonstrating the passion of abortion pill advocates, this page is a good representation of the book as a whole. Piquing the browser’s curiosity, this page leaves them without a resolution, which is how the book ends as well. Nevertheless, the advocates’ passion and determination may leave the browser optimistic that they will prevail despite tremendous odds--similar to how the reader may feel at the end of the book, and today if they follow my ongoing coverage of this issue.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned constitutional abortion rights and today 18 states ban first trimester abortions. Despite these restrictions, more people are accessing abortion today with telehealth and abortion pills than before the pandemic due to the creative, determined and courageous activism documented in Abortion Pills: US History and Politics, available open access here.

Visit Carrie N. Baker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Boland Erkkila's "Spaces of Immigration"

Catherine Boland Erkkila is an architectural historian specializing in American cultural landscapes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work has received several awards, including the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Newberry Library fellowship, and the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s 2016 Bishir Prize. She previously worked as the managing editor of SAH Archipedia and taught at Rutgers University.

Boland Erkkila applied the “Page 99 Test to her new book, Spaces of Immigration: American Ports, Railways, and Settlements, and reported the following:

Page 99 – Here we join Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson traveling on an immigrant train across the United States in 1879. A newsboy boards at the Ogden stop in Utah, and becomes a comforting guide to the train’s weary travelers, who otherwise had no way of knowing when or where the train would stop next, or if there would be amenities available. Stevenson, feeling ill at this point in the journey, is especially grateful for the newsboy, who offers him a free pear and lends him reading material while he languishes near the propped-open railcar door, gaining what little relief he could from the train’s stifling air. Another traveler notes the small, high windows on the railcar, a design that allowed railroad companies to ship freight eastward in boxcars and shuttle immigrants westward by adding benches to those same cars. These travel scenes are put into the context of the railway age—where the railroad altered not only the physical landscape itself, but also the 19th-century traveler’s perception of space and time.

The Page 99 Test works surprisingly well with Spaces of Immigration, and readers get a good idea of the book as a whole from that one page. One of my goals for this book was to strike a balance between the individual immigrant experience and the larger cultural and political processes shaping that experience (forces largely driven by conflicts of race and class). On page 99 specifically, Stevenson’s firsthand account of an immigrant train merges with a discussion of the larger capitalist forces at play, wherein white European immigrants were often treated similarly to the freight shipped along the railroad lines (the treatment of nonwhite immigrants is also covered in the book, just not on this specific page). The design of the railcar itself is also discussed on page 99, which clues readers into the fact that this book is written from an architectural history perspective. While this page focuses on immigrant trains, the rest of book uses a similar approach to present the network of physical spaces (ports, immigration stations, waiting rooms, boardinghouses) along an immigrant’s journey.

One of the coolest parts of the Page 99 Test was that this specific page discusses the underlying massive cultural shift that occurred during the railway age. My hope in writing this book is that readers consider how this history relates to the present day. There are so many parallels between the treatment of immigrants now, in 2025, and the racist and nativist rhetoric of the 19th and 20th centuries. Furthermore, we are in the midst of our own massive cultural shift—the digital era, which alters our own perception of space and time—that impacts American culture in an undeniable way. The physical space of detention centers (especially along the US–Mexico border), the relationship between capitalism and immigration, and the restrictive legislation against specific national groups are well rooted in history, and the structure of this book could readily be applied to the contemporary immigration landscape.

Finally, a note to readers: I would love to see this book reach a broader audience! So, please, if you are able to request a copy at your local library, I would greatly appreciate it. An audiobook version will also be available by July 2025.

Follow Catherine Boland Erkkila on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Debra Michals's "She's the Boss"

Debra Michals is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Humanities Department at Merrimack College in North Andover, MA. She has written extensively on the history of women’s business ownership and its intersection with social trends and social movements, including an essay in The Business of Emotions in Modern History (Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp, editors, 2023).

Michals applied the “Page 99 Test to her new book, She’s the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II, and reported the following:

What an intriguing concept! When you open my book to page 99, you will find a photo of advertising mogul Mary Wells, circa late 1960s, sitting on what appears to be her desk. She is confidently running a meeting with several men in business suits surrounding her. The text that carries over from the previous page completes the description of Wells’ rise to the top of the male-dominated world of advertising. The rest of the page discusses how many women like Wells, specifically those in other predominantly male realms such as finance, blazed trails for themselves and other women to follow, though often without (at least initially) any direct involvement with the women’s movement or by identifying as feminists. Later, however, this page notes, some, like Julia Walsh, the first woman to own a seat on the American Stock Exchange, and Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange (both in the mid-to-late 1960s), either forged relationships with feminist leaders as Walsh did with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, or supported efforts to advance opportunities for womenas Siebert did. The page ends with the first two lines of a new section that discusses increasing press coverage of women entrepreneurs in the 1960s.

A reader who flipped first to page 99 would get a small snapshot of some of the key themes of my book such as women seeing opportunities in business ownership that they could not find in the labor market and women breaking into male bastions for the first time. Page 99 also touches on two other important topics: the complicated relationship of women entrepreneurs to the women’s movement of the 1960s and their increasing visibility in mainstream newspapers/magazines and business publications. Page 99 comes toward the end of the third chapter which focuses on the changing social landscape of the 1960s with rising divorce rates, Great Society social programs, increased civil and women’s rights activism, and the ways in which women turned to business ownership to help themselves and other women through all of this. It’s also a chapter that shows how the 1960s laid the foundation for the revolution in women’s entrepreneurship that would come in the next two decades. While this is a fun page to land on, it does not capture the expansive coverage my book gives to the history of women’s entrepreneurship and to the various women who were a part of it. This page (which is really only a half- page because of the photograph) does not include immigrant women who started ventures or the rich description of African American women’s businesses in the 1960s, their links to the civil rights movement, and their efforts to avail themselves of the Small Business Administration initiatives to help people of color start businesses. Missing from this page, too, is the role of government programs in encouraging women’s small business ownership after World War II and in the 1960s and 1980s; the legislative changes (especially equal credit laws) needed to do that; or the way civil and women’s rights activists hoped their businesses could create a better, more egalitarian society. And while Mary Wells does go on to be a celebrated business leader with some famous ad campaigns, looking at page 99 alone would miss out on the rise of the celebrity entrepreneur in the 1980s and the increased use of the internet or growing interest in social entrepreneurship in the 1990s and beyond.

Visit Debra Michals’s website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Kalaidjian's "Spectacle Earth"

Andrew Kalaidjian is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and the author of Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Spectacle Earth: Media for Planetary Change, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Spectacle Earth includes a discussion of one of the first works of climate fiction, Jules Vernes's 1889 novel Topsy Turvy, or The Purchase of the North Pole in relation to the manifesto of the London Psychogeophysics group published in 2010. It then turns to Guy Debord’s 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle and compares the theories of the Situationist International to those of Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard.

[Topsy Turvy] presents the scheme of the Barbicane Corporation to purchase territory in the Arctic and then use a massive gun to realign the earth’s axis to be horizontal, thereby melting the glaciers and exposing landmasses for coal mining.

A new, horizontal axis will usher in an epoch of the “earthly globe,” in which temperatures will be moderate and advantageous to all sorts of human activities for enrichment. The company enacts the scheme by boring a cannon into the cliff of Mount Kilimanjaro, but the explosion proves ineffective at altering the tilt of the earth’s axis. A mistake of calculation is cited as the culprit, and the real force would require a trillion such cannons. The story concludes with a note of reassurance, “the inhabitants of the earth may sleep in peace. To modify the conditions in which the earth is moving is beyond the efforts of humanity.” This basic argument is the premise of much climate change denial, and it is one that the Psychogeophysical Society repeats, if perhaps unintentionally. At the same time, the society is onto something in their desire to revisit and reevaluate Situationist practices in relation to anthropogenic changes.

The work of the Situationists emerged at a crucial juncture between urbanism and media, lending their theories of alienation and passivity lasting relevance for the digitally saturated present. It was serendipitous that new technologies of television, the personal computer, and the mobile smartphone arrived in quick succession to save the modern subject from the boredom of the perfectly controlled, hermetically sealed environment. The open, white-walled boxes of modern architecture find their ideal antidote in the black squares and rectangles of screens. The saturation of media in contemporary times separates individuals, creates a false sense of connection, and discourages community activism. Beyond urban environmental aesthetics, it is this interpersonal component that remains important for thinking about mediation.

While the SI may have exaggerated their involvement in the 1968 rebellion, their environmental theories were nevertheless tied to social activity. While McLuhan pursued a technodeterminist worldview where enlightened man might embrace his destiny, Guy Debord and the Situationists brought a Marxist analysis of materiality and class relations to analyze media’s role in promoting apathy and acceptance of capitalist ruling order. Debord seemed to both respect McLuhan’s technical analysis of media systems and at the same time scorn his steadfast agnosticism in the face of social issues. Debord’s wariness was inherited by Jean Baudrillard who developed a more robust critique of media’s social influence and its limits as revolutionary technology.

Page 99 actually gives a pretty good idea of the book as a whole! The idea for this book began around a decade ago as I was finishing my PhD. The idea was to do an environmental reading of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle that could be a sequel of sorts to what would eventually become my first book, Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery. Over the years, Spectacle Earth has grown into a larger consideration of how media helps and hinders engagement with ecological crisis. The technological changes during that time with the rise of artificial intelligence, remote conferencing, the metaverse, and social media made for an exciting challenge for thinking about key themes such as ecology, agency, and virtuality.

While this page presents something of the methodological center of the book, earlier chapters travel backward in time to consider a longer history of environmental aesthetics and natural sciences that have led to the concept of the Anthropocene in the 21st century. The book also moves forward from media theory of the 1960s and 1970s to consider new environmental challenges in the age of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and virtual reality. While literary texts remain an important touchstone throughout the book, I also consider many different forms of media such as painting, theater, film, television, video games, augmented reality, and other digital projects.

Learn more about Spectacle Earth at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue