Aaron Sheehan-Dean's "Fighting with the Past"

Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University and the current chairman of the History Department. He teaches courses on nineteenth-century US history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Southern History. His work as a historian focuses on the US Civil War and its meaning for Americans and the world.

Sheehan-Dean applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War, with the following results:

Page 99 of Fighting With the Past explores the contest between radicals and conservatives in the Civil War North over the changes wrought by the war. That contest, I argue, reflected and derived from their contrary readings of the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. The New York Herald, a conservative pro-war paper quoted a recent history of the earlier conflict to celebrate what they saw as Oliver Cromwell’s effective balancing of competing interests. After quoting the editorial, I conclude: “In this telling, Lincoln could emerge as a wise Cromwell, resisting the radicalism of the abolitionists even as he suppressed secession.”

Page 99 probably includes more quotation than is typical of the book as a whole, but it actually reveals my narrative strategy quite effectively. I am primarily interested in explaining various elements of the American conflict: how Southerners justified secession; why Northerners resisted it; how Northerners disagreed over emancipation and infringements on civil liberties; why the war ended with generous reconciliation rather bitter recrimination. Because Americans referred back constantly to “the Civil War” (meaning the seventeenth-century one), I wrote the book in a way that braids together explanations of the English Civil War, the American Civil War, and how participants in the latter used the former to navigate through the conflict.

I realize now that taking a page (99, for instance) out of context might leave the reader somewhat confused about which conflict was the book’s subject, but that position actually illustrates one of my underlying points. We rely on the past to make sense of the present so often that, to quote William Faulkner, “it’s not even past.” Civil War Americans understood their experience by refracting it through the prism of English history, just as we do today when we invoke “the Civil War” in the midst of partisan political disputes.

Visit Aaron Sheehan-Dean's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Cordery's "Gilded Age Entrepreneur"

Simon Cordery is Professor and Chair in the History Department at Iowa State University. He is the author of The Iron Road in the Prairie State, Mother Jones, and British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914.

Cordery applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Gilded Age Entrepreneur we find Albert Benton Pullman (1828-1893), the subject of this biography, working as a railroad executive. He is travelling to Indianapolis and Detroit on business in 1870 for his employer, Pullman’s Palace Car Company. Founded by his brother George Mortimer Pullman, this corporation made luxury railroad passenger carriages, beginning with sleeping cars. In Indianapolis he exercised his persuasive charm to smooth the ruffled feathers of a fellow railroad executive and then in Detroit he confirmed that the company wanted to buy a factory to make its vehicles. Sending Albert to inspect a plant Pullman wanted to purchase indicated how important he was as a marketing expert who also knew all about building cars to the company in its early years. This page demonstrates how Albert’s role working with the men and women who built the cars was coming to an end. His mutual approach to labor relations, the idea that all had a shared interest in the profitability of the firm, was impractical in a company where manufacturing would now occur in plants hundreds of miles apart. His ideal of working with directly with, and getting to know, employees was obsolete. Read on its own, page 99 goes a long way to toward identifying many of the talents that made him so useful to his brother George Pullman.

Readers would find several important themes on display on page 99, though ultimately they would get only a partial view of Albert Pullman’s life. His mutualism and his central role in the early years of the Pullman Company are evident, but his family and his entrepreneurship are absent. Albert was a skillful marketer of Pullman products, taking potential clients on trial rail journeys to show off the luxurious cars and convince them to use Pullmans. Particularly important to the trajectory of the biography are the ways in which Albert Pullman built, used, neglected, and destroyed interpersonal networks to find and develop investment opportunities. Those are obscured from view on page 99. His early use of his position in the Pullman Company to place a lucrative cleaning contract with a laundry into which he invested is a key foundation for his financial efforts. Despite this insider access, Albert suffered from poor timing, such as doubling the value of his holdings in a fire insurance company days before the Great Chicago Fire bankrupted it, for example, and a willingness to engage in dubious financial practices, including creating a fraudulent land company and a sham mining concern.

The material on page 99 also hints at Albert Pullman’s mechanical skills. His career started as a carpenter, in which role he helped to create Pullman’s distinctive and elaborate car designs. He learned about the railroad industry by watching and listening, eventually being seen as an expert whose opinion other railroaders sought. He played a key role in the creation of the town of Pullman, where the Company housed many of the workers it employed, and toward the end of his life invested with little success in hansom cabs, telephones, automobiles, and electricity. Newspapers across the country covered his death, but by then George Pullman had been systematically erasing Albert from the story of the family business—but to know why he did that, readers would need to jump into the whole book!

Learn more about Gilded Age Entrepreneur at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Manu Bhagavan's "The Remarkable Madame Pandit"

Manu Bhagavan is a specialist on modern India, focusing on the twentieth-century late-colonial and post-colonial periods, with particular interests in human rights, (inter)nationalism, and questions of sovereignty. He is Professor of History, Human Rights, and Public Policy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. At the undergraduate level he lectures on modern world history and on modern South Asian history, and offers seminars on Gandhi, modern India, and violence and ethnic conflict. His graduate classes focus on human rights, internationalism, and biography.

Bhagavan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Remarkable Madame Pandit: Champion of India, Citizen of the World, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Remarkable Madame Pandit deals with Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit’s extended thoughts on women’s rights, societal norms, patriarchy, and liberation. She observes that “Woman…must not try to see things as they are, or give expression to the urges within her…[Men and the women they have mesmerized] beg woman not to throw away her modesty and become unsexed and shameless. They entreat her in the name of India’s past glory not to discard those virtues which, it is said, made the woman of a past age great. What these people really wish to preserve is neither virtue nor chastity, but the ignorance which has kept woman enslaved through the ages and which is now giving place to the light of knowledge. Once that light spreads, no power can prevent its reaching women, and they will shake off all restraint and fear and go eagerly forward with men to establish a better order of things.” She then contrasts her treatment as a public figure with her brother’s, he also in a similar line of work. She laments the fact that stories about her focus on her looks and clothes while those about him deal with his ideas and actions.

The Page 99 Test works! Madame Pandit (1900-1990) was a woman of many firsts, and one of the most important figures of the 20th century. Here she is reflecting on some of her early experiences, her observations ultimately capturing the very essence of her life, and hence of the work generally.

Born into an illustrious family, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit grew to be internationally recognized as one of the two greatest women in the world, widely admired for her brilliance and beauty. Her election as the first woman Cabinet minister in the British Empire to hold significant portfolios catapulted her to initial celebrity. She used her fame to further her country’s fight for freedom, facing repeated imprisonment for her efforts.

Steeled by painful personal loss, she launched a pioneering, globe-trotting career spanning Moscow, Washington, London, and New York, where, especially at the United Nations, she shaped the modern world order as her country’s premier diplomat. With wit and charm, Madame Pandit bridged East and West, defeated top lawyers in debate, advanced US civil rights and modern human rights, helped settle the Korean War and resolve the Suez Crisis, and championed world peace. She worked alongside the likes of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell and won plaudits from Winston Churchill and Konrad Adenauer, while dominating the gossip pages and winning over everyday people. Marlon Brando named her the woman he most admired, and Eleanor Roosevelt called her “the most remarkable woman” she had ever met.

Then, in her country’s darkest hour, she came out of retirement to battle her own niece, Indira Gandhi, to stop an authoritarian takeover and save democracy.

The Remarkable Madame Pandit is a comprehensive biography based on continent-spanning, multi-lingual research. It recovers the story of one of the world’s most significant and celebrated women, while asking how even one such as she could be erased from history.

Visit Manu Bhagavan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Woodman's "The First King of England"

David Woodman is Professor and Fellow in History at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. His books include Edward the Confessor: The Sainted King and The Chronicle of John of Worcester, Volume IV: “Chronicula.”

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, readers will find a discussion of Æthelstan’s law-making activities, the ways in which he tried to govern and, more specifically, his attempts to deal with the issue of theft. It discusses the difficulties he encountered in trying to ensure that law was maintained and the sophistication of early tenth-century governance.

Readers opening page 99 of my book would certainly get a good idea of one aspect of Æthelstan’s extraordinary life - that is, of his approach to kingship, the reforms that he implemented and the ways in which he tried to impose law and order across his kingdom. Page 99 shows that Æthelstan was an early medieval ruler of exceptional energy who relied on relatively sophisticated systems of governance. But this is only one aspect of Æthelstan’s kingship. Perhaps the principal reason he should be remembered is for his formation of the ‘kingdom of the English’ for the first time in the year 927, which makes him England’s founding father. This vital detail is not mentioned—or alluded to—on page 99.

The remainder of my book offers a full narrative account of all aspects of Æthelstan’s life and time as king. It details: what little we know (and can surmise) about his childhood; how he first came to power in 924 and secured his position as king; his formal coronation on 4 September 925; his dealings with other kings of Britain (over whom he sometimes claimed authority); his nurturing of the church; his strategy with regard to contemporary European rulers; and finally his death and legacy. In the end we know frustratingly little about details such as Æthelstan’s appearance or temperament, but we can see from surviving royal documents that he must have been ruthlessly ambitious, that he saw through his ambitions by means of war, but that he also supported learning and cultural advances, and encouraged scholars and others from across Europe to attend his court. He was an extraordinary individual. To my mind, the date when he first formed ‘England’—927—should be as well known as those other famous dates of English medieval history, 1066 (the Norman Conquest) or 1215 (the signing of Magna Carta).

Visit David Woodman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Garbes's "Listeners Like Who?"

Laura Garbes is a Sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. Her research focuses on racism, voice, and the cultural industries.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Listeners Like Who?: Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry, with the following results:

Page 99 of Listeners Like Who? describes the types of feedback received by two employees of color in the public radio industry, Jay and Devin. Jay is a Latinx reporter, and he discusses how he has received feedback from a white audience member about how to pronounce his own name. He reflected on how this is part of the job, as he assumes he needs to educate white audiences given the typical public radio listener. Devin is a Black reporter, and he told me about the pattern of who gets feedback: usually women and people of color, not white men that conform to the typical voice of authority associated with broadcasting.

Looking at page 99 of Listeners Like Who? gives us a good sense of Part II of the book, which outlines how people of color navigate the contemporary public radio industry. Jay and Devin’s experiences, as told in their own words, appear in Chapter 4, "Sounding Like Myself." In this chapter, I ask how employees of color define themselves in relation to an established “public radio voice.” I show how public radio broadcasters of color develop a unique relationship with their own voices through their interactions with existing public radio voice models, audience members, and coworkers. Jay and Devin’s accounts show that they have a deep understanding of public radio’s existing expectations through their interactions with audience members. It also brings to the fore the gendered dimension of these expectations, when Devin noted that any feedback he got was way worse for his female counterparts.

You may walk away from page 99 thinking this is only a contemporary story. But Part I of the book roots these experiences of people of color in public radio in deeper historical processes. In it, I show how public radio was formed as a white racialized industry, despite the best intentions of its founders. I then elaborate on how public radio’s voice developed in the 1970s and 1980s as a new type of authority, one more inclusive to white women but still racially exclusionary. Finally, I discuss the underfunding of public radio, and how it forces stations to rely on donors from the white professional class for financial survival. These elements are key to contextualizing why people of color in public broadcasting continue to face barriers to full inclusion.

Visit Laura Garbes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christine Shepardson's "A Memory of Violence"

Christine Shepardson is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is author of Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy and Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria.

Shepardson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity, and shared the following:

Scholars of early Christianity know well that opposing interpretations of key texts can make the difference between orthodoxy or heresy, between a promise of eternal peace or the threat of eternal torment. With that in mind, I approached the Page 99 Test with some trepidation, wondering what I would find, but also what it might mean to see “the quality of the whole... revealed” on that page. I believe that readers will indeed find the quality of the book reflected on page 99 in its depth, rigor, methodology, and topic, even if its words reveal only one part of the book’s complex story.

Page 99 catches readers in a morass of insults that miaphysite Roman Christians (named for their ‘one-nature’ – mia-physis – doctrine about God’s Son) lobbed at their Chalcedonian Roman Christian opponents (who accepted the 451 Council of Chalcedon, which miaphysite Christians rejected). Page 99 cites late fifth- and early sixth-century Greek and Syriac writings of Bishop Philoxenus of Mabbug and Patriarch Severus of Antioch, two pillars of today’s Syrian Orthodox Church, immersing readers in these church leaders’ politicized struggles to claim the title of Christian orthodoxy.

Previous chapters laid the historical foundation for the project, and traced miaphysite claims to inherit orthodoxy from the church’s earlier apostles, martyrs, saints, and councils, before tracing their opponents’ genealogies of heresy through page 99. Later chapters demonstrate leaders’ strategies to persuade congregants to persevere in miaphysite Christianity for the promise of eternal rewards, even if it meant suffering and persecution in this world under Chalcedonian Christian emperors. The final chapters follow Syriac miaphysite Christians through the late sixth-century consolidation of Chalcedonian Christian power under Emperor Justinian, to the seventh-century rise of Islam, when the conquests of Muhammad’s followers separated most Syriac-speaking Christians from the Christian Roman emperors who considered them heretics.

While religious radicalization can lead to violence and schism, opponents often share more in common than their heated arguments suggest. As page 99 shows, for example, “All sides of these debates claimed to inherit orthodoxy’s lineage.” It is my hope that studying the intersections of radicalization and violence in the past might help us de-escalate our increasingly violent and polarized present.

Learn more about A Memory of Violence at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David L. Sloss's "People v. The Court"

David L. Sloss is the John A. and Elizabeth H. Sutro Professor of Law at Santa Clara University.

He is an internationally renowned scholar who has published six books and several dozen book chapters and law review articles. His scholarship covers a broad range of areas, including international law, constitutional law, and international affairs. His scholarship is informed by a decade of experience in the federal government, where he helped draft and negotiate several major international treaties.

Sloss applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, People v. The Court: The Next Revolution in Constitutional Law, and reported the following:

Readers who open the book to page 99 will see this table:

Information in the table is taken from a YouGov poll conducted in May 2024. Positive scores indicate that respondents trust a particular information source. Negative scores indicate that they distrust that source. The text after the table notes that there is a large gulf between Democratic and Republican scores for CBS, the New York Times, CNN, and Fox News.

Page 99 continues:

It is questionable whether American democracy can survive the collapse of epistemic authority.... The problem today is that democracy cannot function effectively without agreement on shared facts. The rise of the right-wing media ecosystem has undermined agreement on shared facts because denizens of the right-wing media ecosystem occupy a different factual universe than citizens who rely primarily on the mainstream media as a source of news and information.

Unfortunately, the Page 99 Test does not work very well for my book. The book is primarily a work of constitutional theory. The theory is designed in part to address the problem of democratic decay in the United States. The book as a whole demonstrates that the Supreme Court’s constitutional doctrine is a key factor contributing to the problem of democratic decay. The book elaborates a theory of judicial review that, if implemented, would transform constitutional law from a body of law that is accelerating democratic decay to a body of law that could help ameliorate the problem.

Page 99 is part of chapter 4, which deals with election-related misinformation. Election- related misinformation is one important factor that contributes to democratic decay. Chapter 4 explains how the Supreme Court’s misguided First Amendment doctrine has exacerbated the problem of election-related misinformation, thereby contributing to democratic decay. Chapter 4 also sketches the outlines of a legislative proposal that would limit the spread of election-related misinformation. The analysis shows that changes in First Amendment doctrine—changes justified by my broader constitutional theory—are necessary to give Congress the flexibility it needs to enact effective legislation to curb the widespread dissemination of election-related misinformation.

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

The Page 99 Test: Tyrants on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

C. Yamini Krishna's "Film City Urbanism in India"

C. Yamini Krishna is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Languages at the FLAME University, Pune, India. She has been the recipient of India Foundation for the Arts grant (2023), Asia Art Archive – Shergil Sundaram Foundation archival grant (2022), Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute Independent Research Grant (2022), Philip M. Taylor Award for best article by a new researcher (2021), Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship (2017). Her research lies in Film History, Urban History, and Deccan history. She has published in Urban History, South Asian Popular Culture, Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, and South Asia. She is the founding member of Khidki collective, a group of scholars committing to reimagining and building perspectives on regional identities with a view to challenging established narratives around history, nationhood and belonging.

Krishna applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City, 1890-2000, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book discusses the burning down of Motimahal Cinema in Hyderabad in 1936, and how that led to one of the first legislations on cinema in Hyderabad, The Cinematograph Act, 1936. Large part of early film history of the Indian subcontinent has been about British India, often it stands in for the rest of India, subsuming all other histories under it. Unlike in British India where there was regular scrutiny of films and cinemas, in princely states like Hyderabad, cinemas and performances are relatively free to operate. The state did not interfere with them unless there was an incident that called for it. On 14 June 1936, the Motimahal Cinema located in the Residency Bazaar of Hyderabad, an erstwhile Prem Theatre which was converted to cinema, was burned down due to a fire. This fire led to the death of twelve women and two children. This incident was widely reported in the press across British India and beyond. The Nizam’s State Government set up a committee to investigate the accident and the committee’s report is one of the rare documents which gives insights into understanding early cinema in Hyderabad. The committee collected testimonies from workers, operators, and audiences in the cinema, and this helps us understand who were the people that watched film, what communities did they come from, how the cinemas were structured, and what was the film viewing culture like.

At the time of the accident, the cinema was playing the film College Girl. The cinema was divided into first class, second class, royal box, and reserved seats which each class being guarded by a separate gate keeper. While there was a separate Purdah section reserved for women, some women also sat in the non-Purdah section along with men. There was also a separate zenana yard for women to relax during the break. The audience testimonies give insights into emerging tastes in cinema: one woman said to that committee that she and her husband had come to watch separate films in adjacent cinemas. Multiple cinemas in the same location indicates the sprawling business of film in the city. Other businesses like bicycle repair shops, restaurants, parking had emerged creating an entire urban economy around film going. We see a small glimpse of film as a part of urbanization, which the book discusses in depth.

After a thorough investigation the committee had concluded that the absence of Cinematograph Act in the state was responsible for the accident. They expressed their disappointment that the men present in the cinema had not made efforts to rescue women and children. They placed certain moral obligations of honour and valour on a modern man. During this tragedy one Ashrafunnisa Begum was termed as the heroine of Motimahal Cinema by the press for saving many lives.

Based on the recommendations of the committee The Cinematograph Act of 1936 came into existence. This act established guidelines of structural aspects, operational procedures, inspection protocols for cinemas. Cinemas which until then were operating in multiple ways were now forced to be standardized. This event led to the inspection of all the cinemas in the Hyderabad city, and shutting down of a few which did not meet the standards. Furthermore, the event also led to inspections in other cities of British India. The case also indicates the hands-off approach of the princely state towards regulation; an aspect which was so central to the colonial government.

Interestingly page 99 gives a sneak-peak into the method I follow in the first half of the book: to use various cases to discuss the larger distinctions and interflows of princely film history, from British India. It introduces the readers with the important actors in the first part i.e., princely state government, the British colonial administration, trader capital, early audiences, and practices. The case discussed above is one of the many other cases I use to tease out the details of capital, labor, infrastructure, and organizational details of film history in the princely city. The 99th page however does not give a sense of my second part of the book where the stage shifts from colonial world to post-colonial, and then the global world, where the actors and the networks they mobilize are different. In the post-colonial city, the state government, politics of linguistic identity, and questions of labour competition shape the film – city relationship. In the global city, the book locates the film-city relationship it is global outsourcing industries, transnational flow of capital.

Learn more about Film City Urbanism in India at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keriann McGoogan's "Sisters of the Jungle"

Keriann McGoogan has a PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Toronto. She spent months living in Belize, kayaking rivers in search of black howler monkeys and coping with the hardships of field science, including rainy-season floods, wasp stings and two bouts of malaria. Her memoir and first book, Chasing Lemurs: My Journey into the Heart of Madagascar (2021), chronicled her nineteen months studying groups of endangered lemurs in an isolated forest region. McGoogan lives in Guelph, Ontario.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sisters of the Jungle: Women Who Shaped the Science of Wild Primates, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Sisters of the Jungle: The Trailblazing Women Who Shaped the Study of Wild Primates finds us in 1966 with Dian Fossey, preparing for her long-term research on the mountain gorillas of the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda. Still green to scientific research, Fossey had been selected by charismatic archaeologist Louis Leakey to study the mountain gorillas to learn more about how our early human ancestors may have lived.

This page captures a pivotal moment in Fossey’s journey: she is buzzing with excitement as she prepares for her field research. Fossey receives help from Jane Goodall and Alan Root, and is warned of growing political instability in the region. Unbeknownst to her, as a young woman without experience in the field, her qualifications are being called into question. This blend of passion, risk, and scrutiny reflects the tensions that are at the heart of Sisters of the Jungle.

Page 99 also offers a glimpse into Fossey’s character: her stubbornness and fierce commitment to her work, even in the face of doubt and danger. These same traits would result in her groundbreaking conservation achievements, her controversial legacy, and her still-unsolved murder in 1985. In this moment, as Fossey embarks on her fieldwork, we see the seeds of her successes and her struggles.

This page exemplifies a pattern faced by women scientists in the early stages of primatology: they venture into the unknown, filled with hope, only to encounter complex realities that test their resilience, values, and sense of self. Promise and peril coexist on this page, as they do throughout Sisters of the Jungle.

Sisters of the Jungle explores why primatology became a uniquely female science and how the abundance of women primatologists has shaped the discipline. Fossey is just one of the many intrepid women who—in the early days of primatology—travelled to far-off places to learn more about wild primates and ourselves. Page 99 is a microcosm of the key themes in Sisters of the Jungle: gender, science, courage, ethics, and discovery. In this single page, we glimpse the early optimism, personal conviction, and ethical complexities that shape the stories of all the women featured in Sisters of the Jungle. Like Fossey on page 99, they all once stood at the threshold of transformation.

Visit Keriann McGoogan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Juyeon Park's "Families for Mobility"

Juyeon Park is an assistant professor of sociology at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Families for Mobility: Elite Korean Students Abroad and Their Parents' Reproduction of Privilege, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Joy’s mother — another less affluent, locally based parent — offered a distinct perspective on sending her two daughters abroad. Her dislike for the intense competition and fierce academic rivalries typical of schools and hagwons in Gangnam (the most affluent district in Seoul) drove her decision to enroll her children in a school near family in the United States: “One day, I asked Joy, ‘Would you prefer to study in Gangnam or go to the United States and live with Grandma?’ She replied, ‘Mom, I heard all the kids in Gangnam are so smart. They seem intimidating.’ That’s when I decided to send Joy and her sister to live with my mom in the United States.” With her parents and brother residing in the United States, sending her children there for their education was a feasible and economical choice. She framed her transnational parenthood as also financially motivated rather than educationally purposeful, stating, “If my parents and brother were not living in the United States, I wouldn’t have sent my kids there for school. [...] We saved a considerable amount of money [that would have been spent on English hagwons], thanks to my family.”

With two daughters studying in the United States for more than five years, Joy’s mother wanted to view their education abroad primarily as an opportunity for them to experience life outside of Korea rather than as a stepping stone to cosmopolitan careers. She envisioned overseas education as liberal, flexible, and culturally diverse—qualities she imagined rather than had firsthand experience with: “Looking back, I believe sending Joy to the United States was the right choice. She’s such a creative and insightful kid, with a sharp perspective on things. Although I didn’t fully realize it at the time, her teachers have consistently highlighted these qualities. Studying in the United States has been really beneficial for her.”

Although this page does not present the core argument of the study, it offers an important example that illustrates the diversity among my participants. Joy’s mother, introduced in detail on page 99, was among the very few parents who lacked significant transnational resources, such as foreign degrees or overseas work experience. Her positionality, shaped by this absence, set her apart from other parents in terms of how she understood the purpose and benefits of her child’s Ivy League education.

Whereas most parents with sufficient financial and cultural capital—whom I refer to as highly transnational parents—strategically viewed their children’s study abroad as a deliberate means of reproducing class privilege, particularly transnational mobility, a small number of parents—whom I call locally based parents—framed their children’s overseas study as more accidental than intentional or necessary. This contrast highlights how class produces meaningful differences—and, as I argue, inequalities—among Korean parents who send their children to elite U.S. colleges.

Visit Juyeon Park's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey H. Cohen's "Eating Grasshoppers"

Jeffrey H. Cohen is a professor in the department of anthropology at Ohio State University and the author or coeditor of several books, including Eating Soup without a Spoon: Anthropological Theory and Method in the Real World.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Eating Grasshoppers: Chapulines and the Women Who Sell Them, with the following results:

Eating Grasshoppers, tells the story of the women who sell toasted grasshoppers (chapulineras selling chapulines) in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Page 99, in the chapter “Building a Touchless Economy,” follows chapulineras as they create a touchless economy in response to the lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lockdowns devastated Oaxaca’s rural and urban marketplaces. The impact was immediate; sales fell, and it became difficult for chapulineras to connect with their clientele. The page notes the importance of cell phones to new and old clients and allowing people settled far from Oaxaca who now had the opportunity to order for delivery.

Page 99 makes clear the role cell phones play: “Bargaining and sales that might have been missed or simply impossible to conduct in the past can take place;” and sets the stage to understand how chapulineras used cellular services to create a touchless economy and manage the lockdowns.

For readers, page 99 is a good page to land upon. You’ll likely want to learn more about the ways chapulineras beat the lockdown and save a lot of people from going hungry! Ideally the readers’ interests are piqued, and they will want to learn more about these entrepreneurial women and how they created a dynamic market system. These topics and more are covered in parts I and II of the full text.

The story of the women who sell toasted grasshoppers is one of entrepreneurial success. It is easy to think that chapulineras are following in the footsteps of history; prepping edible insects as their ancestors did thousands of years ago.

Reality is more complex. Eating Grasshoppers recounts the historical importance of chapulines, and documents how chapulineras 1) meet the growing demands of restauranteurs and foodies; 2) connect with and export to consumers abroad; 3) create a touchless economy during the pandemic and 4) navigate the challenges of rural poverty.

Visit Jeffrey H. Cohen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heidi R. Lewis's "Make Rappers Rap Again"

Heidi R. Lewis is Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College. Lewis' first book, In Audre's Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk examines how women of color resist subjugation and do solidarity. She has also published in Womanism Rising, Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies II, The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, the Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, and Indivisible: Alliances against Racism and contributed to NewBlackMan, NPR, and Bitch.

Lewis applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Make Rappers Rap Again: Interrogating the Mumble Rap "Crisis", and shared the following:

Page 99 is in “‘Outsiders are welcome—but not, of course, necessary!’: The South,” the third chapter of Make Rappers Rap Again. Here is where I begin to explain the subjugation of Mumble Rap by situating it as Southern, noting most mumble rappers are from the South and that the subgenre is largely powered by Southern DJs and producers. I more substantially underscore the Southernness of Mumble Rap by examining mumble rappers’ discursive claims to the South in their lyrics and music videos and the ways they showcase Southern pride and/or appreciation vis-à-vis citational and collaborative politics.

At the top of page 99, there’s a screengrab from Missy Elliott’s music video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” (1997). Underneath is the conclusion of the paragraph that begins on the previous page, a discussion about the ways mumble rapper StaySolidRocky (Virginia) has been influenced by Missy and Pharrell Williams, Hip Hop’s Virginia old heads. The following paragraph, which concludes on the next page, is the start of a discussion about The Neptunes (Pharrell and Chad Hugo). I understand Ford’s original claim about the Page 99 Test to be focused on the quality of a text. In that way, page 99 gives readers a relatively good idea about the overall quality of Make Rappers Rap Again.

First, my argumentation is largely anchored by my decades long and very close relationship with Hip Hop, as well as my careful study of and attention to its vast history. I don’t simply argue Mumble Rap is “real Hip Hop” because I like a great deal of it. I make that argument by examining its congruence with myriad definitions of real Hip Hop. To do that effectively, I had to “dig in the crates” early and often. So, I was glad to see at least one footnote on page 99, because the book is heavily footnoted, and the bibliography is extensive.

Second, discourse analysis is my primary methodology. Discourses are highly regulated statements and concepts, but they’re also highly regulated technologies and practices, and I made every effort to be as comprehensive as possible in that regard. So, I was also glad to see an image on the page. I feature a lot of visuals so readers can better understand my arguments and perhaps develop their own. For that reason, the companion website features those same images (in color), playlists of all the music videos and songs I examine, and my interview with DJ Drama.

Visit Heidi R. Lewis's website, and check out the companion site for Make Rappers Rap Again.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Fusco's "Hollywood's Others"

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Katherine Fusco's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

David Obst's "Saving Ourselves from Big Car"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit David Obst's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ayoush Lazikani's "The Medieval Moon"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark LeBar's "Just People"

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Page 99 Test: How States Pay for Wars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Devoney Looser's "Wild for Austen"

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

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

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

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

Page 99 continues the exploration of the pseudonym Catherine Morland:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Devoney Looser's website.

The Page 99 Test: Sister Novelists.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Vellend's "Everything Evolves"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Mark Vellend's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue