Maxim Samson's "Earth Shapers"

Maxim Samson is a geographer and the author of Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World. An award-winning educator and researcher, he has taught and presented keynote lectures at universities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Indonesia. In addition to working as an adjunct professor at DePaul University in Chicago, he is the immediate past chair of the American Association of Geographers’ Religions and Belief Systems research specialty group and serves as associate editor of the Journal of Jewish Education. In his free time, he enjoys long-distance running and exploring the culture and language of his favorite country, Indonesia.

Samson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, from the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way, and reported the following:

Page 99 brings readers about three quarters of the way through the third chapter, which examines how people have molded and remolded the planet to make travel more convenient. Specifically, the chapter draws attention to the somewhat controversial development and administration of the Panama Canal; the excerpt quoted below covers one of the final episodes before the USA handed over control to Panama:

And so, when insistent words and the withdrawal of economic and military aid failed to pressure Noriega to stand down, in late 1989 the United States opted to initiate its last assertive hurrah in Panama. Contending that democracy, US citizens’ lives in Panama and the very integrity of the Torrijos–Carter Treaties were all threatened by a military dictator who had turned the country into a loathsome hub of drug trafficking, President George H. W. Bush’s forces succeeded in chasing down and ousting a former ally in a matter of weeks, via a highly unorthodox method. Having learned that this notorious drug smuggler with a penchant for prostitutes was hiding out in the unlikely confines of the Holy See’s diplomatic offices in Panama City, the Americans’ successful strategy involved blaring out a playlist of rock anthems with a common theme: ‘Manuel, your days in charge are numbered’. Though many international observers were outraged by what they viewed as a flagrant violation of Panama’s sovereignty and international law – the invasion, that is, not the refrains of ‘No More Mister Nice Guy’ by Alice Cooper or ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ by Bon Jovi – and the United Nations General Assembly condemned the invasion by a vote of seventy-five to twenty, few in Panama seemed to care. Finally, Americans and Panamanians appeared to be on the same page, assured that with the strongman out of the picture, the connective infrastructure the United States had built and managed according to its own interests could now work to Panama’s benefit as well.

This excerpt offers readers only fragments of Earth Shapers’ central theme—how through our fashioning of geographical connections, humans have guided the course of history—as it focuses rather narrowly on one of the book’s eight case studies. One can learn far more about how the Panama Canal fits within the book as a whole by reviewing the following page, which commences the conclusion to this chapter. Even so, a reader of page 99 can glean certain insights about Earth Shapers, not least my (hopefully) accessible writing style and my commitment to finding surprising and intriguing events relevant to my book, as I portray the farcical story of US forces passive-aggressively playing rock music to smoke Panama’s controversial general Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican’s embassy. While the following page is more explicit about this point, page 99 also hints at the USA’s close interest in Panamanian political affairs, a reality that endures, albeit primarily now in relation to China’s geopolitical influence, to the present day.

Visit Maxim Samson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Ivermee's "Glorious Failure"

Robert Ivermee is a historian of British and wider European colonialism in South Asia. He is Associate Professor at Sciences Po Grenoble, and the author of Hooghly: The Global History of a River.

Ivermee applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India, and shared the following:

Page 99 introduces one of the most important Indian characters in Glorious Failure, the Tamil merchant and official Ananda Ranga Pillai. The page presents Pillai’s background and explains how, through his family connections and commercial dealings, he became one of the wealthiest residents of the French colony of Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast. It then outlines Pillai’s involvement with the French East India Company, first as a commercial agent and later as chief advisor to the governor at Pondicherry, Joseph François Dupleix. The page notes that Dupleix relied heavily on the polyglot Ananda, who spoke Tamil, French and Persian, to organise the Company’s trade with the local Tamil community and conduct diplomacy with Indian courts. It adds that Ananda kept a journal covering some twenty-five years of his life. For historians, this journal is an outstanding primary source on events at Pondicherry and in wider south India from 1736 to 1761.

Readers opening Glorious Failure to page 99 would understand that Ananda and Dupleix were important figures in the history of French India. They would get an insight into French eighteenth century commercial operations in the Indian Ocean. Some perceptive readers might note that the French presence in South Asia was not only commercial, as the presence of a French governor at Pondicherry and the mention of diplomacy with Indian courts suggests. However, readers turning directly to page 99 would get little sense of how, during the governorship of Dupleix, France became a major territorial power in southern and central India. The key argument of Glorious Failure – that France acted as an aggressive imperial power on the subcontinent, establishing an empire through force – is not clearly stated on this page. The Page 99 Test therefore does not work very well for the book.

Page 99 falls early in chapter five of Glorious Failure, which is devoted to the crucial years of French imperial expansion on the subcontinent (1739-1751). The pages that follow explain how, capitalising on its military superiority over local powers, France installed compliant rulers in different Indian courts before taking direct control of large swathes of territory in the Carnatic and the Deccan. Within a decade, however, France’s nascent empire in India had collapsed in the face of internal weakness, hostility from Indian powers, and conflict with Great Britain.

Learn more about Glorious Failure at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jake P. Smith's "The Ruin Dwellers"

Jake P. Smith is associate professor of history at Colorado College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Ruin Dwellers: Progress and Its Discontents in the West German Counterculture, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Ruin Dwellers is peculiar in that it serves as the last page of a chapter and only contains two complete sentences. The sentences — which read: “In order to keep the feeling of perpetual breakthrough alive, then, youth activists needed to engage in ever more radical acts of transgressive destruction and consistently widen the scope of negation. As the next chapter shows, this strategy proved very difficult to sustain.” — are meant to serve as a connecting thread which gather up the ideas from one chapter and project them into the next. Although rather cryptic when taken on its own, I nonetheless feel that this page does indeed provide the reader with a good sense of the book.

I say this for a few reasons.

First, the lines on page 99 introduce the main protagonists of the book, namely the youth activists of the early 1980s who, taking inspiration from the apocalyptic aesthetics emerging from the punk and New Wave movements and from the forms of domestic world building being cultivated by housing activists, developed novel modes of urban activism and novel ways of engaging with (and critiquing) progressive time.

Second, the lines on page 99 mention some of the central theoretical concepts of the book including transgression, negation, and perpetual breakthrough, all of which point to the book's overarching theoretical interest in the temporal logics of modernity. The overarching argument of the book is that leftist activists in the early 1980s challenged and modified some of the ascendant temporal logics associated with progressive modernity and that the oft-derided temporal shift towards the past evident in late twentieth-century leftist thought and practice should be understood not as a romantic rejection of futurity but rather as part of a critical occupation of the logics of progress, one that explored the potential of what Svetlana Boym has called the “off modern.”

So, while page 99 might not give readers a full sense of the book's arguments, it does indeed reflect some of the book's larger concerns.

Learn more about The Ruin Dwellers at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ning Leng's "Politicizing Business"

Ning Leng is an Assistant Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University. For the year of 2025-2026, she a Wilson China Fellow at the Wilson Center.

Leng applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Politicizing Business, the book is just beginning a comparison between two cities and the divergent fate of their private bus firms. It’s starting to dig into a short history of the bus sectors in these two cities—full of fun stories (though not quite on this page yet)—to introduce one of the book’s key concepts: “visibility projects.” These are political showcases dreamed up by politicians and bureaucrats, and a political service often demanded of firms in China, and as this book shows, they can be damaging to the private sector.

And so, no, if readers open my book and turn straight to page 99, they will not get a full sense of the entire book. But readers will immediately see that “visibility projects” is an important concept and that it contributes to the demise of the private bus companies in Chinese cities. If readers are not deterred by the mundaneness of the bus sector, page 99 might prompt them to flip backward to learn what visibility projects are—a salient feature of China’s economy and urban planning—and then forward to discover how such projects “killed” a private sector. Upon landing on this page, some might wonder: is the whole book just about buses?! Should I put it down now? In fact, buses occupy only two of the book’s eight chapters, and in this author’s humble view, the sector is anything but dull. Those who read on from page 99 into the heart of Chapter Five will find vivid accounts of how bus firms interact with city governments and attempt to resist official projects in an authoritarian system, where firms do not have full property rights protection.

And just to keep readers on their toes, the next two chapters venture into another thrilling sector: waste incineration. These four chapters (Chapters 4–7) form the empirical core of this political economy book, which examines how the Chinese government politicizes business and what happens when firms become politicized. As readers may have guessed by now, the kind of politicization described here goes well beyond the usual examples—such as pressuring companies to create jobs or assist in monitoring and surveillance. Politicization, much like these seemingly unremarkable sectors, can be quiet yet transformative. When firms are treated as part of the political system itself, they are asked to alter their operations in subtle but far-reaching ways to serve the state and its officials.

Visit Ning Leng's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc James Carpenter's "The War on Illahee"

Marc James Carpenter grew up in Oregon and now works as associate professor of history at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. He has published in American Indian Quarterly, Oregon Historical Quarterly, and Settler Colonial Studies.

Carpenter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest falls at the end of Chapter 3, and thus has only a few sentences of text:

...[it was] the invaders who started the wars, and the invaders who threatened to 'war forever' until they had gotten what they wanted. American aggression, not Native resistance to that aggression, caused just about every escalation of the War on Illahee—and arguably, just about every U.S. war for land fought across the North American continent.

Although this excerpt doesn't capture the core of the book, it does point to central themes of violence, deception, and manipulated narratives. One point I am making in this chapter is that the habit in American history of periodizing "Indian wars" from a given act of violence from a Native person tends to obscure deeper reasons behind that violence. The 1855 Yakima War portion of the War on Illahee, discussed here, is typically periodized as beginning with the killing of American agent Andrew Jackson Bolon, rather than with the trespassing American rapists whose executions Bolon was threatening genocide to avenge, or with the American decision to respond to a suspected murder with massive military force rather than investigation or diplomacy. More broadly, I argue, there is a norm treating American invasion and "Indian wars" differently than we discuss other invasions and other wars. Elsewhere across history, invaders are usually presumed to be the aggressors. Why not talk the same way about Americans invading Indigenous lands?

We still depict American invaders as defenders in part due to a longstanding culture of cover-ups. I have been able to show that a number of historians, politicians, and pioneers deliberately created false histories for profit and posterity. In a way, this book project began from a place of angry bewilderment, wondering how I, as an Oregonian passionate about history, had lived more than a quarter century without hearing much about the often-genocidal violence perpetrated in my home state. Deep in the archives, I found a big part of the answer: legions of people who preferred honor over truth had skillfully and deliberately distorted history, while keeping enough private records that I could still figure out what they did. My hope is that by proving these cover-ups, I can spur readers to more broadly reconsider histories they thought they knew.

Learn more about The War on Illahee at the Yale University Press website.

--Mashal Zeringue

Denise M. Walsh's "Imperial Sexism"

Denise M. Walsh is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Women's Rights in Democratizing States, a former editor of the American Political Science Review, and has actively advocated for and published on how to diversify the profession. Walsh specializes in comparative politics, gender, human rights, and feminist theory, focusing on how democracies can become more inclusive and just. Her research has been funded by many organizations, including the Institute for Advanced Studies at Notre Dame, the National Science Foundation, and the Institute for Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.

Walsh applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Imperial Sexism: Why Culture and Women's Rights Don't Clash, with the following results:

Page 99 from Imperial Sexism offers a vivid and troubling account of how well-intentioned legislation can reinforce the very inequalities it seeks to dismantle. It focuses on South Africa’s 1998 Recognition of Customary Marriages Act and its failure to protect rural women in polygynous marriages. Despite promises of legal recognition and rights, the law’s implementation was marred by bureaucratic hurdles, patriarchal norms, and the enduring legacy of apartheid. Women were often unable to register their marriages, and when they did, courts invalidated them, leaving them without access to pensions, property, or legal recourse.

This page is a strong reflection of the book’s core themes. Imperial Sexism explores how the compounding effects of colonial-era racism and sexism continue to shape contemporary gender policy debates. It shows how state institutions, even when reform-minded, often reproduce structural inequalities when they fail to account for the lived realities of marginalized women. Page 99 exemplifies this pattern: the state’s attempt to modernize customary marriage law ends up reinforcing rural African women’s second-class status.

So yes, the Page 99 Test works well for this book. A browser landing on this page would immediately grasp the stakes of the book’s argument—how gender, race, and power intersect in policy, and how women resist, navigate, and are often failed by democratic institutions. The page also reflects the book’s method: close analysis of legal reforms, public discourse, and the lived experiences of women across different national contexts.

Imperial Sexism analyzes policy debates about polygyny in South Africa, veiling in France, and Canada’s law stripping Indigenous women of their official Indian status to show how many women around the world challenge discriminatory policies by telling “compatibility stories”—narratives that refuse false binaries and demand both their rights to equality and culture.

Visit Denise M. Walsh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Katz Anhalt's "Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times"

Emily Katz Anhalt is professor of classics at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny and Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths.

Anhalt applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times: Why Humanity Needs Herodotus, the Man Who Invented History, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains the first two paragraphs of Chapter Seven, “On Deception.” The first paragraph introduces the story of the rise to power of the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus (6th cent. BCE) as narrated by the ancient Greek prose writer Herodotus (5th cent. BCE). Briefly situating this tale in the context of Herodotus’s work as a whole, I explain that “In Athens [547 BCE], Peisistratus has gained autocratic power by exploiting factional divisions and religious faith.” This first paragraph articulates the chapter’s central theme: Herodotus explicitly identifies civil strife and unthinking credulity as sources of vulnerability to tyranny. Connecting tyrannical deception to political subjugation, Herodotus ridicules Peisistratus’s contemporary Athenians for their irrational faith and lack of intellectual discernment. Page 99’s second paragraph begins my translation of Herodotus’s engaging narrative of Peisistratus’s use of deception to obtain autocratic power.

Happily, the Page 99 Test works well! My book examines Herodotus’s valuable insights on deception as well as numerous topics of relevance today (e.g. sexual predation, tyranny, freedom, self-restraint). Each chapter includes a translation and discussion of one story in Herodotus’s Histories, an eclectic assortment of tales culminating in the only extensive surviving account of the Persian Wars of the 490s-479 BCE.

As page 99 indicates, Herodotus’s tale of Peisistratus exposes calculated deception as a potent autocratic weapon. Driven from Athens by factional conflict, Peisistratus cunningly costumes a tall woman as Athena, the city’s patron goddess. Accompanied by this woman disguised as Athena, Peisistratus drives his chariot into Athens. He sends heralds ahead to announce that the goddess herself is escorting him back into power. Derided by Herodotus as a deceptive stunt, Peisistratus’s ruse may have been, in fact, a ritual enactment of an Athenian religious ceremony. But Herodotus criticizes the Athenians for their foolish gullibility. Susceptibility to the tyrant’s trick costs the Athenians their political freedom.

Writing in the 440s/430s BCE, Herodotus introduced the vital distinction between myth and history, distinguishing unverified and unverifiable tales of the long-ago past (stories of the Trojan War and the like) from narratives of more recent events verifiable by eyewitness accounts and, when possible, material evidence. Ironically, Herodotus’s own criterion of verifiability enables us to identify many of his stories as fanciful, tendentious, even impossible. Emphasizing the value of evidence-based, rational, critical discernment, however, Herodotus equips us to learn from his less credible as well as his more credible tales.

Today’s online news feeds and social media imperil Herodotus’s vital distinction between myth and history, continuously spewing enthralling, evidence-free, deceptive narratives. As online experience begins to eclipse actual, lived experience, Herodotus’s tale of Peisistratus reminds us that autocratic deceptions and undiscerning credulity make us easy prey for tyrants. Throughout the Histories, Herodotus recalls us to our responsibilities as sentient beings capable of distinguishing fact from authoritarian fabrications.

Visit Emily Katz Anhalt's website.

The Page 99 Test: Enraged.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ryan D. Griffiths's "The Disunited States"

Ryan D. Griffiths is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. His research focuses on the dynamics of secession and the study of sovereignty, state systems, and international orders. He teaches on topics related to nationalism, international relations, and international relations theory.

Griffiths applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work, and shared the following:

I took the Page 99 Test and got lucky. Page 99 happens to be the first page of Chapter 6: The Perils of National Divorce. The chapter begins with this paragraph:

The fundamental problem with a Red State / Blue State divorce is the interspersed population. Breaking up is hard to do at the best of times. Although the track record is bad, secession works best when the nation looking to secede is regionally concentrated, ideally delimited by a clear border, and possessing a territorial unit that is defined in some unique way. Only then does secession have a chance of working peacefully. None of these conditions hold in the fever dream of a nice and tidy and peaceful division into Redland and Blueland. Attempting secession when two populations are interspersed is both foolhardy and dangerous.

In chapter 6, I draw on research in political science to consider the problems that would follow from a serious attempt to divide American into two countries: Redland and Blueland. I identify six perils: (1) Polarization and ideological hardening; (2) Ideological Unmixing and cleansing; (3) The security dilemma and stranded populations; (4) Land grabs and vital assets; (5) Divided groups; and (6) Refugee crises. These are interlinked, cascading problems that would arise as the country tried to unmix and disassemble. They are perils that commonly occur in other settings, and they would undoubtedly happen here. Collectively, they explain why the project would collapse into violence and chaos.

The point of the book is to say that while polarization in America is a problem, secession is not the solution. Page 99 provides a useful summary of the argument.

Visit Ryan D. Griffiths's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

G. Edward White's "Robert H. Jackson"

G. Edward White is the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and the author of twenty books and numerous articles on law and legal history, including the three-volume Law in American History and Oliver Wendell Holmes: Sage of the Supreme Court.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment, with the following results:

Page 99 in Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment comes at the end of a chapter summarizing Robert Jackson’s service as Solicitor General and Attorney General in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It indicates that Jackson, who had been with the federal government in various capacities since 1934, had become dissatisfied with his role as Attorney General because he felt that by the spring of 1941 the U.S. economy was moving to a war footing and New Deal domestic programs, which Jackson had sought to implement, were coming to an end. The last paragraph of page 99 states that just at the time Jackson was experiencing that discontent, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes of the Supreme Court announced his retirement and Jackson became a likely candidate to be appointed to the Court, very possibly as Chief Justice.

As such readers of the book would get a good idea of its whole from page 99. The page identifies a forthcoming transition in Jackson’s career, from private law practice in Jamestown, New York from 1912 to 1934 and government official in Washington for the next seven years to the role that would occupy him for most of the rest of his career, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The remainder of the book covers Jackson on the Court, where he served from 1941 until his death from a heart attack in October, 1954, and Jackson as Chief Prosecutor for the U.S. delegation at the Nuremberg trials, where several leading Nazis were accused of war crimes. Jackson not only prosecuted some of the Nazi leaders, most conspicuously Hermann Goering, but was the architect of the Nuremberg tribunal’s form and substance. Page 99 shows Jackson poised to make the major contributions of his professional career.

Robert Jackson, who never went to college and attended law school for only one year, is one of the unique figures in American legal history. He was the author of a concurring opinion in the steel-strike case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer that sketched a framework for the scope and limits of executive power under the Constitution. His opinion was relied upon in two of the Supreme Court’s most pivotal opinions, Nixon v. United States (1974), rejecting President’s Nixon effort to invoke executive privilege to prevent revelation of White House tapes, and Trump v. United States (2024), setting forth the immunity of the President from criminal prosecution for “official” acts during his tenure. Robert Jackson has not had a biography in sixty-seven years. It is time to reintroduce him to the reading public.

Learn more about Robert H. Jackson at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gillen D’Arcy Wood's "The Wake of HMS Challenger"

Gillen D’Arcy Wood is the Robert W. Schaefer Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of the award-winning Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World and Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of Its Ice.

Wood applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Wake of HMS Challenger: How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans' Decline, and reported the following:

My book on the 1870s ocean discovery voyage of HMS Challenger is a catalogue of wonders, which page 99 exemplifies in spectacular fashion. There we meet, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a blind lobster brought up from the deep sea by the ship's trawl, an enigmatic monster that to Challenger's scientists seemed to defy all Darwinian logic of survival.

Mysteries and marvels abounded during Challenger's legendary four-year expedition around the world, the first ever commissioned to explore the hidden depths of the seas. It was a wildly successful mission. The Challengers brought home almost 5000 species new to science, along with brilliant corals, sponges from the earliest era of life on Earth, and clouds of microscopic plankton scooped from the sunstruck surface of the ocean waters. They also collected reams of data on ocean temperature, chemistry, and deep sea currents. From Challenger's incredible round-the-world bounty emerged the modern sciences of oceanography and marine biology.

Why is this amazing marine collection from the late nineteenth century still important? Because it offers a snapshot of the world's oceans on the eve of industrialization, and a vivid contrast to our deteriorating oceans of today. Overfishing, ocean warming, and plastic pollution threaten the stunning real-world aquarium the Victorians encountered, and my book, with the Challenger voyage as its baseline, charts the changes human colonization of the seas has wrought over the last 150 years.

But wonder abides, on page after page of my book and in our still resilient oceans. Later on page 99 finds our intrepid naturalists' lingering on the Challenger's deck after midnight, mesmerized by the brilliant luminescence of the sea's lilting surface. Millions of living creatures combined to produce this "dazzling illumination that reached even in the rigging, where the men working the sails appeared like ghosts eerily lit against the black sky." While my book's focus is on the wild phantasmagoria of marine life, the trials of our first deep sea explorers loom large, too. The deep sea lobster of page 99, the Willemoesia leptodactyla, is named for one of Challenger's naturalists, its youngest member, who paid for his curiosity and passion for the sea with his life.

Learn more about The Wake of HMS Challenger at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Tambora.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wendell H. Marsh's "Textual Life"

Wendell Marsh is an Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guérir, Morocco. He researches and teaches at the intersections of African and diasporic intellectual history, comparative literature, religious studies, and the politics of knowledge production.

Marsh applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities, and shared the following:

The reader of page 99 of Textual Life will find themselves in an extended citation of a treatise on French colonial policy towards Islam. It is there that Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945), the Muslim scholar from Northern Senegal who wrote a monumental history of West Africa, first appears in colonial records. Although the document is far from great literature it would become very influential in how Islam in the region would become theorized, made policy, and institutionalized in practice. “Islam noir” has become a short-hand to describe a racializing idea and process that sought to distinguish and isolate West African Muslims from their co-religionists throughout the world. Kamara’s appearance here speaks to how fundamental he was to colonial knowledge production and how perplexing it is that he is not better known. The rest of the page provides an in-depth commentary on the passage.

The test succeeds, in a sense. Textual Life is a parable about the fate of humanistic scholarship amid political, technological, and epistemic change through the life, work, and reception of a prolific but poorly known African Muslim intellectual. Page 99 takes us to the crux of that story’s conflict: the will to know the colonies as a will to have power over them created the paradoxical condition in which knowledge was solicited but becomes distorted through the imperatives of strategic interest. We get several of the major plays in this drama and a sense of what was at stake. In addition to the substantive relevance this page’s part to the whole, there is also a fundamental quality of the book well represented here. As a kind of philology, the book takes seriously the value of commentary.

At the same time, page 99 obscures as much as it reveals. Chapters One and Two as well as Five and Six are all about what the colonial encounter fails to contain. In this book, Kamara becomes an aperture into a literary theory of Arabic in West Africa, a rich tradition that warrants more research. He also illuminates the place of dreams in the Muslim imaginary in West Africa as well as the intellectual struggles that have defined debates in the Sahel during the period of decolonization and since the War on Terror. The meaning of the parable of Kamara is that the restriction placed on knowledge by colonial power is only short-lived. It would be tragic for the reader to miss that message.

Visit Wendell H. Marsh's website and learn more about Textual Life at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Celene Reynolds's "Unlawful Advances"

Celene Reynolds is assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX, with the following results:

Page 99 discusses how the people claiming rights under Title IX have deployed the law differently against different types of schools across the country. Title IX is the US civil rights law that bars education programs from discriminating “on the basis of sex,” and, as part of my effort to understand its changing use over time, I constructed an original dataset of all federal Title IX complaints filed against colleges and universities from 1994 to the near present. Page 99 presents one part of my analysis of these claims, specifically whether some schools have been targeted more than others relative to student enrollment. The finding that’s most central to my broader argument here is that our nation’s most selective schools have faced a disproportionately higher number of overall complaints, indicating that students at these schools are more likely to mobilize the law.

Page 99 provides only a partial sense of what the book is about. A reader might misconstrue the book as an exclusively quantitative analysis focused on tracing the evolution of Title IX at the national level, but I also draw on historical documents as well as interviews to explain how people on the ground shaped the law. The three empirical chapters preceding page 99 focus on these stories, explaining the emergence and diffusion of a new understanding of unlawful sex discrimination in education. I clarify how feminists at Cornell in the 1970s developed the political concept of “sexual harassment,” laying the foundation for and directly enabling the expansion of Title IX to encompass sexual harassment. Indeed, the feminists at Yale who initiated this shift in the law discovered “sexual harassment” through direct communication with the Cornell women. With this new language, the Yale women were able to invent a new interpretation of Title IX and then deploy it in a lawsuit against the university. One of the plaintiffs in this suit exposed feminists at Berkeley to the legal innovation, who went on to file the first federal complaint with the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare alleging that a school had violated Title IX by mishandling sexual harassment. This complaint was crucial because it compelled the primary agency responsible for enforcing the law to recognize that sexual harassment can inhibit equal educational opportunity, setting new compliance standard for nearly all schools. The final chapter, where page 99 appears, traces the legacy of this transformation of Title IX through an analysis of key lawsuits, federal policies, and my original dataset of federal complaints. I show how the law’s prohibition against sexual harassment has grown more expansive—barring not just faculty-student incidents but also student-on-student incidents, for example—and how the specialized sexual harassment response systems schools used to address this problem have grown more legalistic.

While still an incomplete snapshot, page 99 does illustrate that the people’s power to transform law is unevenly distributed, which is key to the book’s argument. It was remarkable that young women at Yale and Berkeley were able to effect such lasting shifts in the law, university administration, and campus culture. But these weren’t any students; they were students at some of our nation’s most prestigious universities. Their actions continue to shape life on campus today.

Learn more about Unlawful Advances at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lars Cornelissen's "Neoliberalism and Race"

Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Neoliberalism and Race, and reported the following:

On page 99, we are introduced to the way Arthur Shenfield, a British barrister and political thinker who fulfilled a prominent role in the neoliberal intellectual movement, thought about white minority rule in southern Africa in the 1960s and 70s. We learn not only that Shenfield was fiercely opposed to anti-colonial movements but also that he had no objection to white minority rule or even racial apartheid. We encounter his assertion that ‘The principle of apartheid is neither dishonorable nor, in the bad sense, racist.’ (To which I respond: ‘Did he think there was a good sense?’)

The reader who opens my book to this page would get a decent idea of my overall project. Neoliberalism and Race offers a systematic critique of neoliberal thought that centres themes of race, colonialism, and culture. It maps out how prominent neoliberal thinkers conceptualised race and where they stood on such questions as the European colonial project, apartheid, and civil rights. The arguments discussed on page 99 are certainly representative of the themes explored in the book and would give the reader a keen sense of what else to expect in its pages.

What the page 99 reader would miss, however, is my attempt to read neoliberal racial thought through the lens of the Black radical tradition, which provides me with the conceptual tools to demystify some of the more densely coded racial constructs that populate the neoliberal repertoire. My engagement with this tradition happens mostly in the Introduction and Conclusion to the book, and in the opening and closing sections of each chapter, but does not feature on this page.

Learn more about Neoliberalism and Race at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Haulman's "The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America"

Kate Haulman is an associate professor of history at American University. She is the author of the prize-winning The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America and co-editor of Making Women's Histories: Beyond National Perspectives. An active public historian, she has worked on several exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

Haulman applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America, and shared the following:

My first thought was, “Page 99 is not even half a page of prose! What does that reveal about the ‘quality of the whole?’” Happily, the 19 lines of text express the book’s main theme and claim. But they certainly don’t tell the whole story. In fact, there’s an important narrative and interpretive element they do not capture. Read on!

Page 99 of the Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America is the final page of chapter three and close to the middle of the book, which runs six chapters and 210 pages. Titled “Mother Mary,” the chapter explores antebellum depictions of Mary Ball Washington, George’s mother, in biographies (both of her and of George) as well as images. Biographies like these grew in importance in this period, instructing American readers in morality, virtue, patriotism, and, in the case of Mary, ideal motherhood. Through these works the “Mother of Washington” figure, first sketched in 1826, took shape through a canon of stories that depicted an increasingly domestic, loving, and piously Christian woman, one who bore the lion’s share of responsibility for her son’s greatness. Men and women writers alike fashioned this portrait, some drawing from newly available evidence such as Mary’s Bible and books of devotional literature. In contrast to actual American women who were engaging in public, political discourse, basing claims to engage the state on issues such as abolition in Christian, republican motherhood, the private and retiring Mary served as a counterpoint. She was a true Christian, republican mother (and slaveholder) from the Revolutionary past itself, her son the undeniable proof of her worth.

The page connects the chapter’s argument to the book’s: across the nineteenth century, elite white men and women used Mary (really, the Mother of Washington figure) to lay claim to the founding past, lodging their vision and version ideal motherhood in it. Yet they also did so through attempts to erect a monument to her at the site of her grave in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which the page does not mention. The story of the monument to Mary, Mother of Washington, serves as both a narrative throughline in the book and important feature of Revolutionary commemoration, one that exposes the paradox of a monument to a mother. First proposed and backed by elite men, the monument got off the ground in the early 1830s to great fanfare but languished unfinished for more than six decades. Some made pilgrimages to the site to pay homage to Mary’s memory while others vandalized the incomplete structure and even used it for target practice; such was the range of engagement by the public. There were practical reasons for its status, mainly lack of funding. But the lack of will to complete it and meaning of the monument as it ran to ruin suggests the ambivalence around erecting a monument, a public structure typically reserved for male heroes, to a mother. Mothers were supposed to be private, retiring, domestic figures—in fact, in those very qualities lay Mary’s greatness. Her son George was the monument. Only when two elite women’s groups organized in the early 1890s did the Mother of Washington finally get her monument.

Learn more about The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Denise Z. Davidson's "Surviving Revolution"

Denise Z. Davidson is Professor of History and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Georgia State University. She is the author of France After Revolution and coauthor of Le roman conjugal.

Davidson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters, with the following results:

Page 99 of Surviving Revolution appears a few pages into a chapter on the weight that bourgeois families in early nineteenth-century France placed on intergenerational ties and responsibilities as visible in their childrearing practices. The page delves into an episode dating from January 1817, when Catherine Arnaud-Tizon, the matriarch of one of the families discussed in the book, finds herself in conflict with her youngest daughter, Adèle, who is pregnant with her first child. After Adèle expressed a lack of interest in following her mother’s advice, Catherine wrote to her eldest daughter, Amélie, for the second time in two weeks to express her shock and frustration. (A quotation from the first of the two letters appears on the previous page.) In addition to voicing her feelings, Catherine’s letter provides details on key components of preparing for childbirth in these years including choosing the right “accoucheur” (a male midwife or doctor) and a wet nurse, matters about which Catherine had strong opinions. Catherine then explains that she will not stay with Adèle while waiting for her to go into labor, because “like you, I realize that our young household needs to take care of itself. We must allow them to figure things out on their own, and I assure you that I will no longer attempt to offer them advice…. I will go only when my presence becomes necessary.” The chapter argues that intergenerational cooperation was essential to families’ successful navigation of the challenges they faced as France moved from republic to empire and back to monarchy. This letter provides a rare example of such cooperation going less than smoothly, a situation that caused the more experienced woman to feel angry and hurt. Such feelings rarely appear in the correspondence that serves as the basis for this study, as letter-writing served primarily as an opportunity to share good news and reinforce positive emotional ties. The page ends with a few lines introducing a new topic: the family’s discussion of Adèle’s due date, which sheds light on how people worked through such matters before the rise of modern medical knowledge and techniques.

Does the Page 99 Test work? The answer in this case is yes and no. Readers turning to page 99 would get an accurate image of the book’s approach: a focus on private, intimate spaces and discussions through the lens of familial correspondence. The anecdote discussed on the page serves as a typical example of the nitty-gritty of everyday life that fills much of the book and that I argue gives us a deeper understanding of bourgeois lifestyles and attitudes during this chaotic period in French history. In addition, the letter writer, Catherine Arnaud-Tizon, a mother of four who lived through the Revolution in Lyon and later helped her husband run their business in Rouen, plays a prominent role throughout the book. However, this single page does not give much insight into the book’s larger arguments about what it meant to be “bourgeois” in the decades following the French Revolution and how wealthy families navigated this period of rapid change. In addition, the topic of pregnancy and childbirth occupies only a small space in this chapter and rarely appears elsewhere.

Surviving Revolution is divided into two parts. Part one provides a brief overview of the lives and trajectories of the two families at the center of my story from about 1780 to 1830. Part two contains five thematic chapters focused on marriage, childrearing, business and property, socializing, and politics. Relying largely on the thousands of letters I read in the archives, these chapters discuss networking and correspondence practices as essential tools that these families relied upon as they lived through regime change, warfare, and economic crises. The strategies these families employed to survive during this chaotic moment in history included focusing on family and the pleasures of private life and relying on longstanding, trusted allies to help them to accomplish their goals. These methods dating from two hundred years ago may help readers reflect on their own efforts to persevere through difficult times.

Learn more about Surviving Revolution at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Decoteau J. Irby and Ann M. Ishimaru's "Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change"

Decoteau J. Irby is professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, codirector of the Center for Urban Education Leadership, and coeditor of Dignity-Affirming Education. Ann M. Ishimaru is the Killinger Endowed Chair and professor of educational foundations, leadership and policy at the University of Washington College of Education, and author of Just Schools: Building Equitable Collaborations with Families and Communities.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book is the first page of Chapter 6, “Designing Work Routines and Process(ing) Tools: An Infrastructure of Strategic Equity Leadership” by Maurice Swinney and Decoteau Irby. It opens with a quote by Maurice Swinney on his time as the first equity officer in a large urban district:

People often ask me “How did you accomplish these things?” “How did you build the Equity Office to sustain itself?” I strategically designed the office with a focus on creating internal and external organizational routines, which are processes for engaging teams, in prioritizing work, creating tools to support it, structuring time and effort, and providing support and feedback.

We believe our book passes the Page 99 Test, as the page highlights three defining features. First, the book amplifies the voices of actual practitioners, who have done the work of equity leadership on the ground. We feature the experiences and strategies of equity leaders, especially Black women and other women of color, navigating challenges and making change.

Second, the book weaves together our own research with practitioner insights, in this case, illustrated by the chapter collaboration with researcher and editor Decoteau Irby. The book is co-authored by a mix of practitioners and academics, giving readers a balanced view of both day-to-day leadership practices, framed by almost a decade of research on the topic of leadership for equity by some of the field’s leading researchers.

Third, it positions leadership practices, such as the creation of organizational routines, as the drivers of systems change. Rather than focusing solely on individual leaders with formal titles, we illuminate how leaders “colored outside the lines” with others to improve learning and well-being for children, especially those least well served by the status quo. We hope this helps readers to develop a strategy orientation to their own leadership.

One thing page 99 does not address is the way the book recognizes geographical differences and socio-political events that shape leadership practice. For example, the first section of the book “Mornings” recounts what equity leadership entailed at the end of the second Obama administration and into the first election of Donald Trump. The second and third sections, “Middays” and “Evenings,” offer insights into equity leadership from the Covid-19 pandemic, the movement for Black lives, and the pushback on diversity, equity, and inclusion work throughout the Biden administration, and up to the final term of Donald Trump.

After reading our book, we want readers to understand three things. One, there are clear differences in what equity leadership practices look like across space and time. Two, leadership turnover should be expected because the work draws resistance, challenges, and vitriolic pushback. Third, despite the pushback, leaders, especially Black women, have demonstrated a level of creativity and commitment that continues to influence, institutionalize, and sustain changes that benefit students who depend most on public education.

Visit Decoteau J. Irby's website and Ann M. Ishimaru's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helen Morgan Parmett's "Stadium City"

Helen Morgan Parmett is the Edwin W. Lawrence Endowed Professor of Forensics and an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television.

Morgan Parmett applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Stadium City: Sports and Media Infrastructure in the United States, and shared the following:

Sports stadiums play an oversized role in contemporary city life. This is especially true for residents who live in and around the neighborhoods in which stadiums are built, which are often in politically and economically marginalized parts of the city, where land is cheaper and the political capital of its residents weaker. Page 99 of Stadium City concludes the the chapter on the city of Atlanta’s professional baseball team’s (the Braves) departure from urban Atlanta’s Turner Field for greener pastures, bigger tax incentives, and the whiter fans of Suburban Cobb County. The page concludes my remarks on the efforts of the Turner Field Benefits Coalition, an activist group of neighborhood residents and supporters, which demanded greater community benefits for the neighborhoods surrounding Turner Field in the subsequent developments being planned to replace the stadium and its parking lots. The page begins by noting that since its formation, the group had splintered into various factions, with some of the group making deals with developers and others arguing for more transparency and more investment in the existing structures and cultures of the neighborhood. The page focuses especially on how, even though the group was not entirely successful in garnering benefits nor in preventing gentrification from future development, it did contribute to a discourse that both drew from and shaped future resistance to stadium building in Atlanta and beyond. The page includes an image from the tent city the group installed around Turner Field, where the group called for resistance to the kind of displacement that too often comes from stadium and other sporting-oriented development projects.

Page 99 is a pretty good representation of what readers will find in Stadium City. The book contends with the cultural and spatial implications of stadium building in the U.S. in both contemporary and historical contexts. This page concludes the book’s section on stadium building in Atlanta. Together with the other two sections on stadiums in Seattle and Minneapolis, the book argues that stadiums embody what I call a sportification of place, wherein stadiums work to reshape cities (and their residents) according to the logics and values associated with mediated sporting culture. This page emphasizes agency—neighborhood residents are not just passive actors or problematic populations to be displaced or reshaped by new sporting developments. Stadiums are sites of struggle over who and what the neighborhood is for. But resistance is hard, and it can be especially challenging to build and maintain coalitions to sustain that resistance. Page 99 is a good example of how even though the book contends with how stadiums have historically razed neighborhoods or led to displacement in the name of urban renewal and revitalization, it also emphasizes how residents have not just passively accepted this remaking of their neighborhoods into shiny new versions imagined by developers and urban, corporate elites. They resist and articulate other senses of place that lay claim to alternative ways of valuing, inhabiting, and practicing urban space that contests the sportification of place.

What readers might miss from page 99, however, is the central role that media culture plays in the sportification of place. Stadium City theorizes sports stadiums as urban media infrastructures—they are at once mediatized, mediated, and mediating sites that constitute, direct, and govern urban space and spatiality in complex ways. Page 99 concludes with a gesture to this broader focus on the intertwinement of stadiums, media, and urban space, as it turns attention to how stadiums help to constitute a city’s image and brand. Whether through integrating forms of media that help to govern and control stadium and urban space, construct a city’s image, or to experiment with new forms of surveillance and data collection, stadiums are more than places in which our favorite teams play a game. They are central nodes in our cities that impact our everyday lives and spatial practices, whether we ever attend a game or not.

Learn more about Stadium City at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Lindauer's "The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts"

Matthew Lindauer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at CUNY Graduate Center. He specializes in moral and political philosophy, moral psychology, and experimental philosophy, and has published numerous articles in these areas in journals including Philosophical Studies, Journal of Moral Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, and Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy.

Lindauer applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts, with the following results:

The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts develops a theory of the different ways in which moral and political concepts, like ‘justice’ and ‘solidarity,’ are supposed to help us solve practical problems in the real world – how they can be “fruitful” for this purpose. They can do so by motivating the right kinds of actions, preventing the wrong kinds, helping us fight back against problematic social phenomena like bias and prejudice, generating consensus, and guiding action. Page 99 of the book sits in the middle of Chapter 3, where I am responding to key objections and challenges, which was maybe the most fun chapter to write.

At the top of page 99, I’m considering the challenge of what to do when these different aspects of problem solving conflict with one another. For example, what if a given conception of justice would be widely accepted by the general public but not very useful to activists and other people who are most committed to fighting injustice? I first note that the fact of competing demands is not a unique issue for my theory – ordinary life is full of them, too (take the balancing act of being a good parent and a reliable friend). But I also think my view helps us make progress on how to approach these philosophical tradeoffs. Insofar as those most engaged in a struggle are getting to the heart of a practical problem and likely to generate a workable solution, it may be that it matters more that a conception of justice empowers them rather than achieving the broadest consensus possible. Still, if we care about practical problem solving we will have to keep the value of achieving buy-in from the broader public in mind, as well as the fact that generating consensus among those most committed to promoting justice will often be important.

The Page 99 Test works well for this book, in part, because I am arguing for the importance of bringing multiple approaches together to understand the practical problems that we face – it would be very hypocritical not to explore an approach like this one. While the 99th page lies in the middle of a chapter defending rather than articulating my theory of normative fruitfulness, I think chapters like this one can be very important for strength testing and understanding the contours of a theory. A reader who picked up the book at page 99 would get a sense of how my view handles some challenges that scientifically-informed theories of morality and justice face. And whether they ultimately agreed with me or not, I also hope that they would get a sense of my openness to critical engagement and revision, which are to my mind the most important aspects of a scientific worldview, particularly one that aims to address practical problems that we face in this moment.

Visit Matthew Lindauer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mariya Grinberg's "Trade in War"

Mariya Grinberg is an assistant professor of political science and member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She focuses on international relations theory and international security. Her research interests center on the question of how time and uncertainty shape the strategic decisions of states, examining economic statecraft, military planning, and nuclear strategy.

Grinberg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Trade in War: Economic Cooperation across Enemy Lines, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, the reader will find an assessment of the changing expectations of the length of war among British decision-makers in World War I. The page picks up the story in 1915, remarking on the sense of optimism around the launch of the Dardanelles campaign. However, by the middle of the year, given the failure of the Dardanelles campaign to restart a war of movement, expectations of a short war once again gave way to planning for a long war.

The Page 99 Test would rather grievously deceive the reader about the contents of the book. Judging purely from page 99, a reader might expect this book to be a military history of World War I. In fact, the book explains wartime trade – why states would allow their own firms to trade with the state’s military opponents during open hostilities. British decision-making in World War I is one of the cases used to test the argument; other cases include the Crimean War (1854-6), World War II, and the United States wartime trade in its post-Cold War conflicts.

The book argues that states develop nuanced wartime commercial policies, determining how each product will be treated during the war. Products that can be quickly converted into military capabilities by the enemy are prohibited from trade, while those that take a while to become useful on the battlefield are more likely to be traded. Products that are essential for the key domestic industries of the state are also traded in war. Furthermore, states tailor their commercial policies to the war they expect to fight. When states expect a a short war, more products can be traded with the enemy; while expectations of a prolonged war bring a more restrictive wartime commercial policy.

Page 99 captures British expectations of the length of war – which in 1915, in the moment of optimism allowed them to continue importing German dyes, which were integral for the British textile industry. However, the changing expectations towards a long war in 1915 ended such imports and brought prohibitions on the export to the enemy of food, cotton manufacture, rubber, and other raw materials. All of which were previously allowed to be traded with the enemy. Of course, for these details, the reader would have to reach page 109.

Visit Mariya Grinberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew A. Szarejko's "American Conquest"

Andrew A. Szarejko is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wartburg College. His work has been published in journals such as PS: Political Science and Politics, Millennium, The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and The Journal of Global Security Studies. He is also the editor of Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations amid COVID-19.

Szarejko applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy, and shared the following:

Page 99 of American Conquest is near the end of Chapter 4. After examining the origins of the Northwest Indian War (1790-1795) in Chapter 2 and the process by which military basing decisions helped U.S. forces defeat the countervailing Native American coalition in Chapter 3, I turn in Chapter 4 to the ways U.S. forces brought the perceived lessons of the “Indian Wars” abroad. More specifically, Chapter 4 is about how the U.S. military brought a sort of nascent counterinsurgency doctrine learned (and continually re-learned) on the American frontier into the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). Page 99 speaks to “lessons learned” processes that the U.S. military has since established to try to more systematically codify the lessons of recent experiences in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I caution against trying to make law-like generalizations on the basis of such experiences.

This gives readers a good sense of what I am doing in this book. I am not just interested in the origins of the Northwest Indian War; I am also interested in the ways its influence lingers in U.S. foreign policy and American politics. Readers who continue a few more pages into Chapter 5 will find the most recent events I discuss—debates in Fort Wayne, Indiana, concerning whether to celebrate the city’s namesake and the victorious general in the Northwest Indian War, Anthony Wayne.

Page 99 also speaks to my interest in how foreign policy professionals continue to use the Indian Wars as an analogy. There I begin a final section in Chapter 4—a coda in which I discuss how a U.S. military official, Colonel Elbridge Colby, justified indiscriminate violence in the Philippines with reference to the purportedly “savage,” “uncivilized” nature of the Filipino insurgents. I then turn to a description of how Colby’s great-grandson and President Trump’s current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge A. Colby, has used the “Indian Wars” as an analogy in some of his own work on military strategy. In short, American Conquest is about the origins and legacies of the Northwest Indian War, and page 99 underscores those central concerns.

Visit Andrew A. Szarejko's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julija Šukys's "Artifact"

Julija Šukys is associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, where she teaches the writing of memoirs, autobiographical writing, essays, and archival research methods. She is the author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007). Šukys holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto.

Šukys applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives, with the following results:

Page 99 of Artifact lays out the background for Amy Bishop’s tenure denial. That denial was the reason Bishop opened fire on her colleagues during a faculty meeting, killing three colleagues. As part of my research, I interviewed Bishop’s former department chair. We talked about Bishop’s career trajectory. “Amy wasn’t stupid or incapable of receiving tenure,” said Debra Moriarity in the interview. “It’s just that her timing was bad and that she spent too much time developing the [cell] incubator and not enough producing the kind of scholarship that would have secured her position at the university.” Page 99 then takes us through the kind of research activity that would have earned Bishop tenure: ‘“at least two papers a year,’ that is, ten papers before tenure (which usually comes in Year 6 of an academic appointment as assistant professor),” plus a solid record of grantsmanship. The final paragraph introduces the issue of gender, and whether or how institutional structures played a role in Bishop’s professional struggles.

Page 99 of Artifact isn’t a terrible representation of the book’s concerns, but it has the disadvantage of falling mid-weeds, so to speak. I write incrementally, so each paragraph, section, and chapter builds on the last. To enter the book at this point in the Amy Bishop story feels like walking into a documentary film 1/3 of the way through. It’s not disastrous, but you’ve got to work quite hard to catch up.

The idea to write this book grew out of those three events. One was a shooting in a writing classroom. That occurred at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. The event shook me because that could have been my classroom—I too teach writing. Then came the second event: a law professor at the University of Missouri sued the university administration for the right to carry his weapon with him on campus. Finally, within two weeks of that lawsuit, there was a third event, this time at the University of Northern Arizona, a couple of students shot one another at a fraternity house.

That third shooting happened shortly before I was about to travel to Flagstaff, Arizona, to attend a large nonfiction writers’ conference. Suddenly our writing community was talking about this event on social media. There was talk of whether we, as a community of writers, should address this violence at the conference. I remember reading a passing comment: “Somebody should write about this.” That’s when the idea went ding, ding, ding in my head. Maybe this was a way to deal with the discomfort, disquiet, and fear I’d been carrying while on campus.

I ended up traveling to and writing about five different campuses where shootings occurred. I’m an archival researcher by nature, so, as is my habit, I arrived on each campus and then headed out to see what its archives held. I tracked the story the archives told me about each shooting. Every archive told me something different. Slowly, the book began to take shape.

In the end, Artifact became a text about what institutions collectively choose to remember, about what they willingly forget, what they silence, what they keep, what they trash. The book is also about my love for the university. It’s about the ways the university grows increasingly broken. And it’s about my beloved profession, that is, being a professor.

Visit Julija Šukys's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven A. Dean's "Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law"

Steven A. Dean is an award-winning author and a Professor of Law and the Paul Siskind Research Scholar at Boston University. He has spoken at the United Nations and testified in Congress about the impact of racism on tax law. Dean's work forced President Biden to change course on tax havens and forced the leading international tax policymaking organization to withdraw a major marketing brochure. He led the world's foremost graduate tax law program at NYU and practiced tax with leading global law firms. Dean earned his law degree from Yale. His books include For-Profit Philanthropy (2023), Social Enterprise Law: A Multijurisdictional Comparative Review (2023), and Social Enterprise Law: Trust, Public Benefit, and Capital Markets (2017).

Dean applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow, and reported the following:

On page 99, I describe how the 2000 US presidential election shaped the fate of the OECD’s effort to blacklist tax havens. The change in Treasury leadership—from Lawrence Summers, Clinton’s secretary and the OECD initiative’s strongest supporter, to Paul O’Neill, Bush’s pick and one of its fiercest critics—proved decisive. Personnel shifts like this can make the difference between momentum and collapse in global tax diplomacy.

The page also considers the role of right-wing think tanks, especially the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (CFP), which mobilized opposition to the OECD plan. Even if the CFP exaggerated its influence, it managed to forge improbable alliances, linking the Heritage Foundation with members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The section closes by speculating how different things might have looked had Al Gore won in 2000—a reminder that international tax law is never just about taxes but about politics, power, and identity.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Yes—almost eerily well. A browser landing on this page would immediately see the book’s central themes at work: how domestic political battles in the United States shape global tax policy, how right-wing institutions exert surprising influence, and how questions of race and identity are never far from the surface.

Page 99 captures the larger argument of the book: international tax law cannot be understood without grappling with racial capitalism. The Clinton-to-Bush transition, the replacement of Summers with O’Neill, and the lobbying of groups like the CFP all illustrate how seemingly technical tax rules are embedded in struggles over legitimacy, sovereignty, and belonging.

This single page shows both the drama of individual political actors and the deeper structural forces at play. That’s what the book does throughout: reveal how international tax law reflects and reinforces racialized hierarchies, while also tracing the moments of resistance—from small states labeled “havens” to dissenting voices within US politics—that sometimes push back against those hierarchies.

In short, if you opened the book to page 99, you would get a very good sense of what the book is about.

Learn more about Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frances R. Aparicio's "Replaying Marc Anthony"

Frances R. Aparicio is Professor Emerita in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. She is the author of Negotiating Latinidad: Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago and Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, among other books, and coeditor of various critical anthologies.

Aparicio applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Replaying Marc Anthony: Sonic, Political, and Cultural Resonances, and shared the following:

If one reads page 99 in Replaying Marc Anthony, its discussion around singing in English, crossover, and the Latin music industry serves as a window to the rest of the book. Fueled by my curiosity regarding how Marc Anthony's arrangements and songs allow him to resonate with specific communities and identities, Chapter 3 delves into his engagements with Anglo rock and roll, freestyle and R&B in the song "I need to know."

Page 99 describes the ways in which Marc Anthony was discursively framed as a “crossover” act around 1999, when he first performed “I need to know” on Good Morning, America on July 23. Yet his musical history evinces the opposite, as he started his singing career in the 1980s singing freestyle in English in local New York clubs, to later sing salsa in Spanish in 1993. Refuting these mainstream notions of “crossover,” Marc Anthony reaffirms his bicultural and bilingual upbringing as the foundation for these linguistic dilemmas. I document the ways in which his arrangements deploy forms of translanguaging or Spanglish, as in his unexpected version of Bread’s “Make it with you.” This chapter analyzes Marc’s multiracial arrangements in “I need to know” as a sonic text and performance that rewrites so-called “American music,” and specifically rock and roll, as sounds that also belong to racial minorities in the United States.

Known as the King of Salsa and as a global celebrity, Marc Anthony is also, as I propose in the Introduction, a “listener” himself who has brilliantly curated songs that resonate with multiple audiences and listeners. By highlighting the rich diversity of voices, singers, songs, and musical traditions with which he has been in dialogue, we can better understand the sonic, cultural and political meanings and resonances of his repertoire. This framework allows me to argue that some of his most canonical songs have circulated hemispherically and globally, thus hailing multiple identities that include Puerto Rican, Latino, Latin American, American, Black, and Algerian/North African. Rather than just “Latin pop,” Marc Anthony offers us serious sonic incursions that allow us to acknowledge ourselves within the colonial precarity of our lives. The impact of Marc Anthony is profoundly felt by Puerto Ricans, Nuyoricans and so many others in the U.S. Latinx community as we critically listen to our own vulnerabilities through the power of his extraordinary voice.

Learn more about Replaying Marc Anthony at the Ohio State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue