Adam S. Hayes's "Irrational Together"

Adam S. Hayes is professor of sociology at the University of Lucerne. Before entering academia, he worked as an options market maker and equity derivatives sales trader and was licensed as a financial advisor.

Hayes applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Irrational Together: The Social Forces That Invisibly Shape Our Economic Behavior, with the following results:

Page 99 is the hinge where the book moves from storytelling to method. It really distills the broader mission of the book: to show that economic choices are never purely about numbers or cognitive quirks—they’re also greatly influenced by social forces. The passage invites readers to see how experimental techniques can unpick the ways that price, convenience, and status jostle with trust, loyalty, and shared identity in everyday financial decisions. It’s not about dismissing “economic” explanations or romanticizing the social. Instead, the page makes a case for measuring these factors in tandem. Unraveling the way that our dollars interact with our culture, social contexts, socialization processes, and relationships is indeed a miniature of the book’s central framework.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Absolutely. The entire argument of Irrational Together is that economic life is governed, in part, by social forces—and that we can measure these influences. Page 99 reveals how the book bridges disciplines, bringing sociology’s insights about things like norms, networks, and identity into conversations typically dominated by economic rationality or behavioral biases. It’s not a rejection of what's come before, but an insistence that to truly understand choice, we have to see how these perspectives mesh and rub up against each other. This page signals a book that’s more than just a critique of “rational economic man”; it’s a toolkit for better understanding how our choices get entangled with who we are, who we know, and what matters most to us.

If this page draws you in, the rest of Irrational Together offers an extended invitation to see economic life in high relief. From meme-stock booms to the hidden scripts of gendered money talk, from algorithmic investing to the moral boundaries of peer-to-peer transactions, the book uses familiar stories, original data, and lived experiences to explore how everything from culture and social identities to interpersonal ties and social networks shape even what we think of as our most private economic decisions. What emerges is a vision of economic life that is less about solitary individuals optimizing abstract curves or even hopelessly irrational beings with limited processing power & cognitive biases--and more about real people navigating the social landscape that is the economy. By the end, readers won’t just have a richer view of economic sociology; they’ll see how these insights can inform more reasonable efforts at navigating financial choices and the crafting of more effective policies. If page 99 made you curious about why you sometimes pay more to buy from a friend—or why an app can nudge you toward “rational” investing—you’ll find the rest of the book picks up that thread and runs with it.

Visit Adam S. Hayes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Neil Gregor's "The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany"

Neil Gregor is professor of modern European history and director of the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich, How to Read Hitler, and Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past. Most recently he coedited Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor.

Gregor applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book falls in a section entitled ‘Guidance, Direction, Censorship’, so takes us straight to the heart of what the book is about – namely the question of how the Nazi dictatorship impacted the work of German orchestras in the 1930s and 1940s. As one would only expect, the regime swiftly developed mechanisms to ensure that orchestras adjusted their repertoire to Nazi demands regarding the promotion of ‘healthy’ German music (whatever that was). Conversely, the regime’s antisemitism was such that the performance of ‘Jewish music’ was rigorously policed – composers such as Mahler or Mendelssohn disappeared from concert programmes very quickly. So in this sense the Page 99 Test works remarkably well!

At the same time, the passage nods to the ways in which the work of monitoring orchestral programming was carried out not by ‘the Nazi regime’ in the sense of something suspended over the musicians’ own world, but by figures co-opted from that musical world into the apparatus of control. In other words, it carries something of one of the core arguments of the book, namely that the remaking of German musical life under the dictatorship was a process in which musicians participated actively themselves. Over the course of the last twenty years historians of Nazi Germany have come to understand that the regime was not so much something that sat on top of German society as something that was embedded in it. This encourages us to think of musicians – and others – not merely as passive objects of the regime’s policies, but as agents in the formulation and implementation of those policies, and to recognise that the participatory dimensions of Nazi rule were in operation in the musical sphere too.

Where the test works slightly less well is in capturing the side of the book that is about audiences. As well as exploring how orchestras changed as institutions, the book is concerned with the question of whether new forms of listening to music emerged among the public. I am interested to explore not only how the transformation of ‘Germans’ into ‘Nazis’ over the 1930s and 1940s can be mapped in the concert hall, but also to think about how the concert hall was a site in which that transformation was pursued. In that way, the book moves beyond thinking about the world of policy and regulation into offering a social and cultural history of the phenomenon of concert-going more generally.

Learn more about The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Gabbott & Jan Zalasiewicz's "Discarded"

Sarah Gabbott is a Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. She researches the fossil record of ancient life and is particularly interested in understanding how fossils form and what they reveal about evolution and ecology. She actively seeks new fossil specimens from across the globe, going on digs to China, South Africa and the Canadian Rockies. She also works in the laboratory analyzing fossils and undertaking grisly experiments to determine how decomposition affects fossilization. Recently, she has turned her attention to the potential fossil record created by human activity, especially thinking about how long our 'artefacts' will endure.

Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. He was formerly a field geologist and palaeontologist with the British Geological Survey, involved in the geological mapping of eastern England and central Wales. His interests include Early Palaeozoic fossils, notably the graptolites (a kind of extinct zooplankton), mud and mudrocks, the Quaternary Ice Ages, the nature of geological time, and the geology made by humans. In recent years he has helped develop the concept of an Anthropocene epoch. He has written many popular science articles and books.

Gabbott and Zalasiewicz applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book Discarded takes the reader, fair and square, into the kind of world – or rather worlds – that we as palaeontologists must navigate in our daily work. It casually spans three and a half billion years, as the story stretches out from the microbes that colonize our clothes today to the first microbes that began to grow on the seafloors of the early Earth. It crosses, too, from living world to the chemical one, as it considers which minerals might crystallize to turn this kind of interaction into tangible, durable fossils, whether of primordial microbial colonies or of our modern fashion items. And it’s also a page that takes us into the mechanisms that keep our planet habitable, in introducing the diatoms, oceanic microplankton that provide much of the oxygen that we breathe.

It's a fair sample, we think, of the story that we have to tell: of how our science of palaeontology can throw a new kind of light on many aspects both of our lives and of the workings of our planet, as we show how even our most fleeting of human fashions may become immortal, leaving fossil impressions in strata that can endure until the end of the Earth.

This single page, mind, gives only a tantalizing glimpse of the extraordinary novelty and diversity of technofossils: those objects that we create for our profit and pleasure, and that have durability built into them by human design as a very effective first step to future fossilization. You have to turn to other pages of our book to consider the palaeontological puzzles posed by objects that range from concrete- built megacities spanning thousands of square kilometres to the almost unbelievably minuscule patterns etched onto the microchip within your computer and mobile phone; and, to consider how this new kind of palaeontology is affected by such things as global warming, sea level rise, and the balance between war and peace.

It’s the whole narrative of the book that shows our motive for writing it: that the countless objects that we so casually discard won’t simply somehow go away, but will all too often persist as a challenging, polluting legacy for our and future human generations. As technofossils begin their long journey to geological posterity, looking at them through a palaeontologist’s eyes may help with the vexing problems that they pose today.

Learn more about Discarded at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Jan Zalasiewicz's The Earth After Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ross Benes's "1999"

Ross Benes is a journalist, market research analyst, and author. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. As an entertainment industry analyst, he’s regularly cited as an expert source by the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and Bloomberg. His books include Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold and Turned On: A Mind-Blowing Investigation into How Sex Has Shaped Our World.

Benes applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times, with the following results:

The 99th page of 1999 covers how Vince McMahon spun untrue stories about WWE’s primary competitors. One passage states:

Because WWE bought out its competition, it owns their video libraries, which WWE uses for documentaries and series about the companies McMahon purchased. These videos can be a fun trip down memory lane with their fantastic archival footage and interviews with prominent sources. But there’s bias because WWE spins stories so it always appears superior.

Readers seeing this page would get a good sense of what that particular chapter is about. But they wouldn’t get a sense of how 90s low culture connects to our modern world. Later on in that chapter I tie WWE’s revisionism to insincere storytelling by current politicians and business leaders. One of those pages, combined with page 99, would provide a strong example of what the book is about. Because 1999 is a group of essays, no single page covers its multiple subjects. But out of the subjects covered in the book, pro wrestling is arguably influencing the world the most. In that regard, page 99 points readers in the right direction of connecting yesterday’s low culture to current events.

Visit Ross Benes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Mutnick's "No Race, No Country"

Deborah Mutnick is professor of English at Long Island University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright, and shared the following:

I love Ford Madox Ford’s theory of opening a book to page ninety-nine to find the quality of the whole revealed. Of course, I had no idea what would be on page 99 of my recently published book until I looked. Ford is right, at least about No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright, except that I have to start with the sentence on page 98, which continues onto 99: “As he recounts in Black Boy, he stayed up all night to read issues of the New Masses after his first visit to the John Reed Club in 1933 and woke up to write ‘I Have Seen Black Hands,’ expressing the core principle in interracial, working-class solidarity that would guide him throughout his life, even when he chafed against it.” I then cite this stanza from the poem:

I am black and I have seen black hands
Raised in fists of revolt, side by side with the white fists of white workers.
And some day—and it is only this which sustains me—
Some day there shall be millions and millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!

Then comes a section break with the subtitle, “The Marxist Threads of Wright’s Sociology,” in which I contest the idea that Wright appropriated the sociological perspective of the Chicago school of urban sociology, according to literary scholar Carla Cappetti, thus attesting to the “1930s dying movement” of US Communism (40). To the contrary, not only did sociology during the Cold War fall into line with US policy to equate communism with totalitarianism and fascism, a perspective Wright explored and ultimately rejected in his 1953 novel The Outsider, but also the resurgence of Marxist sociology in the 1960s countered that narrative with a critique that he would have shared. For Wright, who remained a Marxist for the rest of his life, the Chicago school of sociology offered useful tools of inquiry, but as was always the case with him, he approached them critically, taking what he needed to pursue his own quest for a more just, egalitarian world.

Learn more about No Race, No Country at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judith Weisenfeld's "Black Religion in the Madhouse"

Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her books include New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, winner of the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions.

Weisenfeld applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Black Religion in the Madhouse describes the transition in the diagnostic categories for mental illness in early twentieth-century US psychiatry from mania and melancholy to dementia praecox and manic-depressive psychosis, the latter categories proposed by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. To illustrate the change, I present the case of Charles D., an African American laborer who was admitted to St. Elisabeths Hospital in Washington DC in 1905, diagnosed with acute insanity caused by “religious excitement,” discharged from the hospital and readmitted the same year. On readmission, he was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox. While the application of these diagnostic categories was not limited to African Americans, Charles’s case underscores the book’s argument about the prominence of “religious excitement” as a listed cause of insanity for African American patients in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and signals the incorporation of these ideas into the new disease categories, even as the language of “religious excitement” fades away.

On page 99 I write:

As white American psychiatrists embraced Kraepelin’s new disease category in the early twentieth century, they mobilized ideas about race and religion in diagnosing Black patients and used their clinical experiences to theorize more generally about race, religion, and mental illness in ways that linked discourses from the older diagnostic system to the new.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book as it describes a critical turning point in the history of race, religion, and American psychiatry with the adoption of Kraepelin’s system. I argue that, with the turn from long-standing ideas among white American psychiatrists about “racial traits” to a system they presented as more rigorously scientific, sedimented assumptions about Black people’s propensity for superstition and religious excess persisted. In fact, in the early twentieth-century studies white psychiatrists published exploring the incidence of dementia praecox among Black patients, they often highlighted “primitive” religious expression as a helpful diagnostic tool.

At the end of page 99, I note that Emil Kraepelin read work by white American psychiatrists on dementia praecox among African Americans and took their accounts of racialized mental instability as authoritative. While not a central part of the book’s argument, it points to the influence of white physicians’ ideas about African American religion and mental normalcy in psychiatric circles.

Visit Judith Weisenfeld's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jordan Thomas's "When It All Burns"

Jordan Thomas is an anthropologist and former Los Padres hotshot wildland firefighter. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, and The Drift. Thomas is a Marshall Scholar with graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge and Durham University. He is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California.

Thomas applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, with the following results:

From page 99:

“And so we waited, hoping for an initial attack. An initial attack, or IA, is the zenith of fire suppression operations, allowing us to be the first crew on the fire’s edge. “That’s what hotshot’s live for,” Scheer told me.

Then, just when an initial attack seemed a distant dream, when the routine of running and practicing and pranking had softened my nerves, and when it seemed inevitable that we would sulk home as faux heroes— just then, we heard a noise. It started in a high pitch before dropping in frequency, zapping us all like an electric shock coming from the radio in Aoki’s truck. A voice followed the sound, announcing a lighting fire in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. Within thirty seconds, we were gone.

* ** *

The American West is full of pyrophiles, or fire lovers— species of plants, animals, and fungi whose existence depends upon their ability to follow ignitions. Of these species, the fire beetle is perhaps the most tenacious. These beetles are black, the size of a fingernail, and are equipped with heat receptors the width of a human hair. Their receptors hold liquid that expands when absorbing radiant heat, allowing the beetles to detect flames from over one hundred miles away. Wildfires act like magnets, pulling the beetles in swarms of millions, where they mate amid the flames, waxy bellies dispelling heat as they bore into charred wood to lay their eggs. In California in the 1940s, football games were occasionally disrupted when the collective embers of spectators’ cigarettes attracted beetles that, finding—"

If readers open to page 99, they’ll get a strong sense of the book’s overall approach. I move between close-up scenes of life on a hotshot crew—its rhythms, language, tensions, and jokes—and wider reflections on fire as an ecological and political force. That pairing is at the heart of the book: the human experience of wildfire nested inside the broader systems that create and respond to it. And I like to slip in cool facts and details—like fire beetles drawn to flames from over a hundred miles away. This, of course, is a metaphor for what we were doing as wildland firefighters who had traveled some 800 miles to be present in the Southwest when the monsoons brought lightning fires. The difference was, we followed the cycle of fire in order to break it.

As the fire season progresses and the fires grow more dangerous and difficult, the interplay between lived experience and broader context deepens. The book sinks into the historical forces and power structures that have made 21st-century fire so violent—centuries of suppression policy, colonial land management, and extractive economic systems. At the same time, I keep the story grounded in my crew and our lives on the fireline, where humor, banter, and friendship coexist with exhaustion, stress, and absurdity. That balance is the rhythm of the book, just as it was the rhythm of the fire season.

Learn more about When It All Burns at the Riverhead Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liz Kalaugher's "The Elephant in the Room"

Liz Kalaugher is a science journalist and the coauthor of Furry Logic: The Physics of Animal Life. Her writing has appeared in BBC Focus magazine, the Guardian, New Scientist, and Physics World, among other outlets. She lives in Bristol, UK.

Kalaugher applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Elephant in the Room: How to Stop Making Ourselves and Other Animals Sick, and shared the following:

From page 99:

‘People take their dogs out and think it’s funny that they chase prairie dogs,’ says Fraser. ‘That may be entertaining but your dog may come home with a plague-infested flea. Why take that chance?’

It’s by chance, too, that Kimberly Fraser of the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center’s words fall on page 99 of The Elephant in the Room: How to Stop Making Ourselves and Other Animals Sick. They’re deep in the chapter about black-footed ferrets, which feed on prairie dogs and have been plagued - if you’ll excuse the pun - by not one but two diseases. So much so that these animals only survive thanks to a lucky find by a Wyoming farmer’s dog.

For this book I’d rate the Page 99 Test at six out of ten. As it’s near the end of a chapter, page 99 reveals ways people are counteracting some of our earlier damage to ferret health: by feeding prairie dogs peanut butter laced with plague vaccine, and releasing captive-bred ferrets into the wild. Almost every chapter finishes with solutions for the species it covers; the final chapter examines strategies for safeguarding the health of all animals, including ourselves. Also typical is the inclusion of interviews with experts, who tell us why they work with wildlife and what it’s like to be out in the field.

Because it’s focused on solutions, page 99 spends less time than other pages describing a wild animal and its habits, habitat and challenges, as well as less time detailing how humans inadvertently harmed that animal’s health. For the black-footed ferret, this harm began in the early 20th century when we transported the bacteria that cause plague to North America via a flea-infested rat onboard a ship from Hong Kong. Other chapters look at other ways that humans have exacerbated disease - farming, habitat loss, trade and climate change.

What’s more, the chapter around page 99 concerns a mammal whereas some of the others cover birds, frogs and, briefly, shellfish. When it comes to setting, page 99 is based in North America, whilst other stories trot the globe from Antarctica to the Arctic via Australia, South America, Europe and Asia.

In essence, page 99 gives a flavour of the book but not the whole taste.

Visit Liz Kalaugher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Furry Logic: The Physics of Animal Life by Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bonnie Yochelson's "Too Good to Get Married"

Bonnie Yochelson is a former Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York and an established historian of New York City’s photographic history. Her notable works include Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half, Alfred Stieglitz New York, and Berenice Abbott: Changing New York.

Yochelson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen, and reported the following:

The top half of page 99 shows an 1893 self-portrait of Alice Austen. The caption reads, “When Alice left for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago – the farthest she had been from home – she took a self-portrait with Punch [her dog].” The bottom half of the page describes the photographs she took at the Exposition, two of which are shown on page 100.

The Page 99 Test works very well for this book! The page features one of Austen’s many carefully considered self-portraits, and it demonstrates the key features of the book’s design: illustrations were placed in close relation to the relevant text, yet the descriptive captions allow the reader to follow the story independent of the text. The quality of the paper and the printing, which were subsidized, is also apparent.

As it happens, this photograph marks a major turning point in Austen’s life. The first full sentence on the page suggests as much: “The purposeful young woman in the smart traveling suit is a far cry from the feminine charmer in lace decollete and elbow length gloves of the previous summer.” In the 1880s, Austen was a social butterfly, playing tennis, and going swimming and boating, with a full social calendar of dances, concert, dinners and balls, both at home and on vacation. What she called “the larky life” was the primary subject of her photographs. As she and her friends approached 25 in 1890, the pleasure of these social rituals gave way to the expectation of marriage and children, a rocky road for most of them. At this point, Austen briefly took up the idea of professional photography, which she first attempted at the Chicago Exposition.

Visit Bonnie Yochelson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling's "The Ghost Lab"

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a freelance journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting. He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, USA Today, Popular Science, Atavist Magazine, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Associated Press, and elsewhere. His books include A Libertarian Walks into a Bear and If It Sounds Like a Quack....

Hongoltz-Hetling applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Ghost Lab opens with a discussion of the Betty and Barney Hill Case, one of the most famous alien abduction reports in American history. The top of the page includes some of the evidence that supported the Hills' claims"

There were also several tantalizingly physical pieces of evidence: circular shiny spots on the back of their car that caused a compass needle to go haywire; a pink powder and rips on Betty’s dress; scuffs on the top of Barney’s shoes, allegedly caused when he was dragged up the ramp of the spacecraft; and a star map that Betty drew from memory that bore a resemblance to an actual star system about which she had no knowledge.

But then I transition to some of the reasons that skeptics point to not believe the Hills encountered aliens, after which I summarize the little-known path the couple took after their famous encounter:

Betty came to believe that she could send mental messages to the aliens, and encourage them to pilot their craft to a specific location. A network of legitimate scientists and UFO enthusiasts formed around the Hills. They spent several nights at Betty’s family farm in Kingston, to see if aliens that Betty had invited would show up. They never did.

I then transition to a sympathetically-described scene about Barney's death at their New England home.

The Page 99 Test does shed some light on what readers who pick up The Ghost Lab can expect -- the book is chock full of weird and colorful tales of the paranormal told from an objective viewpoint that is respectful and sympathetic of the "experiencer," but doesn't shy from information that contradicts the veracity of their outlandish claims.

But the test would also lead a browser to walk away with some misunderstandings about the book. I have to admit that the prose on this particular page is fairly straightforward and businesslike; but the book as a whole is suffused with humor and a more dramatic writing style. It also gives the impression that the book is primarily some sort of history, when in reality it's a modern tale about a group of ghost hunters, psychics and alien abductees, presented with historical and cultural context.

I hope that The Ghost Lab will appeal to believers and skeptics alike; the main characters come together with a shared, noble quest to inject science into the paranormal fields that they've become so interested in. They spend 9 years having all sorts of fun and bizarre misadventures, including an undercover mission to liberate the ghosts being held in a former insane asylum, communicating with aliens aboard a UFO, and a hunt for Bigfoot on the forested mountains of New Hampshire.The characters are colorful and relatable, right up until the moment that they do something too strange to be believed. While I've better appreciated the value of the Page 99 Test on my first two books, this one fell a bit flat, suggesting a more sedate journey than the actual ride, which is wild.

Visit Matt Hongoltz-Hetling's website.

The Page 99 Test: If It Sounds Like a Quack....

--Marshal Zeringue

Aviva Briefel's "Ghosts and Things"

Aviva Briefel is Edward Little Professor of the English Language and Literature and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of The Deceivers and The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination.

Briefel applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, with the following results:

I was relieved to find that page 99 captures the book as a whole: it introduces the concept of “exposure,” which I argue was essential to the cultures of Victorian spiritualism and skepticism. (Understandably, I had been somewhat nervous that my book itself would be exposed as failing the Page 99 Test.) One of the recurring themes of Ghosts and Things describes the complex interactions that occurred between those who adamantly believed that material objects could be used to communicate with ghosts during séances and those who were ready to expose spiritualists as frauds.

Page 99 initiates a discussion of how the concept of exposure was applied to the Davenport Brothers, American spiritualists who claimed to be able to interact with spirits by using a wooden cabinet. During their public séances, the brothers sat in the cabinet, which also contained a selection of musical instruments, and asked audience members to tie them with ropes and shut the doors. Spectators would witness spirit manifestations emanating from the closed cabinet, including musical instruments playing and spectral hands reaching out of the cabinet’s aperture. After a while, the doors to the cabinet swung open and the brothers could be seen, freed from their ropes, allegedly through the intervention of spirits. These feats led the Davenports to become renowned mediums in the United States and Britain. On page 99, I preview the various types of exposure that would befall the brothers a few months after journeying to England in 1865, both through the destruction of their cabinet during performances in Liverpool, Huddersfield, and Leeds, and through the appropriation of their trick by “anti-spiritualist” magicians who used their own versions of the cabinet to discredit the brothers.

Both of these strategies for exposing the Davenport Brothers reveal the tenuousness of the term “exposure” itself. When an angry audience rushed the stage and destroyed the cabinet on February 15, 1865, at St. George’s Hall in Liverpool, they did not find any hidden mechanisms or tricks. And yet, newspaper headlines announced the “Defeat and Exposure of the Davenport Brothers,” raising the question of what exposure without proof of fraud might mean. Given that the Davenports’ humiliation emphasized the breaking of the cabinet, does the term take on other meanings, such as an “exposure” to the elements? Or does it represent a loss of value through an unpackaging, not dissimilar to what happens now to action figures or dolls when taken out of their original containers? Likewise, the repetition of the Davenports’ acts by anti-Spiritualists such as Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and John Nevil Maskelyne also signal the instability of the idea of exposure. The replication of cabinets on stages throughout Europe and the United States blurred the line between homage and parody, as well as between the role of skeptics and believers in spiritualism, one of the main claims of my book.

In the rest of the chapter, I discuss the ways in which the Davenports themselves might have eventually been subject to yet another form of exposure. I contend that it is possible they borrowed their act from Henry Box Brown, who famously escaped from enslavement in March 1849 by arranging to have himself shipped in a wooden container from Richmond to Philadelphia. He subsequently went on to reenact this feat in front of audiences, including in England, when in May 1851, he traveled in his original box by from Bradford to Leeds, to the acclaim of large audiences. He later undertook his own anti-Spiritualist performances, seeking to expose the Davenport Brothers, which I argue might point to another meaning of exposure, this time of the brothers’ secretive adoption of a “gimmick” that Brown himself had devised. The dizzying significations of the term “exposure” are one example of the ways in which spiritualism offered new terminologies for grasping the visible and invisible worlds of Victorian culture.

Learn more about Ghosts and Things at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Hartmann's "Making the Invisible Real"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Kate Hartmann's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

A. Tunç Şen's "Forgotten Experts"

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

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

From page 99:

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Gubser's "Their Future"

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Hartman's "Karl Marx in America"

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

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

From page 99:

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

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

Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Frank Krutnik's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Page 99 Test: America's Church.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greta Lynn Uehling's "Decolonizing Ukraine"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Greta Uehling's website.

The Page 99 Test: Everyday War.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Tiffany D. Joseph's "Not All In"

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

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

From page 99:

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

How Language Hinders the Medical Encounter

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

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

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

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

Visit Tiffany D. Joseph's website.

The Page 99 Test: Race on the Move.

--Marshal Zeringue

Justin Eckstein's "Sound Tactics"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue