Brahim El Guabli's "Desert Imaginations"

Brahim El Guabli is an associate professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and an associate professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences, and reported the following:

I wrote Desert Imaginations to explain why what happens in deserts is almost expected to unfold in them. Given that the abundant literature about arid lands has not really been able to furnish a concept that can connect its variant threads, I have defined Saharanism as the ideology that undergirds the myriad ways deserts are perceived and acted upon. Accordingly, Saharanism is always at work in the manner deserts are talked about and (mis)used whether we are thinking about their exploitation for extractive industries and their use for storage of lethal waste or whether our attention focuses on approaching them as loci for experimentation with new technologies or as areas outside the realm of law and ethics where anything can be undertaken.

Interestingly, this except from page 99 is the start of my chapter on “Experimental Saharanism,” which an important theme that runs throughout the book:

In April 1927, botanist Walter T. Swingle, who worked for the US Department of Agriculture, was invited by French authorities to participate in an investigation into Fusarium oxysporum’s infestation of palm groves in the Moroccan desert. Swingle, who happened to be affiliated with the University of Lyon, was asked by his French contacts to accompany them to Figuig and Boudnib, which had a reputation for the high quality of their dates, but whose groves suffered from this illness that made palms wilt and die. This proved to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Swingle to set foot on what he called “the single date planting place in all Africa.” In addition to learning about Bayoud disease, Swingle observed how local people tended to the groves, pollinated the trees, and cleaned them in preparation for the harvest season. During his time in Boudnib, he met a tribal leader who gave him eleven Medjool palm offshoots that he sent to Washington, DC. Once there, the offshoots were quarantined on a Native American reservation in the Nevada desert for a period of two years. A hundred years later, Swingle can be said to not only have imported a new plant but also to have placed the Sahara at the heart of the multibillion-dollar Medjool (pronounced Mejhoul/ljihl in Morocco) date economy in the US. Swingle’s story is only one manifestation of a practice that I propose to call “experimental Saharanism,” which subsumes all endeavors to test new ideas and undertakings in desert spaces.

Page 99 of Desert Imaginations gives a clear idea about what the book is about in two ways. Firstly, it demonstrates the extractive and experimental as well as the inter- desert nature of Saharanism through Swingle’s and his contemporaries’ endeavors to transplant plants and husbandry from other deserts to the American west. Secondly, the passage takes us to France, Morocco, Algeria, and the United States, indicating the imbrication of histories of Saharanism and the existence of an trans-desert grammar that the book delineates to help readers understand why deserts across different geographical

Learn more about Desert Imaginations at the University of California Press website.

Read an interview with Brahim El Guabli about Desert Imaginations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Adamson's "Projecting America"

Patrick Adamson is Associate Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Editor at Open Screens, and Assistant Editor at Film Journal.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Projecting America: The Epic Western and National Mythmaking in 1920s Hollywood, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds me moving between two major case studies from Chapter Two of Projecting America, wrapping up a discussion of North of 36 (1924)—a film that looked to present the first post–Civil War cattle drive from Texas to Kansas in 1867 as a decisive episode in America’s national story—and beginning one centered around The Pony Express (1925)—which looked to do similar for the eponymous mail service. A heading, “‘Saving California for the Union’: The Pony Express (1925)”, divides the two and hints at what they look to do with their respective topics. As is indicated here, both the cattle drive linking the postbellum South with markets to the north and the express riders racing west to California against the backdrop of a looming Civil War are presented on film as episodes where “the very course of national history is at stake”. In turn, page 99 signals why 1920s Hollywood was attempting to contribute to, and even reshape, popular understandings of what was then widely seen as the most important period in American history, quoting Billboard magazine’s assessment of North of 36’s success: “That the public is not supporting socalled [sic] sex pictures, society dramas, stories of beer-drinking revels, petting parties and whatnot overloaded with Boccaccio frankness is borne out in blazing proof.”

Here we see why the Page 99 Test works well for Projecting America. One of my book’s larger arguments is that silent-era Hollywood turned to epic Western production in a moment in which the morals of its films and stars were under scrutiny, and the chapter this page comes from is a detailed exploration of what this actually entailed in terms of film production and promotion. My quotations and framing here give a sense of how this effort was received and what the intent behind it was: by linking the nation’s most pervasive form of mass entertainment to a stated aspiration to educate the public, the new American film capital positioned their historical films about the frontier as interventions in the period’s pressing debates around cinema and, in particular, its social influence.

The result was that epic Westerns were acclaimed by many at the time as a new, distinctly American way of engaging with history that could unite diverse filmgoers via inspiring lessons in the “making” of the nation. What the Page 99 Test highlights is that, in doing this, the film industry of the 1920s actively looked to expand standard narratives of Westward expansion, presenting those responsible for the Texan cattle drive and the express riders delivering news to the frontier as “pioneers” comparable to those who had traversed the Oregon Trail in The Covered Wagon (1923)—the film that inaugurated the cycle. This was a major aim of my study. While it is tempting to assume that the film industry simply restated the favorite myths of American audiences, the idea that cinema could offer a new way of engaging with history—visual, wide-reaching, and understood across linguistic and national divides—was a crucial part of these discussions. Revisiting this page brought me back to the simple questions that first guided my research: what did it mean to make a successful historical film in the first decades of Hollywood, and why did it matter?

Learn more about Projecting America at the University of Oklahoma Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert E.C. Davis's "Lieutenants and Light"

Robert E. C. Davis spent twenty-five years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps and retired in 2008 as the colonel of an artillery regiment. He holds a BS in geography from the University of Utah, an MA in national security and strategic studies from the College of Naval Warfare, an MS in geographic information systems technology from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in remote sensing and earth observation from Penn State University. He is certified as a mapping scientist by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

Davis applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Lieutenants and Light: Mapping the US Army Heliograph Networks in Late Nineteenth-Century Arizona and New Mexico, with the following results:

On page 99 there is a map of the Lyda Spring heliograph station. On the map, the station is located on elevated terrain west of the small village of Mule Creek, a village that still exists. A single sightline connects the station to the heliograph station at Siggins’s Ranch. Nearby features include Mule Spring and the Lyda ranch house, both situated along Mule Creek. Present-day Highway 78 is labeled to the north. An inset map shows the station’s position within the broader heliograph network.

The Page 99 Test reflects the character of the book. The map shows how a remote corner of New Mexico fit into a broader system of military communication and introduces the heliograph, a form of wireless communication that uses reflected sunlight to send messages. It also underscores a central feature of the project, since much of the book focuses on mapping each station and interpreting its role within the wider network. Page 99 offers a small view of the system, yet it represents the larger story.

The Lyda Spring (also called Mule Spring and Lydia Spring) was one of the most difficult heliograph stations for me to find (even then, its location is only speculation, but based on the best available data and analysis). This station is part of a group of heliograph stations extending up the San Francisco River valley, all emplaced in late August 1886. Alone and off to the west, the Lyda Spring station was placed almost three weeks later after considerable difficulty and effort by the soldiers tasked to establish it. I surmised that the connecting station at Siggins’s Ranch was not positioned to support a station to the west, which likely would have been the case if this site had been part of the original plan. Nevertheless, this station, emplaced on September 15, 1886, eleven days after the surrender of Geronimo, as well as another complete line of stations running to the east from nearby Fort Bayard to Fort Stanton, built by Lieutenant John J. Pershing in November, shows that the Army’s interest in the heliograph networks did not wane as the Apache War ended. The heliograph networks emerged from the 1886 campaign as an important communication tool that enhanced the Army’s ability to effectively command and control tactical forces and secured a lasting place within the Army’s field practices into the early twentieth century.

Visit Robert E.C. Davis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Al Filreis's "The Classroom and the Crowd"

Al Filreis is Kelly Family Professor of English, founding faculty director of the Kelly Writers House, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, codirector of PennSound, and publisher of Jacket2 magazine, all at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent books include 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (2021), and he is the host of the podcast PoemTalk.

Filreis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book happens to be the final page of a chapter about a massive open (free) online course (a MOOC, called “ModPo”) that drew tens of thousands of people to it during the lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why did they come? What did they want from this (already existing) online community set up for the purpose of collaborative close readings of poems? (Yes, poems!) Well, they came because they were lonely. Because (for those in schools at the time) classrooms didn’t or didn’t yet know how to accommodate remote, quarantined citizens. Because they needed the kind of connection some of them were used to having in conversational spaces (living rooms, restaurants, coffee shops, and seminar rooms). Page 99 describes and defines a variation of MOOC—the weird and iconoclastic “bMOOC.” The bMOOC pushes back against instruction-led learning. In bMOOCs the learners shape the material from which they are to learn. Ken X., one of the 90,000 ModPo people, was alone one night. He entered the ModPo discussion forums and was worried that no one was there. It was late. He needed to talk. He pondered the meaning of loneliness, and the poem he chose to discuss, seemingly by himself, was about loneliness. The primary teaching choice of teachers who set up bMOOCs is to create a learner-centered course that includes content meant to disorient learners. Ken learned to live with disorientation. And, by the way, he wasn’t alone. I was there that night too. We talked. To this day, I don’t know where he was located, nor what his personal situation was. Nonetheless, I felt a connection to him, because…weren’t we all at least a little bit lonely. In a successful online community, no one is lonely for long. ModPo is not truly a bMOOC but on page 99 we happen to encounter an example of what an open online course could look like if we all took seriously the idea that a crowd can not just fit into a classroom but indeed can assume the role of teacher.

Learn more about The Classroom and the Crowd at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rebecca Jumper Matheson's "Artisans and Designers"

Rebecca Jumper Matheson is a fashion historian. She is the author of The Sunbonnet: An American Icon in Texas and Young Originals: Emily Wilkens and the Teen Sophisticate, among other publications. She is an instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in the Fashion and Textile Studies MA program.

Matheson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps is part of a discussion of Phelps Associates’ 1944 American Fashion Critics’ (Coty) Award win, and their contribution to the fashion show during the awards ceremony.

About three-fourths of the page is Figure 4.3, a page from the Coty Awards program, with my caption and the image credits to the Coty Archives and the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Special Collections and College Archives (SPARC). The awards program shows photographs of the Coty Award statue by Malvina Hoffman, as well as photos and bios of the award winners: “Claire McCardell, Casual Clothes Designer,” “Sally Victor, Millinery Designer,” and “Phelps Associates, Accessory Designers.” At the bottom of the program, there is text explaining the award criteria, “These Awards are made to the most outstanding American fashion designers who, in the opinion of the Jury, have best interpreted the fashion trend in 1943, under the restrictive influences of war-time economy.”

At the top of page 99 there are two partial paragraphs of my own text about the types of bags that Phelps Associates showed at the Coty Awards, including a bag “of worsted surcingle webbing with llama hide gussets,” with my observation that this combined a woolen textile used in horse harness with leather not in demand for military use. The second paragraph begins a discussion of how the Coty Awards publicized Phelps Associates’ production of leather shoulder bags that met the WWII-era women’s uniform specifications for branches of the US military, including WACs, WAVEs, SPARs, and Marines.

Between my text, and the text and images of the Coty Awards program that is reproduced on page 99, readers are introduced to several important themes in the Phelpses’ work and in Artisans and Designers. Firstly, the working partnership between Elizabeth and William Phelps is evident in their joint award, photo, bio, and even the name of the business. This page also highlights the Phelpses’ work in leather shoulder bags inspired by historical military forms and the hands-free freedom these bags give their wearers. Another theme is the way that Phelps Associates reused vintage metalwork in their pieces—a concept that was an innovative way to handle wartime scarcity, but also resonates with today’s interest in sustainability. Readers will also learn about the influence of hand-worked horse harness on the Phelpses’ work, and the related theme of the Phelpses’ interest in hand craft traditions from both the US and Europe. Finally, the page emphasizes that William and Elizabeth Phelps designed from the perspective of being makers themselves, and that they personally worked out the initial design samples for their accessories.

However, 1944 is only at the beginning of William and Elizabeth Phelps’s years in American fashion. Reading page 99 alone, the reader would not know about later developments in their careers, from workshop moves (New York to Pennsylvania to North Carolina) to the introduction of sportswear in the post-war period.

In terms of my methods, what the reader can see from this page is research using archival materials such as ephemera, but readers would miss out on the object-based research that is also key to the book. Each chapter of Artisans and Designers is anchored by an introductory object or objects—extant garments or accessories that I have studied in person, each object telling more of the story of Phelps Associates and their clients.

Learn more about Artisans and Designers at the The Kent State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Edward Huth's "A Sense of Space"

John Edward Huth is the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard University. He has done research in experimental particle physics since 1980 and is currently a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). He participated in the discovery of the top quark and the Higgs boson and is the author of The Lost Art of Finding Our Way.

Huth applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Sense of Space: A Local's Guide to a Flat Earth, the Edge of the Cosmos, and Other Curious Places, with the following results:

Page 99 in A Sense of Space is the close of chapter 5 on spatial and cultural/social connections in Dante's Divine Comedy. It represents a segue from the end of that chapter to the next chapter on the concept of extraterrestrial intelligence that emerged with the invention of the telescope.

Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already—like
a wheel revolving uniformly—by
the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

(Par. 33 133–45)

Here, we have the final writing of le stelle.

Three centuries after Dante, the telescope was invented and revealed structures associated with the planets, like the rings of Saturn, phases of Venus, and the moons of Jupiter. Observations triumphed where pure reason could not solve riddles, which spelled the end of Aristotle’smodel of space.

But our inclination to project human-like qualities onto space persisted. Where Dante populated the heavens with virtuous souls, some astronomers contemplate whether the universe could be home to intelligent beings like us.

This captures the theme of the book quite well: that social concepts are interwoven with spatial concepts. Here is an additional detail. Dante was very taken by astronomy, and the last word(s) in each of the books (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) is "the stars" (le stelle). I wove this into A Sense of Space as well. The first words are "the stars" in my preface and "the stars" at the end of the concluding chapter. Stars also feature prominently throughout the book in various guises: Ancient Greek astronomy, astrology, cosmology, and the fundamental forces of nature.

The book examines the interplay between visions of space and associated social/cultural manifestations over the eons from the Ancient Egyptians to modern physics and cosmology. I lead off with the cognitive psychology underpinning the interplay. Dante adopts Aristotle's model of the universe, with the earth at the center and spheres of the moon, sun, and planets in the heavens surrounding. I explore his spatial/cultural connections in the context of the Divine Comedy. Likewise the astronomers later speculated on whether the planets were home to intelligent beings. HG Wells, partly inspired by an astronomy report of a strange light from Mars, wrote War of the Worlds, which was a jump-off point of our modern culture of extraterrestrial aliens.

Learn more about A Sense of Space at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rob Miller's "The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low"

Rob Miller is the cofounder and former co-owner of Bloodshot Records.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low: A Curious Life in Independent Music, and reported the following:

I think Mr. Ford Madox Ford would be reasonably pleased with his hypothesis in this instance.

Page 99 finds the reader in the latter chapters of the first half (or, as I call it, this being a book about music, “Side A”) as I stumble along the circuitous path that led me to start an independent record label, Bloodshot, that became internationally known as a home for a curious blend of punk and roots music. Jumping back and forth in time between an adolescence in the 70s that looked upon what is now “classic rock” with a mixture of horror and boredom, and the origin story of the label in mid-90s, the book to this point devotes itself to the important idea of finding freedom, identity, and community in the music of the underground. In my colossal leap from comedy records and AM radio baseball, to hardcore punk rock---skipping any incremental steps in between, I discovered an openness to exploration, without foreknowledge or judgement. It was in this manner that I started to hear whispers and echoes of the music that came before, the weird underbelly of Americana. One particular band that had a powerful impact was The Cramps and their song “Human Fly.”

The Cramps were the mysterious distant uncle I secretly wished would come to family reunions. He’d tell stories about knife fights and scoring with showgirls, hand me a shrunken head he bought at a bazaar somewhere in the East and then wink, give a boozy, smoky laugh, and let me take a pull off his flask if Mom wasn’t looking. And while both sides of the family of rock and roll sang about the virtues of wanting to kiss your sweet lips, the Cramps aimed a little lower, and a little closer, to the truth than most spoke of in decent company. “Human Fly” was a baptism in the murky waters that course past us unseen, but not unfelt. Thanks to that pulsing, aural equivalent of an opening rusty crypt door, I have taken the road more strange and less popular, and that has made all the difference.

After an ornamental section divider in the middle of the page, I describe the insidious creep of tribalism and intolerance I started to experience in the punk rock scene, the very qualities I was trying to escape in the first place.

By the end of high school, the bloom had, as they say, fallen off the rose of much of punk’s promise. A friend of mine once remarked that hardcore had the shelf life of unpasteurized buttermilk, and many aspects of a scene that had arisen from a dissatisfaction with conformity quickly slid into the age-old traps of tribalism and self-destruction. One orthodoxy was traded for another; boots and braces became the new IZODS and boat shoes. Hair too short at school was now not short enough at shows. I’d been to this movie before, and I didn’t get into punk and hardcore only to feel out of place again.

At the bottom of page 99, I draw a throughline from my distaste for conformity and the stifling expectations of codes and rules to my reflexive impulse to blaze my own trail.

Worse, there was an emerging absolutism regarding the music itself. It was hardcore or it wasn’t. There were “right” albums to have, and “wrong” albums to have, “right” shows to go to and “wrong” shows to go to. Wearisome What is versus What is not arguments of authenticity--which I’d encounter ad nauseum in a different context later with Bloodshot--overtook the conversation with Talmudic gravity.

While page 99 does not deal with the any of the specifics of the growth and development of Bloodshot Records, nor the issue of the business of independent labels in general that takes up much of “Side B,” it is an informative glimpse into the tone and beating heart of the book, and highlights a theme that reverberates throughout. That is, as another band I cite as an influence, Crass, put it, “if you don’t like the rules they make, refuse to play their game.” Be it in the usual pairing of punk and country, or in the way I chose to run the business.

Visit Rob Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arnoud S. Q. Visser's "On Pedantry"

Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history. His books include A Cultural History of Fame in the Renaissance, Reading Augustine in the Reformation, and Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image.

Visser applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All, and shared the following:

Pardon the pedantry, but my answer is both yes and no.

Yes, page 99 does capture the heart of the book: the idea that flashy displays of knowledge and cleverness have often provoked intense irritation. On this page, we find ourselves in medieval Europe, where the tensions between Christianity and classical learning come into focus. We meet Vilgard of Ravenna, a grammar teacher living around the turn of the millennium, who was so enchanted by the Latin classics that it cost him his life. His studies had made him obsessive and arrogant. One night, demons appeared to him in his sleep, disguised as his literary heroes Virgil, Horace and Juvenal, promising him a share of their glory. From then on, Vilgard could not stop preaching the virtues of the ancients. He was swiftly condemned for heresy and reportedly burned at the stake. Beyond its historical interest, the story of Vilgard also reflects the book’s style. Anecdotes, vignettes and images show in a lively and hopefully entertaining way how “know-it-alls” have been mocked and feared, resented and punished over the centuries.

Still, there’s also a case for “no.” Page 99 does not show the book’s historical range. Know-it-alls come in many forms, not just teachers obsessed with grammar or classical literature. The bigger picture is about how intellect and irritation have always gone together. Beyond religious motives, there are social and economic reasons at play too. On Pedantry aims to offer a kind of historical therapy, making its readers aware of enduring patterns. Seen across the long sweep of history, these patterns help us understand why hostility to intellectuals is still so familiar today.

Learn more about On Pedantry at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Hall's "Power and Powerlessness"

Edward Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. He works on three main research areas: political ethics, liberal political thought, and realist political theory.

Hall applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty-First Century, with the following results:

Page 99 of Power and Powerlessness is near the beginning of Chapter 4, which focuses on torture. On this page, I distinguish between three reasons why agents of the state torture. These are, first, to intimidate torture victims or third parties; second, to force confessions; and third, to secure valuable intelligence. I also remind readers that all three forms of torture occur in liberal-democratic regimes today.

Does page 99 give readers a good idea of the whole work?

Not really. The central aim of my book is to argue that the liberalism of fear – the negative and cautionary vein of liberal thinking, most famously articulated by Judith Shklar, which urges us to prioritize the avoidance of public cruelty – has something significant to teach us about politics in the twenty-first century. This matters because many prominent critics dismiss the liberalism of fear as an outdated form of “Cold War liberalism” that has little to say beyond blandly insisting that liberal democratic regimes are less terrible than their authoritarian alternatives. In contrast, I suggest that because contemporary liberal democracies invest people with coercive power that is routinely used in cruel ways, liberals today should be preoccupied by the question of how public cruelty can be mitigated.

The book is split into two parts. In the first part (chapters 1-3), I offer a detailed reconstruction of Shklar’s writings on the liberalism of fear and offer a defence of the liberalism of fear from various objections. In the second part (chapters 4-7), I employ this perspective to reflect on four issues of pressing political concern that all liberals should be deeply perturbed by today: torture, policing, immigration control, and hate speech. Here I depart from Shklar and engage with these issues in first-order terms, offering novel arguments about what the liberalism of fear suggests for these vitally important political matters.

Page 99 is, therefore, near the beginning of Part Two where my argument pivots. This is a crucial moment in the overall argument. However, page 99 does not typify what the book is about. Does Power and Powerlessness therefore fail the Page 99 Test? Perhaps not. Even though this discussion of torture is not very revealing of the overall project, I hope the page does reveal something about the quality of the book.

Learn more about Power and Powerlessness at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan S. Jones's "Opium Slavery"

Jonathan S. Jones, an assistant professor of history at James Madison University, is a historian of the United States Civil War and Reconstruction era (1820-1920) as well as American medicine and health.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis, and reported the following:

Page 99 presents evidence that the Civil War contributed significantly to the spread of opiate addiciton in the 19th century United States. This page presents evidence that the contemprary Americans blamed a surge in addiction on the war, while also noting that many Americans used drugs for a variety of reasons that were not connected to the lingering affects of war.

The Page 99 Test works moderately well for Opium Slavery. It gets at half the argument—that the Civil War caused an epidemic of opiate addiction among veterans. However, the other takeaways from the book—how addiction negatively affected veterans, what they did about it, and the epidemic’s lasting significance—are missing here. Perhaps that’s unsurprising, considering the multifaceted nature of America’s first opioid crisis. But certainly, the Page 99 Test gives a good snapshot of the book.

Opium Slavery is the first comprehensive history of the Civil War’s opioid epidemic. Schlolars and other interested folks, like medical doctors, have long been aware that some Civil War veterans used drugs. But we’ve never been able to guage the scope of addiction, let alone its lived experience or consequences. By reconstructing this history, we get the most detailed portrait of 19th-century drug users to date and a tragic view of the Civil War’s unexpected legacies.

Visit Jonathan S. Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Justin Randolph's "Mississippi Law"

Justin Randolph is Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history. His work has appeared in Southern Cultures and the Journal of Southern History; he has received prizes such as the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. His current research includes an oral history project with the first Black police officers after Jim Crow segregation as well as a cultural history of the Taser.

Randolph applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Mississippi Law drops readers into a local fight against America's regime of Jim Crow apartheid during the 1950s. In some ways I think it provides a fairly accurate snapshot of the book. The ingenuity of everyday people. A scope of violence too easily described as "segregation." Activist recognition of the police as part of a system of inequality. These are all historic truths I emphasize on page 99 and throughout the book. Yet this page should also leave readers wanting more.

Page 99 falls in Chapter 5, “The Cattleman’s Massive Resistance.” This chapter establishes the connections between new forms of rural economic power and so-called massive white resistance, the racist fight against a new phase of Black freedom struggles. Page 99 begins in Columbus, Mississippi, a small city by rural Southern standards. And there we meet two important activists, Emmett Stringer and Flora Ghist Stringer. The page covers the years in their lives between World War II and ends in 1954, the year the US Supreme Court invalidated racial segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. Black Mississippians like the Stringers drove civil rights movements in a time before civil rights icons like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. took center stage. The page shows us a world of possible futures. Will white elites simply implement Brown and desegregate the schools? Will Black Mississippians be allowed to continue to register to vote in larger numbers? Will segregationists find enough pro-segregation Black leaders to attack civil rights activists on the government’s behalf? The page ends in a moment when the future was far from certain.

None of these imaginable outcomes came to pass, and so page 99 should leave folks wanting more. Readers who continue in Chapter 5 and the rest of the book will find how the everyday campaigns against Black human rights came from all directions. Bankers canceled activist lines of credit. Insurance brokers refused to renew activist policies. Civil rights activists turned on each other. Police and courts amplified their criminalization of Black life in historic proportions. And yes, as the chapter title implies, Mississippi’s beef cattlemen frequently led the effort. One created the global white Citizens’ Council movement. Another expanded the state police force, a central topic of the rest of the book.

Learn more about Mississippi Law at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Mason's "Seeking the High Ground"

Matthew Mason is Professor of History at Brigham Young University and the author of Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World, with the following results:

On page 99 of Seeking the High Ground, fortuitously enough, readers will find the opening of a new chapter in the book, chapter 5, entitled “Humanity.” “The concept of humanity played a central role in both the imperial crisis and the Revolutionary War,” the chapter begins. After defining that ideal for 18th-century Anglophone thinkers, I note that “humanity’s most politicized manifestations in the imperial crisis and war included ideals connected to civilization, moderation, and the proper locus of sovereignty throughout these conflicts, and to military discipline during the war. To lay successful claim to it was to be safely within all the right categories in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, including proper religiosity as well as the cult of sensibility.” The rest of this chapter explores how the politics of slavery connected to all these angles for humanity as both Patriots and Loyalists, and their respective British allies, sought to lay claim to this virtue for their cause.

As such, the Page 99 Test works uncannily well as an indication of the kind of things I’m arguing in this book. For the five chapters of it dedicated to the American Revolution, I try to show how debaters on both sides connected slavery to the moral (and thus political) high ground for which they contended. They did so in complicated ways linked to the multiple facets of those ideals that constituted the high ground.

This is my contribution to the debate over slavery’s relationship with the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. Some historians argue that the traditional explanations of the American Revolution, centering on issues and taxation and representation with their accompanying high-sounding ideals, do not capture the way in which the defense of slavery and white supremacy drove the Patriot movement. And as such, these historians argue, the Revolution strengthened American slavery. Their opponents argue that we should take the traditional explanations, and the stated idealistic motives of the Patriots, seriously, and that the rise of antislavery was the really notable impact of the Revolution. I argue that it is better to see how slavery naturally and pervasively connected to those traditional issues and ideals. And I contend that for that reason, the Revolution had both specific antislavery and specific proslavery consequences for both the new United States and the remaining British Empire. So in short, the Page 99 Test works very well in my case.

Learn more about Seeking the High Ground at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward E. Andrews's "Newport Gardner's Anthem"

Edward E. Andrews is a Professor in The Department of History and Classics at Providence College. A scholar of early American history, his work explores issues related to race, religion, and slavery in early America and the Atlantic World. His first book, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, was published in 2013. His new biography, Newport Gardner's Anthem: A Story of Slavery, Struggle, and Survival in Early America, reveals the remarkable history of an important but forgotten African leader in early New England.

Andrews applied the “Page 99 Test” to Newport Gardner's Anthem, and reported the following:

Flipping to page 99 of Newport Gardner’s Anthem will reveal two of the major themes of the book: struggle and survival. A formerly enslaved African living in post-Revolutionary Newport, Rhode Island, Newport Gardner became a key leader, organizer, and activist for a community that had been historically oppressed and marginalized. In these pages we see Gardner’s struggles to keep a school running for Black children in the first decades of the nineteenth century, as well as his crucial role as a leader in the town.

Newport Gardner helped to found the African Benevolent Society in 1808, an organization primarily dedicated to the education of the people of color in the town of Newport. Not only did Gardner serve as president of this Society for years on end, but he was also one of the teachers in this promising school. But, as page 99 makes clear, the school had a rocky history. Opening with excitement and optimism, by the late 1810s the Society barely had enough money to keep it going. They even shuttered it temporarily and used the meager funds left over in the treasury to pay for private tutors instead. By the early 1820s it was back in action, but by that point Gardner was also looking to other reform projects, like creating a free Black church and, eventually, emigration to Liberia.

So, yes, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Newport Gardner’s Anthem, as we witness Gardner’s struggles to help his community survive in a city that offered no public education for Black children, dismal economic prospects, and limited civic rights. It highlights Gardner’s critical role as a Black leader in the region and foreshadows some of the other initiatives he will take on – church building and African emigration – towards the end of his long, fascinating life.

Learn more about Newport Gardner's Anthem at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pamela Walker Laird's "Self-Made"

Pamela Walker Laird is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin, which won the Hagley Prize; and Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Self-Made: The Stories That Forged an American Myth, and shared the following:

The American Revolution created openings and incentives for ambitious men to assert self-made success following centuries when that claim would have risked both their souls and social capital. Page 99 captures this transition in the evolution of the myth of self-made success. It describes how the label “aristocrat” shifted from a mark of esteem and authority to a “catch-all political pejorative, contrasted against ‘self-made’ as a catch-all political encomium” when the new political order required elites to seek votes from among recently enfranchised men. Aristocracy’s loss of cultural authority was one of many competitions for political authority fought in cultural arenas, as Self-Made reveals.

Page 99 also describes how Andrew Jackson’s opponents reframed the story of Roger Sherman as “A SELF-MADE MAN.” In the rough electoral politics around 1830, these partisans claimed this important Founding Father as a model of self-improvement and citizenship.

Throughout, Self-Made mixes ideas, such as America’s anti-elitist rhetoric, with stories about people, some still famous, some not. In that way, page 99 is a good measure of my approach. It also reflects one of the book’s arguments, namely that stories about self-making initially presented positive connotations by highlighting men who served faith and community. Sherman’s story is one of many that confirm that the materialist, individualist values now associated with “self-made success” are neither natural nor representative of the long stretch of American history.

Page 99 does miss several essential elements, however. It lacks a milestone to indicate that it’s only part-way along a four-century narrative, so readers might think the book is all about the Revolutionary era. Nor does it promise to explain how “self-made success” came to be associated with individualist economic success. Most of all, page 99 misses the book’s “So What?” If your hypothetical browsers were to look two pages ahead, they would see that as early as 1830, apologists had already begun using the myth to justify inequality and the regressive distribution of common resources.

Learn more about Self-Made at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gerard N. Magliocca's "The Actual Art of Governing"

Gerard N. Magliocca is Distinguished Professor and Lawrence A. Jegen III Professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. He has written six books and many articles on American constitutional history. His book, Washington's Heir: The Life of Justice Bushrod Washington (2022) won the Erwin N. Griswold Book Prize awarded by the Supreme Court Historical Society.

Magliocca applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, The Actual Art of Governing: Justice Robert H. Jackson's Concurring Opinion in the Steel Seizure Case, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Actual Art of Governing talks about how the invention of nuclear weapons increased executive power. Harry Truman was the first president with the exclusive authority to blow up the world. Moreover, President Truman argued that his unilateral decision to seize and operate the nation’s steel mills during the Korean War was justified in part by the need to safeguard America's nuclear program. Taken to its logical conclusion, the President’s nuclear authority could justify almost any unilateral executive action. If the President can destroy mankind by himself, then why can’t he do something less consequential on his own like raising taxes?

Turns out that page 99 nicely captures one of my book’s central themes. The Actual Art of Governing is about Justice Robert H. Jackson’s concurring opinion in the Supreme Court's Youngstown decision rejecting President Truman’s steel seizure as unconstitutional. Justice Jackson’s concurrence is the most influential opinion ever written on the separation of powers between Congress and the President. One reason why is that the opinion self-consciously updated the Constitution’s structure for an age in which the President was far more powerful at home and abroad than the Framers could have imagined. For example, Jackson wrote about the fact that Congress could and sometimes did give the President significant (though temporary) emergency powers. He also explained that the President was fully capable of persuading Congress to give him additional authority through his role of the head of state, the leader of his party, and his dominant media presence. As a result, courts should exercise great caution in giving the President emergency authority without such a statute or in circumstances that were at odds with legislative practice. At the same time, Jackson said that the President must have broad latitude to act on his own overseas given America’s role as a global superpower.

Learn more about The Actual Art of Governing at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan: Constitutional Law and the Politics of Backlash.

The Page 99 Test: American Founding Son.

The Page 99 Test: Washington's Heir.

--Marshal Zeringue

John R. Haddad's "Thrill Ride"

John R. Haddad is Professor of American Studies and Popular Culture at Penn State Harrisburg. He is the author of America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation and Cultures Colliding: American Missionaries, Chinese Resistance, and the Rise of Modern Institutions in China.

Haddad applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thrill Ride: The Transformation of Hersheypark, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes near the start of chapter 4. That chapter begins with Hurricane Agnes striking Central Pennsylvania in 1972. In Hershey, the torrential rains caused the creek that runs through Hersheypark to overflow, which led to massive flooding. The first part of page 99 catches the very end of a very touching story. Hersheypark employees rather heroically tried to save all of the animals in the nearby zoo and in Hersheypark. The park had two trained dolphins, Dolly and Skipper, whose lives were at risk because their saltwater tank had filled with muddy flood water. Since they would not survive in there for long, these heavy animals had to be physically lifted out and carried by a group of men up a steep hill to a pool – in a driving rain! Page 99 then introduces the main topic of the chapter, which is the demolition of Hersheypark landmarks. The backstory here is that, in 1972, the park was under construction because they were converting the old amusement park into a modern theme park in the model of Disneyland. Page 99 explains that this overhaul required the destruction of cherished landmarks inside the park – the Picnic Pavillion, Bandshell, and Starlight Ballroom. These structures had been built by Milton Hershey generations ago and had become sites of community memory. Thus, it was jarring for the community to watch them get razed. This chapter, in sum, is about a very emotional and tumultuous time in Hershey history!

This test does not work in the most obvious sense in that page 99 does not capture the larger idea of the book. However, if you read between the lines, you will discover that the Page 99 Test actually does work – though in very subtle fashion. Let me explain. The book tells the story of Hersheypark, from 1906 to the present day. However, the focus is squarely on the 1970s, because this was a transformative decade in the life of the park, one filled with big changes. The demolitions of landmarks and the construction of a modern theme park were two changes, but there were others. All this change was especially hard on the local community, which preferred Hershey “the way it was” and struggled mightily to adjust. The book explains how Hersheypark’s leaders really cared about the local community. In building a theme park, they opted for a sensitive design that used architecture and theming to honor the past and persuade local residents to accept change. Even though page 99 does not explicitly convey this point, I think that the love and dedication of park officials for the town’s beloved park does shine through in the heroic way they sought to save animals. Park officials invested that same level of caring in designing and operating the new theme park, which opened in 1973 – the year after Hurricane Agnes.

I hope readers will enjoy this book. By conducting interviews and reading company records and oral histories at the Hershey Community Archives, I uncovered lots of stories like this one. Taken collectively, these stories tell the remarkable history of Hersheypark. It is a unique place – unlike all other theme parks. The book was a joy to write, and I hope people find it informative and fun to read!

Learn more about Thrill Ride at the Penn State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Watts's "Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville"

Edward Watts is professor emeritus of English at Michigan State University. His previous book, Colonizing the Past: Myth-Making and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing (2020) was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2021.

Watts applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds the reader late in chapter four, a chapter that looks at the creeping suspicion among readers that “Indian Haters” might not be the uncritical heroes they become in dozens of stories, novels, poems, plays, histories, and travelogues between 1820 and 1860. Based on the legends of historical figures like Tom Quick or Lewis Wetzel, “Indian Haters” were white men on the American frontier between 1760 and 1830 who purportedly responded the loss of family members at the hands of a few “Indians” (strawmen of settler fantasy, nothing to do with genuine indigenous peoples) by vowing to kill all Indians and then largely succeeding, “out-savaging the savage,” in the terms of one scholar, marking racial superiority at an atavistic level. For decades, Indian Haters had been portrayed in sensational texts as heroes and martyrs, doing the necessary dirty work of settler colonialism, sacrificing personal safety for the race and nation. However, as Indian Haters were depicted more and more sensationally, skepticism crept in. On page 99, my discussion of Charles Averill’s ridiculous novel Kit Carson: Prince of the Gold Hunters (1849) concludes. Averill portrayed Carson as an Indian Hater, an obnoxious attempt to cash in on public interest in both the California Gold Rush and Carson’s celebrity after his depiction in John C. Fremont’s popular narrative. As the page ends, Carson’s own refutation of his textual exploitations begins in a responding text supposedly dictated to Dewitt Peters: the historical Carson was not an Indian Hater and, in fact, would marry two indigenous women, though his much later actions in the 1863 massacre of the Navajo cannot be forgiven.

While page 99 accurately represents the work, it does so in a minor key, as this chapter examines a broad variety of texts that celebrate Indian Haters into virtuous heroes. Averill’s book was soon forgotten, thankfully. Furthermore, his book was part of a broader effort to transpose a legend born in the eastern woodlands to the far West in order to establish a unifying narrative for the increasingly geographically disparate US. Other chapters offer more sustained readings of major Indian Hater fictionalizations by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Herman Melville. However, the book is mostly about the function of print culture and public media in the larger project of antebellum settler colonialism as seen through the example of the trope of Indian Haters. Averill wanted badly to profit from participating in the triumphant settler agenda. However, as Peters’ redemption of Carson on page 99 shows, this process was not monolithic or unilateral (as settler culture is often theorized to be). Averill’s Kit Carson stands as a dubious attempt to create a mythology suited to the racial and cultural goals of the settler nation as it aspired to subjugate the lands and peoples it intended to control and exploit. Peters’ pushback, in microcosm, reveals an intra-cultural tension that symbolizes the fragility and incompleteness of settler nationhood, even as it so wanted stability and totality

While Carson has come down (mostly) as a hero, it is not because he was or was not an Indian Hater. In Milford, Pennsylvania, there is still a Tom Quick Inn, named for a local Indian Hater who boasted of killing ninety-nine Lenape to avenge his father. Until recently, a monument to him in a public park that explicitly celebrates those killings. Currently, the monument remains in storage, its resurrection challenged by the descendants of the Lenape Quick never got around to. In other words, while my book studies an old story, even as shown on page 99, its subject pertains in 2025, as the settler nation still struggles about what parts of its past to embrace and which to disavow.

Learn more about Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Satya Shikha Chakraborty's "Colonial Caregivers"

Satya Shikha Chakraborty grew up in India and is Associate Professor of History at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). Her research and teaching focuses on histories of South Asia, British Empire, gender and sexuality, colonial medicine, and visual culture.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India, with the following results:

Page 99 of Colonial Caregivers contains an image, and very little text. The image shows an oil portrait of a British family fleeing during the violence of the 1857 Indian Rebellion (fought against the British East India Company’s rule in India). It was painted in 1858, in commemoration of the rebellion’s anniversary, by the British artist Abraham Solomon, who had never visited India. The reason I have included this painting in my book is because of the depiction of the British family’s Indian ayah (nanny/maid). She is shown carrying one of the British children, as she faithfully follows her British employers, even as her own countrymen are rebelling against British colonial rule. The painting, following the tradition of European art, places the brown ayah in the shadow of the trees, while moonbeams bathe the British women and child, who are thus resplendent in a surreal white glow, in contrast to the dark shadowy figure of the ayah. The rest of the page introduces a British fiction from 1872, where the plot centers around the sudden disruption of the “very happy home” of a British family, the Ogilvies in colonial Calcutta, when the 1857 Indian Rebellion breaks out. The Ogilvies are saved thanks to the intervention of their loyal Indian ayah Tara, who hides them from the rebels. The page ends with quotes from the fiction highlighting the supposedly “strange contrast” between the white “little golden-haired girl” of the Ogilvies, and the dark “faithful ayah” Tara.

While a random snippet, nevertheless, I feel, page 99 does give a good sense of some of the core arguments of my book – how the darkness of the South Asian ayah was used as a foil to highlight the white racial purity of the British family, particularly the British child. The chiaroscuro technique used by the British painter and the “strange contrast” mentioned by British writer demonstrate the visual and literary construction of race in a colonial context, particularly whiteness. The figure of the ayah, as my book shows, played a crucial role in British attempts to highlight their own racial purity at a time when inter-racial concubinage and “mixed” race children in the empire caused moral anxieties in Britain. The fidelity of the ayah to the British family, which we see in both the painting and the fiction, showcases another point my book makes – the sentimentalization of the love and loyalty of the colonial Indian caregiver, particularly during moments of anti-colonial violence (such as the 1857 Indian Rebellion), provided moral legitimacy to British colonialism in India.

So, the Page 99 Test sort of works for my book Colonial Caregivers, which argues that the South Asian ayah provided not only domestic labor, but also moral labor for the British Empire. The idealized ayah archetype, my book further argues, erased the precarious lives of real-life ayahs. Elsewhere in the book, we see numerous case-studies of ayahs who were sexually assaulted by their European masters, physically chastised by their mistresses, not paid their promised wages, taken to Britain to provide care-labor to British families during the long ship-voyage, but then abandoned without return-passages to India. The book also shows how colonial medical archives naturalized the care-labor of hardy brown women for fragile white women in the tropics, and upheld caste-based discrimination of ayahs in the name of hygiene. British cultural veneration of the ayah (which we see on page 99) obscured the vulnerabilities and everyday experiences of colonial domestic workers, which the book exposes.

Visit Satya Shikha Chakraborty's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scot Danforth's "An Independent Man"

Scot Danforth is the Jack H. and Paula A. Hassinger Chair in Education and Professor of Disability Studies at Chapman University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights, and reported the following:

A reader opening to page 99 would almost get an accurate understanding of my book.

Page 99 glimpses the preliminary sparks that foretell the blazing fire to follow. My book tells the story of the origins of the American disability rights movement through the life of activist leader Ed Roberts, a quadriplegic man who organized disabled students at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960’s. He helped develop a national network of over four hundred independent living centers, self-help units where disabled people assist one another to live successfully in the community. Roberts traveled the world spreading the outrageous idea that people with all kinds of disabilities could live full and rich lives.

On page 99, the graduate student Roberts met with his mentor, the brilliant Professor Jacobus tenBroek. Roberts and his hippy friends, an activist crew of a dozen students with physical disabilities, crafted the radical idea that their troubles were not caused by their failing bodies. Late night rap sessions in the infirmary campus housing yielded the crucial idea that what held them back was the many social and architectural obstacles in the larger society. The students planned a new kind of organization uniting people with many disabilities to work for dramatic social change.

Jacobus tenBroek seemed the perfect person for the upstart Roberts to consult. A blind man, the great scholar was the dedicated leader of the National Federation of the Blind, a coalition of blind people advocating for their own well-being. His prescient speeches presaged the political path forward that resulted ultimately in the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

TenBroek blasted the paternalism of the traditional blindness charities. Looking down upon blind people with pity, the nondisabled charity leaders acted to control a population they viewed as deficient. TenBroek called for blind people to lead the way to their own emancipation.

Roberts asked his mentor if people with other types of disabilities could join the National Federation for the Blind to create the revolutionary, multi-disability political organization that Roberts envisioned. Sadly, the Professor disagreed.

Roberts knew tenBroek was wrong. The disability rights revolution required unity. In 1980, Roberts worked with Canadian activists Henry Enns and Jim Dirksen and hundreds of disabled advocates from across the planet to found Disabled Peoples International, the first worldwide organization fighting for the rights of all disabled persons.

Learn more about An Independent Man at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mitchell B. Cruzan's "Looking Down the Tree"

Mitchell B. Cruzan is Professor of Biology at Portland State University. He received his BA and MA in Biology from California State University, Fullerton, and his PhD from Stony Brook University. He is currently an associate editor for Molecular Ecology, a leading journal in the field. He has previously published an advanced textbook, Evolutionary Biology: A Plant Perspective (2018).

Cruzan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Looking Down the Tree: The Evolutionary Biology of Human Origins, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Looking Dawn the Tree – The Evolutionary Biology of Human Origins we get a taste of how this book explores different ideas for the origin of human characteristics. This page introduces proposals concerning the origin of the clitoris and female orgasm in humans and sets up subsequent pages that evaluate these ideas. It discusses suggestions from previous authors on the origin of the clitoris. One is that that it is simply an artifact of development like nipples and non-functional breasts in men. Another suggests that we inherited it from a common ancestor that was similar to bonobos, where sexual interactions – and especially between females – were important for social bonding. In subsequent pages we come to understand that human clitoris is not just an accident of development or a leftover from an ancestor, but is a highly functional organ. We learn that it has a high density of nerve endings and is one of the most complex organs in the human body. The fact that orgasm releases hormones that make a woman feel relaxed and safe with their partner suggests that it has a function that was favored by natural selection in our ancestors. We come to the conclusion that the clitoris and female orgasm contributed to pair bonding and the maintenance of stable relationships for male-female and female-female couples. This was critical for the survival of our ancestors because, as brain volume tripled from Lucy’s species to ours, infants were born much earlier in development and required more parental care than could be provided by a single parent. We ultimately learn that stable relationships and cooperation within the clans of our ancestors was critical for their survival.

So yes, opening this book to page 99 would give a reader a good idea of the writing style and content of this book. I think that most readers would be intrigued enough by what they read on this page to continue with subsequent pages to see where it led. But this single page is not representative of all of the content of Looking Down the Tree. As the cover suggests, there’s more to this book than just a discussion of science. As a non-fiction book, this one is unique because it includes vignettes into the life of a fictional character who lived around 70,000 years ago. The story of her life serves to vividly illustrate the struggles and challenges that our ancestors faced. By the end, my hope is that readers will have a much deeper appreciation of the circumstances that led to our unique appearance and behaviors; like any other animal, our species is the product of the environments experienced by our ancestors as they struggled to survive.

Visit the Cruzan Lab website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Davis's "A Biography of a Mountain"

Matthew Davis is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale, and the first English-language children’s book published in Mongolia, The Magic Horse Fiddle. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among other places. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Davis lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, a diplomat, and their two young kids.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book dives into the politics of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, and begins to explore how his politics impacted his art. A representative sentence from this page is: “Borglum’s own politics were antiestablishment and championed the individual against overarching systems, beliefs he extended towards his art.”

In this sense, page 99 is both representative of the book as a whole while also limiting the book’s aperture. It is representative in that the relationship between politics and art is crucial to the meaning of Mount Rushmore—how Gutzon Borglum’s politics influenced his ideas behind the memorial, and how today’s politics influences its contemporary meaning is an important element of A Biography of a Mountain. But it is limiting in that what I hope to accomplish with this book is expand the story of Mount Rushmore beyond the actual sculpture itself. It is why the work of art is decentralized on the cover in favor a broad picture of the mountain of Rushmore, and why so much time is spent reporting from the present-day Black Hills. The actual sculpture is essential to any book about Rushmore, as is Gutzon Borglum. But what I hope to do in my book is tell a fuller picture of how the memorial came to exist in the Black Hills, how it represents the complicated conversations we are having today about the narratives of American history, and how it reflects the processes by which we memorialize those narratives. In this sense, page 99 limits that perspective.

Visit Matthew Davis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Griswold's "Resurrecting the Past"

Sarah Griswold is Associate Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. She has published articles in the Journal of the Western Society for French History, War & Society, and the Journal of the History of Collections.

Griswold applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate, and reported the following:

From page 99:

...the latter dynasty having displaced the Umayyads, moved the seat of Islamic power to Baghdad, and encouraged a historicization of their predecessors as despotic and decadent. German scholar Julius Wellhausen’s Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902) most influentially chipped away at the old paradigm, his book asserting the bias of Abbasid historiographers. Meanwhile, the Jesuit priest Henri Lammens, a historian of early Islam at the Université. Saint-Joseph in Beirut, became a leading public apologist for reinterpreting the Umayyads, doing so on either side of World War I; his La Syrie (1921)—written at the behest of the French High Commission—repositioned the long-discredited Umayyads as both Syria’s best Islamic legacy and Islam’s apogee, characterizing the religion as in moral, political, and cultural decline ever after.

It was thus amid this broader reformulation of the Umayyads that work at the Great Umayyad Mosque took shape, the site becoming a showpiece of the French regime’s focus on the Islamic past, and for multiple reasons. For one, it remained geographically axial and religiously dynamic in present-day Damascus. Built from 706 to 715, the Great Mosque continued to anchor the old city in the 1920s.

Does the Page 99 Test work in the case of Resurrecting the Past? I think so: oui. Page 99 drops readers into my 300-page book, which focuses broadly on heritage work in the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon, a regime set up after WWI. The page distills a critical shift that the book traces from the Christian preservation projects that anchored France’s initial claims in the Levant to projects about the Islamic past that seemed more politically serviceable by the late 1920s. The page, moreover, is neatly half text, half image--a layout that, if not all that common in the book, is still telling about its methods and arguments.

The text alludes to how French officials in Damascus had started to rethink what heritage should mean in a mandate setting that no longer felt "controlled" or practicable in the long-term. The image—a 1931 aerial photograph taken by France's aviation forces—shows Damascus' Great Umayyad Mosque, whose rediscovered 8th-century mosaics were suddenly being hailed by French heritage specialists as proof of earlier Christian and Islamic coexistence. The glittering tiles, French officials suggested, showed historical cooperation—and, by implication, justified French involvement in Syria and Lebanon.

It's also noteworthy that my page 99 suggests how images work in Resurrecting the Past. The book depends on images because the mandate’s heritage work did also. And this particular photograph illustrates a point that I make throughout the book: that heritage was produced through a dialectic relationship between representation and materiality.

Here we get a classic “view from above" of the Mosque that was shot by French military photographers and appeared in magazines back in France. The image is a reminder that the French wanted to frame how the Mosque was presented to French publics back home. But the Mosque is also, very clearly in its own right, a massive structure anchored in the heart of Damascus, and those properties gave the site qualities that often eluded French attempts at control.

You can see here, all on page 99, how real materiality and representational framing both defined heritage-making.

Learn more about Resurrecting the Past at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna-Luna Post's "Galileo's Fame"

Anna-Luna Post is a historian of knowledge at Leiden University. She is interested in all facets of the world of scholarship and learning in the early modern period. Trained as a cultural historian and Italianist, she is also fascinated by the intersections between early capitalism and environmental history, especially in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Post has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, Cambridge University, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, and the Medici Archive Project and the Netherlands Institute for Art History in Florence. She studied in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Bologna.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Galileo's Fame: Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century, and shared the following:

Readers opening my book on page 99 will be met by a black-and-white portrait of Galileo smiling at them. The portrait, made by Francesco Villamena, appeared in his 1613 work Letters on Sunspots, a polemical work flowing out of a dispute between Galileo and a German Jesuit, Christoph Scheiner, over the nature of dark spots that could be observed on (or near, according to Scheiner) the sun’s surface. Villamena’s portrait captures Galileo, dressed in a fur-lined robe, below two putti holding the instruments of his scholarly fame: his geometrical compass, the telescope, and the books he had published thus far. Most of the page is taken up by the portrait and caption, leaving space for just five lines of text. These lines let readers know that this was the first of Galileo’s works to include an author portrait, and convey the idea that an author’s portrait often served to capture readers’ attention and establish a sense of familiarity. The last line tells readers that the Accademia dei Lincei “paid for the design and worked—”, but then the page cuts off…

Alas, I don’t think the Page 99 Test works too well for my book, as it may give readers the wrongful impression that the book consists of 80% images and 20% text. Still, page 99, which appears in the middle of the third chapter, does showcase my book’s approach and thematic focus.

Galileo’s Fame recounts how a remarkable cast of characters, including artists, poets, philosophers, popes, lower clergymen, cardinals, courtiers, and, yes, the members of the Accademia dei Lincei, shaped Galileo’s fame through a variety of media. The book consequently embraces a wide variety of sources, pays careful attention to the visual culture of the time, and is not afraid to pursue in-depth analysis of poems written in Galileo’s honor: page 99 lies in the middle of a chapter that focuses especially on such poems and the visual artefacts of Galileo’s fame. I use these sources to show how people with different relationships to Galileo could try to latch onto his fame, in order to advance some of their own career goals, and argue that this could be beneficial (the poems meant attention!) but also detrimental (the poems did not always give him full credit) to Galileo.

That said, within the book, chapter 3 (“Admiration and Appropriation”) stands out as it discusses a full cast of characters for whom fame was a good thing. The other four chapters, meanwhile, show that for many seventeenth-century observers fame usually elicited some form of suspicion as well, as they associated it with gossip, the unreliable and unruly opinion of crowds, and with pride. In this way, the book captures the highly ambiguous nature of scholarly fame in this period, showing that fame was at once a highly coveted, and a controversial asset.

Learn more about Galileo's Fame at the University of Pittsburgh Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue