Mia Bloom's "Veiled Threats"

Mia Bloom is a Professor of Communication and Middle East Studies at Georgia State University and the International Security Fellow at New America. She conducts ethnographic field research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. Author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing, with Roy Licklider; (2007), Bombshell: Women and Terror (2011), Small Arms: Children and Terror (2019), and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon, with Sophia Moskalenko (2021).

Bloom applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Veiled Threats: Women and Global Jihad, and reported the following:

If readers opened Veiled Threats to page 99, they would read both about how ISIS abused and exploited Yazidi sex slaves as well as whether ISIS should be charged with the crime of genocide because it engaged in ethnic cleansing of Yazidi areas, but also the capture of women during combat, requires the implementation of the Geneva accords, that they would be protected from predation. In fact, ISIS did quite the opposite. Page 99 describes the process of selection, where the female prisoners were separated from the men, the combatants separated the old from the young. ISIS terrorists treated the women like chattel, as ISIS evaluated them based on age, eye color, and even breast size.

While the majority of the book is dedicated to the women who exercised agency and joined the jihad, perpetrated acts of terrorism, or recruited others to do so, page 99 explores the ramifications of women’s involvement with Jihadi groups and offers the reader detailed information about the victims.

The book as a whole explores whether women in Jihadi groups were nothing more than victims of men or the patriarchal society. In some instances, the woman have been drugged or manipulated, especially the very young girls who were operatives for Boko Haram. Perhaps the most surprising part of the book, is that what we think we know about women in Boko Haram, or ISIS or Al Qaeda is superficial and stereotypes. The women in these militant groups exercised considerably more agency than the literature has previously allocated them. While women in ISIS did not fight on the front lines, many were as radical if not more radical than their husbands. The lesson patriarchal groups learn is that if you get the women on board, you guarantee the next generation of extremists and make the organization immune to counter terror policies like targeted assassination.

The book also probes how jihadi groups legally differentiate between female hostages (rahina) versus sex slaves (sabayya), drawing on Islamic law and applied to the events of October 7, 2023, in Gaza and Southern Israel. By the Islamic rules of war, what occurred in Southern Israel in 2023 violates multiple hadith and surahs in the Quran. The book presents a theory of why gender-based violence occurs during certain types of ethnic wars in which the ultimate goal is the control of territory, making violence against civilians intentional to force them to abandon their homes and flee. Thus Veiled Threats offers a corrective to the inaccurate stereotypes about veiled women being powerless, voiceless and faceless in the global jihad.

Learn more about Veiled Threats at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Bombshell: Women and Terrorism by Mia Bloom.

The Page 99 Test: Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom & Sophia Moskalenko.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Todd's "Living with Jane Austen"

Janet Todd has been thinking and writing about books for more than half a century. She has been a biographer, novelist, critic, editor and memoirist. In the 1970s, she helped open up the study of early women writers by beginning a journal and compiling encyclopedias before editing the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, and Jane Austen. She has worked in English departments in Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK. A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is now an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish and Newnham Colleges and an Emerita Professor of the University of Aberdeen.

Todd applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Living with Jane Austen, and reported the following:

This is part of page 99 where I look at Jane Austen as a letter writer, mainly to her beloved sister Cassandra , her other self, as she calls her:

I have become a fan of Jane Austen’s letters, mischievous portmanteau accounts of a life filled with people – some too fat, some too short-necked, some just too nondescript for comment – and random things, from muslins and sofas to honey, cakes and wine. The letters are unpredictable, skipping from lace collars to a brace of pheasants, from ale to ailments. Austen displays in herself those little grievances we all have as duty bangs against desire, but she never stays long in irritable mode. Soon, she’s off and away to green shoes or missing gloves.

The letters are captivating, with their spurts of excited or tremulous life. A niece has a ‘purple Pelisse’; it may be a secret but not kept well enough to avoid the snooping of an aunt in the bedroom acting like a naughty, middle-aged Catherine Morland poking around Northanger Abbey. Not much escapes this aunt, not much is unrecorded. She’s eager to share the most enticing trivialities.

Page 99 occurs in the chapter called ‘Poor Nerves’. It is part of the section on Jane Austen and the body, the next chapter being labelled ‘The Unruly Body’. In ‘Poor Nerves’ I describe my joy in reading Jane’s letters meant only for her sister’s eyes—or sometimes the eyes of other close family members and friends—but not for ours in the 21st century. Where the novels are the result of careful revision and rewriting, these letters are spontaneous and undoctored. Jane Austen is thrifty with paper, so there’s little question of her jettisoning first attempts; in one letter she chides herself for not writing a smaller hand so that she could get more on to her single page. Paper and postage are expensive.

In the quotation above, the interweaving of my personal response to Austen’s writing and more distanced critical comment is typical of the book as a whole, although elsewhere I provide more background historical and literary material. This includes detail on Regency houses, on the fashionable way of looking at external nature, on contemporary responses to money and the making of money, on the uneasiness over girls’ education and manners in a changing world--and on the anxiety over ailments that result from a seeming interaction of mind and body.

For this topic I put Jane Austen in the context of other writers worried about physical ailments. In this context, her attitude in novels and letters can often seem bracing, sometimes less than sympathetic! She shows how often headaches and nervous diseases result from emotions like jealousy or self-pity; instead of running to physical remedies—many of which, such as bloodletting with leeches and drinking concoctions including mercury, would have worsened the problem—she advises exercise and a change of scene. As so often, there’s much useful advice in Jane Austen--though she never presses it on you!

Austen’s ‘global’ fame means that many people know her from the films and many spinoffs and dramatisations rather than her writings. I hope that my book might draw readers back to the wonderful novels—and that they will share my enduring enthusiasm, and be challenged by some of my unorthodox ideas. (Did Cassandra burn most of Jane’s letters?)

Visit Janet Todd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Rosino's "Democracy Is Awkward"

Michael Rosino is assistant professor of sociology at Molloy College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside American Grassroots Political Organizing, and reported the following:

Democracy is Awkward is a study of grassroots political organizers and how they respond to racial inequality in politics and society. It focuses on a political organization I call the “Grassroots Action Party.” This matter is clearly relevant to our contemporary struggles to protect rights and democracy through the power of multiracial coalitions that take racial justice seriously. Page 99 of Democracy is Awkard lies in the middle of the chapter on how whites participants racial habits shape grassroots political strategies, it specifically tells the stories of participants who regard conversations about race with people of color as inherently stressful and conflict-laden. As an ethnographer, I have many tools in my toolkit for studying the social world of my participants. In this case, I used a vignette during interviews where I presented them with a hypothetical situation where a white person is uncomfortable discussing racial issues with people of color and therefore avoidant. The vignette seemed to resonate with several of them. In particular, a participant that I call Jacqueline connected it to the following story,

“I had a dear friend, and I still consider her a friend, but I haven’t talked to her in many years. We just hit it off, you know, and had a wonderful friendship, and she was having some struggles at a certain point, and we were in a phone conversation, and it just kind of went down this road where, you know, she was really upset, and she just got more and more upset and she ended up screaming at me which I mean she is one of the sweetest people I know she just screamed 'fuck you' at me and hung up. […] I was kind of like, wow, what happened and what is going on, and I couldn’t… I sort of… it is like do I call her back or do I not? […] She called me back, and she was really upset, and she is like, 'you know, I am really sorry,' and I am like “'it is not a problem, it is really not a problem.'”

Jacqueline told me that if she could talk to her estranged friend now, she would say,

“I love you. You are one of the people that I have been closest to in my life, and I know I am a white person with stupid white person stuff, and I am sorry, you know, and, you know, I am responsible for my behavior at the same time, but there is a way that nobody is to blame for growing up, you know, being born into a racist society […] my guess is that she was angry or, you know, she knew, and you know, knows that I have privilege as a white person, as a middle-class person.”

This page illuminates a critical example of the argument in Democracy is Awkward – that our feelings of discomfort, particularly around unwieldy confrontations with the reality of racial injustice, can undermine real strategies for building grassroots democracy amid racial oppression. The book examines the overall situation and the promise of cross-racial coalitions for grassroots organizing, the shared motivations and experiences of organizers, and the distinct awareness, habits, and strategies of white organizers and organizers of color. Documenting and theorizing the stark contrast between participants of different racial backgrounds is a major plank of the book’s contribution. It represents how racial oppression produces social distance and inequalities that shape our everyday lives and underlying assumptions.

White participants avoided situations that took them out of their comfort zones. Their organizing stuck to the neighborhoods they knew well, the people they felt they had commonality with, and the rituals and routines that they’d come to expect. In contrast, in the next chapter, I highlight the many participants of color who recognized and leaned into productive conflict and attempted to rectify the contradictions and limitations of the organization. These participants, for instance, noted that although the party advocates for racial justice and the empowerment of people of color, it remains overwhelmingly white and struggles to actualize its antiracist agenda. In many ways, navigating conflict, awkwardness, and ambiguity was an inherent aspect of their lived experiences. The point of this book is not simply to describe what people in the Grassroots Action Party did or theorize why it happened but to build real and practical insights about how confronting these racialized contradictions, awkwardness, and conflict inherent in building coalitions for democracy can be a catalyst for making grassroots organizing more effective and inclusive.

Visit Michael Rosino's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacy Torres's "At Home in the City"

Stacy Torres is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), core ladder rank faculty in the sociology doctoral program, and affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at UC Berkeley.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America, and reported the following:

Readers who flip to page 99 of At Home in the City will receive a glimpse into core themes at the heart of my book: grief, loss, place, memory, coming together, and unconventional place- based communities. This snippet showcases the voices of older adults I met during my five- year ethnographic study, trying to understand how they navigated a range of late life challenges, including health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges.

On this page, they share the complex emotions stirred in mourning a special place they’re about to lose—a mom-and-pop bakery in Manhattan that had become something of a public living room. At this point in the book, the store hadn’t yet closed, but as lease renewal negotiations broke down between the bakery owner and the landlord, its patrons began to ponder a future without their special place. They share deep sadness, bitterness, and dark humor as they react to the store’s imminent closure. The mood of this page reflects anticipation of their expectant loss and hints at their growing recognition of what they will lose and how important this “third place” had become to them, allowing them to connect with neighbors and avoid social isolation in retirement.

As I nervously applied this test, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the page captures the stakes of crisis they confronted and their deep attachments to place and to each other. I also found myself on page 99, as a chronicler of their story and a participant observer. Here, I reflect on my own attachments to them and their place, “Their kindness also stirred a twinge of anticipated loss for me as their parting words for the evening reminded me of how they had pulled me into their web of care. I also felt unease, on the precipice of a changing world that had in some ways become my own.”

What’s missing from page 99 is an explicit mention of people’s advanced ages and how their circumstances in old age heightened the significance of neighborhood places to them, as they spent more time closer to home due to financial limitations, surplus time in retirement, and health and mobility issues that constrained traveling far from their residences. But this page capably sets the stage for their unfolding journey—one that I hope readers will join—as they reconfigure long-held routines around new places and people, while also working together to preserve the vital bonds they forged in their lost home away from home.

Visit Stacy Torres's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessie Cox's "Sounds of Black Switzerland"

Jessie Cox is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University and received his doctorate from Columbia University. Active as a composer, drummer, and scholar, his work thematizes questions at the intersection of black studies, music/sound studies, and critical theory. From Switzerland, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, Cox thinks through questions of race, migration, national belonging, and our relation to the planet and the cosmos. His first monograph Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices addresses how thinking with blackness and experimental musical practices might afford the opening of new discourses, such as thematizing Black Swiss Life.

Cox applied the “Page 99 Test” to Sounds of Black Switzerland and reported the following:

From page 99:

Thus, to be with blackness is to be together in music, together in sound, even when not together, both at the same time, because togetherness cannot, here, imply beings reduced to one among others that meet. Rather, Blackness is that which speaks of a together-apartness that is before and out of which all singularities come from—it is radically before any togetherness in contradistinction to apartness. It is like Mighty’s music. This book is not by itself, even when it appears as such: it is always with those who are named within it and those who came before it, but also those who touched my life, the lives of the readers, as well as those yet to come, yet to be unearthed in it, who will Shift the timbre of my voice. Blackness bespeaks an incompleteness theorem, that asks us to keep digging, as a continual reworking of our stories and us. It is not that the future is radically open, marking something that is closed in the past or present—rather, everything is always open, even in its closedness. How otherwise could infinities calculate into singularities from nothing, like in Jérémie Jolo and in Chénière’s musics?

Page 99 is only half full. By itself it is not reflective of the whole book. But in some ways, it is quite an exemplary page. It in fact conveys a key theme found within the book: the importance of the listener (or reader) as part of that which we call the book, or the musical work. This idea is how I approach joining the opening of discourses around Black Swiss life with the unique possibilities of music. As an artform music always asks for listeners’ inventiveness—for people to listen and to do so in new ways. To me this means also to rethink how we hear, which includes recognizing how we can never hear everything and need each other, tools, materials, and experiences (or performances) to re-learn to listen. Music is radically refusing one way of listening, an end to listening, or a claim over what may be audible. This kind of musical listening practice is imaginative and, as Afrofuturists might say, world transforming. While this might seem at first to be about simply our own private worlds, it in fact, as an born in encounters, always also means a transformation of more than us. New sounds means new instruments, means new arrangements of materials, means new spaces (like for different acoustics)... Music is the sound of changing the world. Thus, this page hints to how this book petitions a re-learning to listen to unthought lives and worlds so as to make a better world. How can we critically engage in imaginative practices that create new ways of listening, sounding, making, and living, in and with the world and each other? Listening opens the question of us and our world, it is the not yet heard possibility to an unthought music.

Visit Jessie Cox's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Athanasopoulos's "Black Iconoclasm"

Charles Athanasopoulos is Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Communication from the University of Pittsburgh, and his research interests lie at the intersection of Black rhetorics, media, and culture. He has published numerous peer reviewed articles in venues such as Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association and the Western Journal of Communication.

Athanasopoulos applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Following Sharpley-Whiting, tracking the slippages in Fanonian thought is fruitful for meditating on how we can use parts of Fanon’s theories against Fanon himself given the limitations presented by his own personal investment in Western icons of gender and sexuality […] Engaging Spillers’ addendum to Fanonian theory, Fanonian slips highlight how Western conceptions of family and gender are inextricable from the racialized construction of Western humanity.

A reader who opened Black Iconoclasm on this page would be thrust into a complex conversation surrounding my concept of a “Fanonian slip” in relation to Fanon’s own commentary on gender and sexuality. Page 99 opens by finishing a paragraph which begins on page 98 and interrogates Fanon’s comments about cross-dressing and that “he know[s] nothing” about women of color in Black Skin, White Masks. It ends by beginning to read Fanonian thought through the addendums provided by Hortense J. Spillers in Black, White, and In Color. I imagine that the reader would likely have to pause and decide to gain a fuller context of the chapter to fully apprehend the unfolding argument on this page. However, I think this page demonstrates that this chapter wrestles with the limitations of Fanonian thought as it relates to gender and sexuality.

In this broader chapter (pp. 89-127), I unfurl the concept of “Fanonian slips” as moments of slippage which accidentally emerge in the attempt to smoothen racial tensions. For example, I interrogate former president Biden’s statement that “poor kids are just as bright as white kids” as a Fanonian slip which accidentally announces his correlation of rich/white, poor/BIPOC. In this chapter, I unfurl three examples across the interpersonal, political, and internal to consider how racial icons – public symbols which reflect Western values of race, gender, class, and sexuality – operate on every level of Western subjectivity and communication. Engaging Fanon and psychoanalysis, I articulate the slippage between Black skin and white mask in, for example, the public address of rapper Killer Mike and former president Obama. Fanonian slips thus reflect how Black iconoclasm manifests as a critical practice to be taken up within the flow of lived experience. This fourth chapter of the book, works in tandem with chapters on activism (Ch. 2), Black radical theory (Ch. 3), popular post/Ferguson films (Ch. 5), and BLM street art (Ch. 6) to unfurl a broader orientation of Black iconoclasm across different cultural arenas. Each chapter discerns the ways Black radicalism exceeds Western Man while also remaining reflexive about how those theories or practices may still contain residues of the very iconography we are trying to unsettle. This ritual process of Black radical discernment thus performs a lived orientation toward Fanon’s call for a “program of complete disorder” which eschews both linear narratives of racial progress and teleological blueprints of Black liberation.

Visit Charles Athanasopoulos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary Watt's "Shakespeare and the Law"

Gary Watt is Professor of Law, The University of Warwick. He co-founded the journal Law and Humanities and is general editor of Bloomsbury's Cultural History of Law. He has held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship on rhetorical performance and as a National Teaching Fellow and national "Law Teacher of the Year" (2009) for many years delivered rhetoric workshops for the Royal Shakespeare Company. His books include Shakespeare's Acts of Will, Dress, Law, and Naked Truth, Trusts and Equity, The Making Sense of Politics, Media, and Law, and Equity Stirring.

Watt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Shakespeare and the Law, and reported the following:

Page 99, which appears in a chapter on Shakespeare’s props, contends that “To appreciate the performance of legal and governmental power through stage props requires us to appreciate material performances in their wider social and religious contexts”. Two examples are given of props that performed the Elizabethan passage from Roman Catholicism to the Protestant idea of the priesthood of all people. The first is a wooden altar that was moved towards the congregants during the church service. The second is a provision in the burial ritual that empowered attendants to throw dust upon the coffin where this had previously been the exclusive function of the priest. Page 99 then considers the crown as an exemplary instance of a legal and governmental prop in Shakespeare’s history plays, quoting the Duke of Gloucester (the future Richard III) where he says ‘[h]ow sweet a thing it is to wear a crown, / Within whose circuit is Elysium / And all that poets feign of bliss and joy’ (3H6 1.2.29-31). That word “feign” has connotations of dishonesty but here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, it also refers to the poet’s art of using rhetorical “figures”. This brings us to the key argument of page 99 and of the chapter on props, which is that Shakespeare’s stage props perform rhetorically. The Crown, for example, performs as synecdoche, which is a figure through which a part represents a larger whole. An endless circle of incorruptible gold, the physical crown expresses exquisitely the deathless sequence of regal authority wherein queens and kings die but the monarch never does. It is a small hand prop, but it signifies a large idea.

The question is whether page 99, as a small part of my book, performs synecdochally as an effective representation of the whole. I think it performs quite well in that regard, since the larger argument of the book is that rhetorical performance is the key connection between Shakespeare and the law. Page 99 considers only one Shakespearean prop – the crown – but this invites us to consider other legally significant props (sword, book, seal etc) discussed in the same chapter. Alongside the chapter on props, we will naturally go on to consider the chapters on Shakespeare’s legal “stages” (his historical and physical place), his “roles” (his lawyers and other legal personalities), his “script” (the binding magic of his legal language), and the judgment of his “playgoers”.

Learn more about Gary Watt and his work, and read more about Shakespeare and the Law at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott Spillman's "Making Sense of Slavery"

Scott Spillman is an American historian and the author of the book Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today (2025). His essays and reviews have appeared in The Point, Liberties, The New Yorker, The New Republic, n+1, the Chronicle Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has published academic articles in Reviews in American History, History of Education Quarterly, and North Carolina Historical Review.

Spillman has a PhD in history from Stanford University, and before that he studied history, English, and political philosophy at the University of North Carolina (and Duke University) as a Robertson Scholar. Originally from Atlanta, he now lives in Denver with his partner and their twin daughters. He also spends part of his time in Leadville, where he serves as chair of the city’s historic preservation commission.

Spillman applied the “Page 99 Test” to Making Sense of Slavery and reported the following:

Page 99 of Making Sense of Slavery introduces Francis Lieber, an early political scientist in the United States who wrote an influential code of army conduct during the Civil War. The page gives some background on Lieber’s journey from Germany, where he was born, to the United States and shows him wrestling with the question of how war affects the status of slavery.

This turns out to be a perfect encapsulation of my book, which is all about how scholars like Lieber have studied and wrestled with slavery over the course of American history. In fact, the specific question that interests Lieber on page 99—the question of slaves as people versus slaves as property, or the mixture of “the two ideas Man and Thing,” as he put it—is one of the central themes of the first part of the book. Lieber believed that war washed away the status of slaves as property, leaving only people whom the US government and military should consider free. This was one of the arguments that the Union used to justify emancipation during the Civil War.

The way Lieber approaches that question about the status of slavery in the midst of the war also provides a good example, I think, of the way that the book always tries to connect ideas to lived experience. In other words, this is not just a story of books or arguments flying back and forth, but of embodied people struggling to make some sense of their own lives.

In addition to ideas and individuals, the book is interested in the institutions in which they take shape. Lieber’s background on page 99 provides a nutshell summary of some of the broader changes in the landscape of American intellectual life during the early republic, particularly the influence of German ideas and educational models after the 1820s. The very bottom of the page hints at an even more transformative institutional change that will come after the Civil War—the rise of the research university. The rest of the book deals largely with how the study of slavery would become incorporated into the research university, and with what consequences.

Visit Scott Spillman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Hecker's "Zero Sum"

Charles Hecker has spent forty years travelling and working in the Soviet Union and Russia. He has worked as a journalist and a geopolitical risk consultant, and has lived in Miami, Moscow and London. A fluent Russian speaker, he holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.

Hecker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia, and reported the following:

Clinging tenaciously by a toenail to the bottom of page 99 is one of the more important topics of Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia.

Page 99 is where the book starts to discuss the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stampede of adventurous international executives into the newly emerged Russian Federation. In the space of two-and-a-half paragraphs at the very bottom, page 99 also shows how the opening of the Russian market slotted directly into a rapidly globalizing world. Countries that were once too far, too opaque or too dangerous for business were rapidly becoming economic hotspots. Russia in the 1990s fit that trend perfectly.

That said, page 99 will not give you a comprehensive view of the scope of Zero Sum. Missing from the page, for example, the story of what happened to all those intrepid executives once they left the all-you-can-drink comfort of business class and disembarked at Moscow’s squalid Sheremetyevo airport. Also missing is the story of the stampede in reverse, as executives fled Moscow’s skyscrapers at the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. All of that is described in vivid detail in Zero Sum, both before and after page 99.

The top half of page 99 describes the amount of money ricocheting around the world during various peaks of international economic activity. Did you know, for example, that until 2004, when record amounts of money crossed international borders at the speed of light, the world was most globalised in 1914, on the eve of the First World War? That’s right, it took almost ninety years for the world to be as globalised as it was when international connections were facilitated primarily by the telegraph.

Visit Charles Hecker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Derricourt's "Five Innovations That Changed Human History"

Robin Derricourt is an honorary professor of history at the University of New South Wales and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books in archaeology and history include Inventing Africa, Antiquity Imagined, Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions, and Unearthing Childhood: Young Lives in Prehistory, which won the 2019 PROSE Award in Ancient History and Archaeology.

Derricourt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Five Innovations That Changed Human History: Transitions and Impacts, and reported the following:

The reader of page 99 will encounter there a key stage of a major development in human history. That is the point at which, five millennia ago in the urban civilisation of ancient Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), symbols used to show objects were developed into symbols to represent sounds – the invention of writing!

So page 99 gives us an image of revolutionary innovation, an excellent example of what I engage with in this book. My goal there was to examine some major transitions in human culture, drawing on archaeology and history to consider what were their impacts, and exploring how many changes can be brought about by one single discovery or invention.

Writing developed from geometric patterns to mark ownership or show numbers in a traded agreement, to pictographic symbols which represented sounds to those trained in reading them. An origin in economic arrangements would lead to writing used for administrative, legal and military roles, religious rituals, political propaganda, and the transition of literature from an oral to a written form, used in the training of a literate elite.

Writing is one of five major introductions in human history I examine in the book: the taming and control of fire, the domestication of the horse (and its later association with the wheeled vehicle), the invention of writing in early civilisations, the creation of the printing press and the printed book, and the revolution of wireless communication with the harnessing of radio waves.

I also use these to raise some broader questions of what we mean by progress and innovation. Until the 18th or 19th century in much of the world innovation was regarded with suspicion by religious and political authorities. Are we now confident that change always beings us benefits? Are we dominated by a “presentist” perspective than biases our understanding of the past and our expectations of the future? Studying the deep past can illuminate our present – and our future.

Visit Robin Derricourt's website.

The Page 99 Test: Creating God.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel J. Mallinson and A. Lee Hannah's "Green Rush"

Daniel J. Mallinson is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. A. Lee Hannah is Professor of Political Science at Wright State University. Their research on the politics and policy of state medical cannabis programs has been published in a several scholarly journals, including Public Administration Review.

Mallinson and Hannah applied the “Page 99 Test” to their latest book, Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States, and reported the following:

Browsers who open our book to page 99 will see an overview of what constitutes a comprehensive state medical marijuana program. The concept “comprehensive” is critical to our work in many ways. Fundamentally, it means that a state has decriminalized the sale and possession of medical cannabis by licensed business and patients, respectively. There is a method for patients to obtain access to state-legal medical cannabis and it is broadly available. Additionally, comprehensive programs have oversight on production and dispensing, as well as providers and patients.

The figure on this page provides a 30,000-foot view of the complexity of medical marijuana programs. Due to federal prohibition of marijuana, each state must stand up a distribution system that can go from “seed” to “sale.” Thus, each aspect of marijuana production from cultivation, to processing, to retail must be developed within each state. The Page 99 Test captures a critical argument in our book that you cannot understand the expansion of legitimization of medical marijuana without focusing on the states.

Green Rush tells this story and puts forward the states as the primary drivers of cannabis liberalization and broader drug policy reform in the U.S. It is structured around four stages of the policy process: agenda setting, adoption, implementation, and feedback. This gives the readers a thorough understanding of how and why medical cannabis policy emerged and spread across 38 American states and the effects it has had on governments and patients.

Learn more about Green Rush at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas D. Anderson's "Inadvertent Expansion"

Nicholas D. Anderson is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics brings the reader to the middle of one of the book’s ten historical case studies—in this case, of France’s failed inadvertent expansion into the Vietnamese kingdom of Tonkin in 1873. A French naval officer by the name of François Garnier had, without authorization from Paris, conquered the kingdom by force. While Garnier would be captured and decapitated by Chinese river pirates over the course of this invasion, he had hoped that his fait accompli would be accepted by his superiors in the capital. This page presents key pieces of evidence for why Paris would turn him down: because of France’s weak position in Europe (in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War) and the geopolitical threat it faced from the great powers there. Thus, Tonkin was returned to local authorities, and the French cabinet ordered the immediate withdrawal of all its forces. While another French naval officer would follow almost exactly in Garnier’s footsteps less than a decade later, and would succeed (covered later in the chapter), for now Tonkin was to remain independent.

The Page 99 Test is only moderately successful in the case of my book. On the one hand, it does serve to highlight one of the two key factors explaining when and why inadvertent expansion occurs: variation in geopolitical risk. It also takes the reader into one of the book’s detailed historical case studies and highlights the kind of primary, documentary evidence that is in abundance throughout the book. On the other hand, simply reading this page in isolation wouldn’t tell you much about the book as a whole—about the puzzling nature of inadvertent territorial expansion, about the details of the theory explaining it, about the nature of the quantitative and qualitative evidence presented in it, or about its relevance to contemporary issues and concerns.

Learn more about Inadvertent Expansion at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

N. Katherine Hayles's "Bacteria to AI"

N. Katherine Hayles is distinguished research professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of literature at Duke University. She is the author of many books, most recently Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational.

Hayles applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Bacteria to AI, readers will encounter speculations about how future interactions with humans and machines will evolve. The main interlocutors on this page are biologist Lynn Margulis (and her son Dorion Sagan) and environmentalist James Lovelock. Margulis and Sagan write that “the future of our machines . . . is less bleak than that of ourselves,” whereas Lovelock envisions a utopian future when intelligent machines, having become “entirely free of human commands because they will have evolved from code written by themselves,” nevertheless will be eager to enlist humans in a grand effort to keep the Earth cool. These are two different versions of what I call “technosymbiosis,” the idea that the evolutionary trajectories of humans and intelligent machines will be from now on inextricably entangled with one another. I call Lovelock’s rosy prediction “wistful,” because it seems highly unlikely, given the anthropogenic global warming that we have already seen, that intelligent machines will suddenly decide they want humans as cooperative partners. It is far more likely, I say, that they will try to exterminate humans as soon as possible.

Turning from the risky game of prediction to what we already know, I point out that technosymbiosis, the symbiotic relationship between humans and intelligent machines, implies each is interdependent with the other. This means that human decisions are already penetrated at multiple levels with algorithmic calculations, that human agency, far from being “free,” is now entwined with AI in multiple arenas, and human practices are joined together with both nonhuman organisms and intelligent machines in what I call “cognitive assemblages,” collectivities through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. I end the page by alluding to the different forms of embodiment that participants in cognitive assemblages possess: enfleshed bodies for humans, nonhuman bodies with different cognitive capacities than humans, and sensors, actuators and computational media for intelligent machines.

The Page 99 Test works well for Bacteria to AI. It articulates one of the book’s major themes, the emergence of technosymbiosis; the chapter of which it is a part expands on these ideas, showing where technosymbiosis overlaps with previous theories as well as where it departs from them.

The book’s main purpose is to criticize the belief that humans are the dominant species on the planet because of our superior cognition. It draws connections between this belief and our present multiple environmental crises; regarding ourselves as superior, we humans conclude we are entitled to exploit earth’s resources for ourselves, regardless of the cost to the environment and our future prospects for survival. It draws on my previous work to distinguish sharply between cognition and consciousness, noting that conscious creatures are a tiny minority of living beings on earth; most organisms are nonconscious. This does not prevent them, however, from having cognitive capacities. Indeed, I argue that all living creatures possess some cognitive abilities, even plants and microorganisms such as bacteria. Re-imagining our cognition in relation both to nonhumans and to AI is thus an urgent necessity.

The alternative I offer is the Integrated Cognitive Framework, or ICF. ICF contextualizes different kinds of cognition according to the umwelten from which they arise. “Umwelt,” roughly translated as “world surround,” is German biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s term to describe the different worlds that species construct for themselves. No entity, including humans, can see reality “objectively”; each species builds its world through its specific cognitive, sensory and physical abilities, including the worlds that computational media construct through their affordances. Learning about and respecting the umwelten of other biological species and AI—our nonhuman symbionts-- will be crucially important to our human futures.

Learn more about Bacteria to AI at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keith Richotte Jr.'s "The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told"

Keith Richotte Jr. is the Director of the Indigenous Peoples and Policy Program, Professor of Law at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona, and Chief Justice of the Spirit Lake Appellate Court; and he never thought he would ever have this many jobs at once.

Richotte applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told: Native America, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Constitution, and reported the following:

From page 99:

As we have seen, the Supreme Court has been, shall we say, less than rigorous in identifying a specific constitutional source of federal authority over Native America. To that end, on a number of occasions the Supreme Court has simply asserted that the U.S. Constitution as a whole is the source of federal authority with little if any reference to specific provisions within the document. … It might be tempting to dismiss McLean’s opinion as an outlier, especially as it was not really in keeping with how we understand the law either then or now. But it is nonetheless helpful because it is evidence of a pattern: on a number of occasions the Supreme Court has asserted that the authority being claimed over Native America is authorized under the U.S. Constitution as a self-evident truism.

If I happened to overhear the Page 99 Test telling a friend about my book using its methodology, I would not be compelled to jump in and correct the Test. Rather, I would be amused at how quickly and simply the Test both cuts to the bone of the argument and hints at the relaxed, familiar, and even humorous way the book makes that argument.

What authority does the federal government hold over Native America? More importantly, how does it justify the authority that it claims? Does this justification comport with its claims over its citizenry more generally? What consequences do the answers to these questions hold for Native America?

These questions fuel The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told. The Page 99 Test reveals much of the heart of the book: the answers to these questions provided by the Supreme Court are not particularly satisfactory. By examining the justifications for federal authority through an Indigenous perspective, it becomes clear that the Supreme Court is trying to tell what amounts to a trickster story – but it is the worst one ever told.

Why is it the worst trickster story ever told and what can we do about it?

Please read the book to find out.

Learn more about The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brittany Friedman's "Carceral Apartheid"

Brittany Friedman is recognized as an innovative thinker on how people and institutions hide harmful truths. Her current work examines this in the realm of social control, and the underside of government such as prisons, courts, and treasuries. Friedman is considered a pathbreaking scholar producing big ideas that blow the whistle on bad behavior within society, and author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Carceral Apartheid and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons takes us on the journey of the second Great Migration, where generations of Black families have fled white supremacist violence in the U.S. South, hoping to find refuge in California. Yet, upon arrival they continued to experience more racism, which in some cases radicalized the liberatory politics of West Coast Black communities. I write on page 99:

Black families who had fled the South were left feeling disillusioned. Their hopes and dreams for a better life elsewhere were revealed to be simply unattainable due to the same racialized violence they had endured for generations.

Particularly for the younger cohort, joining Black revolutionary struggles in California became a way to fight back against new versions of the same carceral apartheid that their families fled in the Southern states. During the time that I first met Anthony, I also began to connect with several members of Black political organizations who joined in the 1960s.

Through this network I met Avery, a high-ranking leader in the original Black Panther Party who explained to me in an interview this sentiment in the context of Oakland, California:

Oakland is probably very much the ideal place because Oakland had been an all White city up until the forties, 1940s, when, during the second Great Migration, Blacks came to Oakland, as they did to Chicago, whatever, from the south…So, Oakland went from being a white city to an almost half Black City, in like one generation. In the south, where you had the main part of the movement; where the majority of Black people had been living, the Whites were so violent and vicious…Now, why is that important?

Because, who joins the Black Panther Party are the people who are living in the North because they are already disconnected from the Klan, so they don’t have that fear; they don’t have that fear of the Klan. But, now they have a consciousness; who is going to let somebody…

Surprisingly, page 99 captures deeply a key takeaway from my book that explains why the Black Freedom Movement holds a significant place in California history. This page also showcases the power of life history interviews and how Carceral Apartheid weaves lived experiences with clear theorizing throughout the book’s storytelling, a writing style often found in creative non-fiction.

Overall, the test works for my book in so much that page 99 displays a key takeaway from Carceral Apartheid. The generation of the 1960s and 1970s that fought for liberation and organized major social movement groups against carceral apartheid were a unique generation in terms of many being the children of Black people fleeing the Ku Klux Klan dominated South, with the promise of a new life. When they instead encountered a similar pattern of alliances between emerging white supremacist groups and the police in California, both in society and within prisons, they fought back every step of the way.

So even though the Page 99 Test only captures a portion of my book’s main argument, it does reveal several of my book’s strengths. Notably, my use of original interviews with people who catalyzed organized resistance to the system of oppression that I term “carceral apartheid,” the system I trace as a violent through-line of colonial and postcolonial governance designed to decimate, destroy, and divide political opposition.

Visit Brittany Friedman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew C. Halteman's "Hungry Beautiful Animals"

Matthew C. Halteman is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics in the UK. He is the author of Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation and co-editor of Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating.

His new book, Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan, is a heartfelt, humane, and humorous exploration of how going vegan can bring abundance into our lives.

Halteman applied the “Page 99 Test” to Hungry Beautiful Animals and reported the following:

Page 99:

[Or parrying writer’s block] with a furious elliptical run to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.’” Or bracing for a workday that might otherwise elicit one-finger salutes to all comers by lingering in a hug from a loved one. Ah, the calming effects of oxytocin!

Managing our inner ecologies can be mighty difficult too. Like when your heart blissfully ignores both your gut and your head as a toxic relationship sends you careening toward implosion. Or when a month of poorly managed work travel transports you predictably from Lonely Valley throughout Booze Gulch onto the floor of the dingiest room at the Motel Dicey Choices. Or when your gut wants a burger, your heart wants to nuzzle a cow, and your head bobbles about between defending old habits and exploring new ones as your friends look on befuddled.

To fully express our capabilities for well-being—to “flourish,” as Aristotle would say—we need relative harmony across the provinces of our territory. When we are unwell, chances are that two or more of the provinces are at war. If we want to bring peace among them, it pays to know each of them intimately—their points of strength, their weaknesses, their insecurities, which ones naturally collaborate well and which ones are temperamentally at odds. Perhaps most importantly, we must know who to approach first to start building the requisite alliances.

Here’s where the genius of Bryant’s advice to “start with the visceral” really comes home. It’s hard to imagine the beauty of a vegan world while your stomach churns at the thought of endless turnip porridge and your heart sinks into dread of the social death sentence sure to follow. Disgust and anxiety are imagination killers. If you want to open a window from our inner ecology into the beauty of a vegan world, go first and with gusto for [the gut, preferably with a superabundance of delicious food and comforting company.]

Page 99 of Hungry Beautiful Animals is as serendipitous a harbinger of what to expect from the book as I imagine any single page could be.

The first five lines offer an accurate sampling of authorial voice: we read a quippy and self-deprecating yet authoritative Gen-Xer wielding the edginess of a rude gesture and the camp of a Journey anthem to balance the glow of a sudden flood of love.

The book’s essence peers out from the first full paragraph: an opportunity to envision and enact transformational changes of our eating habits in ways that embrace and celebrate the complexity of human desire in its oft-conflicted physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and moral aspects. We see that we don’t need to judge ourselves for struggling to unify our “inner ecology”—that we can fail, learn from our foibles, even laugh about them, and then aspire to go again (always imperfectly) in the direction of the beautiful vegan world that has captured our imagination.

A window into the book’s method opens in the second paragraph: to draw on philosophical traditions, East and West, ancient and contemporary, to help us align our desires with our best interests. Achieving the flourishing lives and the gorgeous world we all desire is a matter of knowing ourselves intimately enough to meet all the inner parts of ourselves where they are and invite them into joy: to make peace outside, we must first make peace inside.

The final paragraph anchors page 99 like Bryant Terry’s inspiration to “start with the visceral, move to the cerebral, and end at the political” anchors Hungry Beautiful Animals. To get our inner families into accord, we must put feelings before facts and assure the gut and the heart that delicious food and abiding fellowship are possible in a vegan world. Then and only then can we pivot with joy to the headwork of figuring out our unique contributions to this world-transforming work and the politics of being the change we wish to see.

As a bonus, this deference to Bryant Terry’s work at the foot of the page previews the grounding energy of Black vegan work throughout the book, which draws inspiration from Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen, A. Breeze Harper’s Sistah Vegan, Aph Ko and Syl Ko’s Aphro-ism, and Christopher Carter’s The Spirit of Soul Food in those pivotal moments where everything is at stake.

Visit Matthew C. Halteman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Surekha Davies's "Humans: A Monstrous History"

Surekha Davies spent her childhood watching Star Trek and planning to become an astronaut. By the end of her freshman year there was no warp drive, never mind comfy starships. She became a historian of science instead, specializing in the histories of exploration, cartography, cross-cultural encounters, and monsters in the era from Columbus to Captain Cook.

Davies has a BA and an M.Phil. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters.

After working as a curator and as a history professor, Davies became a full-time author and speaker.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Humans: A Monstrous History, and reported the following:

Page 99 opens with Trevor Noah, the South African comedian. The title of his autobiography, Born a Crime, encapsulates an act of administrative erasure. During the apartheid era, mixed-race relationships were illegal in South Africa, and Noah, the child of such a relationship, spent his early childhood hidden at home. The legal regime of apartheid invented monsters of invisibility: people defined in law as nonpersons, a process that made them legally excludable from society. Defining people as illegal effectively defines them as monsters: as something beyond regular categories, a threat to be suppressed. Such laws show how ideas about race and nation can operate in the same way. They fix the idea of innate differences into a system of hierarchy that justifies an unequal distribution of rights and protections.

The page then outlines a pervasive myth: that before the twentieth century, people in different countries and continents were totally separate and distinct. Myths about medieval European nations (before the sixteenth century, before European colonialism across oceans) being white, Christian, and ethnically one-dimensional fuel white supremacist conspiracy theories today. At times, European Christians in the Middle Ages (between around the seventh and the fourteenth centuries) defined Jews, Muslims, and people from different parts of Europe as monstrous. Such monstrifying stories lie at the roots of today’s debates about nationhood and citizenship.

The page’s closing alludes to less demonizing ways of defining “nation”: as community relationships, not necessarily blood relationships. Native American nations define tribal belonging in ways that differ from nation to nation. Today’s notion of citizenship as a legal category that can be fulfilled in various ways contains something of that flexible way of understanding belonging. But as we reach the end of page 99 and turn over, we’re reminded that this is not how citizenship is typically experienced in practice.

Humans: A Monstrous History ranges from antiquity to the present and roams around the world. Page 99 offers a glimpse of this: apartheid-era South Africa, eleventh-century Europe, contemporary North America. It reveals the book’s core argument: that monster-making is a process of storytelling. People often invent monsters to disappear people who show that seemingly separate categories sit on a continuum.

But page 99 doesn’t reflect the book’s breadth: science, history, politics, pop culture. And it doesn’t reflect the overall feel of the book. The page suggests that the book makes grim reading, but other pages contain comedy and wonder. Humans ranges from light-hearted material like Monsters, Inc. to harrowing stories like that of Charles Byrne, the “Irish giant” whose skeleton was displayed after his death against his wishes, to manifesto-speak about Big Tech. Some sections are utopian, like discussions of the Muppets. Some explore historical events and people; others analyze novels and movies. The test doesn’t capture the full experience of the book although it reveals a key takeaway.

The book as a whole shows how people define humans, monsters, norms, and other beings in relation to one another. Humans is structured thematically in chapters that move from earth to outer space. People invent monsters in order to define three boundaries. One lies between the human and “other stuff” – animals, gods, machines, Martians. Another is the boundary between social groups: this is how societies define and police categories of race, nation, sex, and gender. The third is the boundary of “normal”: by defining monsters, people define norms. And in order to claim that there are discrete categories, people define anyone that doesn’t fit them as an exception, a threat to be suppressed or punished, or as a monster that breaks categories. To build a better future, we might remember instead that each one of us is unique: if we are each monstrous in the sense of being wondrous, then no one is a monster.

Page 99 appears as part of a longer excerpt and author interview in The Ink.

Visit Surekha Davies's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua K. Leon's "World Cities in History"

Joshua K. Leon is a writer, and Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona University. He was awarded the 2022-23 Robert David Lion Gardiner Fellow at New York Historical to research his next book, New York 1860.

His latest book, World Cities in History: Urban Networks From Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire, has been called “the definitive worldwide analysis of pre-industrial cities.”

Leon applied the “Page 99 Test” to World Cities in History and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, World Cities in History, can tell us a lot about the savage inequalities of a point in time: the early Roman Empire and the cities that linked it together. It does not do what the rest of the book does, which is broadly explain how power worked in historic urban networks, so-called golden ages when cities expanded in scope, size, and reach.

But the page is representative of the book. We learn that this was a high period for urbanization. The urban network linking the Roman Empire consisted of 1,800 cities housing perhaps ten million people. Still, they were a minority, dominating the imperial hinterlands that fed them with, for example, grain from Egypt. We learn that local democracy had deteriorated, with a few rich people controlling urban planning through direct financing (in the form of liturgies) rather than deliberation and taxes.

On this page, a new section starts that begins discussing how the Roman Empire reached this point through force, diplomacy and myth. Augustus reconstructed the state on the national narrative written by the poet Virgil. None of it was really true, but it spoke to Augustus's revolution in urban life that he framed as a restoration to times past, down to the city's mythological founding by Trojan refugees.

In the myth, women pay dearly for the construction of their new city-state. They are abducted from rival tribes and married off in order to populate the city—because in ancient times, population was power. They were pawns in Rome’s expansion, dealt like currency in city mergers that enlarged the state. Constant wars of course reflected the recent past of the Late Republic, until the newfound stability of Augustan rule.

That was the myth. The bottom of page 99 hints at the reality of Augustus the city builder. He does not come off well. He sought to Make Rome Great Again with very real legal codes intended to restore the supposed female chastity and piety from those simpler agrarian times. Clearly, he was legislating based on myth, rather than reality, yet the human consequences of Augustus's crusading to reshape the city would have been palpable. For the vital details, you'll have to turn to page 100.

Visit Joshua K. Leon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hiroshi Motomura's "Borders and Belonging"

Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Immigration Outside the Law (2014), Americans in Waiting (2006), many influential articles on immigration and citizenship, and he is a co-author of the law school casebook, Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy. He has testified in Congress and served on the ABA Commission on Immigration. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Migration Review and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.

Motomura applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Borders and Belonging is part of Chapter Six, which addresses a key question in immigration debates: what about people without lawful status? The focus is the United States, but the discussion offers lessons for analogous debates worldwide. Chapter 6 as a whole explains why the best approach is legalization – that is, offering lawful status based on some conditions. Page 99 digs into a specific problem with legalization – that one-time legalization will do nothing to prevent the emergence of a new population of people without lawful status. Page 99 explains that one way to anticipate and address this problem is to have some sort of periodic legalization, but then I turn to the limits of this approach.

A reader who looks at page 99 will get a good glimpse of the book, but just a glimpse. Let me first explain what makes the glimpse a good one. Page 99 shows that the book is about immigration policy, and that it grapples with one of the topic’s most contentious issues, legalization (or amnesty). Page 99 also shows that the book takes on some of the conventional wisdoms shared by legalization’s proponents. In particular, page 99 expresses skepticism about the potential of legalization as a durable solution. So page 99 is like many pages in all chapters in two ways. First, page 99 delves deeper than the usual arguments. Second, it emphasizes how responsible approaches to immigration require broadening the time horizon to include both a long-term view and mustering the patience to put farsightedness into practice.

Why, then, would readers get only a limited view of Borders and Belonging by reading page 99? I wrote the book because I’ve learned, over several decades in this field, that almost all writing and thinking about immigration policy is too narrow. People with views or research on immigration often don’t see refugees as their topic. Lawyers don’t consider the work of international development economists. Immigrants’ rights activists may dismiss the concerns of Americans who feel displaced by immigration and immigrants. Borders and Belonging adopts a much broader perspective that includes issues that are rarely addressed together and yet are interwoven in reality.

So chapter 6 is about people without lawful status, but chapter 1 asks a very different question: “why national borders, and why not?” Chapter 9 examines a topic often raised but less often examined: “what does it mean to address migration’s root causes”? Chapter 10 discusses the relevance of history to the making of immigration policy today. In short, page 99 may give the impression that the book is about people without lawful status, when in fact the book weaves that topic into a complex set of interlocking questions. The answers try to be faithful to the book’s subtitle. And so the book is: Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy.

Learn more about Borders and Belonging at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruce Robbins's "Atrocity: A Literary History"

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has authored several books, among them Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (2022).

Robbins applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Atrocity: A Literary History, and reported the following:

Well gosh! In my case the Ford Madox Ford test seems to have worked pretty well. Page 99 of Atrocity: A Literary History offers evidence from the nineteenth century to back up two key arguments of the book, both of them liable to be controversial: 1) that while racism or ethnocentrism certainly made it easier in the past for people to commit atrocities against Others or foreigners, there are plenty of atrocities in which racism was not a cause at all, indeed had nothing to do with the capacity to slaughter noncombatants, and 2) that while we think of white European populations in modern times as full of enthusiasm for atrocities committed by their armies against people of color, there have always been some (not necessarily anti-imperialist) who were horrified both by the violence and by the lies told to justify it. So-- this goes to the argument of the book as a whole--I contend that humanity does have a significant moral history, a progressive history, and this in spite of the terrible, terrible atrocities committed in modern times, atrocities (think of both the Holocaust and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023) that have made modern times seem the most violent times of all.

Learn more about Atrocity: A Literary History at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Abigail Ocobock's "Marriage Material"

Abigail Ocobock is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships, and reported the following:

Page 99 launches browsers into the middle of a chapter about a group of LGBTQ+ people I call “Marriage Assumers.” The previous two chapters examine two other groups - “Marriage Embracers” and “Marriage Rejecters.” Taken together, these chapters explore variations in the marital orientations of different kinds of LGBTQ+ people.

Page 99 conveniently offers readers a brief summary of what they have already learnt about Marriage Assumers thus far in the chapter. Asking them to “pause and imagine the average Marriage Assumer for a minute,” it directs readers to imagine the following kind of LGBTQ+ person:

She came out and started dating same-sex partners after legal marriage was already possible. She always assumed that she would get legally married one day. Knowing that her relationships have marriage potential matters to her, and she has vetted her partners for marriage interest and commitment early on, making it a deal-breaker. She does not know exactly why marriage is so important to her. Instead, she feels it is “just what you do” when you love someone and are committed to them. She also wants children, and she feels strongly (but rather abstractly) that marriage is important for having them. She has been lucky enough to find a partner who feels the same way.

Having reiterated central features of a “Marriage Assumer,” page 99 then guides readers to focus on the topic of a new section on “Marital Readiness” by asking: “But how does she know when it is the right time to get married?”

By the end of the page, I have set the scene for answering that question, but have not yet delved into the data that does so. I explain that although Marriage Assumers needed to know that marriage was “on the table” from the beginning, it was usually only the front end of their relationships that progressed very quickly toward marriage, then their relationships slowed down (something I later refer to as “locking it down, then slowing it down” – p.101). Marriage Assumers moved quickly from meeting to dating and moving in together, in an effort to ensure a commitment that could put them on the track toward marriage, but then wanted to take their time to achieve particular relationship and life attributes deemed necessary for marital readiness. Marriage was regarded as the crowning achievement of their relationships; it was something they were consciously working toward, but would not rush into.

Browsers would get only a partial idea of the whole work from page 99. They would gain a general sense that it examines how LGBTQ+ people think about and do marriage. Yet relationship trajectories and “marital readiness” represent just one small part of that larger story.

Because page 99 conveniently summarizes how “Marriage Assumers” think about marriage, readers would accurately glean the way marriage is taken for granted by LGBTQ+ people who formed serious relationships after same-sex marriage was already legal, and the extent to which marriage defines their relationships. And if one had to pick a group to narrow in on, Marriage Assumers perhaps make most sense. Now marriage is legal nationwide, all LGBTQ+ people start their relationships with the option to legally marry.

But it is only by comparing across groups that readers gain important insights about the transformative impact of legal marriage on LGBTQ+ lives. Browsers might be left with an impression that same-sex relationships today are fairly indistinguishable from heterosexual ones. But they may not realize that this represents a significant transformation in same-sex relationships. And they will not understand what has been gained and lost with that change. Notably, at the very top of page 99 a run-on sentence from the previous page emphasizes “the central role that access to legal marriage plays in shifting ideas about marriage and parenting across generations.” The rest of page 99 quickly moves on to a new sub-section, but I hope a savvy reader might be alerted to ponder social change.

What I would want readers to know, that might not be possible from page 99 alone, is that Marriage Material is not just about same-sex marriage. I use the case of same-sex marriage to advance understanding of the enduring and changing meaning of marriage as an institution. I challenge the prevailing narrative in family sociology that marriage is a fundamentally weakened institution, showing how it continues to shape individual choices and behaviors in profound ways. I illustrate how marriage operates, shedding light on a variety of institutional mechanisms that work independently and in tandem for different people. Overall, I contend that marriage has had a transformative power on same-sex relationships—one that is much stronger than the power of LGBTQ+ individuals to change the meaning and practice of marriage.

Learn more about Marriage Material at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Mann's "You Are My Sunshine"

Robert Mann is the author of ten books on U.S. and Louisiana political history. He was a senior aide to US senators Russell Long and John Breaux and Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. A professor emeritus of mass communication at Louisiana State University, Mann held the Manship Endowed Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU for 18 years.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the Biography of a Song, and reported the following:

Page 99 of You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the Biography of a Song does not give the reader much insight into the history of the iconic song in my book’s subtitle. This page is devoted to Davis’s transformation from country singer to gospel music entertainer in the early 1950s, four years after the conclusion of his first term as Louisiana governor.

[Davis] surely noticed that other country artists were releasing more gospel songs. Popular acts like the Bailes Brothers and Molly O’Day had made gospel records since the late 1940s. Davis’s label, Decca, had inaugurated a “Faith Series” in March 1950 featuring gospel recordings by its top stars, including the Andrews Sisters, Ernest Tubb, and Red Foley. Foley’s 1950 recording of the gospel standard “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” was a top-ten country hit in July 1950. In February 1951, Eddy Arnold’s “May The Good Lord Bless and Keep You” for RCA Victor reached number five on the country chart. And that summer, Foley released another gospel single, Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Peace In The Valley.” It became the first million-selling gospel record. It’s unclear how much these hits influenced Davis, but by 1951, he had gone all in. He would record almost nothing but gospel music for the next two decades. It was a brilliant decision that kept his career alive. Within a few years, as rock and roll exploded in popularity, most of the top country stars of the 1940s and early 1950s saw their careers decline. But, because he had already migrated into a new genre, Davis’s career survived and thrived.

Not only were his audiences ready for this new, dignified, upright Jimmie Davis, but his voice was well-suited for gospel. On the first recordings with the Anita Kerr Singers, Davis’s voice was pure and smooth, with a revitalized, heartfelt quality. Perhaps it was the new sparer instrumentation. Or maybe it was the support of masterful backup singers. Whatever the case, it was a fresh and appealing sound.

In re-launching his career as a singer of sacred songs, Davis was also a trailblazer. There were few major solo artists in Southern gospel. When Davis entered the field, singing groups— mostly quartets—dominated the genre. They roamed the South, performing in churches and other venues. Among the most prominent were The Chuck Wagon Gang, The Speer Family, The Blackwoods, The Statesmen, and The Sunshine Boys Quartet. For Davis, the new emphasis on gospel music boosted his waning career. The decision came with a ready audience that had followed him for years and loved gospel music as much or more than they loved country music. Those already toiling in the southern gospel field regarded his advent not as threatening competition but as an enormous compliment. “The gospel music industry profited during the 1950s from a genuine celebrity in its midst,” James R. Goff Jr. wrote of Davis in Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel.

When I began working on this book, I set out to explore the background of Louisiana’s state song, a simple lullaby that I thought Jimmie Davis wrote. At the time, I had no idea I would chronicle four decades of Louisiana political history and as many years of country music history, all through the lens of this iconic song.

Here's the book’s bottom line: Davis didn’t write “Sunshine,” but the song was the foundation of his remarkable political career as well as vital to the growth and respectability of hillbilly music, what we now know as country music. “Sunshine” and other seminal hillbilly songs helped give the nascent musical genre respectability by crossing over into popular music when stars like Bing Crosby and other non-hillbilly artists recorded them in the early and mid-1940s. It was one of the main reasons for Davis's induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1972.

“Sunshine” was also vital to Davis’s political success in the 1940s and 1960s. It helped him become Louisiana’s governor twice. That’s because “Sunshine” and other hit songs like it allowed him to overcome and obscure the fact that he had made a series of bawdy Blues records in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Those songs -- with names like “Bed Bug Blues,” “High Behind Blues,” “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues,” and “She’s a Hum Dum Dinger from Dingersville” -- threatened to derail his embryonic political career. But the wholesomeness of his popular, trademark song overwhelmed all that and blunted his opponents’ attacks.

Although he didn’t write “Sunshine,” it’s impossible to appreciate the song’s cultural and political significance unless you understand Davis, his personality, artistry, and long and colorful political career.

Visit Robert Mann's website.

The Page 99 Test: Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU.

--Marshal Zeringue