Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas's "When the Good Life Goes Bad"

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University and has served as the executive director of both the Society of Christian Ethics, the Black Religious Scholars Group and is co-founder of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion. She has published ten books including Religion, Race, and COVID-19: Confronting White Supremacy in the Pandemic and The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture.

Floyd-Thomas applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, When the Good Life Goes Bad: The US and Its Seven Deadly Sins, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Understanding pride as the doctrinal dimension of the American good life is essential for distinguishing between the projections and shadows that myths cast. The American discipline of education and schooling produces knowledge that shapes what Americans consider to be good. In short, American education has long indoctrinated Americans to accept social and cultural norms (aka assumptions and lies) about themselves and others as fact. Pride or “knowledge without character” is the process by which Americans presume and impose the supremacy of their worldview to the exclusion of all others. Through an analysis of knowledge production and dissemination, this chapter explores the ways in which the privileged perspectives of some become the normalizing process by which the general public comes to believe in these death- dealing ideologies as they order our world.

In Christocentric terms, pride is the pinnacle of human hubris, whereby we focus on our own ability, an ability often rooted in delusions of grandeur. Where Hebrews 11:1 articulates that Christian faith is trusting in the divine, pride substitutes our own self-aggrandizing feats and self- serving facts as the source of the “assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.” Philosopher David Hume assesses pride as a pleasant sensation and humility as a painful one. Many wise people have deemed pride to be the greatest of sins. Specifically, American pride emanates from American nationalism and the alleged magnanimity of the United States as a first world power. Many in the world regard the United States as a country proud in the extreme and profoundly lacking in national self-awareness. Take, for example, “Make America Great Again” as a political motto whose adherents exhibit their reluctance or inability to learn moral lessons from past great empires and to gauge its historical significance relative to them. American pride is founded upon Gandhi’s blunder of “knowledge without character.”

Rather than doing the hard work of gaining an enlightened, historically informed understanding of their nation, Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that self-knowledge is more about trusting their feelings of superiority, whether based on nationality, race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability. As a result, the goal of establishing and advancing common ideals such as fellowship, freedom, and flourishing is ignored. In short, America’s system of knowledge production privileges the national functionality of its citizens to the detriment of their national character and moral formation. The rising intolerance in the United States for critical reflection and analysis has coddled the American mind and compromised its ability to search for wisdom and to question untruths.

Page 99 appears in a chapter that frames “pride” as a doctrinal dimension of the American good life.

The core of the text is actually revealed on this page! A browser opening to page 99 would get a good idea of what When the Good Life Goes Bad is doing. The book is a theological and moral critique of the stories that shape American identity, and page 99 shows the engine of that critique: pride as “knowledge without character,” where confidence outruns wisdom and inherited assumptions get treated as fact. It also captures how I read culture as formation. Education and “knowledge production” are not neutral; they can function like catechesis, training citizens into “normal” ways of seeing and then baptizing those perspectives as universal.

I write as a theologian listening to public life. Scripture and moral philosophy sit beside the everyday habits that form us—what we celebrate, what we ignore, what we call “common sense.” If page 99 resonates, it may be because you recognize the feeling it names: certainty that isn’t wisdom, confidence that isn’t character. The page also signals a Christocentric contrast. Hebrews 11:1 describes faith as trust oriented toward God; pride replaces that trust with self-aggrandizing achievements, national myths, and self-serving “facts,” producing a certainty that resists correction. Readers will also see that this pride is not merely personal. It is communal and political—bound up with nationalism, privilege, and the way one group’s worldview becomes the standard by which everyone else is measured.

What page 99 cannot supply, on its own, is the book’s full architecture: how pride interlocks with other “shadows” cast by the American good life, how these ideologies take on everyday force, and how the argument turns toward moral formation and hope. Even so, as a browser’s shortcut, the Page 99 Test works well here.

If page 99 hooks you, the rest of the book shows why that diagnosis matters. I follow the American good life’s promises—fellowship, freedom, flourishing—and then track what those promises can conceal: exclusion, domination, and a growing intolerance for critical reflection that coddles the mind and dulls our capacity for wisdom. Along the way, I ask questions that refuse easy answers: Who benefits when nostalgia becomes moral authority? What happens when superiority feels like self-knowledge? The text helps us realize that we live in a time of gaslighting—public gaslighting. A time when the obvious is denied. When facts are treated as opinions. When propaganda is called patriotism. When cruelty is called “strength.” When greed is called “freedom.” When lies are called “just asking questions.” In such a world, faith must become more than comfort. Faith must become clarity. Or otherwise, faith becomes synonymous for lying.

Alas, this is not a book that settles for scolding or despair. It presses toward an alternative moral imagination: humility in place of hubris, historically informed self-awareness in place of myth, and character formed for the common good rather than national functionality. Page 99 gives you the thesis in sharp relief; the chapters that follow trace its consequences—and invite readers to imagine a good life that does not have to go bad.

Learn more about When the Good Life Goes Bad at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia Seed's "Sails and Shadows"

Patricia Seed is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the award-winning author of To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico; American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches; and Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Sails and Shadows: How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic and Launched the Slave Trade, with the following results:

This page focuses on the Portuguese explorer of Africa’s Atlantic coast, Diogo Cão. Despite being little known outside of Portugal his contemporaries viewed his voyages as a far more important than Barthlomew Dias’s because Cão was the first European to successfully sail south of the Equator, that is, without the help of a pole star. Furthermore, the page illustrates the common Portuguese tactic of ingratiating themselves with leaders of very wealthy African kingdoms, in this example, with the Congo. Their goals were twofold: to convert the leadership to Christianity and to establish an ongoing commercial relationship including cooperation with the slave trade.

Page 99 may surprise readers, who expected that any Portuguese encounter with Africans would result in the latter being deliberately harmed. Yet nothing of the sort happened in Congo. Far from altruism, Diogo Cão’s politeness sought to entice Congo elites into an orbit in which they would exploit or enslave other Africans in return for wealth the Portuguese could supply. Readers might view this information as creation of a web of complicity.

Much of the book explains how the Portuguese finally managed to cross the mid-Atlantic and return, a feat that had eluded sailors for thousands of years. Although Norsemen had briefly island-hopped across the northern rim, knowledge of the Americas remained hidden from Europeans and Africans until the breakthrough Portuguese voyages of the 1400s.

Learn more about Sails and Shadows at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

L. Archer Porter's "Homebodies"

Archer Porter interrogates the social, cultural, and economic life of performance in digital culture. She holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA and Masters from UNC-Greensboro. In her first monograph, Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media, Porter examines the politics of everyday media production by amateur performers, grounded in the study of thousands of home dance videos online. Outputs of her research have been published in Documenta, Performance Research Journal, communication +1, International Journal of Screendance, Bloomsbury Handbook on Dance and Philosophy, and Etúdes. Porter is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Texas at Arlington.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Homebodies and shared the following:

On page 99 of Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media, I describe how Instagram users maintain multiple accounts to brand themselves differently for different audiences, and how dance supports those brand distinctions. This discussion appears midway through the second chapter on “the dancing selfie,” a media form whose aesthetics and semiotics make clear that the dancer is recording themselves. Two dancers whose home dance videos I analyze earlier in the chapter reappear here, and their posts and profiles continue to serve as tools for unpacking the choreographies of intimacy and circulations of authenticity in digital culture. By considering their Instagram accounts as a whole on this page, I suggest how each dancer crafts a personal brand through the dancing body, domestic space, and autobiographical narrative, all organized into a coherent aesthetic.

Page 99 is a representative snapshot of Homebodies, particularly in how it foregrounds the neoliberal co-optation of the dancing body on social media—a central concern of my theory of intimaesthetics. This theory names the aestheticization of intimacy in Web 2.0, especially through self-produced media that stage interior life, private space, and personal narrative. On platforms like Instagram, however, home dance videos play directly into systems that harvest intimate data and refashion the person as a product for the capitalist marketplace. In the book’s introduction, I draw on Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello to critique the “sophisticated ergonomics” of neoliberal capitalism in new media, showing how these systems tap into the most interior dimensions of subjectivity and convert them into marketable forms. Personal branding on social media is a key expression of this process.

The discussion on page 99 demonstrates this dynamic by focusing on the everyday, choreographic manifestations of the “new spirit of capitalism” online. It shows how home dancers produce media that reflect and refine their personal brands, and how platforms actively encourage and reward this crafting of persona. In this sense, the page functions as a concise portrait of intimaesthetics as a whole.

The reference to two dancers who have honed the practice of the dancing selfie also signals a more structural feature of the book. Each chapter centers on just two home dance videos, which I analyze closely to trace their choreographic mechanisms, media genealogies, and platform politics. This deliberate focus counters social media’s overabundance of images and its corresponding lack of critical attention to the aesthetic regimes it creates and promulgates.

What page 99 cannot fully convey, however, is the book’s sustained attention to the body and its framing. Throughout Homebodies, I engage in choreographic analysis to show how intimacy is produced and how it enters different circuits of circulation. A dancer might cultivate closeness by closing his eyes and drifting in and out of frame, as if unaware of the camera—an image that circulates as privacy with a surveillance aesthetic. Or he might dance in the kitchen with a mop, as if pausing from household labor. Whatever the scene, movement, or framing, Homebodies treats choreographic intimacy as the anchor for its social, cultural, and economic life on the platform.

Visit Archer Porter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yonatan Green's "Rogue Justice"

Yonatan Green is an Israeli-American attorney and an author, most recently a Fellow at the Georgetown University Center for the Constitution. He co-founded and was Executive Director of the Israel Law & Liberty Forum.

Green applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Rogue Justice: The Rise of Judicial Supremacy in Israel, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Rogue Justice closes out my theoretical discussion of the dominant form of statutory interpretation in Israel, called “Objective Purposive Interpretation” (or “OPI”). Under this novel method, judges can apply a statute according to what its purpose ought to be, in their own estimation – really. The page includes a quote from renowned Prof. Stanley Fish critiquing OPI (“you have broken free of any and all constraints on what you then declare the law to be”), and summarizes a central flaw of this interpretive method – that it explicitly enables courts to make binding decisions based on “the entirely personal and prejudiced moral ideology of each and every judge.” I finish the section by writing: “The use of OPI renders legislation meaningless, legislators powerless, and the legislative process futile.” The page then continues on to another section, in which I examine a striking and perplexing similarity between Justice Aharon Barak (pioneer of OPI), and Justice Antonin Scalia (paragon of judicial restraint and textualism).

I think the Page 99 Test works for my book – partially. Rogue Justice is an analytical, scholarly, rigorous critique of the Israeli legal system, and especially of the doctrines developed by the Israeli Supreme Court over the past four decades. This page sums up the overall critique against one of the core pillars of Israeli judicial supremacy – a wild and unparalleled form of statutory interpretation, which openly flouts legal, democratic and linguistic norms and which grants judges unrivaled governing power. Much of the book involves a serious principled and theoretical examination of the Court’s doctrines, and this page shows the tail-end of such a discussion. The page refers to a well-known expert, reflecting the book’s spirit because so much of the book endeavors to present the critiques of prominent legal scholars, and not solely my own views. One might fairly say that more than anything else, this book compiles a vast array of arguments advanced by leading legal figures against the Israeli Court’s supremacist jurisprudence.

The last sentence quoted above (in the page description), which closes the section, reflects my effort that the book be accessible, readable and enjoyable – I try and condense core arguments into memorable zingers which pack a punch (and are no less true for it). As I continue to the next section, I raise a point of interest to American readers (Scalia vs. Barak), and this too reflects an overall goal of the book, bridging the gap between a far-off jurisdiction and a foreign non-Israeli audience. Further, I think the section (albeit in the next page) makes a non-intuitive and nuanced argument (namely, that Barak and Scalia reach the same conclusion but for completely opposite and contradictory reasons), something which the book does quite often.

The page is missing two significant elements. First, throughout the book I regularly refer to real-life examples and to judicial decisions. This is missing from the current page, making the book seem more theoretical and less practical than it really is. Second, the page has very few endnote references, which is unusual – the book is supported by a vast array of sources and notes, meticulously researched, which typically adorn (and sometimes crowd) every page. Indeed, a key emphasis of my book is how much the granular details matter. In that sense, the very notion of a single page capturing the book’s “essence” is, by definition, contrary to the book’s essential claim. Nonetheless, I think this page provides a useful and not-misleading glimpse into Rogue Justice, its style, and its substance.

Visit Yonatan Green's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patti M. Marxsen's "Karen Blixen’s Search for Self"

Patti M. Marxsen is an essayist, biographer, independent scholar, and translator (FR>EN) whose writings have been published in the USA, Europe, and the Caribbean. She is the author of three biographical studies, two essay collections, a collection of short fiction, and numerous articles and reviews related to visual art and Haitian literature.

Her books include Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own and Jacques Roumain: A Life of Resistance.

Marxsen applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Karen Blixen's Search for Self: The Making of "Out of Africa" (LSU Press), with the following results:

Page 99 of my book proves the astute observation of Ford Madox Ford to be true in many ways. On that page, I begin with the fact that animals are everywhere in Karen Blixen’s famous memoir of her idealized African world. In that sense, Out of Africa echoes her idyllic early childhood in nineteenth-century Denmark where “dogs, horse, and birds were ever-present.”

This gets complicated, however, when Blixen compares Black African people to animals … as she does, throughout her book, with statements such as, “The old dark clear-eyed Native of Africa, and the old dark clear-eyed Elephant, they are alike.” For this she has been criticized by post-colonial scholars who read her animal metaphors as evidence of racism since racism was, clearly, built into the framework of British Colonialism and she was, in fact, a colonizer by choice. Yet when neither species is deliberately diminished—as in the example of a wise old elephant—another perspective emerges that goes to heart of a current culture debate that dares to question human superiority as the basis of modern “humanism” vs. the wisdom of the animal world as an essential aspect of what many scholars refer to as “post-humanism.” As Danish scholar Peter Mortensen points out, Karen Blixen’s unique vision represents one of the early examples of “post-humanism” because it recognizes a necessary balance of human/animal interaction.

This issue is one of several that emerges in my book as I offer a twenty-first-century reading of a twentieth-century classic, beginning with a “deep dive” into how Karen Blixen thought and lived with issues of colonialism, racism, and feminism in a section titled “Contested Legacy.” I also untangle a kind of “identity theft” in that section with regard the blockbuster film in 1985 that posthumously romanticizes Blixen’s difficult life.

I find it fascinating that one page of a book can serve as a kind of “on ramp” to the many complex issues I explore through the lens of a memoir first published in 1937. That said, I would argue that a true understanding of Karen Blixen’s life and work requires several angles of vision—and many more pages.

Visit Patti M. Marxsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alec Worsnop's "Rebels in the Field"

Alec Worsnop is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park where he direct the Military Perspectives Speaker Series and is a Research Fellow in the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rebels in the Field: Cadres and the Development of Insurgent Military Power, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book walks through the way in which Việt Minh sought to develop a modern military system by selecting a cadre of small unit leaders who could plan effective military operations and train their troops. It comes in a chapter that assesses the performance of various Vietnamese insurgent groups as they countered the French during the First Indochina War (1945-1954). While the victory of the Việt Minh, the predecessor for the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, also known as the Việt Cong), looms large in the 20th century, as the conflict started, the French were less worried about the Việt Minh than many of its competitors.

This page actually touches on one of the core themes in the broader book. Rebels in the Field departs from the existing research into insurgent behavior by explicitly focusing on the military processes involved in deploying force in substate conflicts. To conduct guerrilla warfare, groups have to fight well. While perhaps a weapon of the ‘weak’, guerrilla warfare is not a weapon of the tactically incapable. And the things that help groups to organize in the first place, ideology, religious, social ties, do not necessarily help organizations to fight well, and can actually impair military development.

To fight this way, I argue that insurgents, like any other military actor, need capable small units that can fire and maneuver without suffering extensive losses. To do this, I draw on much research into conventional militaries and hold that a key linchpin in this process is capable small-unit combat leaders. When facing much stronger foes, creative small-unit combat leaders can "punch above their weight." Not only do they lead effective operations, but lay the groundwork for military adaptation and resilience from the bottom-up.

The Việt Minh is an archetypal case of the importance of military development. While their success is often attributed to their Communist ideology, leaders in the organization were painfully aware that ideological commitment did not generate military capacity. As I elaborate on page 99, "General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the commander of the Việt Minh forces, advised that 'it is necessary to carry out regular training systematically and according to plan, proceeding from the rank and file upwards … The army must be trained to master modern techniques, tactical use of arms, coordinated tactics, and modern military service.'"

In this context, the chapter on the Việt Minh helps to explain how the Việt Minh, which looked weak at the onset of the war, developed into one of the most successful insurgent militaries in the 20th century, defeating the French in a set battle at Ðiện Biên Phủ. The chapter ends by quoting a French post-mortem which recognized that the French military had underestimated the immense effort the Việt Minh put into developing a professional military.

The following chapters, covering the US interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, identify similar dynamics. As with the Việt Minh, the groups that fought well did not do so based on their religious, political, and social endowments, but instead developed a cadre of small-unit combat leaders who served as the back bone of their military efforts.

Visit Alec Worsnop's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bianca J. Baldridge's "Laboring in the Shadows"

Bianca J. Baldridge is Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University. She is the author of Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youthwork (2019).

Baldridge applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work, and reported the following:

On page 99, you’ll find the beginning of Chapter Four, titled “Protecting Youth, Protecting Ourselves.” I begin the chapter with two quotes. The first is from the extraordinary feminist scholar, activist, and poet, Audre Lorde. The second is from Chris, a youth worker from the Midwest and an interview participant in my book. Like Lorde, he’s a poet and activist. He’s also dedicated his life to working with youth in community-based educational spaces.

I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference . . . Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
–Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays

We have to take care of ourselves, take care of each other, honor memories, and honor legacies that just don’t exist in the same way for other people.
–Chris, youth worker

I began this chapter with these two quotes because they speak to the struggle to be well and to care for the self amid struggle, pain, and structural harm, while also trying to care for others. The opening paragraph describes an experience Chris had while giving a guest lecture at a local university, where he wanted to protect himself and to honor and respect the memory of a former student he lost to gun violence.

This test works for part of the book but not for the entire book. But it does capture a very important part! That is, how do community-based youth workers—professionals in youth organizations who educate, nurture, and guide young people through many forms of development—take care of themselves in a loosely organized field that can be quite precarious due to low wages, high turnover, housing and food insecurity, etc., while also taking care of young people as they cope with structural harm. I believe that page 99 will give readers a sense of how skilled youth workers are at managing the nuances that arise in their work.

In my book, I argue that because youth workers, particularly in nonprofits, are situated as care and education workers, their work is typically viewed as “noble,” which ultimately furthers their exploitation. For Black youth workers, I make the case that this precarity is exacerbated by racial discrimination and racial microaggressions. Despite the challenges I raise, my book also shares their visions for the future and how joy serves as a tool of resistance and protection for youth workers and the young people they work with. Laboring in the Shadows highlights precarity and invisibility while demonstrating the power and promise of youth work as a sustaining and necessary force in Black educational and social life.

Visit Bianca J. Baldridge's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan Seale-Feldman's "The Work of Disaster"

Aidan Seale-Feldman is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and a research associate at the Centre d’anthropologie culturelle (CANTHEL) at the Université Paris Cité in France.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Work of Disaster tells a story called “Vishal’s Medicine.” Vishal was a man I met in an earthquake-affected village in rural Nepal who received psychosocial counseling and medication after the disaster. He was one of many people who discovered such treatments because of the seismic rupture and the post-earthquake humanitarian psychosocial interventions that followed. Around the time of the earthquakes, Vishal had been suffering from troubling episodes of incoherent wandering in the forest which he described as jangali, wildness. The story on page 99 takes place three years after the post-disaster mental health program phased out, during a follow-up trip I made back to Nepal to explore the afterlives of humanitarian intervention.

I think readers opening the book to page 99 would get a clear idea of some of the core issues I address in the work as a whole. In fact, I used to give talks that would start with a photograph of Vishal’s medicine: three blister packs of pills–red, blue, and green–on a plastic shopping bag laid out on a patch of Himalayan earth [image left]. I felt this image and the story that accompanied it cut to the heart of the key question that I raise in the book: What are the consequences of transient care, in a world of cascading disasters?

Vishal’s story is exemplary for multiple reasons. Like many of the clients treated by the post- disaster psychosocial program, Vishal did not conform to humanitarian assumptions of the “earthquake victim.” Vishal’s suffering began before the earthquakes, and he was prescribed antipsychotic and antidepressant medication by an NGO because he happened to live in the disaster zone. When humanitarians deemed the “crisis” of mental health in Nepal to be over, Vishal was once again left to manage his affliction on his own in a region with minimal access to psychopharmaceuticals. The temporary prescription of psychiatric drugs in the earthquake- affected districts is one of the most troubling aspects of the story of disaster and mental health in Nepal.

At the same time, Vishal’s story confounds our (now well established) anthropological expectations that humanitarian interventions are solely a form of violence, or that global mental health is simply a mode of medical imperialism. Despite the obstacles of access, after the program phased out Vishal chose to continue taking the medication he discovered through the work of disaster, whatever the cost. Vishal continued his treatment because it made him feel better and allowed him to return to health, which he defined as being able to care for his children, his animals, and to work the land. Ultimately Vishal’s challenge was one of chronicity. When I met him years later, he was strong and had just come from planting rice, but he was also ambivalent about the efficacy of his treatment. He worried that he might have to take psychiatric drugs for life. The story of Vishal’s medicine not only raises questions regarding the ethics of brief humanitarian psychosocial interventions but it is also an example of what disaster generates, and the limits and possibilities of transient care.

Visit Aidan Seale-Feldman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan VanGorder's "A Mother’s Work"

Megan VanGorder is assistant professor of history at Illinois State University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Mother's Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War–Era Nurse, and shared the following:

The top half of Page 99 of A Mother’s Work is occupied by an image of a large building, the Illinois Soldier’s Orphan’s Home, which was officially opened to occupants in August 1867 in Normal, Illinois. In front of the building, the reader can discern a row of children. They are dwarfed by the grandeur of the building, but they stand out because they all dressed in white and neatly assembled. These children are presumably the orphans or half-orphans of Illinois Civil War soldiers who occupy the home.

The remaining text on page 99 states:

[Mary Bickerdyke] also inserted herself into traditionally male-dominated aspects of organizational development, influencing fundraising efforts, teacher and matron assignments, and even decisions about the home’s location.

Publicly, the creation of the Illinois Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home was the province of powerful Illinois men eager to publicly demonstrate their dedication to fallen soldiers and their families. Even before the guns fell silent, state leaders began to anticipate the social and financial responsibilities that would accompany peace. As the Civil War was still being waged across the South, the Illinois General Assembly recommended a “tax for destitute families of soldiers, schools for soldier’s [sic] orphans, and a state sanitary bureau” to prepare for the postwar reality in early 1865. Governor Richard Yates entreated the state’s citizens to support the measure and invoked their patriotism and collective obligation to the general welfare of their neighbors: “No State is worthy of its sovereignty, and no government the respect of its people, who will not protect and nurture the children of its soldiers...”

The Page 99 Test hints at the major themes of the book and works reasonably well as a way to understand how Mary Bickerdyke consistently worked to “insert herself into traditionally male-dominated” spaces. However, the page only contains a single example of that lifelong journey. From page 99 alone, a reader might reasonably assume the book is primarily about the founding of the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home or about state-level policy formation. In reality, the institutional story is one strand within a broader exploration of how one woman leveraged Civil War service to reimagine authority, obligation, and maternal citizenship in the nineteenth century.

The image of the Illinois Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home visually signals that this book is not simply a wartime narrative, but a study of how wartime service translated into long-term structures of veteran and dependent care. The accompanying text underscores one of the book’s core arguments that Bickerdyke did not merely operate within accepted feminine spheres of professionalism but took direct action to influence institutions pertaining to soldier or veteran care. The page also situates this example of her work within the broader political culture, showing how male state leaders publicly claimed authority over commemorative and welfare efforts while women like Bickerdyke exerted influence in ways that were less visible but no less consequential.

A Mother’s Work spans four decades of Mary Bickerdyke’s tireless efforts to legitimize herself as a professional caregiver and the ways in which she utilized her reputation as “Mother” to effectively accomplish those goals.

Visit Megan VanGorder's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Adrienne A. Winans's "Moving Mountains"

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is Chancellor’s Professor of the Departments of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she also serves as an associate dean in the School of Humanities and faculty director of the Humanities Center. She is coauthor of Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress. Adrienne A. Winans is an independent scholar.

Wu applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Moving Mountains: Asian American and Pacific Islander Feminisms and the 1977 National Women's Conference, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my co-authored book, Moving Mountains: Asian American and Pacific Islander Feminisms and the 1977 National Women’s Conference, does give readers a good sense of the overall book. On that page, I highlight Rita Fujiki Elway. A multi-racial Japanese American from the state of Washington. Rita was the youngest and only Asian American member of the National Commission that organized the 1977 National Women’s Conference at the time of the Houston gathering. This historic event was the first and only time the U.S. Congress authorized funding to support the creation of a national women’s agenda. The national conference was preceded by 56 pre-conferences, held in every state and six territories. As a National Commissioner, Elway had access to resources and information, which she shared with other Asian American and Pacific Islander women as well as a broader network of women of color and allied women, like Gloria Steinem. Nevertheless, Elway felt like a “token” who “wasn’t supposed to speak up.” In an interview, she shares her conflicting roles a token symbol of inclusion and a dedicated organizer. Elway’s status reveals how Asian American and Pacific Islander women, often relegated to marginalized roles as racialized immigrants and colonized Indigenous people, nevertheless invited themselves to the National Women’s Conference in order to advocate for the needs of their communities.

Learn more about Moving Mountains the University of Washington Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Fierce and Fearless.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sonia Hazard's "Empire of Print"

Sonia Hazard is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media, with the following results:

Page 99 is the first page of chapter three, titled “Distance and Distribution’s Exclusions in the West.” It consists of the chapter’s opening paragraphs, which introduce Ornan Eastman’s 1828 appointment as the first “General Agent of the West” for the New York-based American Tract Society, and his sharp criticism that the organization had long neglected areas of the US beyond the Allegheny Mountains. His comments mark the first public acknowledgment that the publisher’s tract distribution efforts were falling short.

The page also explains how ATS leaders viewed the West not only as a geographic area outside the Northeast but as a spiritually deficient missionary field populated by poor, churchless settlers. Many of them were Catholic immigrants, whom they considered vulnerable to superstition and religious error (“the victims of a superannuated and rotten superstition,” “bound hand and foot” by priests!).

The Page 99 Test is not a perfect shortcut. Page 99 introduces the American Tract Society’s distribution struggles, and it captures several of the book’s concerns: the difficulties of national distribution, the vastness of American space, and the chauvinistic assumptions embedded in evangelical publishing. However, it doesn’t capture much about the central argument of the book, which is that the ATS built a “media infrastructure” to distribute evangelical media over distances, and to make that media compelling to readers. The book further posits that media infrastructure was a pervasive but overlooked form of evangelical power in the nineteenth century. The two paragraphs on page 99 are setting up the problem of distance, but do not yet describe the solutions that are the heart of the book. Page 101, which describes some of the ATS’s distribution systems, would be a better shortcut.

I want to say a little more about what the book is about. Nineteenth-century evangelicals believed that print media like tracts and newspapers could change minds and save souls, and they often described that power as an “influence,” something vague and mysterious. I was motivated to write this book because I wanted to explain that mystery. How does print work? How can a printed text change someone's mind? And, moreover, how does it do it over the vast distances that characterized the period’s imperialism?

The book argues that evangelical power lay less in the content of the messages than in the infrastructures that shaped how texts were made, circulated, and read. Writing this book was my effort to explain those mechanics and to rethink the power of texts and religion in the nineteenth-century US.

Learn more about Empire of Print at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuel D. Anderson's "The French Médersa"

Samuel D. Anderson is a history teacher at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa, and shared the following:

Page 99 recounts a debate between two French colonial administrators concerning the fate of a school in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in 1919. The school was a médersa, a colonial invention that combined both French and Islamic curricula; this one had been controversial since it opened in 1908. The page begins by describing a proposal from Charles Mercier, the new director of the school, to reorient its structure and goals to be more in line with similar schools in Algeria, where the médersa system originated in 1850. Mercier had just arrived in Senegal from Algeria, and thought that this Algerian model would transform the Senegalese médersa from an “excellent primary school” into something akin to a “Muslim university,” which would better serve the colonial goal of training a Muslim elite to work with the French colonial administration. The second half of the page is devoted to a long and indignant retort from Mercier’s predecessor at the médersa, another administrator named Jules Salenc. Salenc rejected all of Mercier’s proposals, arguing that Algeria and Senegal were fundamentally different. He wrote: “Any less superficial study of Black Islam [l’islam en pays noir] would have shown him the problems with the ideas he proposed: excellent, perhaps, in Algeria, but completely useless and even dangerous in Senegal.” The page concludes with a coda: Salenc ultimately won the argument, Mercier left his position the next year, and the médersa closed shortly after that.

This page is more of an argumentative stepping stone than an encapsulation of the whole book. It highlights two of the book’s core themes, namely that these médersas linked North and West Africa in new ways under French colonial rule, and that ideas about race shaped their development. It shows that this linking was controversial. Some administrators believed that the two regions should be considered a single area, with Islam a major unifying factor, and others believed that they were fully separate, divided racially into Black and “white” Arab or Amazigh (or “Berber”) zones. These competing interpretations are central to the book’s third chapter, where this page appears, and which recounts the expansion of the médersa system from Algeria to West Africa. This page suggests—and the next pages demonstrate—that Salenc’s idea of a racial division won out, and the médersas in what the French considered “Black Africa” were closed shortly thereafter. In that sense, this page fits within a common interpretation of these schools—the idea that the West African médersas had a relatively short lifespan and thus a minor impact on the colonial history of Senegal or West Africa more broadly.

Reading past page 99, however, would help the reader understand the counterargument I make in the rest of the chapter and in the book as a whole. I argue that historians who address Franco-Muslim education, and who address the broader colonial history of northwest Africa, have been limited by the “Saharan Divide” that separates North and West Africa into distinct spheres of historiography. The specific dispute between Salenc and Mercier discussed on page 99 highlights the controversial comparison with Algeria, but it does not show how, beyond that specific case, Franco-Muslim education became an idea that linked North and West Africa for the century between 1850 and 1951.

A core theme in the book is that Franco-Muslim education was a “hyphen” that linked disparate ideas, especially those about the relationship between France and Islam under colonial rule, about tradition and modernity in Islamic education, and about North and West Africa. I draw the “hyphen” terminology directly from archival materials. Though neither of the documents discussed on page 99 use that term explicitly, the page clearly highlights how controversial the idea was. These were some of the first archival sources I read while researching this project, and they piqued my interest in learning more about this controversial trans-Saharan connection. I hope that a reader who opened the book to page 99 would feel the same way, and would want to read on.

Learn more about The French Médersa at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric C. Smith's "Between Worlds"

Eric C. Smith is associate professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of John Leland: A Jeffersonian Baptist in Early America.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Between Worlds: John A. Broadus, the Southern Baptist Seminary, and the Prospects of the New South, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Between Worlds is also the opening page of chapter 6, the critical transition in the life of my subject. The Civil War has ended and Reconstruction has begun in John A. Broadus’s South Carolina. He has plummeted from his antebellum success and prosperity into poverty and humiliation. The southern institutions he labored to build—most notably the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—now teeter on the brink of collapse. This page features one of, if not the single most important moment of his life. As his fellow faculty members at the seminary consider shutting school down for good in the wake of Confederate defeat, Broadus makes a famous and well-documented vow: “Let us all quietly agree that the seminary may die, but we’ll die first.” He spends the rest of his life struggling to keep that commitment.

In fact, the Page 99 Test applies remarkably well to Between Worlds, because it falls exactly at the pivotal moment of John A. Broadus’s life and career. it is difficult for me to imagine another single page in the volume that so succinctly captures the crux of this story. Remarkable!

My book is the first critical biography of John A. Broadus, a highly influential Southern Baptist preacher, educator, and cultural influencer in the late nineteenth century. The book focuses on his unique ability to navigate “between worlds,” in order to keep alive the southern institutions, religious and otherwise, in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the pivotal moment documented on page 99, the rest of the book chronicles Broadus’s herculean efforts to recover his personal position and to re-establish the seminary and other southern institutions he loved in what to him in the strange new world of Reconstruction and Gilded Age America.

Learn more about Between Worlds at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenneth W. Noe's "Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend"

Kenneth W. Noe is the Draughon Professor of Southern History Emeritus at Auburn University. He is most recently the author of The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War.

Noe applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief, with the following results:

Page 99 begins at the end of April 1863 with Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s army on the move against the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg. Once across the Mississippi River below the city, Grant decided to ignore Abraham Lincoln’s wishes that he cooperate with Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks’s army in Louisiana. Instead, Grant marched away from Banks, drove deep into central Mississippi, approached Vicksburg from the east, and eventually besieged the city after two failed assaults in mid-May. After the defeat of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s army at Chancellorsville, Virginia, in early May, and with it the resulting resurgence of antiwar Democrats, Lincoln dreaded the political effects of a time-consuming siege. He needed a victory. Affairs were no better in Virginia, where Lincoln considered replacing Hooker as the general’s subordinates turned against him. Gen. Robert E. Lee then marched his army around Hooker and headed north with an eye on Pennsylvania, leaving Hooker grasping for a response. The already bad situation had become much worse for Lincoln.

The Page 99 Test yields disappointing results for Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend. It does touch upon an important theme of the first half of the book, Lincoln’s struggles to convince his generals to fight the Civil War in the direct way that he preferred: “hard, tough fighting that will hurt somebody” rather than elaborate turning movements and sieges as epitomized previously by Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan in Virginia and now Grant in Mississippi. What page 99 does not do is reveal the larger thrust of the book, the origins and evolution of what I call the “heroic legend.” Taken from my readings of folklore studies, this is my shorthand for the now-common idea in Civil War literature that Lincoln was a self-taught military genius who was a wiser and more modern military thinker than his generals. Today, most Civil War historians will argue that he displayed his brilliance from the beginning of the war, or else that he grew as a military thinker through deep study and in tandem with Grant once that general came east in 1864. The heroic legend, I maintain, began with Lincoln himself. From the very beginning of his presidency, he behaved as if he thought he was smarter than the brass. His loyal inner circle later argued that assertion in print, but for decades they failed to convince readers. The heroic legend instead required a long historiographical gestation, facing indifference until it reemerged in Great Britain after World War I and finally found acceptance as canon in Cold War America. The development of this historical construct from Lincoln’s death to the 1950s is the subject of the book’s second half, something that a reader would never guess from page 99. If anything, Grant’s decision to reject the president’s advice seemingly runs counter to the overall notion of Lincoln’s far-seeing strategic and operational wisdom. The president later confessed to the general after the fall of Vicksburg that his ideas had been faulty, and that Grant’s response was better.

Ultimately, page 99 is an important block in the book’s foundation that nonetheless does not suggest the appearance of the complete structure.

Visit Kenneth W. Noe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carl F. Cranor's "Vital Lives"

Carl F. Cranor, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside (after 53 years) has published widely on risks, medicine and the law to protect the public's health. His research has been supported by The National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Yale Law School, and the University of California. He served on California science advisory panels: Proposition 65; Electric and Magnetic Fields; Nanotechnology; and Biomonitoring, along with Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences Committees. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Collegium Ramazzini, a Congressional Fellow, the National Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Professor in Philosophy for 2014-2015, "Educator of the Year,” National Pollution Prevention Roundtable, 2022 and Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor, 2025-2026.

Cranor applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Vital Lives: Social Responsibility and the Battle Against Chronic Disease, and shared the following:

From page 99 (and the end of page 98); footnotes omitted:

The world is awash in toxicants to which millions are exposed, including mothers, developing children, and newborns (Chapter 5). Women, pregnant or not, may have from 43 to 200 toxicants in their bodies and with possible additional contributions from their local environment or living conditions. Data reveal newborns with many toxicants in their umbilical cords. 1 Minority women and their youngsters are among the most contaminated and most susceptible subpopulations.

Puberty is a notable susceptibility period for teenage women and perhaps to a lesser extent for men. Are teenage men and women alerted to possible toxic exposures during this life-stage? Recall that young women have enhanced risks of breast cancer when exposed to some toxicants at this time (Chapter 3).

While white women have risks of breast cancer, Black women have two- or three-times greater risks, with Asian American women having lesser risks. Additionally, if women have some chronic diseases or are obese, they are likely to have greater breast cancer risks from toxicants. Prediabetic adults with exposures to perfluorinated compounds are twice as likely as unexposed individuals to have elevated cholesterol and blood sugars, conditions that could foster diabetes.

However, decisions beyond the previous points may not be easy to make because of social circumstances in which one lives.

The influence of the Social Determinants of Disease

How do social and economic conditions shape lifestyle choices? Do public health officials, WHO and CDC inadvertently assume favorable social and economic circumstances in which persons could influence their health; to choose to smoke or not, drink to excess or not, or pay little attention to fat-enhancing foods or not? Certainly, socially advantaged and educated people with decent incomes, might better appreciate the importance of healthy choices and their consequences, and more plausibly could choose to avoid risky courses of action that invite diseases.

Less specific contributions to chronic illnesses have been identified by sociologists and epidemiologists. These are called the “social determinants of disease.” [These may create risks of disease, set the stage for chronic disease or foster behaviors that reduce them.]

Page 99, in Ch. 4, partially provides clues of some major ideas from the book. Chronic diseases are biological conditions (Ch. 2), but they can be limited or accelerated by personal habits (Ch.4), life stages (Ch. 3), referenced here, involuntary toxic exposures (Ch. 5), also referenced here, or substandard living conditions [social determinants of disease] (aspects of Ch. 4 & 6). This is one of the earliest references to the social determinants of disease. Page 99 first calls attention to the downside of toxic exposures during the puberty life stage, and toward the end hints at influences from the social determinants of diseases. While this page is not critical, it points to three features of life circumstances that may enhance chronic afflictions (life stages, toxic exposures, and substandard poor living conditions). Page 99 is not the best single page for introducing the book’s ideas, but it provides references of themes that are developed elsewhere and hints at their significance. Page 99 in this book might whet a reader’s appetite to discover more about chronic maladies and what contributes to them and what can be done about them.

Readers opening this book to page 99 would get some clues of the broader work. By suggesting more major ideas, this page hints at connections between those themes. As a “test” of a browser’s shortcut, this page may whet an appetite for the larger themes broached elsewhere.

Learn more about Vital Lives at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Legally Poisoned.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christophe Wall-Romana's "Black Light"

Christophe Wall-Romana is professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry and Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy, and translator of Jean Epstein’s The Intelligence of a Machine as well as Gilbert Simondon’s Imagination and Invention.

Wall-Romana applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Black Light: Revealing the Hidden History of Photography and Cinema, and reported the following:

In Black Light, page 99 acts as a hinge between two sections of Chapter 2. These sections are titled “Herschelian Cosmology and the Chrono-Imaging Equation,” (94) and “Animating History: Astronomical Culture and the Specter of Slavery,” on 99. These somewhat technical titles address two central components of the overall argument of the book. That argument is the following: “astronomical and cosmological visualization within the purview of natural history—together with the accounts of racial differentiation and Blackness that linked Earth to the cosmos, as well as photochemistry to skin color—were integral to the new models of imaging that progressively shaped the matrix of photocinema from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries” (24). In other words, in the history of technical images that led to photography and cinema, I argue that modeling the cosmos and modeling race were key imperatives that predated the goal of simply reproducing visual reality.

The first section ending on 99 explains the dynamic cosmology of William Herschel, a German musician who migrated to England and became passionate for astronomy. Herschel is famous for being the first (identified) person to discover a new planet in the solar system in 1783: Uranus. But in the history of astronomy, he played a more crucial role: he was the first to propose a general theory of the formation of all objects in the cosmos, from planetary systems to galaxies, based on actual data. His driving insight came out of the patient cataloguing of star clusters which he conducted with his sister Caroline—the first woman scientist to receive a state salary from in 1785 (at her insistence!). With their thousands of sketches of variegated star groupings, they realized that a single dynamic process could account for all of them. That process is the opposite tug of gravity condensing them and centrifugal force giving them an ellipsoid form (like the spiral Andromeda galaxy). For media studies what is noteworthy is that William expressly pointed out that the thousands of still sketches they amassed amounted to freeze frames within a single dynamic process, a single ‘film’ as it were. That is exactly how cinema emerged from the work of photographers in the 1860s and 70s who decided to ‘animate’ the sequential shots (chronophotographs) that they took when studying motion. Cosmology thus ‘invented’ the idea of animating still images.

The page 99 section titled “Animating History: Astronomical Culture and the Specter of Slavery,” goes on to link Herschel’s dynamic cosmology with a late 18th-century view of human history as equally cinematic. While cosmic objects evolve from physical forces alone—a radically atheistic notion!—Enlightenment thinkers puzzled over what propelled human history. Their answer was civilizational progress. And the only measure of it for Europe’s white intelligentsia was cultural comparison, which was at that time inherently racial and overwhelmingly racist. It was indeed an astronomer, Condorcet, who first posited progress explicitly on the model of cosmological dynamism. Condorcet was an abolitionist, largely because slavery was obviously an inhumane and backward practice. This section shows that astronomical culture tended to reject slavery also on optical grounds, knowing that Black skin is a simple matter of light reflectance rather than physiological difference. This goes a long way towards explaining why 19th century antislavery legislation was spearheaded in England and France by two actors trained in photochemistry: Henry Brougham and François Arago.

Page 99 provides a very solid preview of the book as a whole which endeavors to rethink media history through astronomy, slavery, and anti-Blackness. Of course there are important aspects missing. For instance, the ‘multiple word hypothesis’, which was taken for granted in the 18th century, limned out rational grounds for thinking that all planets of the solar system were inhabited. This turns out to be a pivotal component for linking astronomy and race since extra-terrestrials were invariably envisioned through racial and racist lenses. It’s also vital to know that philosopher Immanuel Kant, who penned an original dynamic cosmology that likely inspired Herschel, considered that the decomposition of white light into spectral colors ultimately presages the racial superiority of whiteness.

The Page 99 Test is thus rather successful here. Pages 97 and 98, as well as 100 and 101—to sample a few neighbors—would certainly not give as full an idea of the book’s main argument as 99. Of course, there is a substantial element of probability in choosing 99. The first 20 to 30 pages are obviously selected out from the test since their introductory bent might serve to illustrate the book too well. A later page, say 140 or 160, might either not be present in a shorter book or veer towards concluding matters. So, the test applies realistically to a span of pages ranging, let’s say, from page 40 to 120. Is 99 better than all or even most of these? I’m a bit skeptical... On the other hand, my book shows that European ideas about race and especially Blackness were based on just the kind of magical thinking as the Page 99 Test—only, with devastating consequences for millions of people, to this day. I do believe some magical thinking can be benign, even beneficent. I know the sun isn’t rising and setting: Earth is just rotating. But the sun remains the extraordinary agent in my experience of sunrise and sunset. The Page 99 Test for me is about wonder as a guide in life and thought. And wonder is exactly what I felt when I cracked up my freshly printed book to its fated page 99!

Learn more about Black Light at the University of Minnesota Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Misty L. Heggeness's "Swiftynomics"

Misty L. Heggeness is co-director of the Kansas Population Center, Associate Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the University of Kansas, and former Principal Economist and Senior Advisor at the US Census Bureau. She is also creator of The Care Board, a dashboard of economic statistics built by and for caregivers that brings their economic contributions into the fold.

Heggeness applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy, with the following results:

Page 99 does a surprisingly good job of setting the stage for Swiftynomics because it situates Taylor Swift within a longer lineage of women who reshaped pop culture—and the economics of the music industry—by refusing to accept the constraints placed on them. This section focuses primarily on Madonna, tracing the ways her career mirrors and anticipates Swift’s success: the intense connection between artist and fans, the persistent underestimation of women’s intelligence and ambition, the policing of their visibility, and the outsized scrutiny of their personal lives.

The page concludes:

Taylor Swift is similar to Madonna. Madonna oversees her music, writing her own lyrics, and tied her own growth and experiences growing up female into the type of artist she would become. She championed for young women’s voices and experiences to be heard in art and advocated for the LGBTQ+ community. Madonna’s Blonde Ambition Tour of the 1990s was in many respects the original Eras Tour. It focused on the various eras or ‘worlds’ of Madonna’s music career. It became not only a concert, but an immersive theatrical experience.

Swiftynomics is not intended to be a biography of Taylor Swift, and page 99 captures the book’s core method and ambition. A browser opening to this page would quickly grasp that the book uses pop culture case studies to illuminate much larger economic ideas about labor, power, gender, and value. It shows how women’s creative, cultural, and economic contributions are routinely trivialized—even as they generate extraordinary returns.

By not focusing exclusively on Taylor Swift, the page also makes clear that Swift’s career, while phenomenal, is not an isolated story. It is part of a continuous history of women who have had to break new ground in order to build something new.

Finally, this page reflects how I draw on my dual expertise as a labor economist and a serious pop music fan to do this work—and to invite more women to see themselves as economists or economic agents. By placing Madonna, Taylor Swift, and artists like Beyoncé in conversation with economic theory, Swiftynomics argues that cultural phenomena often dismissed as frivolous are, in fact, powerful data sources for understanding how markets reward—or fail to reward—women’s work. Ultimately, this page makes clear that Swiftynomics is about far more than one superstar. It is about how women, across industries, learn to mastermind their own futures in systems not built for them.

Visit Misty L. Heggeness's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter D. McDonald's "The Impossible Reversal"

Peter D. McDonald is associate professor of design, informal, and creative education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play, and shared the following:

From page 99:

If a closet is deep and open, then a child can get lost inside of it, allowing the darkness and fabrics to become a doorway to elsewhere. A well-stocked closet visited as a chore, however, fails to enchant, because “there is nothing indeterminate; everything belongs to someone.” Some locations cannot cultivate secrets because they are so communal that they are fixed in place; in that case the cupboard “refuses to ‘play along.’ We don’t expect anything from this cupboard. It will remain merely itself. Just look at it. How it stands there: heavy, dense, unmovable.” Hidden spaces are labile and overflowing with potential transformations precisely because no one knows what they hold, not even one’s parents. The magic of secret spaces opens onto fantastic voyages and secret gardens, a liminal transition often captured in children’s literature. Secret spaces allow a child to recuperate from the demands of the social world and extricate a sense of individuality from family relations.

On page 99 of The Impossible Reversal, we are in the midst of trying to understand an avant-garde version of hide-and-seek invented by the artist Yoko Ono. In the instructions for the game, she tells us to “hide until everybody forgets about you” and “hide until everybody dies.” It is a violent request, and at first glance it doesn’t feel very playful at all. But if we look closely at what it’s like to play ordinary hide-and-seek, with all the desires and fears that children invest in the game, we can start to see how it is also invested in moments where the player is solitary, lost, and secret. The passage above is drawing on children’s experiences of secret spaces, especially attics and cupboards, to reignite those feelings.

So, in one way, page 99 isn’t a very good overview of The Impossible Reversal, which is a book about major historical changes to the theories and practices of playfulness in the United States. We are lost in the weeds, unpicking the specific details of one artist’s work. Yet, this page is also a perfect encapsulation of the spirit of the book, which is all about the experience of playfulness. I want to show that playfulness is many different things, some of which are more dangerous, or boring, or fleeting than we would normally admit. I want people to look closer at the subtleties of play, to slow down and explore its meanings. I can’t think of a better passage to show that exploration in action.

Learn more about The Impossible Reversal at the University of Minnesota Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Angela Simms's "Fighting for a Foothold"

Angela Simms is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard College-Columbia University. She examines the political economy of United States metropolitan areas through the lens of suburban Black middle-class jurisdictions’ capacity to garner sufficient tax revenue for maintaining high-quality public goods and services.

Prior to academia, Simms served in the federal government for seven years as a Presidential Management Fellow and legislative analyst at the Office of Management and Budget during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Texas-Austin, and a bachelor’s degree in government from William and Mary.

Simms applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book compares state and local investment patterns in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to a county it borders—Montgomery County, Maryland. Both of these counties also share a political boundary line with Washington, D.C. I explain that in the 1970s Prince George’s was on the path to shift from a majority-White and working-class county to a majority-Black and middle-class county, while Montgomery County has remained majority- or plurality-White and middle- and upper middle-class. Maryland infrastructure and other policies combined with local policies in both counties, such as zoning laws for apartments, lead to Prince George’s County having more affordable apartments along its border with D.C. than Montgomery County. More affordable housing in Prince George’s is one of the reasons the county is responsible for a disproportionate share of the D.C. region’s economically constrained households. This responsibility puts greater pressure on Prince George’s County’s budget as it seeks to serve high-needs residents, while the county also has fewer of the conditions for a growing tax base.

Yes, amazingly, the Page 99 Test works! It’s an insightful window into core arguments in the book regarding political and economic dynamics shaping local jurisdictions’ tax revenue generation.

Fighting for a Foothold explains how current federal, state, and local government policies and market practices combine with the historical legacies of White domination and anti-Blackness, to create new mechanisms for White Americans to hoard material resources. I argue that local jurisdiction boundaries—those between cities and counties—create a mechanism for White Americans to cordon off their household-level incomes and wealth in ways that enable majority-White counties to experience growing tax bases. Consequently, these counties can consistently fund high-quality public goods and services—from schools and health services, to roads and bridges—to a greater degree than majority-Black counties.

Majority-Black jurisdictions endure the cumulative effects of underinvestment in and extraction from Black people and Black spaces, including, among other things: during the Jim Crow segregation period Black people paying local and state taxes, while receiving no or lower quality public goods and services, which meant Black Americans effectively invested in White Americans’ material wellbeing; Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance policy that did not insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods, which meant Black people had less opportunity to accrue wealth through home buying; and banks’ predatory lending practices in Black neighborhoods (most recently, this occurred in the lead-up to the Great Recession of 2009-2011 when mortgage lenders blanketed Black communities with non-standard mortgages and refinancing options). Overall, Fighting for a Foothold reveals the extent to which Black middle-class people, and jurisdictions serving them, can attain the same financial returns for the same inputs as their White counterparts. I contend that not only do middle-class Black Americans not gain the same rewards, but they subsidize White wealth accumulation.

I conclude my book with policy recommendations: (1) increased federal and state taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations, which will enhance the capacity for government to distribute and redistribute material resources equitably; (2) increased state-level funding of public goods and services, which would decrease local jurisdiction reliance on locally-generated tax revenue; (3) regional tax and cost sharing arrangements, which will ease competition between local jurisdictions in regions; (4) higher penalties and stronger accountability for market actors who enact racial discrimination; and (5) reparations, or equity funds, that seek to repair harms Black Americans have endured across levels of social organization—household, neighborhood, and local jurisdiction.

Visit Angela Simms's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roger Kreuz's "Strikingly Similar"

Roger Kreuz is the W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis, where he serves as an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and as the Director of Graduate Studies. After studying psychology and linguistics at the University of Toledo, he earned his master's and doctoral degrees in experimental psychology at Princeton University. Following that, he was a post-doctoral researcher in cognitive gerontology at Duke University. He has researched and published on diverse topics in the fields of language and communication, but primarily in the areas of text and discourse processing and figurative language. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. He has been a student of German and Old English, but his progress in the latter has been hampered by a lack of native speakers to practice with.

Kreuz applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, with the following results:

Page 99 of Strikingly Similar describes an accusation by The New York Sun, on the eve of the 2004 U.S. presidential election, of plagiarism by the Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry. The senator had published a book about global crime organizations seven years earlier, and The Sun claimed that Kerry had plagiarized a sentence from a 1993 newspaper story, and three sentences from a 1996 magazine article.

The newspaper’s report included the opinion of two plagiarism experts, and they disagreed about the seriousness of Kerry’s alleged appropriation. One claimed that it was a clear instance of plagiarism, while the other expressed doubts that Kerry was even the culprit, since books by politicians are often prepared by their staffs. Neither the candidate nor his staffers publicly commented on the allegations, and the claims seems not to have been investigated by other news organizations.

Readers opening Strikingly Similar to page 99 would get a good idea of what my book is about. As with many other examples I include, it illustrates how accusations of plagiarism can be wielded as a weapon against others: The New York Sun is a conservative publication, and Kerry was a liberal presidential candidate.

The passage also illustrates how even experts on plagiarism can disagree. Such judgments can be affected by how much text was copied, and by whom, and how long ago, and for what purpose. These are the same issues that judges and juries struggle with in reaching verdicts regarding claims of copyright infringement. The result has been an idiosyncratic patchwork of rulings that are not infrequently overturned on appeal.

Strikingly Similar is both a cultural history of plagiarism and appropriation and an examination of the psychological aspects of the phenomenon.

A review of appropriation across two millennia illustrates how cultural perceptions shifted between the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, when the practice was widely condemned, and the medieval period, during which appropriation was rampant and not perceived negatively. I also describe the gradual shift to the modern view, which is inextricably bound up with notions of intellectual property, copyright infringement, and an increasingly litigious society.

At the psychological level, I assess the controversial claim that plagiarism can occur inadvertently, without conscious awareness. (Spoiler alert: several laboratory studies have concluded that this is possible, at least in some cases.) I also explore the varied motivations for why people appropriate, and why some plagiarists seem to get a pass while others are publicly condemned. And of course, generative AI has only served to muddy the waters about what counts as being truly “original” even further.

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--Marshal Zeringue