Lawrence Douglas's "The Criminal State"

Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College and a Guggenheim fellow. His many books include The Right Wrong Man and The Memory of Judgment. His writing has appeared in leading publications such as Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. He is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.

Douglas applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice, and shared the following:

I'm not sure I firmly believe in the Page 99 Test. For one thing, two of my favorite books, Kleist's Michael Kolhaas and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, would have a hard time passing, given that neither book has a page 99. As a second matter, I'm not a huge Ford Madox Ford fan. I've read The Good Soldier twice, and while I'm all for unreliable narrators, I just don't see all the fuss.

That said--and even accounting for grade inflation--I think my new book, The Criminal State, handsomely passes. The book offers what I hope readers will find a gripping and highly readable history of the effort to hold state officials criminally responsible for acts of war-making and atrocity. Page 99 comes in a chapter that discusses the drearily failed effort to prosecute Ottoman leaders for the mass killing of their Armenian subjects during the First World War. Still, I might have preferred if Ford Madox Ford had picked page 100 for his test, because that page permits me to punchily challenge the legal principle that all states enjoy equal international rights: "to paraphrase Orwell, it would be more accurate to say: All states are equal, but some states are more equal than others." In any case, I hope readers enjoy all 366 pages--not all of which are devoted to legal failures!

Learn more about The Criminal State at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc Stein's "Bicentennial"

Marc Stein is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of US History and Constitutional Law at San Francisco State University. He is the 2026–27 president of the Organization of American Historians and director of the OutHistory website. His books include City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, Sexual Injustice, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, The Stonewall Riots, and Queer Public History.

Stein applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes near the beginning of my fourth chapter, which is titled “Ford to Bicentennial City: Drop Dead” (a play on the famous newspaper headline addressing New York City’s potential bankruptcy). It’s August 1974 and Gerald Ford, our only non-elected U.S. president, has just replaced Richard Nixon. There’s some analysis of Ford’s first speeches as president, but my focus is primarily on what the presidential transition meant for the upcoming bicentennial. My first chapter had considered the “queer courtship” of Nixon (a Republican) and Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo (a Democrat), with Nixon receiving a valuable cross-party endorsement in his 1972 re-election campaign and Rizzo receiving presidential promises of generous federal funding for Philadelphia’s commemoration of the bicentennial. By 1974, that funding had not yet materialized, and so on page 99 I write: “Nixon’s replacement by Ford had extraordinary significance for the United States, but for Philadelphians, there were distinct implications for the bicentennial. On the one hand, Ford’s call for national reconciliation and his likely need for Pennsylvania’s votes in 1976 suggested that he might provide generous support for Philadelphia. On the other hand, his calls for reductions in government spending, his opposition to tax increases for the wealthy, and his objections to federal aid for cities hinted that he might not honor the Nixon administration’s promises.”

The Page 99 Test works and doesn’t work for my book. It works insofar as Bicentennial tells the story of the “official bicentennial” and does so with attention to relationships between U.S. presidents and Philadelphia mayors, situated in larger narratives of partisan realignment and the rise of the New Right in the 1970s. Page 99 considers a moment in that story. The test doesn’t work insofar as Bicentennial also addresses counter-bicentennial activism, as expressed by African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, women, and LGBTQ+ people and by coalitional groups such as the Peoples Bicentennial Commission and the July Fourth Coalition. One of the book’s main arguments is that the bicentennial was a key moment in the history of democracy. While bicentennial planners attempted to control the commemoration narrative, they were powerfully challenged by movements representing ethnic, indigenous, racial, and religious minorities; women; and LGBTQ people, many of whom came together in a series of counter-bicentennial protests. The largest of these, organized by the People’s Bicentennial Commission and the July Fourth Coalition, were supported by broad-based and multi-issue coalitions, belying the notion that the left collapsed and divided in the 1970s. Bicentennial follows their lead, presenting “a democratic history of a democratic bicentennial.” Counter-bicentennial activism, which took multiple shapes and forms, changed the way that we think about U.S. history and politics.

The bicentennial prompted an extraordinary set of national conversations about the history and politics of the United States. After Watergate and Vietnam, and in the midst of economic and energy crises, how could the United States celebrate national greatness? How could a nation with colonial attitudes and possessions celebrate the 200th birthday of its anti-colonial revolution? Should Native Americans participate in the commemoration of a national revolution that damaged and destroyed indigenous nations? What about the many Americans whose ancestors never consented to be governed by the United States and those consistently denied the freedom, liberty, equality, and justice promised by the Declaration of Independence? Would LGBTQ+ people, newly organized and mobilized in the 1970s, be invited to the national birthday party, and if not, would they try to crash the festivities?

Some of my favorite parts of the book address Roots, Rocky, Bicentennial Minutes, “Philadelphia Freedom,” and other examples of popular culture during the bicentennial. I also love the many examples of bicentennial humor, with countless references to the “buy-centennial” and the “sell-ebration.” But I think I’m most pleased with the extensive discussions of counter-bicentennial activism. This includes dramatic protests led by African Americans, beginning in the late 1960s; the media-savvy actions of the People’s Bicentennial Commission; the Native American Trail of Self-Determination, which followed the Wagon Trail Pilgrimage as it traveled across the country; the fiery fierceness of Philadelphia’s Chinatown-based Dragon Club; and Dykes for an American Revolution protests in support of the Lesbian Feminist Declaration of Independence. The largest protest was organized by the Puerto-Rican led July Fourth Coalition (J4C), which staged Independence Day marches and rallies in multiple cities, including a particularly large one in Philadelphia. J4C brought together liberals and leftists who were determined to challenge the official bicentennial. I find what they did profoundly inspirational, and completely at odds with common narratives of collapse, division, and fragmentation on the U.S. left in the 1970s. And while it’s common to think about the bicentennial with the wisdom of hindsight—and the knowledge that the Reagan Revolution was just a few years away--counter-bicentennial activism played a role in the country’s decision in 1976 to elect Jimmy Carter as U.S. president and declare (temporary) independence from the party of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Learn more about Bicentennial at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Doherty's "How Film Became History"

Thomas Doherty is professor of American studies at Brandeis University. His books include Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (2013); Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (2018); and Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century (2020).

Doherty applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America, with the following results:

Page 99 of How Film Became History discusses the censorship gauntlet run by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934). The film’s producer, an independent hustler named Samuel L. Cummins, had to negotiate with the New York State Censor Board to obtain a certificate of approval to exhibit the film in New York, a make-or-break market for a commercial release.

Serendipitously enough, page 99 is a good indicator of the rest of the book: a cultural-historical inquiry into a select inventory of foundational archival documentaries made in the 1930s. Like most of the films discussed in the other 266 pages, Hitler’s Reign of Terror is something of an obscurity, but an important one: it is the first feature-length anti-Nazi film in American history, and a well ahead of the curve provocation. (Not until 1939 would mainstream Hollywood attack Nazism in Warner Bros.’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the first major studio release to indict the Third Reich by name.) Vanderbilt Jr., scion of the robber barons, visited Nazi Germany soon after Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933. An amateur shutterbug, he took his home movie camera with him and captured some astonishing footage of the transformation of Germany into a gangster state—incessant military parades, menacing brownshirts, and naked antisemitism. He supplemented his own footage with material from the newsreels, notably of Hitler’s harangue at the Sports Palace on February 10, 1933 and the book burnings staged on May 10, 1933—both of which Vanderbilt claimed to have attended.

Vanderbilt’s film is among a select inventory of pioneering documentaries that established the template for the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that came to shape our memory of the past. Only in the 1930s had a sufficient backlog of motion pictures accumulated on studio shelves and newsreel libraries for filmmakers to be able to stitch together an entirely new film from the raw material of old films. At around the same time, sound was seamlessly integrated into the grammar of cinema and with it the arrival of the narrative voiceover, the omniscient lecturer who guides the viewer (and now listener) through the images from the past.

The other documentaries under the critical microscope are Truman Talley and Laurence Stallings’s The First World War (1934), J. Stuart Blackton’s The Film Parade (1933), Herman Axelbank and Max Eastman’s Tsar to Lenin (1937), and a sampling from the March of Time screen magazine (1935-1951). Overall, the films may seem to have been chosen out of a willful penchant for the obscure (“I’ve never even heard of Vanderbilt’s film and I’ve taught American film history for decades,” groused a colleague who read the manuscript), but they are all (I think) of singular importance in motion picture history.

Learn more about How Film Became History at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.

The Page 99 Test: Show Trial.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Robert Siegel's "Markets of Pain"

Benjamin Robert Siegel is an Associate Professor of History at Boston University. He is the author of Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India. A former journalist for Time in New Delhi and Hong Kong, his writing has been published in Vice, Public Books, American Heritage, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Siegel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Markets of Pain finds us in the laboratories of nineteenth-century Germany, where a remarkable industrial pivot is underway. Dye companies like Bayer — flush with profits from coloring the textiles of imperial Europe — are turning their chemical expertise to a new product: pharmaceuticals. German chemists, backed by enormous state investment in research, are isolating newly-discovered alkaloids like codeine, quinine, cocaine, and ephedrine, and transforming pharmacy from a speculative craft into something closer to a science. But even as they master laboratory synthesis, these firms remain dependent on a global supply of exotic plants: ipecacuanha from Brazil, cinchona bark and coca from Peru, and opium from wherever they can source it. The page closes on a small moment with large consequences: in 1898, Bayer's scientists discover how to transform morphine into a new compound. They call it heroin, and market it as a non-addictive substitute for morphine, particularly useful for coughs.

The Page 99 Test works, but only partly. A reader here would catch something essential about this book: that the power of modern pharmaceuticals was built by organizing raw organic materials from around the world into marketable commodities, along supply chains first forged under empire. They'd see the global reach of the story, and they'd meet one of its great ironies — a German firm introducing heroin as a cure for the addiction its own products had helped create.

What they'd miss is almost everything else. Markets of Pain is really a prehistory of the American opioid crisis — not the Sacklers, not Appalachia, but the longer global story of how opioids and pharmaceuticals helped build the power of modern states, and the United States in particular. Most of the book follows American firms in the twentieth century as they took these German methods and bore them down upon opium, reshaping the lives of farmers in Rajasthan and Anatolia, middlemen in Istanbul and New Delhi, and regulators in Washington. Page 99 shows the industry learning to reach across the world, and the rest of Markets of Pain is about what happened when it did.

Visit Benjamin R. Siegel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Randles's "Living Diaper to Diaper"

Jennifer Randles is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Fresno, and author of Proposing Prosperity? Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America and Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Living Diaper to Diaper: The Hidden Crisis of Poverty and Motherhood, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Mothers of color were particularly attuned to public perceptions of their children’s diapers and fears of involvement with the child welfare system due to inappropriate or insufficient diapers. ... [M]any mothers of color described rarely leaving their homes, missing work and medical appointments, and not going grocery shopping or to social events because of lack of diapers. Avoiding public places required fewer diapers, allowed children to stay close to personal restrooms for toilet training, and subjected mothers to less surveillance and scrutiny of their diapering habits. Diaper work required mothers to consider intersecting gender, class, and race stereotypes of parental fitness as mothers weighed risks of diaper need against potential consequences of their efforts to manage it.

In this case, the Page 99 Test cuts straight to chase. It takes readers directly to a description of many of the most devastating consequences of the problem at the heart of Living Diaper to Diaper. Nearly one in two families with young children in the United States struggle with diaper insecurity – limited or uncertain access to enough diapers to keep children dry, comfortable, and healthy.

Families of color, especially those headed by Black and Latina mothers living in poverty, are especially likely to experience diaper insecurity, a hidden, harmful, and common problem of poverty in the United States. They are also more likely to experience stigma and surveillance related to their parenting practices, including when they don’t have enough diapers. Despite diaper insecurity’s prevalence and consequences, diapers are not systematically covered by existing U.S. safety net programs when families cannot readily access or afford them.

This crucial page details some of the racialized components of what I call diaper work, the physical, emotional, and cognitive labor mothers do to manage diaper need and related social isolation, stress, and stigma. Beyond the work of buying, changing, and disposing of diapers, diaper work involves the creative strategies mothers devise and the many sacrifices they make to secure basic necessities for their children. Page 99 is part of a window onto the proactive carework poor mothers perform to protect their children's well-being and humanity despite severe economic constraints and inadequate social safety nets.

Learn more about Living Diaper to Diaper at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

George G. Szpiro's "Ignorance"

George G. Szpiro is an author and journalist who was a longtime correspondent for the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His books include Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty: Three Centuries of Economic Decision-Making (2020) and Perplexing Paradoxes: Unraveling Enigmas in the World Around Us (2024). Szpiro was on the faculty at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ignorance: What We Do Not Know, Cannot Know, Must Not Know, and Refuse to Know, with the following results:

If you open Ignorance on page 99 you would get a good sense of what the book is about—especially if you simultaneously look at the illustration on page 98. The case turns on a specific form of ignorance: computers rely on sequences of random numbers whose outcomes we cannot predict, even though they are generated by strict rules. It shows how such managed ignorance allows random numbers to be used to solve problems that would otherwise be intractable.

The underlying tension is that computers produce these numbers deterministically from preceding values. In that sense, they are only quasi-random, not truly random. For practical purposes, however, we must remain ignorant of how each number is produced; otherwise, the sequence would lose its usefulness as a stand-in for genuine randomness. The discussion harkens back to my recent book Random Numbers Unveiled: The Secrets of Numbers That You Can’t Predict but Can Rely On (Taylor & Francis, 2026). Even though the computer follows strict rules, one remains ignorant of the next number in the sequence—an ignorance that is not a defect but a feature.

My book examines ignorance across a range of disciplines in sixty short chapters, organized around four categories: what we do not know—say, in mathematics, in law, in philosophy; what we cannot know—like the length of the coast of Britain, the precise location and speed of a particle, or the nature of God; what we must not know—like the costs already sunk in a project, insider information in financial market, the secrets of Kabbalah if you’re under 40; and what one refuses to know—like whether a diamond is real or fake, or—if you are defense lawyer—whether the accused actually committed the crime so as to maintain plausible deniability. Most chapters treat such themes through more familiar and accessible examples; the computational case on page 99 is among the more technical instances.

Across these domains, ignorance emerges not merely as a lack of knowledge but as an organizing principle that structures inquiry, guides decision-making, and conditions belief. At times it is deliberately preserved to enable progress; at others, it marks the limits of cognition or the boundaries imposed by social norms. Rather than standing in opposition to knowledge, ignorance often functions as one of its necessary preconditions.

Visit George G. Szpiro's website.

The Page 99 Test: Perplexing Paradoxes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm's "The Genealogy of Genealogy"

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and chair of science and technology studies at Williams College. He is the author of Metamodernism: The Future of Theory and The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History, and shared the following:

From page 99:

The three essays that make up Genealogy are perhaps, in terms of expression, purpose, and the art of surprise, the most uncanny thing that has ever been written. Dionysus, as is known, is also the god of darkness.
----FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Ecce Homo

In philosophical pedigrees, Friedrich Nietzsche regularly appears as the primeval progenitor or shadowy chimera beyond whom genealogy's history is irrelevant or perhaps vanishes into myth. But, as I demonstrate in this chapter, genealogy was not actually a central term in Nietzsche's work. To be fair, when Nietzsche published Zur Genealogie der Moral in 1887, the word Genealogie (genealogy) was not exactly in common usage in German, either. Nevertheless, genealogy was already interwoven with existing discourses in Germany at the time of Nietzsche's writing.

Addressing these discourses will help us contextualize Nietzsche's usage and provide clues about how he came to the term. It will turn out that Nietzsche's status as founder of a new historical methodology is misguided. Indeed, I will argue that, if we refuse Nietzsche the status of originator, if instead we trace the term back, if we explore the historical vicissitudes that accompany its usage, it will permit us to expose its primordial roots, lowly beginnings, and dangerous inheritance.

Page 99 turns out to be the very first page of my third chapter “Nietzsche as Progenitor.” It is both representative and, in a couple of ways, a little atypical of the book.

What is most representative about it is that in the book as a whole I’m turning the genealogical method—that is, a mode of critical, historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is actually contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—back on itself. I am offering, in other words, a critical history of critical history: one meant to expose its blind spots, to see where it fissures and breaks, and where it might yet be remade.

What makes the selection somewhat less representative is that it might give the impression that the book is only engaged with a few philosophical big names. And yes, I do have chapters on Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze. But much of the book is really about the history of history and philosophy as academic disciplines: including their entanglements with eugenics, racial essentialism, and power. In that respect, it blends intellectual history with philosophical analysis. And though much of the book is quite dark, it ends on a constructive note. More than a critical project, the monograph aims to be a philosophical reckoning with the limits of historiography itself. In so doing, I’m trying to open a path toward alternative historiographies, to invite scholars to imagine new ways of doing history and philosophy.

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

The Page 99 Test: The Myth of Disenchantment.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dan Turello's "Connection"

Dan Turello is a writer, photographer, and cultural historian, and a Technology and Humanity Fellow at the Center for Future of Mind, AI & Society at Florida Atlantic University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans, and reported the following:

From page 99:

How the costs required to consume and produce are measured is important, both aesthetically, in terms of how effort and striving are portrayed, as well as philosophically, because how energy expenditures are measured and accounted for influences perceptions of value, sacrifice, and perceived trade-offs. The strands of these debates, at least in the Western world where our current neoliberal ideas about markets developed, can be traced to debates that took shape during the Renaissance, and the three characters I have mentioned provide an excellent entry point.

Page 99 is remarkably representative: it sets a tone and direction for the next pages of Renaissance art and environmental history. The book, however, is not primarily a history, and this too, I hope, is evident from that paragraph—the history shows up in service of gaining our bearings philosophically and existentially, in the present moment.

The “three characters” I refer to had appeared a few pages earlier: “A German engineer, a Florentine Sculptor, and a courtier from Urbino” who, at the start of Chapter 5 (Insatiable Artists: Technology and Consumer Identity in the Renaissance) I had imagined walking into a proverbial bar. Though Benvenuto Cellini (the Italian sculptor), Georgius Agricola (the German engineer, and Baldassar Castiglione (the courtier from Urbino) never knew each other in real life, the strands of their thinking and writing reverberate down through to our time, when discussions around awareness of environmental costs, effort, labor, sustainability, and so on, have become even more important.

What page 99 does not capture quite as well is the breadth of sources I draw from throughout the book: poetry, lyric, autobiography, Medieval and Renaissance history, but also classical and contemporary philosophy, and film (a dialogue from Pulp Fiction appears just a few pages later, while The Matrix had informed an earlier chapter). All of these strands serve to give context and texture to contemporary debates around our fraught, yet ongoing and vital relationship with technology in all its forms.

Visit Dan Turello's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Nicole Henley's "Inquisition for Blood"

Lauren Nicole Henley is an assistant professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin.

Henley applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South, with the following results:

There’s a lot packed into page 99. First is the speculation of serial murder in the rice belt region of the United States. Second is law enforcement’s theory that the crimes were religiously motivated. Third is Black communities’ recognition that the weapon of choice—an ax—linked the killings in brutal ways. Toward the end of the page, I write: “For all intents and purposes, then, that meant any Black family living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad could be axed to death. No one was safe.” Indeed, the terror of living amidst an unknown serial killer for years on end is well captured on this page.

The Page 99 Test does a surprisingly good job of reflecting the intricate tensions of my book, but fails to tease out a key contribution: a young Black woman named Clementine Barnabet confessed to many of the murders. Although Clementine’s name appears on the page, it is in reference to her first confession as opposed to her second. It was this second confession that thrust her into the limelight as speculation of a supposed Black female serial killer traveled across the United States and beyond.

In fact, when Clementine confessed to murdering 17 people in April 1912, it was frontpage news from New York to Los Angeles. Only the sinking of the Titanic a few weeks later supplanted coverage of her crimes. That a Black female serial killer—whether real or imagined—captured America’s attention in the early twentieth century speaks volumes about who can (and cannot) get away with murder.

Learn more about Inquisition for Blood at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Sharples's "The Long Death of Adolf Hitler"

Caroline Sharples is senior lecturer in history at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of West Germans and the Nazi Legacy and Postwar Germany and the Holocaust, the latter of which was nominated for the 2017 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Studies.

Sharples applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book finds us in Chapter 4: ‘Celebrations and Condolences’ which is an exploration of how audiences outside of Germany responded to the breaking news of Adolf Hitler’s death in spring 1945. (German reactions to his demise are explored in a standalone chapter of the book.) Page 99 drops us straight into quirky anecdotes (coal miners downing tools and giving themselves an impromptu day off in jubilation) and various statements from journalists, politicians and the proverbial ‘person on the street’. A range of emotional behaviours are documented here, from cries of relief, through to disappointment that Hitler had not been captured and made to suffer for his crimes.

In some ways, the Page 99 Test works really well because it immediately highlights two distinctive features in my approach to Hitler’s death. First, it reflects my efforts to reposition Hitler’s death story within the realms of cultural and emotional history. It moves away from the conventional, top-down approach of previous literature that has fixated on the military and political collapse of the Third Reich, and/or the resulting intelligence rivalries and Cold War tensions that obfuscated investigations into Hitler’s fate after the war. Instead, as page 99 illustrates, this book puts the thoughts and feelings of ‘ordinary’ civilians centre stage and traces the meanings that Hitler’s demise has held for different audiences. Second, as the stories presented on page 99 traverse public reactions in Australia, the UK, the United States and Nicaragua, they underscore the book’s unique transnational framework. Hitler’s demise was not only newsworthy for Germans, or even Europeans; but resonated around the globe.

In addition, the material presented on page 99 hints at some of the challenges yet to come. The Times newspaper, for instance, treated Hitler’s passing in the same way as it might report on the death of any other head of state, penning a formal, five column obituary. Other newspapers, however, suggested that the Nazi leader had forsaken all right to such a dignified treatment. The question of how to handle Hitler’s death would spill over, just days later, into a sensational controversy over whether neutral nations should follow diplomatic protocol and extend formal condolences to Germany on the death of its leader.

There is no doubt that page 99 captures the central theme of the book: the passionate, public discourse that sprang up around the fate of the Nazi dictator. Yet in giving us a snapshot of opinion in May 1945, the test actually misses the significant chronological scope of my work. Hitler’s death had been anticipated throughout the war years, imagined within visual propaganda, songs, jokes and even military fundraising activities. Then, the years after 1945 witnessed a protracted search for definitive proof of his suicide; various representations of his fate within popular literature, film and museum displays; and enduring questions as to how to prevent the formation of a heroic legend. In these ways, as my book argues, Hitler experienced a peculiarly long death, one that stretched far beyond those excitable scenes of spring 1945.

Learn more about The Long Death of Adolf Hitler at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dale J. Stahl's "Two Rivers Entangled"

Dale J. Stahl is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Two Rivers Entangled: An Ecological History of the Tigris and Euphrates in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Two Rivers Entangled, you will find a map of the dams along the Euphrates River in Syria and Turkey with their opening dates. Only two reservoirs appear, those behind the first big dams: the al-Tabqa Dam in Syria (1973) and the Keban Dam in Turkey (1974). The rest of the river is depicted as a sinuous, free-flowing line making its way southeast off the map toward Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

Page 99 gives a surprisingly good sense of the book. The map visually illustrates the change at the heart of the story: the damming of the Euphrates River and its transformation into a series of reservoirs. By the mid-1990s, “a traveler with exceptionally long legs could step from one dam’s reservoir to another, walking down a set of watery steps…to the plains and deserts” (136). The map shows the beginning of this process in the mid-1970s, while additional notations indicate where future dams would be built.

The map also specifies the dams’ “opening dates” as opposed to completion, which gestures toward a central question of the book: who or what changes our world? Histories of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey have usually focused on human actors—kings, presidents, and high commissioners, or social groups like unions, religious orders, or political parties. Two Rivers Entangled places the ecologies of the Tigris and Euphrates back inside histories of state-building, revolution, economic development, and geopolitics. Focusing on ecological factors—water, salt, and rock—shows the limits of human-centered histories. Keban Dam, for example, wasn’t really finished in 1974: it leaked so badly the project took another ten years to complete. Another dam on the Tigris at Mosul requires regular infusions of concrete to remain standing.

So, page 99 passes the test. It visually represents the book’s subject and hints at its larger meaning: while historical narratives often reassure us that technology will eventually master the natural world, a closer accounting shows the limits of human control, not only over a river but also over the stories we tell about it.

Visit Dale J. Stahl's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Elwes's "Huge Numbers"

Richard Elwes is an associate professor at University of Leeds, and a Holgate Session Leader for the London Mathematical Society.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7, with the following results:

From page 99:

[...on three stelae (stone monuments) in the ancient city of Coba, another archaeological site in modern-day Mexico, we find the largest Mayan number discovered so far. They rewrite day zero as: 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.0.0.0.0

Such inscriptions put the 3114BCE dawn of our world ‘more than 28 octillion years after the true initial base date in the incomprehensible past’, according to Mayan expert David Stuart, in his 2011 book, The Order of Days.]

He argues this date is the basis of a ‘Grand Long Count’, the fullest expression of the Mayan calendar which we usually see only in abbreviated form. The time for this whole grand long count to reset would be a cycle of over 15 nonillion days (1.5 × 10³¹) or 43 octillion years. We will see numbers on this scale in Chapter 7 when we think about the life cycle of the universe from the perspective of modern science. This reset date would take us to a point long beyond the demise not only of the sun but of the Milky Way galaxy itself, whose stars will long since have been snuffed out, and whose freezing remnants will have been consumed by a supermassive black hole or ejected into the cosmic vacuum. So if the Grand Long Count reset is imagined to represent the end of the world, the Maya would appear to have overestimated by some distance.

I think the Page 99 Test works pretty well here! We meet an interesting large number, which is the central thing, and think about it in two contexts: the mythology of an ancient civilisation (in this case the Classical Maya of Central America), and the evolution of the universe according to modern physics.

My book is in three parts, and these two perspectives reasonably well represent the first two parts. In part 1, we discuss different ways people have spoken and written large numbers over the millennia. The classical Maya, for example, were able to write numbers on this scale because they had developed a highly efficient written numeral system (essentially base 20 rather than the base 10 as we are used to). In part two, we consider the largest numbers needed to describe the Universe according to modern scientific understanding. The demise of the Sun, and then of the Milky Way galaxy, are milestones in the predicted life cycle of the cosmos, but the story has much further to run beyond these. The book's third part, not reflected in page 99, is about large numbers in the context of modern mathematics, and specifically mathematical logic, where we find numbers which are enormously bigger than anything ever contemplated previously.

Visit Richard Elwes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin A. Saltzman's "Turning Away"

Benjamin A. Saltzman is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he coedits the journal Modern Philology. Saltzman is the author of Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England and the coeditor of Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture, and shared the following:

From page 99:

As a turn inward and from others, Augustine’s conversion is also crucially a turn away from corporeal sensation, a turn away from those things outside the soul. In Fra Angelico’s The Conversion, Augustine covers his eyes and holds his hand over his ear. It’s an incomplete disruption of the senses. If conversion is realized as a turn away from the senses, in Augustine’s case it also happens to be initiated through the senses: “Suddenly I heard” (ecce audio) (Conf. 8.12.29). In this sudden and unexpected interjection of sound, memory kicks in: He stops weeping and recalls having heard (audieram) the story of Antony listening to the words of the Gospel (Conf. 8.12.29). And when he returns to the book, Augustine opens it up to the passage upon which his “eyes first set” (Conf. 8.12.29). Sensory experience precipitates conversion to inner sensation.

Augustine experiences darkness: the “dark clouds of doubt” (dubitationis tenebrae) that dissipate upon conversion materialize in Fra Angelico’s use of gesture. As Augustine blocks his eyes, he deploys a gesture that often formally signifies a state of darkness. I will explore this aspect of the gesture more closely in chapter 4, but for now it bears on the relation between Augustine’s separation from the senses and his state of perspectival instability.

These dark clouds emerge from Augustine’s perspectival instability. In Fra Angelico’s The Conversion, as we have seen, perspective is distorted. The buildings and figures are so disunified that distances between objects seem greater or lesser depending on what objects are prioritized in the viewer’s attention. I would like to think that this perspectival play evokes the unreliability of bodily senses, particularly corresponding to the instability of Augustine’s own senses in these moments just prior to his conversion. His senses—hearing and sight—are thrown off. And so are ours. When Augustine reflects on his own fragmentation, a kaleidoscopic ego thus emerges: “It was I who was willing, I who was not willing: I was (ego eram)” (Conf. 8.10.22). The repetition of ego enlarges Augustine in his own words, much as Fra Angelico does by placing him at the center of the painting. But it is a fragmented ego that splits him away from himself and turns him away from the outside world, from Alypius, and from us. We may be dizzy, unsure of where we stand in relation to the scene and to Augustine’s turning self. It requires a different kind of perspective altogether.

One effect of this altered perspective is a ruptured sense of time (insofar as the human experience of temporality is a function of the inner sense, distended in its relation to the past and future). We may take it for granted, but Augustine’s halo signals his status as a saint. As such, it sets the pre-conversion scene of indecision at an already post-conversion moment. Antony’s presence in the cave is similar: According to his vita, he enters the desert only after he has converted and committed to a life of solitude. The distant memory of Antony speaks to Augustine in the instant of the viewer’s present, which is at the same time the instant of Augustine’s decision as he recollects the story of Antony’s own auricular experience. And yet Fra Angelico’s scene already anticipates the resolution of that decision and resolves this temporal distention with the use of gesture. Augustine’s gesture is a turn into memory’s ruptured temporality, creating something akin to what Elina Gertsman recognizes in the “semiotically rich emptiness” of absent images, in which visual voids work as “temporal bridges, between terrestrial and celestial time.”

There are probably more exciting pages in the book—not least, the seventeen carefully sequenced color plate in the middle—but this page does give a sense of the energy of the project. Here we are considering the variety of meanings possibly attributable to Fra Angelico’s depiction of St. Augustine in the Milanese garden where he would find his way toward conversion. And in these meanings, we can see some of the variety of the gesture more generally: from a turn away from corporeal sensation (into spiritual sensation), to atmospheric and emotional darkness, to perspectival instability (turning this way and that), to a ruptured sense of time. In many ways, as I type this, I’m surprised to find that the Page 99 Test actually works! For this is one moment where all of the chapters of the book are brought together in a single iteration: ambivalence, sensation, darkness, retroversion.

Visit Benjamin A. Saltzman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Curtis Dozier's "The White Pedestal"

Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Dozier applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate, and reported the following:

Even as a person fascinated by the premise of this test, my jaw dropped when I looked at page 99 of The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. I wouldn’t say this page gives readers a complete picture of the book: you would barely know from page 99, for example, that the book examines the intellectual ecosystem of the contemporary phenomenon known to political scientists as “the intellectual radical right,” and you probably wouldn’t catch one of the main theses of the book, which is that “these people know more than you think.” But it does present the piece of ancient evidence that most surprised me when I was researching the book: an ancient treatise attributed to Aristotle that argues, among other things, that black skin is a sign of cowardice and duplicity. The conventional wisdom, among scholars and the educated public, is that because ancient Greece and Rome didn’t develop a theory of racial difference like that of early modern racist pseudoscience, the ancient world shouldn’t lend itself very well to appropriation by white supremacist activists. But there you have it, right there on page 99, an ancient text expressing something very much like the tenets of modern anti-Blackness. That one citation doesn’t tell the whole story of just how congenial the ancient Greco-Roman world (and the ways it has traditionally been interpreted) is to white nationalist thinking — for that you have to read the book! — but it’s a piece of the story that strikes most directly at the ways that too many people try to protect or insulate ancient Greece and Rome from association with white supremacist politics, thereby perpetuating the very thing they claim to abhor.

Learn more about The White Pedestal at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig Fehrman's "This Vast Enterprise"

Craig Fehrman, a journalist and historian, spent five years writing and researching his new book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark. His first book, Author in Chief, was described by Thomas Mallon in The Wall Street Journal as “one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years.” Fehrman lives in Indiana with his wife and children.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to This Vast Enterprise with the following results:

Page 99 finds the expedition about four hundred miles up the Missouri River -- still in their first year but well underway, their fears about encountering Native people as pitched as they will ever get.

I think this page give a great sense of my book because it incorporates multiple perspectives. Each chapter in This Vast Enterprise moves to a different point of view -- think As I Lay Dying or, if you prefer, Game of Thrones. Page 99 is in the middle of a Clark chapter, and I describe him noticing and analyzing Native art. (I found Clark's college notebook; he's an underrated Enlightenment thinker.) But I also describe the perspectives of John Ordway, a working-class soldier who was curious about Native people, and Joseph Whitehouse, a working-class soldier who was terrified of them. When it comes to history, people like to ask whether someone was a "man of his era," but I think that's the wrong question. People believed many different things in 1804, just like they believe many different things in 2026. I tried to capture this period's range of perspectives. Within a few pages, the book will rotate to a new chapter and a new point of View -- that of Black Buffalo, a brilliant Lakota leader who was as interested in using the Americans as they were in using him.

Page 99 also includes details about what the expedition felt like. This was important to me -- I wanted to put readers in the canoe or, for this stretch, on the barge. Here's the page's last paragraph:

July was hotter and harder. The barge continued to wheel, and when the soldiers tried towing it barefoot on the shore, the sand scorched their feet. The Missouri’s bacteria-rich water sloshed in their scrapes and burns, leading to boils and abscesses. Their sweat soaked their shirts in minutes. It was more perspiration, Clark admitted, than he’d thought “could pass through the human body.” The heat produced some positives, including plentiful strawberries and plums. But it also brought ticks and gnats and especially mosquitoes, though Lewis had anticipated these pests and brought netting to help the men sleep at night.

Visit Craig Fehrman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eamonn Gearon's "The Arab Bureau"

Eamonn Gearon is a global historian, specializing in the Middle East and North Africa and the history of intelligence, whose books include The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit and The Arab Revolt. His doctoral research uncovered previously unknown Arabic documents which shed new light on British intelligence work in the region.

Gearon applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Arab Bureau and shared the following:

Page 99 falls in the chapter “Rooms at the Savoy,” which follows the Arab Bureau’s establishment in Cairo’s Savoy Hotel. The page addresses the challenges of coordinating intelligence across multiple, jealously competitive British agencies. It describes the “tri-continental operation” the Arab Bureau conducted, i.e. linking London to North Africa while coordinating with Delhi, Simla, and other British outposts across Africa and Asia. The page emphasises the practical difficulties of building physical infrastructure from scratch, recruiting and vetting local Egyptian staff, and maintaining operational security. Most strikingly, it places the work of the Arab Bureau in technological context: in an age before satellite imagery or instant communications, where information often “travelled at the speed of a camel caravan,” the ability to predict behaviour through cultural understanding became a strategic advantage in itself.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Remarkably well! Page 99 captures what I consider the book’s central insight: that the Arab Bureau’s true innovation was not any single intelligence breakthrough but rather a fundamental reorientation of how intelligence itself was conceived. The page shows the Arab Bureau wrestling with coordination challenges that would be familiar to any modern intelligence agency: turf wars; fragmented infrastructure; and institutional jealousies. Yet it also reveals how the Arab Bureau transformed these constraints into opportunities, pioneering what we might now call “culturally informed intelligence.”

The reference to information travelling “at the speed of a camel caravan” summarises the book’s argument about why the Arab Bureau matters. Where traditional military intelligence sought quantifiable data, the Bureau developed methods that valued contextual understanding, precisely because, in their technological environment, cultural literacy was a form of strategic advantage.

What page 99 cannot capture is the vivid cast of characters who populate this story. From scholar-spies like Gertrude Bell and D.G. Hogarth, to Hussein Ruhi’s extraordinary double-agency, or T.E. Lawrence’s complicated presence in an organisation his legend has obscured. Nor does it convey the Arab Bureau’s astonishing work in Arabic language propaganda, nor its uncomfortable legacy. But as a window into the institutional dynamics that made the Arab Bureau both necessary and revolutionary, page 99 serves as an unexpectedly apt introduction.

The book distils the Arab Bureau’s approach into what I call “Seven Pillars of Intelligence Wisdom”, methodological innovations that resurfaced in Iraq and Afghanistan a century later, often without practitioners recognising the lineage. The past, it turns out, keeps informing the present.

Visit Eamonn Gearon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sandrine Bergès's "No Place Like Home"

Sandrine Bergès is Professor of Philosophy at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and British Academy Global Professor at University of York, UK. Her recent publications include: Liberty in their Names: Women Philosophers of the French Revolution (2022), Olympe de Gouges (2022), Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy (with Eric Schliesser, 2019). She has also written and edited (with Alan Coffee, and with Eileen Hunt) books on Mary Wollstonecraft.

Bergès applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, No Place Like Home: Women Philosophers' Struggles with Domesticity, and reported the following:

What’s on page 99?

Marie-Jeanne Roland, philosopher of the French Revolution, who died at the guillotine in 1793, was a big fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau thought a woman should be a domestic creature: an obedient wife, and a caring mother. Manon Roland, while partly agreeing, distanced herself from his account. Page 99 is about how her idea of domesticity differed from Rousseau’s. Roland agreed that women should spend time running their household, doing the work themselves or with the help of servants. But she thought they should be efficient about it so they had time to do the stuff that truly matters to them: in her case, writing and influencing the course of the revolution by hosting its actors in her salon.

Is page 99 representative?

Page 99 is in the sixth of nine chapters. Chapter 1 starts with Xanthippe, complaining about having to get dinner on a string at short notice for her husband Socrates, and Chapter 9 ends with twenty-first century feminist authors talking about the robotisation of housework. Manon Roland comes bang in the middle: she is the thirteenth out of the twenty-five women philosophers I discuss. Page 99 is representative, because nearly all the women I talk about in the book struggle with the same dilemma: how to live a full human life within the confines of domestic expectations? While some women tried to escape the home, or redefine it, Roland, page 99 says, tries to reinterpret it: to her it’s a sign of power and rationality to be able to get all the housework done in a short time so as to make time and space for other pursuits. So the test works! Except of course a reader would need to read the pages before and after page 99 to get the full argument. I’d say 98 to half-way through 100 would be ideal. Then you’d get a more complete sketch of who Roland was and what her view of domesticity was. And a bit of drama thrown in, as page 98 starts with the signing of her death sentence.

What would still be missing to give a full idea of what the book is about, from page 99 (or 98-100), is a sense that this is a philosophical discussion. Although I treat her as such, Manon Roland isn’t usually regarded as a philosopher – a memoirist, or a hapless victim of the revolution. In the first pages of Chapter 6 I introduce her as a republican political philosopher. She followed Rousseau’s rural republicanism, the view that the a good republic is composed of households and villages which nurture republican values and virtues in all citizens. Roland, comparing herself to a Roman matron, places women right at the heart of this republic: they are responsible for bringing up future citizens. But that’s not enough, she thinks. During a revolution, a woman’s work must take her outside the home, and her sphere of influence must extend to all her acquaintances, not just her family. So the test sort of works – provided it encourages the reader to look at the whole chapter, or maybe the whole book.

Visit Sandrine Bergès's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paula Davis Hoffman's "Making the Miami Cubanita"

Paula Davis Hoffman is an adjunct professor of history at Houston City College.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Making the Miami Cubanita: A Pop Cultural Genealogy, with the following results:

If a browser were to open Making the Miami Cubanita to page 99, they would land almost smack-dab in the middle of Chapter 3. Titled, “In the 1970s, la Virgen de PBS Asked, ‘¿Qué Pasa, USA?’”, it investigates a half-hour sitcom series that ran from 1977-1980. Featuring the Peñas, a multigenerational Cuban refugee family living in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood in the late 1970s and 1980, this show was one space created by Cuban exiles and endorsed by the U.S. government both to engage the exile community and to represent it to the broader American public at a pivotal moment.

Page 99 begins with an analysis of one episode in which older brother Joe was ordered to babysit his 17-year-old sister while his parents and grandparents went out. As they walked out the door, they demanded, “¡Cuida tu hermanita!” (Take care of your little sister!) Though mere months away from being a legal adult, Carmen barely strained against the figurative leash her family conspicuously paraded for all to see, a marker of the family’s honor. This page touches on existing scholarship on Cuban American racial identity during these years and demonstrates how this sitcom’s depiction of communal standards of femininity furthered a political agenda. While there is significant pan- Latin confluence on many of the behavioral mandates related to female comportment (such as chaperonage), in this PBS show these mandates were presented as distinctly Cuban.

Reading this page alone would provide readers with a fair but not complete picture of what my book is about. Making the Miami Cubanita explores Cuban American assumptions of whiteness and right-wing politics from a pop cultural and historical lens. Organized by decade, I start with a prelude from the Spanish American War and then jump to the portrayal of Cuban femininity in I Love Lucy in the 1950s, radionovelas in the 1960s, ¿Qué Pasa, USA? in the 1970s, Miami Vice and Scarface in the 1980s, Old School Miami Bass in the 1990s, the Elián González saga in the 2000s, and movements to reanimate chongaism via social media in the 2010s. My epilogue ties it all together in the 2020s and going forward. I was very deliberate about writing in an accessible, engaging way. I want people to enjoy reading my work, both academic and lay audiences.

Visit Paula Davis Hoffman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caitlin C. Gillespie's "Women and Resistance in the 'Annals' of Tacitus"

Caitlin Gillespie is Helaine and Alvin Allen Chair in Literature and Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University. Her research centers on women and power in ancient Rome.

Gillespie applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Women and Resistance in the Annals of Tacitus, and shared the following:

Page 99 places readers in the midst of a chapter called, “Daring to Die,” which centers on the heroic actions of a freedwoman called Epicharis. Epicharis is one of the only women mentioned by the historian Tacitus in conjunction with the Pisonian conspiracy that threatened the emperor Nero; she is tortured for information, remains silent, and dies by suicide. In his Annals, Tacitus celebrates her as a model of strength, courage, and resilience, and contrasts her with the many elite senatorial men who failed to provide similar examples.

I conclude that Epicharis offers a model of resistance to Nero through remaining silent and refusing to name her co-conspirators; on page 99, readers are confronted by an individual who, unlike Epicharis, embraces the opportunity to speak out and gain the glory of a confession before execution. This man, a military tribune named Subrius Flavus, had been faithful to the emperor as long as he was deserving; after his arrest, he explains that he exchanged loyalty for hatred after Nero murdered his own wife and mother, among other unconscionable acts. Though unrefined, the soldier’s words have force, and Tacitus considers them no less worthy of publication than those of the philosopher Seneca.

With both Epicharis and Subrius Flavus, the historian celebrates the courage of nonelites, giving voice to the voiceless and memorializing them in his text. Browsers might get the sense that Tacitus grants posthumous glory to those he considers worthy, and severely condemns those who were celebrated without merit during life.

Page 99 does not adequately communicate the central thesis of the book, which centers on narratives of women; rather, it unintentionally points towards the dominance of men in Roman history and scholarship. Likewise, it fails to give a sense of the scope of the argument, the number of individuals and groups of women addressed, or the methods of protest they enact.

My research is driven by the desire to amplify women’s voices and experiences in the ancient Roman world, particularly women from outside of the ruling family. Nevertheless, readers may understand from page 99 that the overarching argument is not strictly limited to those of the female sex. Epicharis is an unexpected model of courage due to both her sex and status. Her death by suicide is a declaration of personal autonomy. In her case, suicide is a political statement connected to the concepts of exemplarity and Roman memory.

What I hope readers derive from page 99 is that there are innumerable individuals whose lives and deaths deserve further study. The women of Tacitus’s Annals engage in unexpected and subversive acts of protest and resistance, using ingenuity and creativity to speak truth to power. Though they might fail to achieve their immediate aims, their acts of resistance eventually give birth to glory.

Learn more about Women and Resistance in the Annals of Tacitus at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cotten Seiler's "White Care"

Cotten Seiler is professor of American studies at Dickinson College. He is the author of Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America.

Seiler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, White Care: The Impact of Race on American Infrastructure, and reported the following:

From page 99:

… [P]rimary and secondary school grounds would come to feature an ever more encompassing built environment, adding “assembly rooms, gymnasiums, swimming pools, playgrounds, athletic fields, laboratories, shops, kitchens, clinics, cafeterias, and lounges.” Such an abundant surround testified, as Briggs wrote, to “constantly increasing public support, evidence of an enthusiasm that amounts to a fetish.” Indeed, funding for primary and secondary educational facilities, personnel, and curricula would see a nearly hundredfold increase over the century. The school was the key site at which the state displayed its commitment to “cohesion and equality of resources for children considered ethnically white.” This elevation of schools to the status of infrastructure was underwritten by scientists’ judgments of what white children required for their development and could become for the species and the nation. Conversely, the belief that the education of children racialized as nonwhite would pay few to no such dividends would thwart the public schooling of Americans of color—and later, of white Americans too.

Wow, Ford Madox Ford was spot-on in my case. Reading page 99 of White Care: The Impact of Race on American Infrastructure, one can grab hold of the book’s central argument: in the United States, theories of race have driven the political will to provide—and withhold and neglect—public infrastructure.

In the pages surrounding the quotation above I’m writing about something pretty freaky and obscure, but absolutely central to the building and expansion of public schools and playgrounds in the early twentieth century: the theory of recapitulation. Put forth by evolutionary scientists and progressive thinkers in the late 1800s, this theory held that as each individual organism develops, it repeats all the phases of its species’ evolutionary journey. This meant that homo sapiens’ development amounted to a process of losing the traces of our fish, amphibian, mammalian, and primate ancestry. As scientists, political speech, and popular culture judged racialized whiteness to be the pinnacle of human evolution, it was posited that humans racialized as white would also advance beyond the so-called “savage races” in intelligence and capacity for self-government.

Recapitulation profoundly affected how American thinkers viewed childhood, suffusing the professionalized sciences of child psychology, education, and “play theory,” all of which emerged around the turn of the century. My book emphasizes that it also put its imprint on the built environment, as experts prevailed on the state to provide infrastructures through which children could be shepherded to the fulfillment of their potential. The public school and the playground were the most crucial of these spaces, for they were where the (implicitly white) child could be drawn through the phases of development, “repeat[ing] the history of his own race-life from savagery unto civilization.” Hence the need for “monkey bars,” “jungle gyms,” and the experiential, active pedagogy advocated by John Dewey and other reformers.

Learn more about White Care at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carl P. Borick's "Backcountry Resistance"

Carl P. Borick is Director of the Charleston Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, and the author of Relieve Us of This Burthen: American Prisoners of War in the Revolutionary South, 1780-1782 (2011) and A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780 (2003).

Borick applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Backcountry Resistance: South Carolina's Militia and the Fight for American Independence, with the following results:

For those readers who make it all the way to page 99, thank you! For those opening to page 99, you will find a description of the experiences and character of South Carolina's militiamen, who opposed the British in the backcountry, or interior, of South Carolina in the Revolutionary War. The book itself is an exposition of how these men were raised, armed, and supplied, their experience in fighting the British, and what motivated them to turn out even after the most important city in South Carolina, Charleston, fell to the enemy, so this page definitely alludes to this concept.

Growing up on the frontiers of South Carolina, they were adept with firearms, particularly rifles, and had little choice but to conserve their shot and powder since they were difficult to replace, especially after the fall of Charleston when supplies became irregular. Many, as Charles Woodmason described, had grown up in austere circumstances and were accustomed to hard living.

Surprisingly, the Page 99 Test works for the book as readers will find themselves in the midst of a discussion of the effectiveness of South Carolina militiamen against the British despite fewer supplies after the fall of Charleston and their resilience amidst adverse conditions. The book premise is how South Carolina's militia was able to put up a strong resistance against the British based on a look at the experiences of individual soldiers. Page 99 certainly gives a flavor of that. Among the militiamen discussed here are John Fletcher and Thomas Ramsey who hid out in the swamps to avoid the British and their loyalist allies and Michael Burtz, who in his service, underwent "many wants and privations."

Although the book may appeal to fans of Revolutionary War history, and specifically to those interested in the war in the South, general readers will appreciate the ability of relatively untrained farmers and tradesmen to staunchly resist the British army. They will also be intrigued by discussions of their diet, clothing, weapons, and motivations, particularly as the country commemorates the 250th anniversary of its founding, during the Revolutionary War. The experience of the conventional British army fighting against an enemy who operated somewhat unconventionally mirrors that of the American military in more recent conflicts such as Vietnam in the 1960s and Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century, The book also examines the role of women and the enslaved who both contributed to and were caught up in the war that raged in the South Carolina backcountry.

Learn more about Backcountry Resistance at the University of South Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna O. Law's "Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship"

Anna O. Law is the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at CUNY Brooklyn College. She completed her PhD in Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Her publications appear in political science, history, and law journals and investigate the interaction between law, legal institutions, and politics. Her first book, The Immigration Battle in American Courts (2010), examined the role of the federal judiciary in U.S. immigration. She teaches and researches in U.S. constitutional law, federal courts, U.S. immigration policy history, federalism, American Political Development, and race/ethnicity.

Law applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, readers will find:

Native nations living on land the Americans coveted influenced slave states delegates to vote for constitutional ratification. The framers sought to balance accommodation of regional interests with creating a robust national government that could defend against foreign and domestic insurrections that might destabilize the young republic. Gregory Ablavsky argues persuasively that the framers convinced reluctant states to ratify the Constitution by repeatedly invoking the threat of “savages” to justify the creation of a fiscally and militarily sturdy federal government. Both elements of centralized authority over Indian affairs and a stronger central government had been glaring deficits in the Articles of Confederation.

In the founding era, the attempt to assign by subject matter the management of Indian affairs exclusively to the national government resulted in continuing conflict between the US and state governments given their divergent policy goals. From the confederation period forward, states often claimed Native land under colonial era charters. Congress putatively had the power to reconcile some of these sometimes-overlapping claims between former colonies but did not often step in to resolve conflicts. The legislative branch instead asked states to turn over their claims to the national government, and these requests were usually ignored. Through the colonial and confederation periods, states continued to operate by local laws and pass new ones regulating Native people in their territory. For example, states exercised their authority by regulating the sale and supply of Native land, driving down prices, and facilitating dispossession. Either by statute or by creation of systems, states continued to allow settlers to purchase Native American land without federal coordination and oversight and without any questions from the courts post-Revolution.

By claiming sole authority over Indian affairs, the federal government had the daunting responsibility to “make peace with Natives, restrain illegal settlement, and conciliate state assertions of sovereignty, all with limited funds and while seizing the land necessary to repay the national debt.” Even if the national government enjoyed the sole authority to manage these many tasks, with the cooperation of the states, it would have been a huge range of laws to enact and enforce.

The Page 99 Test doesn’t work for my book because it omits the central contribution of Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship. My intervention is to synthesize into one study the histories and laws governing the citizenship and migration of groups that are usually read separately in disciplinary or time period silos. These are voluntary migrants, African Americans, and Native American. Page 99 only discusses Native Americans. If readers open to this page, they won’t be aware that voluntary migrants and free and enslaved African Americans are also part of the story and that their fates are intertwined.

Although we today think of these groups as unrelated, federal court opinions from the nineteenth century mention all these people in the same decisions. Take for example Mayor of New York v Miln (1837), a case brought by shipping companies against New York to challenge a NY migration law. The statute required ship captains to turn over passenger manifests listing travelers by name, and physical condition (whether they are disabled, or sickly). Failure to comply would result in a fine. The shipping companies hated these laws that were eating into their profits. In that same opinion, Supreme Court justices discussed the implications of striking down New York’s migration restrictions for slave states who had laws controlling the entry, movement, and settlement of free and enslaved Black Americans. Before the Civil War ended slavery and separated the two subject matter areas, slavery and voluntary migration laws were inextricably linked.

Page 99, though, spotlights Native Americans who some readers might find surprising to be in a book about voluntary migration. The land Indigenous peoples lived on and owned for generations was obtained and sold by states and the US government at subsidized prices to lure voluntary European migration to the colonies and the states through to the nineteenth century. States and the US government often gained Indigenous lands by treaty negotiations, levels of coercion, or outright fraud. For example, the US government funded and carried out the violent deportation of 80,000 Native Americans in the southeastern states in the 1830s. The US government did so after being goaded by the states for the expansion of the cotton crop and slavery. Thus, the ability of Native Americans to stay on their own land was inverse to settler migrants’ desire to possess and occupy that same area.

Visit Anna O. Law's website.

--Marshal Zeringue