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.

Visit Roger Kreuz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy D. Grundmeier's "Lutheranism and American Culture"

Timothy D. Grundmeier is professor of history at Martin Luther College, New Ulm, Minnesota.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith in the Civil War Era, and shared the following:

If a reader would open to page 99 of Lutheranism and American Culture, they would find themselves in the middle of the debates about slavery among the Old Lutherans of the Missouri Synod, a Midwest-based church body whose members were almost exclusively immigrants from Germany. Despite having no direct stake in the peculiar institution, several key leaders of the Missouri Synod vigorously defended slavery as biblically sanctioned. I then explain two reasons why. First, they were convinced that the abolition of slavery would lead to societal disorder and the elevation of a false conception of liberty. Second, they believed that the Bible clearly taught that slaveholding was not sinful.

The Page 99 Test succeeds in some ways but fails in others.

This particular page certainly highlights a key theme in my book: Throughout the Civil War era, Lutherans were both distinctive in their outlooks and quintessentially American. So, on the one hand, it is quite surprising that these Midwestern immigrants would be defending the institution of slavery with such vigor. Yet, on the other hand, many of their pro-slavery (or anti-abolitionist) arguments resembled those made by other Christians in the United States.

That being said, if a browser just read page 99, that person would miss my book’s core argument. In my book, I show how the Civil War and Reconstruction forged a distinctive identity among American Lutherans. This identity had four key components: theological confessionalism, ecclesiastical separatism, political and social conservatism, and American exceptionalism. A reader turning to this page might get a sense of the third of those four ideas (political and social conservatism), but not the other three.

Learn more about Lutheranism and American Culture at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel R. Langton's "Darwin in the Jewish Imagination"

Daniel R. Langton is Professor of Jewish History at the University of Manchester with particular interests in modern Jewish thought and identity in the context of religion and science studies and Jewish-/Non-Jewish relations. He is Head of the Department of Religions & Theology, and also co-director of the University's Centre for Jewish Studies.

Langton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Darwin in the Jewish Imagination: Jews' Engagement with Evolutionary Theory, and reported the following:

Page 99 falls within a chapter on Reform Jewish engagements with evolutionary theory. It focuses on Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf’s late nineteenth-century attempt to reconcile Darwinian evolution with a theistic, even mystical, vision of divine immanence. The page develops two intertwined claims: first, that evolution continues beyond physical death—“the spark of life lives and passes on to a higher and better state”—and second, that intellect itself evolves upward through the animal kingdom, culminating in humanity as a form of divine revelation. Krauskopf presents life as a “spark of the universal Life,” identifying that universal life with God, and imagines biological development as a spiritual ascent toward the “God-like.” The prose is rich in organic metaphors: seed and flower, caterpillar and butterfly, matter returning to earth while the life-principle advances.

Would page 99 give a good idea of the whole?

It would give a partly accurate but incomplete idea of the book. Accurately, it captures one of the book’s central arguments: that many Jewish thinkers did not see Darwinism as a threat, but as an opportunity to articulate panentheistic (the world is contained within the divine) or immanentist (divine presence is found within life, law or natural processes) theologies of evolution. It also reflects the book’s close historical reading of sermons, essays, and theological works rather than abstract theorizing about “Judaism and science.”

However, page 99 might mislead the reader into thinking the book is primarily about Reform homiletics or spiritualized evolution. In fact, the study ranges widely across popular, Orthodox, mystical, secular, Zionist, and even Jewish eugenic contexts from the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century from Europe, the US and Israel/Palestine. It includes fierce opposition to Darwin, internal Jewish polemics, and transnational intellectual exchanges. The tone elsewhere tends to be more analytical and historiographical than purely descriptive, as here.

Darwin in the Jewish Imagination argues that Jewish responses to evolution challenge standard “conflict” models derived from Christian contexts. Far from a simple science-versus-religion narrative, the Jewish case reveals creative adaptation, theological innovation, and strategic boundary-drawing. Evolution became a resource for rethinking revelation, chosenness, human nature, morality, and national destiny. Page 99 shows one vivid instance of that creativity—but it is only one thread in a much larger tapestry.

Learn more about Darwin in the Jewish Imagination at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Sanders's "A Will for the Machine"

Mark Sanders is professor of comparative literature and English at New York University and extraordinary professor of Afrikaans and Dutch at Stellenbosch University. He is the author of four books, including Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, and Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid.

Sanders applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Will for the Machine: Computerization, Automation, and the Arts in South Africa, with the following results:

Page 99 of A Will for the Machine is transitional, summarizing part of what has come before, and part of what comes after. It gives the reader a schematic overview of the theoretical implications of my arguments about how South African writers and artists engaged with technologies of automation and computerization in the context of apartheid and its racialization of labor. Coming a few pages into my book’s third chapter, which is about William Kentridge’s animated films, specifically Stereoscope, page 99 introduces the idea that there is a parallel between the automaticity of seeing and that of technologies such as film—the latter being imaginable because of the former. Chapter three is also historical, analyzing how Stereoscope depicts women telephone operators at the brink of the automation of telephone exchanges—which proceeded apace from the 1920s. Kentridge’s film thus asserts, generally, the indispensability of the human being who interacts with the machine. A century ago, such an assertion was integral to Kentridge’s grandfather’s political career. As a member of parliament for the Labour Party, Morris Kentridge was a prominent advocate for white South African workers. William Kentridge’s politics, often given expression in his art, have, by contrast, been non-racial. Page 99 also anticipates how, in the rest of my book, I show how artists have not only depicted workers interacting with machines, which I discuss in my chapters on authors Miriam Tlali and J.M. Coetzee—the latter produced computer poetry before his career as a novelist—but also bring before the eye what humans and machines have in common, which, I contend, is a condition of possibility for their interaction. This is especially apparent from the work of Handspring Puppet Company, which I discuss in the final chapter of my book.

Learn more about A Will for the Machine at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Learning Zulu.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie L. Reed's "Land, Language, and Women"

Julie Reed is associate professor of history and anthropology at the University of Tulsa.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Land, Language, and Women introduces readers to the three major themes of the book (Cherokee girls' and women's educational worlds, the role of Cherokee language in educational settings, and the power of land to shape and inform community). Readers learn about Cherokee girls' access to Cherokee language education and enrollment numbers at Dwight Mission, a school opened in Arkansas Territory that served Cherokees who had removed to the west before forced removal. Dwight Mission later moved to Indian Territory from Arkansas after the United States and Western Cherokees negotiated the Treaty of 1828. Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee written language and whose daughter figures prominently in the book, assisted in these negotiations. Page 99 also describes how Cherokee people re-established and (re)organized their families and agricultural endeavors in the west during what I have been referring to for over a decade as the Long Removal Era. This longer period of study forces us to consider what led some Cherokee families to remove west before the event we refer to as the Trail of Tears and it corrects an incomplete understanding of the Removal Era to better reflect Cherokee peoples' actual family histories of removal, my own included.

Page 99 does discuss the three key themes of the book, but my disappointment with the test as it applies to my book is that it does not introduce readers to any named Cherokee women. I have encountered so many unnamed "Indian women" in the archival record and in published histories; my goal in writing this book was to offer a methodological approach and a corrective to what I see as a continued erasure of wide swathes of everyday Cherokee women in histories written about Cherokee people. Each chapter of the book (and within original artwork in the book created by Cherokee artist Roy Boney, Jr. ) foregrounds a Cherokee girl's educational world in order to launch a much larger conversation about systems of Cherokee education over 400 years that continually relied on Cherokee women to function. This page doesn't introduce readers to a single girl. In part, I judge books on Cherokee history based on whether I meet Cherokee people I have never met before or get to know someone I have met before, but in a far more intimate and nuanced way. Reading this page, I fail my own test even though I haven't completely failed the Page 99 Test.

Land, Language, and Women extends my exploration of the subjects covered in my first book (social welfare, education, public health policies, and the development and implementation of institutions). It also reflects my continued desire to explore questions related to hybridity and the durability of Indigenous-centered models of social welfare and pedagogy. To accomplish this, I drew upon a far more rich and creative set of primary records. I read mollusk collections, archaeological site reports, Cherokee writing in caves, textbooks used in mission and Oklahoma public schools, oral narratives, the oral histories of friends/teachers, artists' experiences, the experiences and records gathered by my family, and records from my own childhood archive to draw out more nuanced and complicated understandings of Indigenous history, Cherokee history, social welfare policies, educational history, regional histories, and women's history.

Learn more about Land, Language, and Women at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lytton N. McDonnell's "Counterpoints of Ecstasy"

Lytton N. McDonnell is Associate Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, University of Victoria.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Counterpoints of Ecstasy: Music, Mysticism, and the Enchantment of Modern America, and reported the following:

Page 99 appears just before the conclusion of Chapter 2, “The Naturalization of Numen.” It describes how certain nineteenth-century musical cultures promoted disciplined self-restraint as the proper expression of ecstatic experience. The page focuses on Theodore Thomas, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who modeled and enforced strict standards of decorum for both orchestra and audience, including synchronized bowing of instruments, prohibitions against talking or moving chairs, and carefully controlled bodily comportment.

This ethos of self-control also extended across the Atlantic. The American journalist George Gladden, for example, praised European audiences for their absolute silence during Wagner opera performances: no applause, no cheers, no visible emotional display, even when a singer delivered a deeply moving performance or “poured his whole soul into the darkness.” When audiences did become noisy or expressive, Gladden condemned them as “savage,” “diabolical,” and violent. In this way, musical elites—conductors, critics, performers, moralists, and audiences alike—framed silence, self-restraint, and internalized experience as virtuous markers of refinement and as the proper form of self-transcendence in the concert hall.

If readers open the book to page 99, they would gain a strong sense of one of its central arguments: that certain nineteenth-century cultural authorities redefined musical ecstasy not as visible excess or collective frenzy, but as disciplined interiority. The page also illustrates the book’s broader concern with how musical experience was reshaped, regulated, and naturalized within modern institutions, including the concert hall. Gladden’s quotations reinforce this point, employing moralizing language that highlights the book’s recurring attention to the ways ecstasy became entangled with hierarchies of class, race, and cultural authority.

However, page 99 offers only a partial—and potentially misleading—impression of the whole. Its emphasis on elite European art music and cultivated restraint might lead readers to assume the book focuses primarily on concert etiquette or bourgeois moral order. What the page does not reveal is the book’s wider comparative scope, which encompasses forms of ecstatic expression in contexts as varied as religious revivals, racialized performance traditions, psychological discourse, and the popular entertainment industry. Here, ecstatic experience often diverged from the ethos of self-restraint, embracing physicality, improvisation, and collective participation. Nor does the page foreground one of the book’s more distinctive contributions: its exploration of how ambivalence, contradiction, and countercurrents shaped—and at times destabilized—interpretations of ecstatic experience.

To encounter these other dimensions, readers might turn ahead a further 99 pages to the introduction of Chapter 6, which opens with a first-person account by Gustav Kuhl, a German writer describing his overwhelming reaction to a ragtime performance in Georgia in 1903:

“Suddenly I discovered that my legs were in a condition of great excitement. They twitched as though charged with electricity and betrayed a considerable and rather dangerous desire to jerk me from my seat. The rhythm of the music, which had seemed so unnatural at first, was beginning to exert its influence over me.”

This example is just one of dozens of historical accounts of intense subjective musical experience examined throughout the book. Together, they create the foundation of Counterpoints of Ecstasy and illuminate its central concern with the shifting interpretations of musical transcendence in America.

Learn more about Counterpoints of Ecstasy at the State University of New York Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick J. Connolly's "Newton's Metaphysics of Substance"

Patrick J. Connolly is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on issues at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences in the early modern period. Connolly has published a number of papers on John Locke, Isaac Newton, and related figures. He earned a PhD at the University of North Carolina and has previously held positions at Iowa State University, Lehigh University, Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Connolly applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Newton's Metaphysics of Substance: God, Bodies, Minds, with the following results:

If you flip to page 99 of Newton's Metaphysics of Substance, you’ll be plunged into my analysis of a dispute between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. These are both towering figures in seventeenth-century mathematics and physics. But the argument I’m adjudicating on page 99 is about something more fundamental: metaphysics. Specifically, Newton is responding to some of Leibniz’s criticisms of his theory of gravitation. And Newton is suggesting that there is a way of thinking about gravitation that makes it not much more mysterious than solidity. For him, these can both be understood by appeal to God’s immense power and providential design of the world.

Does page 99 give a good sense for the work as a whole? While no book can be captured in a single page, I’m inclined to say that page 99 is representative of much of what is on offer in my book. Let me give just a few of the reasons for that claim.

First, some of the most fundamental issues in Newton’s metaphysics are foregrounded here. What, at the most basic level, are bodies? How should we understand their features? And how should we think about bodies in relation to God, as things created by and depending on God? These are absolutely essential questions in my exploration of Newton’s larger metaphysical system, and much of the book is an effort to answer them.

Second, page 99 is focused on an effort to find continuity between De gravitatione and other claims Newton makes. De gravitatione is a fascinating, unfinished, and unpublished manuscript essay written by Newton. Lost for centuries, it was only rediscovered and published in the 1960s. I see it as offering the basic framework for Newton’s metaphysical thinking. So this page in my book can be seen as a microcosm of my larger effort to make sense of many of Newton’s otherwise confusing claims by leveraging the more systematic perspective on offer in De gravitatione.

Finally, one of the goals of the book is to present Newton as a systematic metaphysical thinker. Page 99 shows him considering and responding—I argue in a principled way—to the claims of another systematic metaphysical thinker. This showcases something important about the book. I argue that Newton can rightly be placed alongside figures like Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz as an important early modern philosopher. Accordingly, the book seeks to put him in dialogue with those three thinkers as well as with others. And page 99 is one instance of the book doing this.

Learn more about Newton's Metaphysics of Substance at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Casey Tieken's "Educated Out"

Mara Casey Tieken is professor of education at Bates College. She is the author of Why Rural Schools Matter.

Tieken applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges-And What It Costs Them, and shared the following:

The 99th page comes midway through the book, which follows nine rural, first-generation-to-college students as they enter and navigate an elite college that I call Hilltop. In a passage entitled “Access…” the page outlines the many opportunities and resources that Hilltop has: renowned professors, state-of-the-art science labs, an observatory, a new boathouse a few miles from campus. And it explains how the nine students take advantage of many of them, joining clubs, taking compelling classes, and competing on varsity teams.

The main point of the passage—and much of the book—comes a few pages later, though, in a section called “… with Limits.” As I write, “… the students work hard to capitalize on every opportunity, but oftentimes, their ‘Hilltop experience’ isn’t the same as their classmates’.”

Ultimately, the students find that their access to Hilltop’s numerous opportunities is quite limited; the resources exist, but many—the unpaid job shadows, the study abroad programs, the pricey textbooks—remain out of reach. And, as I describe in detail in the book, the students are navigating a world remarkably different from home. Home, with its different politics and different culture and different values, doesn’t feel very welcome at Hilltop.

So, the 99th page reflects part of the book’s core argument well: elite education is a thing of abundance. But these rural, first-generation students are only near that abundance. They remain on the outside, looking in, and that proximity likely makes the exclusion even harder.

Despite their limited access, these rural, first-generation students do well at Hilltop: they all graduate, some with honors and double majors. But, as they watch their wealthier, more urban classmates leverage connections to find jobs and apartments in large cities—where most jobs for college graduates are located—they realize that an elite degree may not open the doors they’d hoped.

These students were pushed to college by their parents, who understood the weakening rural economy and wanted them to have the stability and mobility they never did. An elite education should just raise their children’s chances of getting “a good job,” they reasoned. They knew that college would likely mean that their children would live adult lives far from home, and these parents made that sacrifice. So much hope and expectation rides on this college degree—and it’s not clear if the cost is worth it.

I bookend Educated Out with the current debate about college: is it worth it? Watching these students navigate Hilltop, I found my own faith in college waning. But when I asked the students, “Should everyone go to college?” they told me plainly that that’s the wrong question. “The controversy should be whether everyone has access to it or not, not whether everybody should go,” one said. “That is the issue we should be focused on: giving access to education—a good education.”

And right now, rural students don’t yet enjoy that kind of access.

Learn more about Educated Out at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert D. Priest's "Oberammergau"

Robert D. Priest is Associate Professor of Modern European History, Royal Holloway, University of London. He studied at University College London and Oxford, and was then a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is the author of various studies in nineteenth-century European culture and ideas, including The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France.

Priest applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Oberammergau: The Passion Play and Its Audiences from the Enlightenment to the Nazis, and reported the following:

On page 99 we find ourselves in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau in 1871, immediately after the Kingdom of Bavaria has fought alongside other German armies in the Franco-Prussian War that ended with the creation of a unified German nation-state. At the outbreak of war in 1870, the village’s long-running passion play had been interrupted so that its performers could fight in the war. Given Bavaria’s strong regional identity and the village’s Catholic history, Protestant Germans from the North arrived at the resumed season of performances in 1871 expecting a degree of hostility and alienation from the local population. Page 99 presents the surprise of northern Protestant journalists when they discover the opposite: the Oberammergauers seem to be sincerely invested in German nationalism. The local politician is a pro-German Liberal, apparently elected by unanimous vote of the village. He hangs a portrait of the Kaiser in his study alongside his bust of the Bavarian King Ludwig II, and bursts into tears recalling the opening of the Reichstag. A chauvinistic poet who sees Germany’s war victory as a triumph over the Catholic spirit even celebrates the play as ‘purely Protestant’ in its meaning.

The Page 99 Test works remarkably well for Oberammergau. One of the major arguments of my book is that the passion play attracted an increasingly and remarkably wide range of audiences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crucial was the play’s capacity to attract from across Germany’s sectarian divide and to present itself as a site of national significance, rather than Catholic and Bavarian. The 1870-1 season is the culmination of the first part of the book, ‘Making the German Passion Play’, and page 99 presents some of the strongest language from Protestant admirers. My book also seeks to focus on interaction between the local community and its audiences, which is directly represented by their encounters with journalists on the page.

While Oberammergau passes the Page 99 Test, of course it only tells part of the story. The final two-thirds of the book explore Oberammergau’s development of an international audience, the debates they had over the passion play on issues ranging from commercialisation to antisemitism, and the ultimate sponsorship of the play by the Nazi government at its tercentenary performance in 1934. The path from 1871 to the end of the book is indirect, but without Oberammergau’s successful presentation of the passion play as a national site, as described on page 99, it is impossible to imagine the paths that follow out from there into the twentieth century.

Learn more about Oberammergau at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Soucek's "The Opinionated University"

Brian Soucek is a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis. A scholar of free speech and equality law, Soucek has shaped national policy on academic freedom, nondiscrimination, and campus speech through his work with the American Association of University Professors’ “Committee A” on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the University of California’s Academic Senate.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Opinionated University is unusual, because most of it is consumed by the longest block-quote in the book: a statement my chancellor at UC Davis released in 2019, after I’d pushed him to recognize that the campus blood drives he so often publicized discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation and gender. In his statement, which I quote almost in full, the chancellor recognized the importance of blood donations, explained the history of the FDA’s ban on blood from men who’d had sex with another man in the previous year, decried discrimination, and called for “evidence- based policies” that would stop unnecessarily depriving members of our community from “joining in this important and generous community effort.”

Unusual as the page might be (since most of the writing there is attributed to someone else), page 99 actually encapsulates my book perfectly. Instead of stating the book’s central arguments—that institutional neutrality at our universities is an illusion, that taking sides on political issues is often unavoidable, and that well-chosen institutional statements can alleviate some of the harms our universities sometimes cause—page 99 exemplifies those claims.

For years, as a gay man, I’d experienced announcements of our campus blood drives as a slap in the face. I didn’t think we should abandon them, even though they violated our non-discrimination policies. But sometimes universities choose, or our forced, to do things that harm part of their community. (Think for example of the hate speech public universities are forced to allow on campus.) Even if choice might be the right one, that doesn’t make the harm they cause any less real. If the institution can alleviate some of that harm by speaking out, I think they have a duty to do so.

Doing so, however, flies in the face of the neutrality pledges that universities have increasingly made, or been forced to adopt, within the past couple years. Following the University of Chicago’s famous Kalven Report of 1967, as many as 150 schools have recently agreed to stay silent on political and social controversies. Most of my book is spent showing that, whatever they might pledge, universities often can’t avoid taking politically fraught positions in everything from their diversity and campus speech policies to the names on their buildings and the art on their walls.

Page 99 does something different: countering a widespread feeling that institutional speech just isn’t worth the trouble, Page 99 offers an example of a time it mattered. The statement mattered not because it led the FDA to change its policies (as it eventually did), but because it educated people about those policies and, for the first time, allowed those of us affected by them to feel that we were fully part of our institution too.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen M. Morin's "Cattle Trails and Animal Lives"

Karen M. Morin is Presidential Professor of Geography Emerita at Bucknell University and adjunct professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University (Toronto). She is the author of Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals; Civic Discipline: Geography in America, 1860–1890; and Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-Century American West; and coeditor, with Dominique Moran, of Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past and, with Jeanne Kay Guelke, of Women, Religion, and Space: Global Perspectives on Gender and Faith.

Morin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Cattle Trails and Animal Lives: The Founding of an American Carceral Archipelago, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Cowboy life on the cattle trail was challenging, difficult, and poorly paid— and, in fact, not paid until the cowboys reached the terminus of the trail in the cow town—in short, it was a job or experience that drew men with few other employment opportunities in the colonial (and colonizing) West. Following Coulter (2015), I surmise that despite the emotional care work involved, most of these were men with few other options and who aspired to ‘become their own boss’ as farmers or ranchers following the cattle drive and, hence, fully supported its carceral logic and structure as one with a personal promising future.

Animality, Agency, and Resistance

All of this being said, to what extent did cowboys and cows resist and challenge the conditions of their work on the cattle trails, if at all? Cowboys have often been portrayed as preferring the ‘independence’ of range labor to the grind of urban wage labor (Johnson 1996; Walker 1981; Tompkins 1992; Russell 1993). Stillman (2008) argues that both groups of workers are a kind of alienated labor often treated a lot like animals (and are similarly romanticized and objectified). The everyday life of the cowboy on the trail was one where the power relations with his trail boss and their differential social status often-times came into conflict. Cowboys’ ‘resistance’ to the work of the cattle drive typically manifested as challenges to trail bosses’ decisions and complaints about the type or amount of food and the harsh physical and environmental conditions, as well as other hardships such as sleeplessness and low wages (Sherow 2018: 135–136). One cowboy wrote of needing to put tobacco in his eyes to stay awake (Hunter 1924: 147).

Questions of agency and resistance to carceral conditions should also be posed with respect to how bovines experienced their labor on the cattle trails. Blattner, Coulter, and Kymlicka (2020) observe the long history of those who have no trouble seeing animal labor instrumentally, with animals as supposed willing participants in factory farms, labs, and circuses (cf. Fudge 2017: 270–271). Yet it would be hard to make the case that bovine animals would willingly work to collaborate in their own exploitation and eventual death via the cattle drive and other sites along the carceral archipelago. The cattle drive and cow towns were institutions of confinement where we find animal labor both producing and being produced as commodities; these are sites of animals working to transform their own bodies into commodities. Western films notably presented images of creatures who were without doubt willing participants in this enterprise and not resistant agents. But there is more to their personal stories.

Scholars notably have different ways of conceptualizing animal agency.

This book combines insights from carceral geography, historical animal studies, and material culture to understand the lived experiences of cows as they transitioned from being free-roaming animals to captives within the carceral infrastructures, technologies, and practices of the early American beef industry. ‘Carceral’ refers here to prison-like, whether direct infrastructural captivity or those instruments and tools that were aimed to achieve and maintain confinement, discipline, and control. The carceral ‘archipelago’ I study includes the western open range, ranch, cattle drive, and cattle town. The work offers a new type of ‘origin story’ of the early beef industry, that is, from the point of view of animal experiences within these carceral spaces, and how attention to these animal experiences challenge ‘re-narrations’ of the heroic taming of the West via the cattle industry in museums and other living history sites by arguing that what is actually being celebrated is the carceral.

Scholarly interventions and activist movements in the latter 20 th century radically changed humans’ understanding of how animals should be considered in their own right – as beings with interests, knowledges, cognition, sentience, subjectivity, and agency of their own and apart from but also in relationship with humans. In that sense page 99 – from a chapter about cattle drives from Texas to their termini in small Kansas cow towns from where the animals would be transported to slaughterhouses in Chicago and beyond by railroad – points to a theme throughout the book, that cattle did exercise agency and resist their captivity and forced movement. Elsewhere I discuss how this resistance took shape – for example by mother cows protecting and hiding their offspring from carceral structures and practices; by cows trying to throw their captors off theirs scents; by voicing their opposition to carceral practices through sounds and bellows; and even by attempting suicide to escape the carceral. At the same time what was likely experienced as ordinary daily life for the animals within carceral spaces is also important to recognize; their experiences were not just of pain and suffering but also caring, playfulness, fighting, the pleasures of grazing, and rest. It may be that subjects might not be aware of their own confinement, they may think of them as ‘normal’ and thus not resist them.

One of my favorite chapters of the book to write was one on mid 20 th -century Hollywood western films about cattle drives (and there are many), focusing on the mutual ‘work’ on the cattle trails by cowboys and cattle together. These films helped promote and entice an American post-war public towards beef eating, and images of carceral practices portrayed in them neutralized and normalized the carceral such that audiences came to not only accept but enjoy images of the carceral.

Learn more about Cattle Trails and Animal Lives at the University of Georgia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jordan B. Smith's "The Invention of Rum"

Jordan B. Smith is Associate Professor of History at Widener University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Invention of Rum falls on a part opener, which introduces the second section of the book: “Extraction.” This is a major theme of the book. To make rum required the extraction of labor from coerced and free laborers. It demanded natural resources including soil nutrients sapped through sugarcane cultivation and wood consumed by heating rum stills and crafting barrels to contain it. The newfound ability to turn rather cheap ingredients into a highly desired spirit allowed the makers and movers of rum to trade an eminently consumable good for more durable things including furs, land, and even people. Extraction in all of its forms is integral to the book’s broader argument that the invention of rum introduced the world to a new type of commodity defined by how it treated nearly everything as transmutable, and thus replaceable.

The only tick stopping page 99 from acing the test, is that this single word might underplay how central human behaviors are to these dynamics. Titles of the other sections—“creation” and “connection and conflict”—are good reminders that commodity histories are, at their core, histories of human decisions and actions.

If you think that relying on one word is too much of a stretch, we can turn to page 101 where readers will encounter the opening of my fourth chapter, “Slavery and the Work of Making Rum.” Each chapter begins with an examination of an uncommon source—usually an item of visual or material culture. Here I analyze prints of the interior and exterior of a plantation rum distillery published in William Clark’s Ten Views in the Island of Antigua. These are imperfect illustrations of historical processes because they present the distillery as more orderly and safer than Caribbean plantations usually were. But Clark captured the vast amount of work completed by nearly two dozen people, mostly men of African descent held in slavery.

The Invention of Rum connects the production, trade, and consumption of rum in the Caribbean, North America, Britain, and West Africa. No single page can encompass this geographical and topical breadth. But page 101 is an exemplar of the expansiveness of the evidence I assembled and the care with which I approached analyzing it. Like much of the rest of the book, the focus here remains on the people making, trading, and drinking rum.

Learn more about The Invention of Rum at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alice Echols's "Black Power, White Heat"

Alice Echols is Professor Emerita in the Departments of History & Gender Studies, Dana & David Dornsife College at the University of Southern California. She is the author of numerous books, including Daring to Be Bad, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture.

Echols applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, with the following results:

From page 99:

physically connected, and in ways that were new and profound. However, SNCC was a much less forgiving environment; its emotional economy was not fully reciprocal. Whites and Blacks forged intense bonds in SNCC. But the need for affection and approval characterized whites’ relationships with Blacks more than Blacks’ relations with whites, and in ways that felt oppressive to some Blacks.

Carmichael and Lester’s characterization of white activists as moved more by self-interest than by the struggle for racial justice might be a fair description of some. However, it did not characterize the behavior of SNCC’s veteran white staff or that of some of the newcomers. It also misrepresented white-on- white antiracist organizing as easily achievable in the American South, something that civil rights activists knew was untrue. Bob Zellner’s experience of trying to organize whites in 1961 led him to ask if it was possible to work with white Southerners “without them stringing you up?”

Despite the odds they faced, some whites in SNCC kept trying, at least for a while. The White Folks Project, initiated in 1964, quickly abandoned its original goal of mobilizing moderate white liberals to counteract the influence of the KKK and the White Citizens’ Councils. Instead, it turned its attention to trying to reach the white working class. The Project put 25 people to work in Biloxi, Mississippi, where they hoped to establish a “beachhead” for the movement among whites. What little headway they made was undone by a malicious rumor that the group was there to help Blacks, not whites, get jobs. Evicted from their office, the staffers were forced to leave town. White SNCC worker Emmie Schrader Adams spent part of the summer of 1964 in a more rural part of the state trying to organize poor whites. Any progress the staffers made came to an abrupt halt when locals discovered they were civil rights workers, “race mixers.” They felt the young activists had hoodwinked them. “They hated us, they felt angry and betrayed,” and they refused to open their doors. In some cases, “they went for their guns or the telephone.”

Organizing poor white people, especially to forestall a backlash against the civil rights movement made sense . . . in theory. However, as Bob Moses had argued in that contentious November 1963 meeting, “It’s not true that whites can go into the white community.” As soon as white organizers tipped their hand and “broke the rules of the racial caste system,” they became the enemy. In 1963, Carmichael laughed with white SNCC staffer Theresa Del Pozzo about the “clear absurdity” that she could “organize” the white toughs in her Atlanta neighborhood who were attacking Black people. Luke (Bob) Block, a white activist involved in SCLC’s voter registration project of 1965, tried...

The Page 99 Test does not quite work for my book. Page 99 of Black Power, White Heat might encourage readers to think that the book as a whole is a defense of white Sixties activists and a critique of those Black activists who challenged whites’ seriousness and sincerity. That would be a shame because the book offers a complex portrait of cross-racial solidarity, one that abjures the vilification and romanticization of activists that sometimes characterizes histories of the Sixties.

Page 99 plunges the reader into the chapter that deals with how Black Power played out in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a Black-led, militant group formed in 1960. For context: in its early years “black and white together” was central to SNCC’s identity, only to become its albatross four years later. This happened for a complex set of reasons. But the upshot was that many Black SNCC workers believed the group should be all-Black, and that whites should leave it to fight racism in their own communities.

Page 99 begins with the tail end of my discussion of Black staffers’ frustrations with those white colleagues for whom Black Power was primarily about their own rejection. I emphasize that within SNCC whites often had a greater emotional investment in interracialism, and that their need for Black colleagues’ approval, even gratitude, proved deeply alienating to many Blacks.

However, most of page 99 is not focused on Black staffers’ understandable frustrations, but rather on the charges that some Black staffers leveled at their white co-workers. Stokely Carmichael and Julius Lester caricatured whites as less interested in Black liberation than in whining about their feelings of exclusion. But as I show on this page, some whites listened to their Black critics and set about organizing in Southern white communities. This is page 99’s takeaway: there were whites in SNCC who attempted to fight racism among whites, though it proved to be impossible. This story is important because too often people imagine that racial solidarity failed in the Sixties, and that its failure was entirely attributable to the unreliability or cowardice of white allies. Neither is true.

Learn more about Black Power, White Heat at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David A. Crockett's "Winning It Back"

David A. Crockett is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Trinity University. He is the author of The Opposition Presidency and Running Against the Grain.

Crockett applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Winning It Back: Restoration Presidents and the Cycle of American Politics, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Another example of Nixon’s “Republican New Dealer” methods can be seen in his economic policy. Declaring he was “now a Keynesian in economics,” Nixon instituted a ninety-day freeze on wages, prices, and rents in August 1971. He ended the gold standard, allowing the dollar to float with other currencies. The addition of new tax cuts and tax credits led to increased deficit spending. Historian Alonzo Hamby calls Nixon’s efforts “an almost unimaginable heresy,” a charge that can only be true for someone seeking a new conservative regime….

….Rather than seek to undermine the Great Society, Nixon added to it. Some referred to Nixon “out-Democrating” the Democrats, while Barry Goldwater criticized him for doing “nothing to block enlargement of the federal establishment.” In fact, Nixon operated on a continuum with Kennedy and Johnson. He allowed at least forty new regulatory programs to exist without a veto, and he presided over the expansion of Social Security through indexing benefits and increasing the benefit base.

Nixon’s heresies continued in the area of foreign policy. The fierce anticommunist forged arms deals with the Soviet Union, visiting Moscow in 1972 to sign the SALT I arms limitation treaty. He redefined containment by embracing détente—hardly the liberation strategy long prized by conservatives. He also reversed decades of American foreign policy by visiting China, sacrificing Taiwan’s seat in the United Nations in the process. National Review called Nixon’s policies an “approximation of the Liberal Left,” while the New York Times saw Nixon as abandoning “outmoded conservative doctrine.”

Page 99 comes toward the conclusion of chapter 5, “New Deal Restoration Politics.” The Page 99 Test does a pretty good job highlighting the major approach of the book, which is an attempt to locate American presidents in their larger historical context, situated in partisan eras that favor one party over the other. In this case, Republican Richard Nixon took office in the Democratic Party-dominated New Deal era, serving as an “opposition president” in that period. Unlike some opposition presidents, however, who launched a full-frontal assault against the governing party, Nixon chose to accommodate many aspects of the New Deal system – hence the “Republican New Dealer” label. Alas, however, Nixon’s clandestine assault on the New Deal order, popularly known as “Watergate,” led to the implosion of his presidency. Page 99 emphasizes Nixon’s rejection of a staunch conservative counter-revolution when the New Deal was weakened following Lyndon Johnson, choosing instead a more cautious center-left approach.

What the Page 99 Test misses is the interplay between these opposition presidents – not just Nixon, but also the Whigs, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, and Bill Clinton – with their governing party successors (Polk, Pierce, Harrison, McKinley, Harding, Kennedy, Carter, and the younger Bush). Each chapter in the book focuses on a specific era in American politics and demonstrates that these opposition presidency interludes frustrate the normally governing party. When the governing party retakes control of the White House, the new “restoration president” attempts to “restore” the political universe to its proper shape. In this case, page 99 is followed immediately by page 100, which briefly addresses Jimmy Carter’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to “restore” the New Deal system, paving the way for the more consequential 1980 election and the rise of a conservative era in American politics. We can see a similar dynamic playing out in our current politics, in the oscillation between Clinton-Bush- Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump. Page 99 captures well one part of that roller coaster journey.

Learn more about Winning It Back at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue