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

Aaron Coy Moulton's "Caribbean Blood Pacts"

Aaron Coy Moulton is Associate Professor of Latin American History at Stephen F. Austin State University. His research has been published in various outlets including the Journal of Latin American Studies, The Americas, and Cold War History.

Moulton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Cold War Struggle for Freedom, and reported the following:

Opening my new book Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Cold War Struggle for Freedom to page 99, the reader finds that a coalition of Caribbean and Central American dictators had decided to halt a 1948 border invasion plot by Guatemalan reactionary Manuel Melgar designed to overthrow Guatemala’s revolutionary, democratically-elected government. Next, that coalition was joined by the neighboring Salvadoran regime to consider a new conspiracy spearheaded by Colonel Arturo Ramírez, another reactionary.

A new section then begins that notes that these dictators and regimes’ various plots were escalating political tensions across Guatemalan politics. This dynamic was directly shaping Guatemala’s 1950 presidential election. Readers are also introduced to the then-unknown reactionary Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas who would be behind the 1950 Base Militar uprising.

As for the Page 99 Test, I would have to say this page only offers a sliver of my book’s whole.

On one hand, this page does provide an important idea at the heart of Caribbean Blood Pacts. In a literature that has focused on the U.S. government’s role in the downfall of the 1944-1954 Guatemalan Revolution, this page highlights how actors outside the United States cooperated to destroy Guatemala’s democratic experiment. Exiles long opposed to Caribbean Basin dictators tapped into the Second World War’s antifascism and launched a new era of antidictatorial activism. This led many of them to Guatemala. There, they expanded their democratic alliances, organized a massive though abortive Cuban adventure against a Dominican dictator, and helped win Costa Rica’s 1948 Civil War. It was this transnational threat that brought dictators together against Guatemala’s governments. Before the U.S. government’s infamous operations in the early 1950s, these dictators spent the better part of a decade sharing intelligence, sponsoring antigovernment reactionaries, and financing numerous conspiracies, including air-bombing plots. Their efforts not only caused political divisions inside Guatemala; this network of dictators, regimes, and reactionaries became central components of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation PBFORTUNE and Operation PBSUCCESS.

On the other hand, Caribbean Blood Pacts also uncovers the parts played by the United Fruit Company and the British government. As had those dictators and regimes, these entities opposed the Guatemalan Revolution for propelling the nation’s economic reforms and anticolonial ideals. United Fruit lobbied the U.S. Congress, British intelligence financed antigovernment students, and both disseminated anticommunist propaganda. Again, such forces were pivotal in causing political divisions inside Guatemala and influencing the U.S. government’s operations. In fact, when the U.S. government approved its first interventionist policy, United Fruit and British officials felt the policy was weak and insufficient. The Guatemalan Revolution’s tragic end ultimately was the product of myriad agents, ranging from dictators to Mexican anticommunists.

Caribbean Blood Pacts is the product of research throughout European, Caribbean, Central American, Mexican, and U.S. collections. Descendants of exiles generously shared their histories with me, and I benefitted immensely from supportive institutions, colleagues, and archivists. I do hope my book inspires others to consider how democratic aspirations can reverberate far beyond physical borders and artificial boundaries.

Learn more about Caribbean Blood Pacts at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Mendenhall's "Invisible Illness"

Emily Mendenhall is Professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and contributor to Scientific American, Psychology Today, and Vox. Her books include Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji.

Mendenhall applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long COVID, with the following results:

Page 99 of Invisible Illness describes the excruciating pain Tam experiences with her multiple overlapping conditions, where her primary diagnosis is endometriosis although she has a cascade of other conditions, including mast cell activation syndrome. What's exemplified by this page is that it describes the multiple physical experiences of pain that resonate through her illness journey. Many people, including those with Long Covid, experience mast cell activation syndrome, which I quote from the page here:

Tam was diagnosed with mast cell activation syndrome, which can cause flushing, itching, abdominal pain, diarrhea, hypotension, syncope, and musculoskeletal pain. These features are the result of mast cell mediator release and infiltration into target organs. The doctor prescribed steroids, which might have caused her adrenal glands to stop making cortisol on their own. Although steroids helped with one symptom, they caused her to gain seventy pounds and develop severe immune dysregulation. In other words, her body shut down. This type of cause and effect is not unusual for people living with a complex chronic illness.

Many people like Tam have symptoms and diagnoses creep up in their illness journey, and struggle with one treatment that makes another symptom worse. In many ways, Tam's story reveals the stories of so many people who manage to manage the ebbs and flows of chronic illness. Tam's courageous story also reveals how patients become experts in their personal health journey and need to be recognized as knowledge partners in their care. They are often the one person who has moved through all the clinical visits, faced unexplainable symptoms, and navigated multiple treatments that have in some cases helped and in other cases harmed. Taking seriously the knowledge and needs of patients is important to lift up as we imagine how medicine may become a culture that tackles complexity with humility and capaciousness.

Much later in the book, I discuss the power of patients as knowledge partners again, arguing:

This scenario might also employ patient consultants who are knowledgeable about unverifiable health conditions to serve as knowledge partners. Clinical researchers often note the importance of recognizing and possibly understanding the lived experiences of patients. However, many people do not believe this approach is enough to transform the practice of medicine to be more inclusive and effective in caring for people. Rather, it’s crucial that people living with invisible illness are recognized and integrated into clinical and research teams as knowledge partners. Patients offer invaluable knowledge, from experiential to scientific, that should be viewed with as much “openness and rigor as other forms of knowledge. (p184)

It's important to note that "invisible illness" is a metaphor for more than something that does not have a quick and easy test, rash, or biomarker to clearly help a clinician diagnose a health condition. In fact, many of these health conditions can be verified in the blood and tissues or surgeries (like laproscopy) to prove that people are sick with what they think they are sick with. In many cases, these test are extraordinarily expensive and difficult to access due to availability and cost. Moreover, many people who experience excruciating pain, like Tam, may feel invisible in their social lives or in regard to the state in part because their patterns of engagement and needs change in meaningful ways. What's remarkable about patient advocacy communities is their ability to organize and push for meaningful change to bring attention to their needs, symptoms, and treatments that foster recovery.

Visit Emily Mendenhall's website.

The Page 99 Test: Unmasked.

--Marshal Zeringue

Trishula Rachna Patel's "Becoming Zimbabwean"

Trishula Rachna Patel is Assistant Professor of African History and Asian Studies at the University of Denver.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Becoming Zimbabwean: A History of Indians in Rhodesia, and shared the following:

Page 99 page focuses on immigration laws in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in the 1950s, and how they intersected with marriage law in Southern Rhodesia as it applied to Indians. Because most Indian couples were married according to Hindu or Muslim law, often in India before wives joined their husbands resident in the colony, Rhodesian immigration authorities argued that their marriages were inherently polygamous (even if the couple were monogamous). Therefore, they interpreted these relationships as invalid according to local marriage legislation for the purposes of immigration of the wife from India, or for her inheritance upon her husband’s death. The page focuses on one case involving a Muslim man whose will was contested after his death because of his second marriage. It also introduces the case of a Hindu family, where the husband remarried his one and only wife in order to register the marriage according to Rhodesian law after their first wedding in India. However, when he died, court authorities argued that the second marriage invalidated his will, which had been made between both weddings. This section of the book considers the intersection of immigration and marriage law, as well as whether Indians fit into civil laws established for white citizens or customary laws set up for Black African subjects.

Would readers opening the book to page 99 get a good or a poor idea of the whole work?

This is a tough question! The Page 99 Test works really well in the sense that it shows how Indians were treated as second-class citizens during British settler colonial rule in Southern Rhodesia, and how legislation discriminated against their rights of mobility. It also demonstrates how colonial laws and racism interfered in their domestic lives, affecting families in huge ways. The two stories featured on this page are great illustrations of the intersection of different legal systems of Indian law, African customary law, and Roman Dutch law. It’s a good test as it applies to this chapter in particular, which is about how Indians contested government intervention in their lives in the court system, revealing how the state treated them as transient immigrant populations – but when it challenged the structure of their families according to gender and generation, the children of migrants made a case for their rights as permanent residents and citizens. This gels with the book’s argument that Indians transitioned from being a diaspora over generations to becoming an African community and population, with their cultural traditions transformed in fundamental ways to make sense in local contexts.

What page 99 doesn’t show as much as I’d like about the book is the centrality of the Indian shop, or the dukkan in Gujarati, to Indian families in their transition to becoming Zimbabwean. Their general trading shops were economic spaces between white industrialists and Black customers, but also social spaces which allowed the growth of Indian families and kinship networks as well as political spaces which enabled their resistance to the white minority state. The shop is hinted at in this chapter as a cultural space, where the structures of family and gender were challenged by legal restrictions against both immigration, which allowed the business to continue to grow with the migration of relatives as a source of labor, as well as determined who would inherit the business and the wealth acquired from it upon the death of the head of the household. But as a physical space and a lens into Indian identity, it’s not as prominent here as I would like as a way to get a good idea of the entirety of the book and its focus on the centrality of the shop to daily life.

Learn more about Becoming Zimbabwean at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

George Lewis's "Un-Americanism"

George Lewis, professor of American history at the University of Leicester, is the author of The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945–1965.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Un-Americanism: A History of the Battle to Control an Idea, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book immediately situates readers in the midst of both the overarching, grand debates over un-Americanism and the dirtier political squabbles that have surrounded its meanings and the uses to which it has been put. The book itself traces the idea of un-Americanism from its origins at the dawn of the Republic to its continued salience in the era of Trump, and shows that, despite its longevity, it has never had an objectively agreed definition. As a direct result, a central theme of its history has been ongoing arguments both over what un-Americanism means and over who has the right to control that meaning.

Page 99 lands readers right in the middle of one of those episodic debates, which here is over the creation of a formal congressional committee tasked with investigating un-American activities in the late 1930s. Many Americans had hoped that a government-led un-American activities committee would at least clarify what un-Americanism was, or how best it might be defined. It did neither. What it did do, though, was clarify that contemporaries believed it to be more important to have an un-American investigating committee than it was to know what the un-Americanism that was to be investigated might entail.

This particular debate was over New York Representative Samuel Dickstein’s 1937 resolution to alter what had been a temporary committee to investigate Nazi propaganda into a standing committee with a wider remit covering un-American activities. Page 99 details the concerns that many congressmen had with the idea, which ranged from the putative power of such a committee to a sense that the nebulous, ill-defined idea of un-Americanism was open to misuse for nefarious goals. They were to be proven correct on both counts.

Learn more about Un-Americanism at the University Press of Florida website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel K. Williams's "The Search for a Rational Faith"

Daniel K. Williams is a historian of American religion and politics who is currently an associate professor of history at Ashland University. Before moving to Ashland, he was a professor of history at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of several books on religion and politics in the United States, including God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right and Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro—Life Movement before Roe v. Wade. His articles on American Christianity and conservatism have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Christianity Today, and the Washington Post.

Williams applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity, with the following results:

If you flip The Search for a Rational Faith open to page 99, you will land in the middle of a chapter on Christian responses to eighteenth-century deists. One-third of the way down the page is the bold-print subheading “Charles Leslie’s Use of Historical Evidence.”

Leslie was an Anglican priest who wrote one of the most widely read refutations of deistic arguments against orthodox Christianity during the Enlightenment, but he is even more significant as a pioneer of the use of empirically based historical evidence to defend the trustworthiness of the biblical record. This became the foundation for an evidence-based Christian apologetic that is still popular in some circles today.

A reader encountering this material would get an accurate idea of my book, because The Search for a Rational Faith focuses on Christian apologists like Leslie – that is, people whose intellectual defenses of Christian faith were influential, but whose life stories and achievements have been largely forgotten.

Many people today have heard of the skeptical attacks on Christianity that came out of the Enlightenment – such as Spinoza’s historical criticism of the Bible, David Hume’s arguments against miracles, or Voltaire’s questions about God’s justice in a world of suffering – but they’re much less familiar with the responses from Enlightenment-influenced Christian intellectuals. My book analyzes those responses and demonstrates that on the whole, Enlightenment thinkers were actually more supportive of Christian faith than many have assumed. It makes this argument by examining a large number of thinkers like Leslie – that is, theologically orthodox Christians who used empirically based reason and historical or scientific examination to defend Christianity.

The Search for a Rational Faith provides a 400-year history of Christians’ intellectual defenses of the faith, first during the Enlightenment and then in the era of nineteenth-century Darwinism and twentieth-century philosophical challenges. While page 99 of the book cannot possibly cover the entire sweep of that history, it gives readers a clear idea of this theme. Leslie’s work “demonstrated the growing belief of many educated Anglicans that Christianity should be rational and provable, in the same way that any scientific principle was,” I say on page 99.

One of the central questions of this book is why so many Christians thought for so long that “Christianity should be rational and provable.” Page 99 doesn’t answer that question – but it might give readers enough of a hint to make them curious about the rest of the book.

Visit Daniel K. Williams's website.

The Page 99 Test: God's Own Party.

The Page 99 Test: Defenders of the Unborn.

--Marshal Zeringue