Tom French's "The Gap Years"

Tom French is a lifelong mountaineer, cross-country skier, and lover of the outdoors. A senior partner emeritus of McKinsey & Company, he is currently board chair of the Trustees of Reservations, a director of Corning Incorporated, and serves on several other nonprofit boards. He lives in Massachusetts, with his wife, Jill.

French applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Gap Years: Climbing, Skiing, and the Journey Back, his first non-business book, with the following results:

From page 99:

Meanwhile, I had been fine-tuning other aspects of my health preparations. Ever since returning from Aconcagua, I had wondered why, after performing strongly lower on the mountain, I had been so acutely affected by the altitude on summit day. This prompted a memory from years earlier on Denali, when our team had passed through the fourteen-thousand-foot camp on the West Buttress the day after summiting via the West Rib. A high-altitude research team, set up in a park rangers’ tent, had asked to measure our blood oxygen levels, starting with the team member who had dealt best with the altitude up high. I was flagged as that person. Yet, when our oxygen levels were compared, mine was by far the lowest. It was a curiosity that I didn’t dwell on at the time. Now, preparing to head to Everest, where performance at extreme high altitude would be crucial, I tried to connect some dots.

When I first heard about the Page 99 Test, I was excited at the prospect of applying it to The Gap Years. When I flipped to the page to see what awaited me, I was disappointed to find it less representative of the book than hoped. The page describes dealing with various personal health issues as I prepare for the first of two attempts to climb Mount Everest. One of these is trying to obtain a Covid vaccination before departure, just as the vaccine is becoming available to the general public. Another is reconciling my blood oxygen levels at various altitudes with my actual performance at those altitudes. The majority of the book contains accounts of expedition travel, cross-country ski racing, and mountaineering worldwide, interspersed with reflections on spiritual fulfillment found in the outdoors and contemplation of the pursuit of life meaning. Page 99 is far less lyrical. Just practical details. Not the book’s best foot forward.

That said, page 99 has its place in the book, and it is indicative of an important sub-theme of The Gap Years: the interplay between physicality and spirituality. The book describes journeys to the summits of the world’s highest mountains, in a quest to embrace spirits rarely encountered. These outward journeys are powered by inward journeys of preparation, to restore a sixty-year-old body to top physical condition, and to prepare for extreme athletic challenge. The physical journeys are not only practical, but also in their own way spiritual. For someone whose youth was defined by endurance training, returning to it was a voyage of rediscovery and deep meaning. As meaningful in many ways as the summits themselves.

Some of my favorite passages in the book describe the interplay between physical activity and the natural world: the “Zen-like exchange of moist breath and frigid air” while ice climbing, or, while cross-country skiing, “feeling the freedom of moving swiftly through crystalline winter beauty, of pride in one’s body, of sharing the experience with close friends." These moments, verging on spiritual, depended on my body being able to perform at an extremely high level; something that can’t be taken for granted in one’s sixties. Climbing high mountains at this age also has unique risks. Death rates on Everest increase markedly for climbers over sixty. There were many reasons why getting practical health details sorted out was important.

In summary, page 99 of The Gap Years is not particularly gripping, and is not indicative of much of the broader focus of the book. But it refers to some practical details that really mattered, and it hints at an inward journey that is central to it.

Visit Tom French's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sally Shuttleworth's "In Quest of a Cure"

Sally Shuttleworth CBE, FBA, is Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, and the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division. She has also taught at the universities of Princeton, Leeds, and Sheffield. She has published extensively on literature, science, and medicine: previous books include The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (2010, winner of the British Society for Literature and Science Prize), and the co-authored work Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019).

Shuttleworth applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort, and shared the following:

On page 99 we encounter Robert Louis Stevenson as a young man – an aspiring writer, but in ill- health. He was delighted when he was ordered by his doctor to spend the winter in Menton on the French Riviera, and explicitly without his over-anxious parents. On arrival, his elation turns to despair as his body refuses to obey his commands – he fears he may be dying. On moving hotels, however, his spirits lift when he meets a Russian child, ‘a little polyglot button of a three year old’ who initially pronounces him to be a mädchen (or girl) due to his long hair. He is soon spending all his time with her and her family, playing games, and at one point spending an entire afternoon ‘washing Nellie’s dolls with her’.

Stevenson’s ‘delight in children – their joy in life, their creativity and imaginative seriousness – which emerges in much of his later work stems from this period. Later that year he publishes ‘Notes on the Movements of Young Children’ which uses Nellie’s dancing to analyze why we find the somewhat graceless movements of young children so lovable. The attraction, he suggests, is in sympathy, as you ‘see her struggling to find expression for the beauty that was in her against the inefficacy of the dull, half-informed body’. Stevenson is fascinated by what he sees as ‘this war of intelligence against the unwilling body’. He aligns the position of the child, struggling to express herself, with that of the invalid, and also the artist. The page concludes: ‘The child is thus a figure for both the invalid and the artist, and in her sheer joy in life, and determination to overcome the limitations of her body, she clearly became for Stevenson a model for how to transcend the confinement of an invalid identity.’

I was delighted to find that page 99 is an excellent entry point for the book. In Quest of a Cure pursues the lives and writings of various invalids sent into medical exile in Europe by their doctors, roughly in the period 1860-1930, and this example illustrates how closely medical experience and literary writing were intertwined. The findings were often unexpected – in this case, Stevenson’s alignment of the young child, artist, and invalid. Much of the book looks at a period before sanatoria emerged, when invalids lived largely in hotels, and moved around freely; they also often brought their families with them. One theme that emerged during the writing of the book was the position of children in these resorts, accompanying their parents, or indeed suffering themselves. Such strange lives they lived: joyful, and cosmopolitan, as we saw on page 99, but also framed by the presence of disease and death.

Stevenson is one of the various invalids I look at who visited both Menton, and its subsequent, snowy, counterpart, Davos, in the Swiss Alps, where walks on the beaches and into the hills were replaced by vigorous skating and tobogganing, which Stevenson adored. When he arrived in Davos, he was accompanied by his new wife, Fanny, and stepson Lloyd. Lloyd later recalled that he had enjoyed his time in Davos ‘the tobogganing, the skating, the snow-balling’, yet it was a place where ‘half the population … were coughing away the remnants of life’. Stevenson himself became almost as famous for being an itinerant invalid as for his writings, as this 1955 advert for Guinness suggests:

The book follows Stevenson from Menton and Davos, to Bournemouth, and Saranac Lake in NY State, before his subsequent voyages to the South Seas and Samoa (accompanied by his family and redoubtable, widowed mother).

Stevenson is only one of many travellers for health in the book. Others include John Addington Symonds (who made full use of the sexual freedom afforded by his move to Davos), the artist Aubrey Beardsley, and in the twentieth century, Katherine Mansfield and Thomas and Katia Mann. By focusing on two resorts, Menton and Davos, I am able to explore the intersections of lives in these self-declared ‘English Colonies’; the changing patterns of treatment, from balmy seaside to snowy Alps, and from hotels to sanatoria; and the highs and lows of medical exile, for patients, their carers, and their families.

Learn more about In Quest of a Cure at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Bryce's "Grounds for Exclusion"

Benjamin Bryce is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches courses on Latin American and global history.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Grounds for Exclusion: Race, Health, and Disability in Argentine Immigration Policy, 1876–1932, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds itself early in the section "Calculated Risk in a Racialized World." It examines the Punjabi labourers who arrived in Argentina in 1912, arguing that their journeys were the product of a mix of poor information and calculated risk regarding racism and economic prospects across the receiving societies. The page draws on memoirs (Totaram Sanadhya's account of a group of 46 Punjabis in Fiji trying to reach Argentina), interviews in the Buenos Aires Herald, and consular correspondence to show migrants paying their own fares, following kin, demanding protection from the imperial state, and acting on information that travelled by letter from a small group of Punjabi agricultural workers in northern Argentina.

The Page 99 Test works pretty well. Chapter 5, in which page 99 sits, is a microhistory of the 1912 Punjabi arrivals, set against the broader economic and diplomatic entanglement of Argentina and Britain on the eve of the First World War. The chapter argues that both worker agency and state efforts to halt mobility shaped this episode. A browser landing on page 99 catches the chapter’s broader focus on migrants as decision-makers weighing race, empire, and economic opportunity. What the reader would miss is the architecture around this microhistory: the book examines South Asians alongside Chinese, Japanese, Roma, Ottoman subjects, and eastern European Jews, and traces health and disability exclusions as well.

Grounds for Exclusion challenges the long-standing image of Argentina as a nation of open-door immigration. Between 1876 and 1932, Argentine officials built a long list of formal and informal grounds for refusing entry — based on race, health, and disability — that deterred many from ever boarding a ship. The inclusion of millions of Europeans was predicated on the exclusion of others.

Visit Benjamin Bryce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Quigley's "The Man Behind the Cane"

Paul Quigley is the James I. Robertson, Jr. Associate Professor of Civil War History at Virginia Tech, where he also serves as Director of the Center for Humanities and Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. He is author of the award-winning Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-65 (2011).

Quigley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War, with the following results:

The Man Behind the Cane tells the story of Preston Brooks, the South Carolina congressman who infamously caned Senator Charles Sumner in the US Senate chamber in 1856. Brooks’s bloody attack came in response to Sumner’s speech criticizing slavery and insulting one of Brooks’s relatives.

Page 99 comes partway through a section exploring the aftermath of the caning. It begins with a Senate speech delivered by South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler, the relative whose honor Brooks was trying to defend when he assaulted Charles Sumner. Butler defended Brooks, as one would expect. Yet, interestingly, he did so with some equivocation, describing his younger kinsman as being “quick to resentment.”

The page then discusses various incidents showing that Brooks was “still spoiling for a fight” after the caning. For example, when he encountered Massachusetts Congressman Calvin Chaffee in a Washington hotel, he threatened to “whip him on suspicion of his having denounced his conduct … he wanted to whip a few more of the Mass. Men.” Around the same time, Brooks was writing letters to other northern politicians who had condemned the caning, strongly hinting that he would be willing to engage in duels with anyone who decried his bloody assault on Sumner.

The Page 99 Test does indeed reveal some of the major themes of the book. It features our protagonist, the man behind the cane, at his fieriest—demonstrating that the caning was no aberration in his life. Readers will also find on page 99 backward glances to the caning itself, which is of course the centerpiece of the whole book. On this page I note that as Andrew Butler delivered his speech, in the same room as the assault, listeners were undoubtedly thinking of the earlier attack. I speculate that “perhaps splashes of blood remained there, camouflaged by the crimson red carpet of the Senate chamber.”

In discussing Brooks’s willingness to engage in duels with his critics, the page also invokes something explored at length in the chapters on his early life: the fact that Brooks felt an obligation to follow the strictures of the slaveholding South’s culture of honor and manhood, even though his efforts to do so were often incomplete, or misguided, or in some way dissatisfying.

Finally, in touching on Brooks’s post-caning conflicts with northern politicians, page 99 gestures toward the broader political ramifications of the caning, which I emphasize in the latter part of the book. Not only did the caning nudge Americans one step closer to the Civil War, it also catalyzed a transformative public debate about free speech and political violence.

Of course, readers must read the whole book to properly understand Brooks’s motivations for the caning, which stemmed in large part from his frustrating experiences with violence as a young man, including his failed attempt to fight in the Mexican War. They must also read the rest of the book to appreciate the far-reaching impact of the caning on nationwide debates around slavery, free speech, and the rightful relationship between rhetorical and physical violence. But for just one page, page 99 actually does a pretty good job of introducing the main themes and characters of the book!

Learn more about The Man Behind the Cane at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mitch Ploskonka's "The Bad Poor"

Mitch Ploskonka is assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute (ATI). His research focuses on southern literature, disability studies, and popular culture.

Ploskonka applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Bad Poor: Race, Class, and the Rise of Grit Lit, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Bad Poor drops the reader into an analysis of a passage from Larry Brown’s Dirty Work at a moment when the machinery of the book is fully in motion. This is one of the book’s close reading chapters, where key Grit Lit texts become case studies for its larger claims. The ninety-ninth page centers on an extended quote in which a Black, disabled Vietnam veteran imagines a future beyond racial division, only to pull back and acknowledge the historical reality that “they keep us all separated.” My reading uses that turn to show the common impulse in Grit Lit texts—and scholarship on them—to conflate poor white and Black experience. This impulse inevitably falls apart under the weight of historical and structural reality.

The page also shows one of the book’s critical interventions by putting pressure on a tendency in scholarship to treat poverty as the overriding denominator that can explain other forms of difference. Class matters profoundly in these texts, but it does not cancel race. On page 99, that problem appears in miniature: what first looks like shared experience between white and black characters—military service, economic hardship and labor, bodily vulnerability—ultimately reveals the persistence of racial division rather than its erasure.

I’d say the Page 99 Test works quite well here. A browser landing on this page would not encounter every author or genre the book examines, but they would encounter both the literary texture of Grit Lit and one of the central claims of my argument: that Grit Lit writers construct a productive poor white identity through encounters with difference. Those encounters with race, class, masculinity, disability, and region are painful and often violent, but they become the materials through which these texts define themselves. Attempts to imagine solidarity across difference—and the equally frequent failure of those attempts—are not simply dead ends; they are part of the genre’s larger process of self-fashioning.

Learn more about The Bad Poor at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Parker's "Drama and the Death of God"

John Parker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Antichrist.

Parker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Drama and the Death of God: Secularity on Stage from Antiquity to Shakespeare, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains a description of Egypt as understood by the church fathers and medieval intellectuals, followed by a catalogue of the carpe diem motif in scripture and elsewhere.

This captures the overall thrust of the book quite well! The Exodus narrative long served the church as an allegory for overcoming bodily appetites through self-discipline. The basic idea is that you are enslaved to your passions. Barring divine intervention these can only lead you to indulge in secular pastimes — sex, food, drink, instrumental music, non-biblical scholarship (saeculares litterae), and other forms of idolatry. Indeed the pull of the vita saecularis or secular life is all the more powerful if you reject out of hand the possibility of an afterlife: "Our time is the passing of a shadow. Come therefore and let us enjoy the good things that are" (Wis. 2:5-6). "What is your life? It is a vapor appearing for a little while, and afterward it shall vanish away" (Jas. 4:14).

Scholarship on atheism, unbelief, and secularity has often insisted that nothing like our current understanding of these concepts appears before the modern age. In fact modernity has inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages a rich apprehension of what it means to deny God and to live in the world as it is with no concern for heaven. I tried to chart the development of this position by looking at the many atheists, unbelievers, and infidels who feature in medieval dramas dedicated to the Exodus narrative, the Nativity, and Easter. In my reading they are the progenitors of the skepticism that we see in King Lear.

Learn more about Drama and the Death of God at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael North's "Making Common Sense"

Michael North is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of English, UCLA. His books include What Is the Present? (2018).

North applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Making Common Sense: On the Construction of the Obvious from Antiquity to AI, with the following results:

The reader who opened Making Common Sense to page 99 would find three 18 th century thinkers duking it out over what is in fact the central issue of the whole book. The immediate occasion for this conflict is a book James Beattie published in 1778, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism, in which the sophists and skeptics in question are George Berkeley and David Hume. Beattie sees himself as the defender of common sense against the corrosive skepticism of his opponents, which he thinks of as both crazy and criminal. For Beattie, though, common sense is a set of self-evident principles, some of them quite general and abstract, such as, for example, “things equal to one and the same thing are equal to another.” These don’t seem much like what most people would consider common sense. Page 99 introduces the idea that Berkeley and Hume are in fact more commonsensical than their opponent. Both were, despite Beattie’s criticisms, fond of citing and relying in argument on common sense, but for them, common sense is simply rooted in the senses and does not extend to elaborate philosophical principles. Both intend to simplify the traditional account of perception, so that it does not rely on any sort of extension or abstraction beyond the purely sensory. As Berkeley puts it on this page, we don’t need any elaborate reasoning to believe in the existence of the cherry tree in the garden, because we can simply go out and see it. For Hume as well, there is no fundamental difference between a sense impression and an idea, and therefore sense impressions tell us as much as we need to know about the world at large. As the argument develops from this page, Berkeley and Hume come to seem more plain-spoken and practical, less prone to mystification, than their opponent, who sees them as little better than madmen. A reader could therefore find on this page a lot of what Making Common Sense tries to convey about the ambiguous position of common sense between the senses and sense and about the twisted and interesting history that it follows from ancient times to the present.

The Page 99 Test: Novelty: A History of the New.

The Page 99 Test: What Is the Present?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sean Keilen's "Shakespeare's Scholars"

Sean Keilen is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he also directs Shakespeare Workshop, a research center that promotes Shakespeare scholarship, community engagement, and theatrical performance. He is author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature and the coeditor of Shakespeare: The Critical Complex and The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature. He is also head of dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a longstanding professional theater company.

Keilen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Shakespeare's Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Shakespeare's Scholars falls in the middle of an essay about The Tempest, with the title "Prospero's Lessons". There, I am reflecting on the ways that Virgil's Aeneid is an important source of inspiration for Prospero's various educational projects on the island, and also on the degree to which Prospero himself and other characters are aware of its influence. More specifically, I am in conversation with another scholar about these topics. The page captures the critical spirit of my book -- friendly conversation about the ambiguities and complexities of Shakespeare's art with other people -- but I don't believe it would lead readers into the heart of things. And what is that? Well, through essays about Love's Labor's Lost, Hamlet, and The Tempest, the main idea of my book is that being a scholar, for Shakespeare, means embracing a state of mind that is ripe for laughter, occasionally baleful, and ultimately deserving of compassion. And that is a lesson, I believe, that all scholars now -- including myself -- would do well to learn.

Learn more about Shakespeare's Scholars at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ainsley LeSure's "Locating Racism in the World"

Ainsley LeSure is the Richard and Edna Salomon Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Brown University. She specializes in political theory, with a particular focus on the critical theory of race and racism, phenomenology, democratic theory, and feminist theory.

LeSure applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Locating Racism in the World, and reported the following:

On the 99th page, a reader will find important concepts—blackness, hallucination, myth, reality, the world, and vulnerability—that are central to the argument of Locating Racism in the World. Page 99 is twenty pages into chapter 3, “Blackness as a World Problem,” which is devoted to explaining what Frantz Fanon, a prominent 20th century Francophone psychoanalyst and political theorist, meant when he described blackness as an ontological problem in his seminal text, Black Skin, White Masks (1967).

Afropessimism, a relatively new school of thought in black studies, reads Fanon’s claims about ontology to mean that black people are objects—not subjects—who amount to nothingness in the antiblack world. I argue that this is a misreading. And it is important for me to show this because Afropessimism and its widening sphere of influence use this reading of Black Skin, White Masks to cast as naïve a core claim of my book, that democratic politics is our only hope to effectively challenge antiblack racism and to craft a commonly shared world that is hospitable to racial justice.

I argue, to the contrary, that Fanon actually means that blackness is nothing to the extent that it is like a hallucination in that blackness does not exist in a spatio-temporal environment, nor is it an actual phenomenon (object, person, or event). Nonetheless, like a hallucination, blackness establishes a parasitic relationship to this environment and the phenomena it holds. Ultimately, Fanon’s description of blackness as a hallucination demonstrates how racial practices project onto the living black body blackness—a mythological, European fabrication—and how this blackness gets materialized through human relations oriented around the myth.

By page 99, I am beginning to explain Fanon’s struggle to challenge blackness and how his vulnerability to hallucination whenever blackness is exerting its force on his perception of the world is his guide for discovering a solution. I argue throughout that Fanon’s thinking about blackness in Black Skin, White Masks models two democratic practices that are essential to making a world that protects against the harms of blackness: 1) awareness about the symbolic power that blackness, a form of racial common sense, makes available to us and 2) a committed refusal to partake in it in our everyday relations.

Visit Ainsley LeSure's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason G. Green's "Too Precious to Lose"

Jason G. Green is a Maryland-born community organizer, attorney, storyteller and entrepreneur. Green served as special assistant to the president, and associate White House Counsel to President Obama, advising on economic and domestic policy matters. Green co-founded SkillSmart, a company that reshapes how communities measure economic impact, and is CEO of EverGreen Labs, where he supports visionary organizations working to expand economic opportunity and strengthen community. Green serves as trustee to the Pleasant View Historic Association and supports its efforts to preserve the historic site. His award-winning documentary, Finding Fellowship, explores the rich history of Quince Orchard and the fight to preserve its legacy. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and Yale Law School, Green remains rooted in the work of truth and justice, investing in stories that remind us who we are. He currently spends time between Maryland and Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Ritu, and son, Aidan.

Green applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Too Precious to Lose: A Memoir of Family, Community, and Possibility, with the following results:

Page 99 of Too Precious to Lose captures a moment from my childhood when while I was walking home along our dirt road I was first called the N-word. I was walking down the very street my family had lived on—and ironically helped name Fellowship—when that word is hurled at me. The page ends with a question that lingers far beyond that moment: do I belong?

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Remarkably the last three words on page 99 are, “Do I belong?” Though page 99 is not representative of every scene or theme of Too Precious to Lose, it does distill the emotional and psychological core and motivation of the story. The book wrestles with belonging, identity, inheritance, and what it means to claim space in a world that can both affirm and reject you. That single moment on page 99 crystallizes those tensions. A reader opening to that page would encounter the wound, and also the question that drives the entire narrative forward.

Beyond page 99...

While page 99 captures a pivotal rupture, the book as a whole traces a longer arc, that moves through family legacy, place, memory, and resilience. The question “do I belong?” doesn’t stay confined to my childhood moment; it becomes a throughline that shapes how I move through the world.

Much of my work, especially in building community, is rooted in creating spaces grounded in dignity and respect, where people can feel a genuine sense of belonging. In that way, the question that closes page 99 is not only a moment of harm; it is also a catalyst. It pushed me to explore, be attracted to and ultimately help build the kinds of spaces I once needed but did not always have.

At the end of the day, one of the things that is too precious to lose is the hope—the quiet, persistent idea that we have the capacity and responsibility to build something lasting and better where people feel like they belong.

Visit Jason G. Green's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stuart Schrader's "Blue Power"

Stuart Schrader is an Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. His PhD is in American Studies, from NYU, in 2015.

Schrader applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, and shared the following:

The Page 99 Test finds the introduction of a central tension in Blue Power, as I begin the seventh chapter, “A Colorblind Counterrevolution.” One key argument of the book is that police developed political power at municipal, state, and federal levels in reaction to the progressive and even revolutionary social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s, including Black Power. Blue Power was a counterrevolution. This counterrevolution, however, would have to contend with the transformed social conditions of the era, including the racial integration of police departments. The Page 99 Test, therefore, does not offer a snapshot of the overall argument about the impact of police political power, but it shows how this political power was responding to the times.

This chapter introduces the upstart Bluecoats, a group of mostly young officers who took over the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association at the outset of the 1970s. It shows how the Bluecoats advocated a new approach to police hiring and promotion that discarded patronage, in favor of more fair, transparent, and widely applicable standards. This approach was meant to be “colorblind,” meaning that white, Black, and other applicants would all face an equal chance of success. The colorblind Bluecoat approach arrived at the same moment that federal and other laws required equal opportunity, but the two were not the same. Affirmative action clashed with colorblindness, particularly in the stationhouse.

Page 99 begins with the report of the Kerner Commission (or National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders):

The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson, found that rough and abusive encounters between white police and Black residents spurred the unrest of 1967 in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere. It thus endorsed recruiting and promoting African American officers in its groundbreaking 1968 report: “Negro officers should be so assigned as to ensure that the police department is fully and visibly integrated.” Putting more Black cops on patrol in still-segregated Black neighborhoods was supposed to ease tensions and ameliorate relationships between police and Black populations, preventing further civil disorder. Moreover, Black officers, better able to work undercover among their own kind, could also provide sharper intelligence than white ones.

Increasing numbers of Black cops were put in the impossible position of both maintaining a social status quo and alleviating the problems of police racism.

Yet many cities, as I detail on this page, had already hired Black officers, though not necessarily in numbers proportionate to those cities’ Black populations. This preceding integration exemplified the problem the Bluecoats wished to solve: some incumbent Black officers had obtained their jobs because of what the Bluecoats called “juice”—who they knew and what favors they were owed.

New recruits wanted merit-based hiring or at least clear standards, but those standards, if applied to some veteran officers who got their jobs through patronage, could, in effect, disqualify the older generation. Worse, the new standards, in many cases, became the basis for new exclusions. Fresh testing or educational standards often prevented, rather than hastened, the hiring of new so-called minority officers.

Clashes ensued: between older and younger generations, between rights-seeking marginalized groups and police unions, between police unions and the federal government’s civil-rights enforcement arms. A key takeaway from this chapter is that these battles over racial integration within police departments afforded police unions and other organizations critical experience with litigation, public appeals and media messaging, cultivating relationships with elected officials, and galvanizing broader constituencies.

Although resistance to integration failed, Blue Power strengthened in the process, honing its tactics. The fundamental problem of racist police practices inspired the Kerner Commission to push for accelerated integration. Unfortunately, those practices would persist, protected by Blue Power.

Visit Stuart Schrader's website.

The Page 99 Test: Badges without Borders.

--Marshal Zeringue

Donald F. Kettl's "The Right-Wing Idea Factory"

Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus and former Dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He is also a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Kettl is the author or editor of 25 books, including Experts in Government: The Deep State from Caligula to Trump and Beyond (2023) and Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems (with William D. Eggers, 2023). He has received six lifetime achievement awards, and three of his books have received national best book awards.

Kettl applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism, and reported the following:

If you want to truly understand how the right-wing movement permanently changed American politics, page 99 of my book is the ideal place to start. It’s a huge mistake to think of MAGA as a federal government, Trump-generated strategy. It bubbled up from the states.

Some states were leaders in building the factory [that produced right-wing ideas]. Other states fought to stop the movement, while others rocked between the extremes. (p. 99)

The right-wing idea factory leaders were Florida and Texas, along with 18 others. Other states have fought back, led by California and Illinois, along with 11 others. The rest—17 in all—have wobbled back and forth in the difficult world of polarizing politics.

Moreover, the factory generating right-wing ideas didn’t focus on just one product.

To truly understand the workings of the right-wing idea factory, it is a mistake to track individual policy areas, like abortion or DEI; to presume that the states run similar policy production lines, because each state is in fact very different.... The state political cultures and power systems have fallen into different clusters, just as their policies have. (p. 99)

That’s where the action is—and will continue to be. The idea factories in MAGA states have shifted from original issues, like claims of abuse of governmental power during COVID, to new products, like wringing Woke courses from public universities and promoting Christian nationalism in local schools. Trump’s great talent had been to sense where this parade was heading and jump to the front to claim leadership. The new issues in MAGA states guarantee that the movement will thrive long after Trump is gone from the scene.

Learn more about The Right-Wing Idea Factory at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Demshuk's "The Filthiest Village in Europe"

Andrew Demshuk is Professor of History at American University. His books include Bowling for Communism, Demolition on Karl Marx Square, and Three Cities After Hitler.

Demshuk applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Filthiest Village in Europe: Grassroots Ecology and the Collapse of East Germany, with the following results:

The Page 99 Test highlights correspondence and Stasi observations surrounding an “Environmental Church Service” held in a deeply polluted East German village in June 1984. Even as critique of glaring environmental degradation challenged state power, those who put on the event had to work closely with state officials (including Stasi informants) to ensure state buy-in. Such collaboration not only helped well-meaning state officials share their expertise and increase public awareness of state efforts: it also enabled organizers to negotiate state expectations and prevent the event from getting banned. This case example dovetails with my broader research into Stasi informants, which challenges black-and-white narratives about collaboration and resistance to state power in East Germany. While one should never downplay negative consequences that always came from informant spying, the Page 99 Test draws out how informants sometimes played an important role in alerting state authorities to serious problems (such as environmental degradation) that required redress. Through their recommendations to handlers, informants even sought to foster local campaigns the state might otherwise have repressed.

The Filthiest Village in Europe explores what I call “grassroots ecology”: how East Germans who ranged from local functionaries to village pastors and concerned mothers banded together to try to improve apocalyptic environmental conditions. Downwind from the massively polluting Espenhain carbochemical plant and surrounded by open-cast brown coal pit mines, by the 1980s the village of Mölbis had become infamous as the “Filthiest Village in Europe.” Although Mölbis was not the site of major demonstrations in fall 1989, it was shrouded in thick smog and discharged frothy water pollution that poisoned the environment twenty kilometers to the north in Leipzig, which was destined to host the “peaceful revolution” that overthrew one-party rule. While the book’s early chapters investigate how the centralized economy meted out catastrophic pollution to the area around Mölbis, by page 99 the book is well into examining how an unruly local pastor named Siegfried Rüffert and a circle of friends who founded the Christian Environmental Seminar (CUR) instigated national awareness of the region’s scandalous pollution. By the time of the second Environmental Church Service in Mölbis in 1984, the savvy pastor Christian Steinbach had assumed a leadership role that captured the everyday negotiation between state and civil actors. Although after 1989 Steinbach presented his state liaison Manfred Seela as little more than a Stasi spy, at the time “theirs was a congenial relationship of mutual assistance, in which Seela won popular buy-in, while Steinbach secured state protection and resources,” such as access to saplings for tree-planting campaigns. Based on earlier cooperation with Seela’s state recultivation company, Steinbach requested Seela’s participation in a roundtable discussion at the Environmental Church Service. Other Stasi informants also backed Steinbach’s effort, insisting to their handlers that Seela’s participation was not ceding state control of environmental policy, but rather using a popular grassroots event to publicize state environmental achievements. In effect, “by deftly soliciting and compromising with state authorities, Steinbach won SED participation that protected and enhanced CUR events.” Nor did Stasi interference manage to curtail critical voices, as the event became a stage on which one of Steinbach’s CUR cofounders assailed state environmental policies and classification of environmental data– taboos that were undermining public trust in state policies. Even more incendiary was a request from the audience for a public fundraising campaign to clean up the Espenhain plant– an idea Steinbach himself took up four years later with an illegal signature campaign that transgressed the very boundaries of state power he had previously worked so hard to satisfy. Ample experience had shown him that working within the existing system’s expectations would not bring meaningful change amid ever worsening environmental conditions. In effect, however much the Page 99 Test highlights the ambivalent role of some Stasi informants, informants still represented a system that was by nature repressive and thus unwilling to meaningfully heed justified criticism from below.

Learn more about The Filthiest Village in Europe at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Lost German East.

The Page 99 Test: Demolition on Karl Marx Square.

The Page 99 Test: Bowling for Communism.

The Page 99 Test: Three Cities After Hitler.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caryl Flinn and Dana Polan's "The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties"

Caryl Flinn is Professor Emerita in the Department of Film, TV, and Media at the University of Michigan. She has written, taught, and lectured extensively on film music, film sound, German cinema, kitsch and camp, musicals, and American independent cinema--areas covered in her six books and numerous articles. Dana Polan is Martin Scorsese Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He is the author of eleven books in film and media studies. He was named a Chevalier by the French government for his contributions to cross-cultural exchange. He is a former President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette, and shared the following:

Our volume is a study of the classic sitcom The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966). Page 99 discusses its 1990s reunion TV movie, The Patty Duke Show: Still Rockin’ in Brooklyn Heights. Our comments on this page note how several aspects harken back to the original show and hint at our larger arguments in considering the role of studio versus real locations for interiors, the efforts of the telefilm to invoke the energy that defined the original series, the appeal to original and subsequent viewers, and the concern to not deal too heavily with the theme of twinning but weave it periodically into the narrative. On this last point, one of our central arguments is that the original series was about much more than gimmicky twinning and instead followed two “identical twin cousins” to observe diverse ways youth were growing up in the fraught social world of the American 1960s.

It would be hard for any one page to convey a real sense of what our overall volume is about. This stems in part from the number of angles and approaches we use to examine The Patty Duke Show including its production history (as well as tie-ins to the show), the life of its star and co-stars, close readings of episodes across the series’ three-year run, a wider review of 1960s sitcoms that challenges standard conceptions of them as “silly” or formulaic, a look at various comic traditions around themes of twinning and doubling, the afterlives of the show in numerous spin-offs and parodies, and so on. The discussion on page 99 deals primarily with one of these categories: the afterlife of the original series.

Learn more about The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Whitney E. Laemmli's "Making Movement Modern"

Whitney E. Laemmli is assistant professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making Movement Modern: Science, Politics, and the Body in Motion, and reported the following:

Much of page 99 is taken up by an image of seven women sitting around a table holding a strip of paper densely covered in geometric symbols. One of the walls behind them displays vertical charts adorned with the same markings, while on the other dozens of paper scrolls sit horizontally on a pegboard, waiting consultation as if in an ancient library. The photograph, however, was taken circa 1955, and the women—of varying ages—are dressed neatly in the clothing of the era and project an aura of happy, ordered competence as they look straight at the camera.

These women were members of a New York City organization known as the Dance Notation Bureau. Founded in 1940, it had the mission of promoting Labanotation—a method of capturing the movements of the human body on paper first developed in Weimar Germany—within the United States and in the world at large. This page comes near the beginning of the book’s second chapter and the text on the rest of the page gives a preview of the chapter’s main concerns:

This chapter is the story of those efforts and of their sometimes unanticipated results. In particular, it explores how the Dance Notation Bureau’s vision of dance as primarily informational raised contentious new questions about the definitions of art and authorship, questions that dancers, choreographers, lawyers, and engineers would all answer differently. It also reveals how these new ideas and practices facilitated movement’s entry into the ‘information age’ in a more literal sense, creating lasting ties between Labanotation, engineering, and computing that would prove important to the system’s future. As the next pages will explore, however, as art became science and dance became data, the meaning of dancers’ thinking, feeling, sweating bodies became increasingly uncertain.

Page 99 provides the reader with a good sense of some—but not all—of the subjects and questions the book explores. It focuses attention on the fundamental act at the heart of movement notation: the transformation of the messy stuff of human movement into static data, ready for deployment by a wide variety of people to an even wider variety of ends. It also speaks to the consequences of this process both for individuals (here, the dancers) and for larger political formations.

It is also fitting that the page contains an image—and not just because issues of representation are central to the work. The photograph suggests some of the aesthetic pleasures and utopian fantasies that made the system so alluring.

Someone who encountered only this passage, however, might get the impression that the book is primarily about notation in dance. In fact, though dance is key to the story, one of the book’s primary interventions is revealing how this system of recording moved across disciplines, geographies, and historical eras, finding purchase everywhere from white-collar human resources departments to psychiatric hospitals to national political spectacles. It leaves out many of the important actors in the story, from Rudolf Laban, the choreographer, movement theorist, and eventual Nazi minister of dance who created the notation, to Alan Lomax, the famous American folklorist who deployed it in an effort to remake the country’s “perceptual apparatus” in support of a multicultural future.

It also only begins to hint at the consequences of this way of thinking about and recording the human body for life today. Indeed, the project sketched here is ongoing, as new kinds of information about human bodies in general—and human movement, in particular—are being gathered at an increasingly rapid rate. Activity trackers gobble up steps in the tens of millions, novel surveillance tools rely on gait analysis, and automated hiring software makes decisions in part based on the movement behavior of the interviewee. Though there is currently little awareness of the history of these practices, a number of these contemporary systems rely on techniques or theories directly derived from Laban’s work. It is my hope that my book speaks both to history and to our current moment, illuminating what was—and continues to be—at stake in efforts to understand, capture, and control human movement on a large scale.

Visit Whitney E. Laemmli's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Youngjae Lee's "Criminalizing Disobedience"

Youngjae Lee is I. Maurice Wormser Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law. Lee's scholarship focuses on criminal culpability, criminal procedure, and state punishment, with sustained contributions in three areas: criminalization of disobedience, the principle of proportionality in criminal law, and the criminal jury and reasonable doubt. He has held visiting positions at Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, NYU Law School, University of Chicago Law School, UCLA School of Law, Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, European University Institute, and LUISS Guido Carli. He serves on the editorial boards of Law and Philosophy and Criminal Law and Philosophy.

Lee applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Criminalizing Disobedience, with the following results:

From page 99:

So, why is killing a grizzly bear wrong? One answer is that killing a grizzly bear is wrong because doing so could lead to the extinction of a species that is of “esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value.” But how would you know if that is actually the case, and is it obvious whether the loss of grizzly bears would be a net positive or a net negative in the long run?

Most people who come across a book called Criminalizing Disobedience would probably assume that it is about civil disobedience and protesters and activists punished for acts of political advocacy. So they may be puzzled to open the book and find a discussion of the Endangered Species Act and grizzly bears. What does that have to do with criminalizing disobedience?

That question gets to the heart of the book. One of its central claims is that many criminal offenses are best understood as “disobedience offenses.” At first, an environmental crime does not look like one. But here’s how the Endangered Species Act works. The statute authorizes the federal government to designate certain species as endangered or threatened. Once that designation is made, the species receives legal protection, and killing one of its members can become a crime. In that sense, whether killing a particular animal is criminal depends on whether the government has placed that animal within a protected legal category.

One might object that this is true of all crimes. The government can always change the law and decide what is criminal. But here’s the crucial difference. The crimes most people first think of as “crimes,” such as murder, rape, and assault, are seriously morally wrong quite apart from the government’s view of them. Their moral wrongness does not depend much on who holds office, what an agency has decided, or how a regulatory program has classified the conduct.

Killing a grizzly bear is a different matter. Now, I have nothing against grizzly bears. But most of us do not have an independent grasp of which species should receive legal protection, why one population is endangered while another is not, or whether the government has drawn the line correctly in particular cases. Most of us also do not think that killing animals is always wrong.

What matters morally, then, is not just the animal. It is the existence of a collective program for protecting endangered species, the designation of officials to administer that program, and the obligation to support it. My argument is that many criminal laws operate in this way. They punish failures to support the state and its programs, even if the relevant conduct may not be independently morally wrongful. That is what I mean by criminalizing disobedience, and the book is about how widespread the phenomenon is, how we should think about such crimes, and what happens when we disagree with the state or when the state is not what I call “cooperation-worthy.”

Learn more about Criminalizing Disobedience at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lawrence Douglas's "The Criminal State"

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc Stein's "Bicentennial"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Doherty's "How Film Became History"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Page 99 Test: Show Trial.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Robert Siegel's "Markets of Pain"

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Benjamin R. Siegel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Randles's "Living Diaper to Diaper"

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

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

From page 99:

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

George G. Szpiro's "Ignorance"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit George G. Szpiro's website.

The Page 99 Test: Perplexing Paradoxes.

--Marshal Zeringue