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

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

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

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

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

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

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 De gravitatione is a fascinating, unfinished, and unpublished manuscript essay written by Newton.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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Casey Tieken's "Educated Out"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert D. Priest's "Oberammergau"

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more about Oberammergau at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Soucek's "The Opinionated University"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

From page 99:

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

Animality, Agency, and Resistance

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

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

Scholars notably have different ways of conceptualizing animal agency.

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Alice Echols's "Black Power, White Heat"

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

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

From page 99:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

David A. Crockett's "Winning It Back"

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

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

From page 99:

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

Kent Lehnhof's "Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays"

Kent Lehnhof is Professor of English at Chapman University, where he has received the university's highest award for scholarship and its highest award for teaching. He has co-edited two essay collections, Of Levinas and Shakespeare (2018) and Shakespeare's Virtuous Theatre (2023), and has published two dozen articles and essays.

Lehnhof applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays, I discuss the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero in the context of Shakespeare's Pericles. This is highly representative, for my book aims to use these two philosophers to enhance our understanding of the ethical stakes of the Shakespearean drama. Why this pair of philosophers? Well, because they open exciting pathways by predicating their ethics on difference, rather than sameness.

Many ethical programs do the opposite. These other programs emphasize sameness, urging us to see the other as similar to ourselves and to treat them accordingly. This is the essence of precepts like "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995), however, felt that supposing the other to be same-as-the-self is not an ethical response but a reductive one. For him, ethics can only arise from a recognition that the other cannot be reduced to your mental constructs or categories. The other exceeds every thought you can think of them--and it is this radical otherness that commands your attention and makes you ethically responsible.

Adriana Cavarero (b.1947) agrees with Levinas and proposes, further, that the fundamental manifestation of the alterity of the other is the sound of their voice. Due to variations in pitch, timbre, cadence, tempo, intonation, and accent, each voice is distinctive. As a result, each voice communicates what Cavarero calls "the true, vital, and perceptible uniqueness of the one who emits it." And this expression of uniqueness, Cavarero insists, is independent of any linguistic meaning it might convey. According to Cavarero, the mere sound of the voice is sufficient. Every "vibrating throat of flesh" sounds an ethical summons prior to and apart from its verbal messaging.

I suggest that Shakespeare conceives of ethics, otherness, and voices in similar terms. Especially in his late plays, Shakespeare invests the sound of the voice with an intense ethical charge. My book, then, explores the power of speech in Shakespeare. Yet it differs from other studies of speech in Shakespeare by attending more to the sensuous and sonorous sound of the voice than to its semantic meaning and linguistic content. At the core of every chapter is the vibrating throat of flesh, communicating the alterity and uniqueness of its speaker. By attending to the ethical efficacy of the voice in Shakespeare's late plays, Voice and Ethics contends that Shakespeare concords with Cavarero that "the voice is always, irremediably relational … the voice is for the ear."

Learn more about Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michelle Pace's "Un-welcome to Denmark"

Michelle Pace is Professor in Global Studies based in Roskilde, Denmark.

Her new book is Un-welcome to Denmark: The paradigm shift and refugee integration.

Pace applied the “Page 99 Test” to Un-welcome to Denmark and reported the following:

Page 99 is the start of chapter 5 entitled "Tracing legislative intent in the Danish Aliens Act from 1983 to 2019."

Here is the text in whole:

5

Tracing legislative intent in the

Danish Aliens Act from 1983 to 2019

Introduction

[F]rom now on it must be clear that Denmark only accepts foreigners who adopt and respect Danish values, norms, and traditions, while all the others may well stay away. My approach is that when people choose to come to Denmark, and want to become citizens, it is of course because they want to become Danish, not because they want to change Denmark. In my view it is the multicultural that makes it all crack. Contrary to opposition parties, I do not see the great value in the multicultural society.

(Søren Pind, minister for refugees, immigrants, and integration, 2011)
(as quoted in Adamo, 2012: 2)

Throughout Denmark's recent history, immigration debates have changed quite drastically. From discussions on how best to ensure equal rights for guest workers during the 1960s and 1970s, to the anti-multiculturalism narratives outlined in the above quote from 2011 (see also Kivisto and Wahlbeck, 2013; Lægaard, 2013), immigration has undoubtedly contributed to various challenges for Danish policy-makers and society at large.

While political opinions may differ, to an extent, across the political spectrum and across various Danish communities, more recent debates have raised pertinent questions:

How many immigrants can the country absorb? Which kind of refugee is Denmark obliged to receive according to UN declarations? Should immigrants and refugees have access to education, health care, and the labor market, and if so, how soon? Is it better to 'assist' refugees and immigrants in distant 'safe zones' (so that they do not appear at the Danish border)? How about placing the unwanted immigrants on an isolated island to incentivize them to go back home? (Villadsen, 2021: 137)

Danish political parties all admit to the well-known fact that Denmark has one of the strictest immigration laws in Europe (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Scott Ford, 2022; Khalid and Mortensen, 2019; Kreichauf, 2020;

Page 99 will enable readers to get a strong sense of the core argument and conceptual framing of this book, but not a balanced sense of the whole work.

What page 99 communicates well, starting at Chapter 5, with the above Søren Pind quotation, immediately signals several central features of the book, namely that: Danish immigration and asylum policy is imbued with the language of 'values', 'identity', and 'cultural conformity'. This in and of itself aligns very well with my book’s title and core argument. Moreover, by framing this chapter as “Tracing legislative intent,” this page highlights the analytical approach of the book: the Aliens Act has been critically read and analysed in light of political ideology, discursive practices, and stated goals. Readers can therefore immediately understand that this book interrogates state power, integration rhetoric, and the challenges with/rejection of multiculturalism. The Danish case is also situated within a longer historical trajectory (1983– 2019), giving the book's analysis depth, continuity, and longitudinal weight. Browsers reading this page will thereby be able to conclude and appreciate that this is a serious, critical study of how Danish asylum and refugee law evolved into an exclusionary, assimilationist regime. This I believe is a fair description of the book’s intellectual project.

However, opening the book on page 99 would miss several important dimensions of the whole work, including its rich background, contextual and empirical groundwork. This contains a nuanced historical-social-policy-integration-methodological and conceptual analysis, none of which is visible here. A browser might therefore underestimate how evidence-driven the book is as well as its analytical scaffolding. Core concepts, definitions, and methodological choices developed earlier (e.g. how I define “integration,” “paradigm shift,” or “welcome/unwelcome”) are assumed rather than introduced. Browsers may also miss important nuances and/or inherent tensions. Beginning with a ministerial quote foregrounds ideology. Browsers may not appreciate how carefully I distinguish between rhetoric, law, implementation, and lived experiences of those targeted by state policies as well as those tasked with assisting and supporting them.

In conclusion, as a snapshot of the book’s core argument and stakes, page 99 does a very good job. As a representation of the book’s full scope, method, and evidence: it gives browsers a partial appreciation of the often-overlooked debate on racism and xenophobia in Denmark's immigration and integration policies, in particular in relation to the forensic investigation of the tensions, illogicalities and injustices in Denmark's racist, illiberal, exclusionary and assimilationist policies towards asylum-seekers and refugees.

Learn more about Un-welcome to Denmark at the Manchester University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Lieb's "Road to Nowhere"

Emily Lieb is an historian of U.S. cities, schools, and segregation. She has a PhD from Columbia and an AB from Brown, and she taught history and urban studies at Seattle University for more than 10 years. She is also a writer at Derfner & Sons.

Lieb applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, with the following results:

Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore is, as the subtitle says, a book about the power of a mid-20th–century highway map—not necessarily the highway itself—to wreck a city, and in particular a Black homeowners’ neighborhood in West Baltimore called Rosemont. So, it’s lucky that page 99 of the book is itself a map. It’s a page from a 1968 report from a group of city planners and engineers that shows just how much harm a proposed expressway route through Rosemont was set to cause: “bisection of residential area,” “isolation of housing by traffic,” the loss of nearly 1,000 homes and businesses.

(You can find the image, which comes from the Urban Design Concept Team’s Rosemont Area Studies(February 1968), at the University of Baltimore’s Baltimore Studies Archives here; the pages aren’t numbered but it’s page 11 of the PDF.)

It would be easy for any reader who flipped to this page of the book to see the damage the proposed expressway would do to Rosemont if policymakers ever built it. But they wouldn’t understand what led up to it, nor why the neighborhood’s story matters so much.

The story Road to Nowhere tells goes like this: Very deliberately, the people who had the power in Baltimore created a Black neighborhood in the early 1950s, robbed that Black neighborhood, labeled that Black neighborhood “blighted,” and then drew an expressway map to destroy it in the name of “renewing” it. That’s where the Urban Design Concept Team came in. By the late 1960s, people who did not live in Rosemont were starting to see the harm the highway would cause to the neighborhood and to the whole city. In the end, officials never built the road they wanted through Rosemont.

It's important to say that this was a good thing. But just not building the highway was not the answer, because the map itself had already caused so much harm. And then, instead of making amends, powerful people in Baltimore compounded the problem, targeting the neighborhood for exploitation once again.

So, as I write on page 11 of the book:

When officials in the 1970s looked around Rosemont, they saw what they called “deteriorated, neglected properties” and “a lack of interest or pride in the home and community.” In other words, they saw the “blight” they’d always expected to see. What they did not see were the consequences of their own actions. In the official version of events, policymakers had tried their best to “renew” Rosemont, but Rosemont would not be renewed. Thus [they wrote]: “We have spent a lot of money on a lot of blocks that have turned out to be unsalvageable.”

But as I say in the book, that’s a lie. “Turned out to be” is exactly the wrong way to explain what happened here. If Rosemont was unsalvageable, Baltimore had made it so.

Visit Emily Lieb's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lydia Murdoch's "What We Mourn"

Lydia Murdoch is Professor of History at Vassar College and the author of Daily Life of Victorian Women.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and shared the following:

From page 99:

The political context of the Indian Rebellion shaped how Britons grieved child death, and grief, in turn, ultimately served to strengthen British imperialism. Without access to communal British mourning rituals, including the witnessing of a child’s death and salvation, the preparation of the body, the funeral and burial service, and the marking of the grave for future visitation, survivors initially struggled to articulate and perform their grief. They pointed to their inability to mourn for children who died during war as a means to highlight the incongruity between an idealized childhood in safe, “British” domestic spaces and extreme wartime violence. These accounts suggested, in fact, that children should never have been present in such circumstances. The initial reports from Lucknow marked a “cultural trauma,” and like many mid-Victorian literary and historical representations of “the Mutiny,” they contained what Christopher Herbert identifies as a “sometimes dizzying rhetorical instability” and “incurable self-contradiction” about such fundamental questions as the excessiveness of British force, the law, race, and religion—contradictions ultimately overshadowed by repeated cries for vengeance and rising imperialist propaganda following the 1865 Jamaican Rebellion and late Victorian colonization of Africa. The swift reclamation of British grieving rituals beginning with the distribution of mourning attire as survivors made their way from Lucknow to Calcutta and the retelling of child wartime casualties as beautiful deaths surely allowed many survivors to express their sorrow more openly, providing them with comfort and solace. However, such nationalistic expressions of grief also left much unspoken and unremembered: the anguish of violent child death, the struggle for resources divided unequally among the besieged population, the awareness that Indian as well as British children were dying and that Britons were dependent on Indians for survival, and the utter loss of oneself that can come with grief for another (Bartrum’s sense that she was “stripped of all,” “empty & desolate”). . . The forms of national mourning and memory that eventually dominated public accounts reaffirmed the ties that bound all Britons along with the distinct subject positions that had been eroded during the conflict: military men and domestic women, British colonizers and Indian subjects, nurturing adults and innocent, protected children.

Page 99 is the conclusion to my third chapter, “‘Suppressed Grief’: Mourning the Death of British Children and the Memory of the 1857 Indian Rebellion.” The Page 99 Test works remarkably well as a reflection of my book’s argument and method. The chapter details British accounts of child death from shell fire, disease, and starvation at Lucknow, where civilians and troops remained under siege for several months during the colonial uprising against the British East India Company. Page 99 speaks to the underlying idea of the book that grieving enables us to rethink our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to others. Here, in the chapter conclusion, I summarize how British adults struggled to mourn the often violent deaths of children during the siege, and how, for some, the defamiliarization of mourning patterns corresponded with a questioning of self and nation. Ultimately, however, after the siege ended and Britain reclaimed violent military control of India, these unsettling deaths of children tended to be forgotten or rewritten as “beautiful deaths” and replaced with imperialist testimonies of British power.

While this chapter focuses on forms of forgotten or “suppressed” grief during the Indian Rebellion, the book’s other chapters take this argument in reverse to explore how a broad group of nineteenth-century reformers politicized their grief over child death. In response to child deaths that they increasingly understood as “premature” rather than divinely ordained, they expressed their grief in public to demand from the state a future with new political rights: freedom, citizenship, and suffrage, as well as the rights to leisure, housing, and medical care.

Learn more about What We Mourn at the the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuele Collu's "Into the Loop"

Samuele Collu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition, and reported the following:

I was kind of hoping the test would work when I went to page 99 of Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition. And… Yes! This page definitely captures something crucial about the book’s spirit, rhythm, and conceptual ambitions. Page 99 is more or less two thirds of the way into “Compulsive Repetitions,” which is the third and my favourite chapter of the book. The chapter explores, in a playfully obsessive tone, how repeated refrains, returns, and circular rituals sustain our affective attachments (in particular, compulsive attachments to romantic others but also to all sorts of dispositifs). The chapter is built around my own compulsive return to the final minutes of a filmed therapy session I observed, in which the couple in therapy decides to separate. The central idea of the chapter is to describe repetition in its (paradoxical) double affordance of thwarting psychic transformation as well as becoming the very medium through which psychic change becomes possible. In the chapter, I turn to anthropological theories of ritual as well as psychoanalysis to make this point.

At the very center of page 99 there is a short section that I loved writing and always makes me smile when I re-read it:

Some repetitions keep you exactly where you are; others could untether you from your own self. Compare binge-scrolling on TikTok for one hour to doing deep, intense, circular breathing for one hour. Both repetitions can get you high, but the kite will fly across different skies.

The idea here is, to put it simply, that repetition is the pulsing beat of psychic rituals, and that it can have radically different impacts on our lives depending on the types of cosmologies you get “wired into.” Repetition has the capacity to promote affective states of openness or to reinforce the boundaries of our own psychic patterns. Page 99 also explains this process, moving into quick conversations about ego dissolution, the subjectifying role of dispositifs, as well as my own reading of the Freudian death drive, which I provisionally describe here as a force that pushes against psychic transformation—and the infinite motions of becoming. This chapter captures the type of book I was trying to write, at least aspirationally. Sometimes it lands; sometimes, a little bit less.

Learn more about Into the Loop at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Carney's "My Father's List"

A writer and magazine copy editor in New York, Laura Carney has been published by the Washington Post, the Associated Press, The Hill, Runner’s World, Good Housekeeping, The Fix, Upworthy, Maria Shriver’s The Sunday Paper, and other places. She has worked as a copy editor in national magazines—primarily women’s—for twenty years, including Vanity Fair, GQ, People, and Good Housekeeping.

Carney applied the "Page 99 Test" to My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free, her first book, with the following results:

As much as I hoped to be the exception to the rule, I was shocked to open my book, My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free, to page 99 and find that it meets the criteria:

"What?" I wrote back. He sent me a GIF from Point Break of Keanu Reeves saying this to Patrick Swayze, just before he rides a wave likely to kill him. "I thought you watched it?" Dave said.

I looked up the phrase.

It means "go with God."

This scene took place in my first year of checking off my late father's bucket list. I had just successfully checked off "surf in the Pacific Ocean," and had plopped on Venice Beach, exhausted. I texted my brother the good news. On page 98, I shared the phrase he responded with in his text back "Vaya con dias."

Why I think this sums up my entire book:

My brother was the one to find my dad's list. He intuited that he should give it to me. He'd had it in a box for 13 years, since our dad was killed by a distracted driver. We were both young when this happened. A central conflict for me as I checked off my dad's list was whether I was doing the right thing. These were his dreams, not mine. Was it wrong that I was receiving lessons meant for him? What if I ended up unstable financially or in my career as my father often seemed to be to my teenage eyes? As I watched my status change—one I'd been attached to previously, as my job at a national women's magazine struck me as important—I often found myself studying my peers, my friends, cousins, stepbrothers and brother. I worried that I was falling behind. That they were acting like typical 40-somethings while I had regressed to age 25.

Earlier in this chapter, I describe meeting President Jimmy Carter (another list item) and listening to his Sunday school lesson, which encompassed the principles of Phillippians 2:13: "...for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." I don't give the actual Bible verse in the book, but it's an odd coincidence that just two days before hearing that Sunday school lesson, I climbed Stone Mountain with my husband, reciting my favorite Bible verse towards the top (Phillippians 3:14): "I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." Both passages emphasize the very thing my brother says at the end of that chapter: "go with God."

He was saying it somewhat facetiously, because he's funny. When Keanu Reeves says that to Patrick Swayze in Point Break, he's saying goodbye, because there is no way Patrick Swayze will survive the wave he's about to surf. But at the same time, Reeves's character respects Swayze's chutzpah. Is life worth living if you're not doing what you love? That's a question Swayze often asks in the movie.

The word 'goodbye' itself stems from the phrase "God be with you." And what is My Father's List if not a book about how to say goodbye? It's by recognizing that our loved ones continue to travel with us. Jimmy Carter said so. Keanu Reeves, too. And in that moment on page 99, so did my brother. The main blessing I needed to continue on.

Visit Laura Carney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eran Shalev's "The Star-Spangled Republic"

Eran Shalev is Professor of History at Haifa University and the author of Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic, and American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation, and shared the following:

Page 99 describes a common but now largely forgotten way in which early Americans represented the American Union: America and its republican governmental structures as a political sun. The page demonstrates how, from the founding of the United States through the Civil War, Americans across the country repeatedly employed astronomical language to conceptualize the federal system in solar terms. Drawing on metaphors that had developed within a European monarchical culture of “sun kings,” this imagery was reborn and refitted in the United States to serve a democratic and republican political culture. Page 99 offers several examples of how early Americans described the federal government as a sun sustaining “a whole planetary system” of states, or as occupying “the same relation towards the States that the sun does towards the solar system—that is, the centre of gravitation.”

The page provides a vivid illustration of the solar image as a mode of explaining the federal system, one of the central forms of imagery that the book uncovers and unpacks. At the same time, it necessarily offers only a partial view of what the book terms political astronomy. Other major components of this conceptual language are not present on this page, including, for example, the constellational mode of understanding relations among the states. Page 99 thus does not capture the full argument, but it does serve as an effective entry point and a useful test case for grasping how astronomical metaphors structured early American political thought.

While page 99 conveys one of the most prominent manifestations of political astronomy, the notion of the Union, the Constitution, or the federal government as suns that hold the political nation together, it does not present the full range of the rich astronomical language in circulation. An alternative and sometimes overlapping and even competing vision was constellational rather than solar: an understanding of the United States as composed not of a single dominant sun but of many stars, equal and harmoniously arranged. This imagery was particularly well suited to expressing the federal nature of the Union and the equality of the states. It also informed the choice of stars to spangle the American flag, a decision that cannot be fully understood without reference to political astronomy. The book further recovers the meaning of other culturally prevalent but little- examined practices, such as calling celebrities “stars” or describing them as “meteors.” To grasp the full richness of this language, one must recover the experience of the dark, star-filled skies of pre-industrial societies, in which astronomical metaphors carried an immediacy and explanatory power that has since faded.

Learn more about The Star-Spangled Republic at the University of Virginia Press website.

The Page 99 Test: American Zion.

--Marshal Zeringue