Jeff Roche's "The Conservative Frontier"

Jeff Roche is a professor of American history at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. He is the author and editor of several books and essays on American politics and the conservative movement, including Restructured Resistance, The Conservative Sixties, and The Political Culture of the New West.

Roche applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right, and shared the following:

Page 99 is early in the book’s fifth chapter in a section that describes the conflict over prohibition in Amarillo Texas in 1907. The brutal murder of a young man in the Bowery (the city’s Red Light District) had created an uproar and a demand among citizens that the city prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol. On one side were a group of people we would now call social conservatives, who believed that eliminating liquor was not just a step in creating a more righteous community, but also a signal that the city had emerged from its rough and tumble frontier phase to become a modern and moral city. On the other side were folks who we would recognize as more libertarian, who did not believe nor support any efforts to legislate morality. It also describes the violent corruption that surrounded the election to go “dry” and begins the tale of the bloody chaos of an Amarillo that was dry in name only, a time when local police and Texas Rangers fought each other in the streets and a local deputy assassinated a Ranger at the city courthouse.

Page 99 is possibly as good an indicator of the tone and style of the book as any other random page I suppose. It demonstrates the kinds of political conflicts that serve as the foundation of the book’s narrative structure and central premise – that it was local struggles over national issues that helped mold West Texas’s cowboy conservatism. It also describes an ongoing ideological conflict between the live-and-let-live libertarianism of a cattle culture and the demands for civic conformity of a small-town elite determined to see their communities grow.

The book itself covers roughly a century of West Texas history as it explains how the region became the most conservative and the most reliably Republican section of the United States. The story unfolds across dozens of vignettes (like the conflict over prohibition in turn of the century Amarillo) organized in shortish chapters written in an accessible style. The first third of the book describes the politics, culture, and economy of what I call the Agricultural Wonderland, a modern, forward-looking society, based on commercial family farming and designed as an alternative to a rapidly changing America. A place literally advertised as a white, Christian homeland on the Texas prairies. The second part of the book traces the origins of the modern Texas right-wing as it moved from a broadly conceived pro-business and anti-labor lobby to a paranoid and conspiratorially minded movement whose members believed that communists were secretly plotting to brainwash American children through subtle messaging in schoolbooks. The last third of the book describes and explains how the far-right took control of the Texas Republican Party over the course of the 1960s and turned it into a vehicle for the expression of their ideology, a project that was all but complete when the book ends with Ronald Reagan sweeping the Texas Republican Primary in 1976.

Visit Jeff Roche's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Flannery Burke's "Back East"

Flannery Burke is associate professor of American studies at Saint Louis University. She is author of A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century and From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's.

Burke applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region, with the following results:

Page 99 appears in the center section of Back East and reveals a mainstream opinion of the eastern United States held by many westerners in the twentieth century. The page begins with a complete sentence: “As it had in ‘The Plundered Province,’ Wall Street, once again, played the role of the East.” The author of the article “The Plundered Province” was Bernard DeVoto, a writer for Harper’s Magazine, a Harvard graduate, and an ardent conservationist originally from Ogden, Utah. In “The Plundered Province” and again in later articles referenced on page 99, DeVoto excoriated eastern corporations who extracted natural resources and labor from the American West and westerners who accepted and even encouraged such economic exploitation. As a westerner who had succeeded in the East, DeVoto considered himself an expert on both regions. As I write on page 99, DeVoto identified himself in the eastern press as a man who was “informed by a western sensibility but understood eastern culture.”

A browser who opened Back East to page 99 would receive an excellent introduction to the book’s primary themes. The book addresses how westerners imagined the eastern United States in the twentieth century, and DeVoto, as one of the most prolific and authoritative writers on the American West in the American East, well encapsulates the ways in which westerners both accepted and countered eastern expectations in their presentations of their home region. That these expectations influenced the material lives of westerners as much as it did their cultural and intellectual ones – from mining to forestry, ranching, farming, and tourism – is an important finding of the book and one foreshadowed by DeVoto’s articles of the 1930s and 1940s.

Page 99 also well reflects the structure of Back East, which is divided into three parts. Parts 1 and 3 explore western views of the American East from the margins of American culture. Part 1 addresses midwestern presentations of the East that non-midwesterners frequently overlooked or overshadowed while demonstrating that Chicago appeared as both a western and an eastern city in twentieth-century American culture. Part 3 examines the outlooks of westerners marginalized by their race, their status as citizens of Native nations, their language, or their efforts to farm on the arid Plains. Although such westerners’ perceptions of the American East appeared less frequently in magazines like Harper’s and universities like Harvard, they illustrate the ways in which regional narratives opened and foreclosed opportunities for greater national understanding. Part 2, in which page 99 appears, describes popular, well-published authors like DeVoto and his dear friend Wallace Stegner, whose views of the American West and the American East were often consistent with the mythology of the frontier. Page 99 illustrates how DeVoto and Stegner furthered that mythology even as they endeavored to undo its harms.

Visit Flannery Burke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kimberley Johnson's "Dark Concrete"

Kimberley S. Johnson is a political scientist and urban studies scholar whose work examines governance, institutions, and the spatial organization of power in the United States. She is also a spatial storyteller, using history, maps, and urban form to interpret cities, suburbs, and metropolitan change.

Johnson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Dark Concrete introduces one of the central tensions of Black power urbanism (BPU): how to build a just and emancipatory city within political and institutional configurations that worked against these aspirations. Page 99 captures this tension playing out in Newark during the city’s second teacher’s strike in 1971. Black and Puerto Rican activists, parents, students and educators were struggling over the control of education, and by extension the future of the city. In this sense, page 99 serves as an illuminating snapshot of the book as a whole, as similar conflicts recur across the multiple cities and policy areas, including housing and policing.

For proponents of BPU like Amiri Baraka, control over the Newark’s education system was not simply about jobs or contracts (the traditional terrain of machine politics). Instead, it was a struggle over who should teach, what knowledge should be centered, and the kinds of spaces that a new system of education could take place. Newark’s BPU activists believed that the city’s teachers and administrators were indifferent if not hostile to the needs of a now majority-Black and Puerto Rican student body trapped in crumbling underfunded schools, even as White residents (including the family of Chris Christie a future governor) and much of the teaching force, left for the suburbs. Although Newark’s education conflicts emerged in the mid-1960s, the movement for community control of schools would be epitomized in the explosive Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teacher’s Strike of 1968 in New York City, and would find its echo in Newark during the 1971 strike.

The election of Kenneth Gibson’s in 1970 as Newark’s first Black mayor appeared to create new political opening. Gibson empowered BPU activists to demand more community control and to condemn the teacher’s strike as a power grab. Yet Gibson’s political influence proved limited in effecting transformative change on the scale desired by BPU activists. Ongoing conflict with Italian American city council members and resistance from White ethnic neighborhood groups constrained Gibson’s capacity to govern. As a result, emancipatory ambitions, as well as tensions inherent in Black Power urbanism– the struggle to create just “new forms” of governance – clashed with precariousness of formal Black electoral power. Ultimately, Gibson pursued greater centralization of the school system (and more leverage over political opponents) rather than the neighborhood-based and alternative pedagogical models advocated by BPU activists. This outcome fostered decades of distrust between parents, activists and teachers on the other, stalling reform and paving the way for the state’s takeover of Newark’s schools in 1995.

At its core, BPU sought to develop “new forms,” a concept articulated by Charles Hamilton and Kwame Ture in their book Black Power (1967). Community control of education, along with ideas around housing and policing, were the most visible of these experiments taking place across the nation’s increasingly majority-Black and Brown majority cities. Dark Concrete traces this struggle not only in Newark, but also in Oakland, East Orange, and East Palo Alto, showing how efforts to reimagine urban life unfolded through experimentation, conflict and constraints. As page 99 demonstrates, Black Power urbanism ultimately reshaped the terrain of urban governance leaving legacies that continue to shape debates over democracy, equity and the right to the city.

Visit Kimberley Johnson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oscar Winberg's "Archie Bunker for President"

Oscar Winberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and the John Morton Center for North American Studies at the University of Turku.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics, and shared the following:

From page 99:

In the minds of many television viewers Carroll O’Connor was Archie Bunker, and so the campaign leaned into the conservative angle – intentionally blending the two personas. Media interest in celebrity and entertainment helped. “Archie Bunker,” the press reported, “is casting his vote for McGovern.” An Associated Press headline read “Archie Bunker Backs McGovern.” Associated Press political reporter Walter Mears, one of the most respected journalists on the campaign beat, even highlighted the support of Archie Bunker before that of the former vice president (and McGovern rival in the primaries) Hubert Humphrey. The coverage made it clear that the strategy of presenting O’Connor as a representative of working-class Queens, rather than another embodiment of Hollywood, was working.

In television advertisements for McGovern, O’Connor went even further than he had in Lindsay’s ads to present himself in character. Thus, he presented himself as a conservative man for McGovern, not as the lifelong liberal that he actually was. Outtakes from the recording reveal the importance of having the conservative Archie Bunker back McGovern. “Never mind,” O’Connor exclaimed in frustration in the middle of one of the takes when he forgot the most important line. “I got to get the conservative in.” Indeed, in one of the sixty-second ads he recorded, O’Connor described himself as conservative no less than three times, while repeatedly describing the Nixon administration as an example of radicalism.

This Page 99 Test sounded like such a fun and quirky experiment when I first heard about it, and I turned to page 99 in my own book with excitement. Turns out that page 99, part of a chapter titled “Archie Bunker on the Campaign Trail,” is, indeed, a rather good representation of the book.

First, it makes clear that Archie Bunker for President is a work of both media and political history. Second, it references one of my favorite archival finds – the television ads Carroll O’Connor recorded for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election (I spent over a year looking for these ads and in a leap of faith paid to digitize old reels in an archive without knowing what was actually on them – it paid off!). Third – and best of all – the page engages and argues a key point of my book: that entertainment television became a part of political life because politicians and the political press believed it mattered. On page 99 we see both politicians turning to the stars of the television show All in the Family and the media focusing on the star power of the character of Archie Bunker. This is a story driven by political interests.

Of course, one page alone cannot capture all aspects of Archie Bunker for President and the reader would not, based only on page 99, expect to find chapters on civil rights organizations, the women’s movement, or congressional censorship campaigns. Still, with references to other chapters and sections dealing with the campaigns of President Nixon and John Lindsay, I hope it leaves readers eager to find out more about the role of entertainment television in political life and, as the subtitle of my book suggests, how one television show remade American politics.

Visit Oscar Winberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua B. Freeman's "Garden Apartments"

Joshua B. Freeman is distinguished professor of history emeritus at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000; Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World; and Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II.

Freeman applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia, with the following results:

Page 99 of Garden Apartments describes two residential complexes built by the United States government during World War II. During the war, all civilian housing production was suspended, except for projects for war workers. For some of these, the government hired inventive, modernist architects, who during the postwar years would become architectural stars. Discussed on this page are Aluminum City Terrace, in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, for workers at a nearby aluminum plant (with a photograph of it), and the Centerline Defense Housing Project, outside of Detroit, designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen and their partner Robert Swanson, for workers at a nearby tank plant and naval armory (with photographs on the next page).

Page 99 does, and does not, give a good sense of this book as a whole. It examines what were in effect exceptions that illuminate the norm. Garden Apartments traces the origins of the two- and three-story apartment complexes, set on large landscaped sites, that are common across the United States, to early twentieth-century efforts to provide affordable housing to European workers and their families. In shows how, when brought to the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, such residential complexes generally were stripped of their most radical and innovative social and design features. During World War II, however, there was a moment when a convergence of progressive New Deal officials, left-leaning labor unions, and modernist architects led to a short burst of construction of brilliantly-designed, affordable, pathbreaking projects for ordinary working people, like the two described on page 99. The moment was short-lived. When, after the war, garden apartment construction resumed, with government assistance, on a mass scale, much more conventional, even banal, designs became near-universal. Garden Apartments recounts how these buildings nonetheless served their residents well. Many still do (as do the page 99 projects). Page 99 thus suggests mostly unrealized possibilities for a form of housing which, even when dumbed-down, represented a significant social achievement.

Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia is the first history of a widespread form of housing almost completely ignored by scholars and policymakers. It is simultaneously a political, architectural, and social history, with the text complimented by extensive illustrations. Written at a time of an intense crisis of housing affordability, it argues that we might learn something about how to address it by looking at our past.

Learn more about Garden Apartments at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Gorup's "The Counterrevolutionary Shadow"

Michael Gorup is assistant professor of politics at Ithaca College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Counterrevolutionary Shadow begins with a section break. The heading atop the page reads: “Abolition, Reparation, and the Politics of People-making.” What follows is the final substantive section of the book’s third chapter.

Chapter three traces a distinctive current of abolitionist political thought that emerged in the 19th century U.S., which I call “abolition as people-making.” Here is how I explain the political content of this current on page 99:

Abolition was not a negative demand that aimed only to eliminate the old world of slavery. It also expressed a desire to create a new world: one in which those who had been historically oppressed could be made a free and politically empowered people. This would necessarily entail social transformation at significant scale. The system of slavery could not be uprooted simply by granting legal independence to the formerly enslaved. The United States would remain, in its basic relations, a slave society, wherein one portion of the population (Blacks) continued to live at the mercy of another (whites).

The preceding parts of the chapter focus on the origins of this political vision in the life and work of the antebellum Black abolitionists David Walker and Hosea Easton. On page 99, readers find me arguing for two propositions: 1. Walker and Easton were early proponents of the demand for reparations for slavery, and 2. Their conception of reparations aspired to more than just repair. For them, reparations was just as much a project that aimed to create the conditions for a collective freedom to come as it was a response to freedoms long denied. On subsequent pages I will argue that this positive conception of reparations later resurfaced among abolitionists and Radical Republicans in the Reconstruction era who called for the confiscation of plantation lands and their redistribution to formerly enslaved people.

The central claim of my book is that racism is a distinctively democratic technology of counterrevolutionary politics. Unlike other traditions of counterrevolutionary politics, racism doesn’t reject the idea of popular rule. Instead, it sutures the contradiction between democracy and despotism by enclosing who can be said to belong to “the people.” Page 99 offers a succinct representation of one of the political visions that has emerged to challenge the politics of racialized enclosure. It thus offers readers a glimpse of a revolutionary, rather than counterrevolutionary, politics of peoplehood.

Learn more about The Counterrevolutionary Shadow at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ralph Pite's "Edward Thomas's Prose"

Ralph Pite is Professor of English at the University of Bristol.

Before moving to Bristol in 2007, he held a chair at Cardiff University. He completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge where he was Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College and Teaching Fellow at Corpus Christi. Pite was Director of Bristol's Institute for Advanced Study (2013-17). His research focusses on literature's contribution to addressing the environmental emergency, both contemporary poetry in the European languages and writing from the past. His new book, Edward Thomas's Prose: Truth, Mystery, and the Natural World, and his study of Frost are part of that inquiry. He is now developing a reading of Romantic period literature and water-based industrial development.

Pite applied the “Page 99 Test” to Edward Thomas's Prose and shared the following:

On page 99 you find the conclusion to my book’s discussion of Beautiful Wales, written by Thomas in 1905, followed by just the first few sentences introducing his next publication, The Heart of England.

My analysis of Beautiful Wales ends by looking at the book’s closing passage – a landscape set at night in a graveyard beside a river, which runs beside an unnamed Welsh town. (The setting is evidently based on Pontarddulais, which stands on the coast of South Wales between Swansea and Carmarthen). Thomas was making his living at the time through journalism, and he'd written about this graveyard in a review two years before. So, as elsewhere in the study, I compare Thomas’s writing in a book with an earlier newspaper article.

According to Beautiful Wales, the past does endure in the country’s landscapes – Welsh identity has not been erased by English power (whether industrial, cultural, or linguistic). Its presence is muted, however — and much more so than it appears to be in the review. Hence, the Welsh Revival, taking place when Thomas was writing, cannot straightforwardly bring the past back to life. The past is definitely there but it's not necessarily recoverable. In a sense, it resists appropriation. This perception and the perspective it leads to are, I suggest, the distinctive achievements of Beautiful Wales.

The Heart of England (I then go on to say) seeks the same discovery of the mysterious and elusive but genuine past that lies within the English countryside. England, though, is for Thomas a different proposition from Wales because the past you will find there, if you search truthfully, will be at odds with the image of stability and order which you are probably looking for – which the ‘Englishness’ of the time and its highly patriotic 'nature writing' were seeking to affirm.

Does page 99 give a reader a good sense of the book as a whole?

I’m not sure it’s the page I would choose when introducing a reader to the book because it builds on a run of examples from the preceding few pages. What I’m trying to say about Beautiful Wales might be hard to be sure of, in isolation and out of context. The page does, on the other hand, give a good flavour of the study : it shows that I’m interested in Thomas’s prose work (which is, to most readers, only marginal to his poetry) and that I’m making claims for its sophistication and subtlety. The page indicates too the chronological structure of the work – that I’m looking for continuity and development across Thomas’s career as a prose writer (which lasted very nearly twenty years, whereas he wrote poems for little more than twenty months). And, thirdly (most helpfully I think), the page brings to the fore Thomas’s loyalty to Wales.

Thomas was born in London, lived in southern England all his life, and he did not speak any Welsh. His reputation is very much as a writer of England and Englishness. Both Thomas’s parents were Welsh, however, and Thomas visited cousins in Pontarddulais many times. His tutor in Oxford was a significant figure in the Welsh Revival. Beautiful Wales is, to my mind, such a considerable achievement because Thomas may bring to the project both his knowledge and his love of the country. Furthermore, he looks to establish through his prose in the book a balance – and a relationship – between knowledge and love, between objective fact and subjective experience. Discriminating between good and bad versions of that relationship formed a central aim of his work as a literary critic; finding the best version of it became the task he set himself as a creative writer.

So, in these ways, page 99 does open the door to key interests and concerns in my book. And, as often with concluding paragraphs, the writing is more ambitious than elsewhere – something like a peroration. I would rather someone came across that first, rather than a passage of bread-and-butter, expository academic writing. More than anything, since this is the underlying aim of the whole enterprise, I hope readers who know of Thomas as a poet might come away from the page encouraged to look again at his prose. His writing in this mode is full of riches and interest — and especially now. Our relationship to the natural world, which needs to be based on both love and knowledge combined, is in danger of breaking down. Thomas's prose, focussed as it is on the natural world and humanity's place in it, can help us find ways to restore that connection.

Learn more about Edward Thomas's Prose at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen J. Ramos's "Folk Engineering"

Stephen J. Ramos is a professor of urbanism at the University of Georgia. His first book, Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography (2010) received wide acclaim for its contribution to infrastructure studies, and it continues to be an important reference for Gulf urban research.

Ramos applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism, with the following results:

Fortunately, page 99 of my book Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism provides a rich representative sample of its broader claims and concerns. The Southern regionalists were a group of social scientists at the University of North Carolina, who during the interwar years developed the concept of regionalism for the South, and regional planning as its operational practice, to navigate pressures for progress and recalcitrance. Page 99 finds us in the center of the action, beginning, “Myth in the South was nothing new.” The mythos of folk was central to regionalism going back to nineteenth-century European movements, and in the South the regionalists combined myth with social sciences and literature as construct for traditionalism. Page 99 continues: "The 'progressive evolutionism' of turn-of-the-century social sciences, with their faith in those sciences to improve society, was met in the New South with the countervailing force of traditionalism. All regionalists called for balance, but in the South, this balance between progressive and traditional culture and ways of thinking was the one the white elite needed to maintain. The contradiction between these two epistemological approaches is glaring: If the claims of modernity were based on progressive evolutionary assumptions about culture and thought, how best to balance them with Victorian and even earlier modes of traditionalism? How could a balance be struck between Old South and New South? Like William Faulker, Odum believed that the South needed time for its white society to 'go slow' in evolving toward the modern egalitarian cultural demands often viewed as imposed from the North. Against his training in the ameliorative organic social sciences of the early twentieth century, Odum struggled 'to articulate a kind of planning at cross-purposes to time.'”

Against this apologist, organic view of history at an evolutionary pace, I then quote James Baldwin’s 1956 response, after a lifetime of hearing this position, countering “this pleasant 'go slow' mythology with acerbic skepticism. In response to Faulkner’s assertion that 'emotional' white Southerners would move gradually away from segregation if left on their own time, Baldwin pointed out, 'The question left begging is what, in their history to date, affords any evidence that they have any desire, or capacity to do this. And it is, I suppose, impertinent to ask just what Negroes are supposed to do while the South works out what, in Faulkner’s rhetoric, becomes something very closely resembling a high and noble tragedy.'”

Learn more about Folk Engineering at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Aiello's "Return of the King"

Thomas Aiello is a professor of history and Africana studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey and Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947–1979.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Return of the King describes the racial state of play in Atlanta in January 1970, wherein a new administration was sworn into city government with more Black representation than ever before, but with court-mandated teacher desegregation mandates causing a furor among white students and parents, protests eagerly celebrated by Georgia’s governor, Lester Maddox. It was a city in transition, as white flight to suburban areas created Black majorities in the city, but the majority of money and power in Atlanta still remained with white leaders, many of whom were antagonistic to Black social and political gains.

The book itself is about Muhammad Ali’s return to boxing after a three-year forced exile for refusing his draft notice for the Vietnam conflict, and Muhammad Ali does not appear on page 99. Nor does boxing. Or sports more broadly. But the book is also a story of race in Atlanta and the conditions that created the possibility of Ali’s return to the ring in a Deep South city beset by racial contradictions. Page 99 goes a long way to demonstrating those contradictions at the beginning of a year that would see, by its conclusion, the revival of Ali’s boxing career. The racial contradictions depicted on page 99 weren’t new in January 1970. Atlanta had long cultivated an image of itself that stressed business-friendly racial moderation. It was, in the words of mayor William Hartsfield, “The City Too Busy to Hate.” When the civil rights movement began, it did not experience the kinds of televised violence that beset Birmingham, New Orleans, Selma, and other southern cities. But under the surface of that moderation was a seething mass of Black frustration at the limits placed on Black economic development, the continued segregation, and the social neglect of city officials. Ali’s return to boxing in Atlanta, facilitated by Black state senator Leroy Johnson, representing a district in the city, would be one of the first and most effective uses of Black power, a channeling of that anger into a legitimately successful venture that would have an outsized and indelible influence on the city and its national and international reputation. And the efforts of Black Atlanta to make the fight happen would come despite attempts to thwart them by segregationist governor Lester Maddox, who was, back in January 1970, celebrating white students for protesting against teacher integration in public schools.

In that sense, even without an appearance by Ali himself, page 99 of Return of the King does demonstrate much of what the book is about—racial transition in the Deep South’s most important city at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s.

Visit Thomas Aiello's website.

The Page 99 Test: Jim Crow's Last Stand.

The Page 99 Test: Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration.

--Marshal Zeringue

Antwain K. Hunter's "A Precarious Balance"

Antwain K. Hunter is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865, and shared the following:

Page ninety-nine of A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865 features an image and consequently, has limited text. The image, courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, is Alfred Waud’s 1871 sketch of “A Snipe Shooter.” This image, which is also used on the book’s cover, depicts a Black man hunting in a marsh, gun at the ready. The text on that page reads:

The food that Major acquired for his fellow laborers was also important to him for a more personal reason. It allowed him to assume the “patriarchal mantle of provider,v and it thereby affirmed his manhood, which both his enslaver and the broader institution of slavery had otherwise deeply circumscribed. The Woods’s enslaver had sold Major’s first wife away from the plantation. It is not clear where she was sold to, but she seems to have been removed from the area, perhaps making Major part of one of the over 300,000 interstate sales…

Readers who opened straight to page ninety-nine would get a glimpse of what my book is about. While there is a limited amount of text, readers would see some important themes around firearms, manhood, and race. This short section is part of my third chapter, “Armed Labor,” which highlights how free and enslaved Black people in the antebellum era used firearms in a number of labor applications. The image which dominates this page shows the quotidian nature of Black Southerners’ gun use. While rebellion and resistance are an important part of this story, free and enslaved Black people labored with their weapons, both with or without their enslavers’ or the state’s permission. This chapter explores how some enslaved men were able to provide food for their communities via hunting, which thereby bolstered their masculinity. While tangential to my book, page ninety-nine also references the interstate slave trade, which wrought havoc on enslaved Black families.

The Page 99 Test works... sort of. While it illuminates an interesting aspect of the book, my larger arguments are about how free and enslaved Black people used firearms for labor—feeding themselves and their families, protecting crops and livestock, and defending their communities from threats. Still, many white people saw firearms as yet another tool through which they could exploit Black labor. As a result, the state legislature’s laws permitted enslavers to arm their laborers from the colonial era through to Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, though some white people ignored the law or used their armed slaves for illegal purposes. Unsurprisingly, many white people were frightened at the prospect of gun-totting enslaved people. Some of their concerns were real but others were merely the anxieties of white people living in a racialized slave society. Enslaved Black folks acquired their weapons from a number of sources, ranging from their enslavers to an illegal arms trade, and were able to push back against enslavement’s constricting grasp and make better lives for themselves and their families. Firearms hold an incredibly complicated place on our current sociopolitical landscape, but our nation’s relationship with them across time is often misunderstood or intentionally mischaracterized. We should all learn more about it!

Learn more about A Precarious Balance at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue