Rob Miller's "The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low"

Rob Miller is the cofounder and former co-owner of Bloodshot Records.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low: A Curious Life in Independent Music, and reported the following:

I think Mr. Ford Madox Ford would be reasonably pleased with his hypothesis in this instance.

Page 99 finds the reader in the latter chapters of the first half (or, as I call it, this being a book about music, “Side A”) as I stumble along the circuitous path that led me to start an independent record label, Bloodshot, that became internationally known as a home for a curious blend of punk and roots music. Jumping back and forth in time between an adolescence in the 70s that looked upon what is now “classic rock” with a mixture of horror and boredom, and the origin story of the label in mid-90s, the book to this point devotes itself to the important idea of finding freedom, identity, and community in the music of the underground. In my colossal leap from comedy records and AM radio baseball, to hardcore punk rock---skipping any incremental steps in between, I discovered an openness to exploration, without foreknowledge or judgement. It was in this manner that I started to hear whispers and echoes of the music that came before, the weird underbelly of Americana. One particular band that had a powerful impact was The Cramps and their song “Human Fly.”

The Cramps were the mysterious distant uncle I secretly wished would come to family reunions. He’d tell stories about knife fights and scoring with showgirls, hand me a shrunken head he bought at a bazaar somewhere in the East and then wink, give a boozy, smoky laugh, and let me take a pull off his flask if Mom wasn’t looking. And while both sides of the family of rock and roll sang about the virtues of wanting to kiss your sweet lips, the Cramps aimed a little lower, and a little closer, to the truth than most spoke of in decent company. “Human Fly” was a baptism in the murky waters that course past us unseen, but not unfelt. Thanks to that pulsing, aural equivalent of an opening rusty crypt door, I have taken the road more strange and less popular, and that has made all the difference.

After an ornamental section divider in the middle of the page, I describe the insidious creep of tribalism and intolerance I started to experience in the punk rock scene, the very qualities I was trying to escape in the first place.

By the end of high school, the bloom had, as they say, fallen off the rose of much of punk’s promise. A friend of mine once remarked that hardcore had the shelf life of unpasteurized buttermilk, and many aspects of a scene that had arisen from a dissatisfaction with conformity quickly slid into the age-old traps of tribalism and self-destruction. One orthodoxy was traded for another; boots and braces became the new IZODS and boat shoes. Hair too short at school was now not short enough at shows. I’d been to this movie before, and I didn’t get into punk and hardcore only to feel out of place again.

At the bottom of page 99, I draw a throughline from my distaste for conformity and the stifling expectations of codes and rules to my reflexive impulse to blaze my own trail.

Worse, there was an emerging absolutism regarding the music itself. It was hardcore or it wasn’t. There were “right” albums to have, and “wrong” albums to have, “right” shows to go to and “wrong” shows to go to. Wearisome What is versus What is not arguments of authenticity--which I’d encounter ad nauseum in a different context later with Bloodshot--overtook the conversation with Talmudic gravity.

While page 99 does not deal with the any of the specifics of the growth and development of Bloodshot Records, nor the issue of the business of independent labels in general that takes up much of “Side B,” it is an informative glimpse into the tone and beating heart of the book, and highlights a theme that reverberates throughout. That is, as another band I cite as an influence, Crass, put it, “if you don’t like the rules they make, refuse to play their game.” Be it in the usual pairing of punk and country, or in the way I chose to run the business.

Visit Rob Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arnoud S. Q. Visser's "On Pedantry"

Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history. His books include A Cultural History of Fame in the Renaissance, Reading Augustine in the Reformation, and Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image.

Visser applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All, and shared the following:

Pardon the pedantry, but my answer is both yes and no.

Yes, page 99 does capture the heart of the book: the idea that flashy displays of knowledge and cleverness have often provoked intense irritation. On this page, we find ourselves in medieval Europe, where the tensions between Christianity and classical learning come into focus. We meet Vilgard of Ravenna, a grammar teacher living around the turn of the millennium, who was so enchanted by the Latin classics that it cost him his life. His studies had made him obsessive and arrogant. One night, demons appeared to him in his sleep, disguised as his literary heroes Virgil, Horace and Juvenal, promising him a share of their glory. From then on, Vilgard could not stop preaching the virtues of the ancients. He was swiftly condemned for heresy and reportedly burned at the stake. Beyond its historical interest, the story of Vilgard also reflects the book’s style. Anecdotes, vignettes and images show in a lively and hopefully entertaining way how “know-it-alls” have been mocked and feared, resented and punished over the centuries.

Still, there’s also a case for “no.” Page 99 does not show the book’s historical range. Know-it-alls come in many forms, not just teachers obsessed with grammar or classical literature. The bigger picture is about how intellect and irritation have always gone together. Beyond religious motives, there are social and economic reasons at play too. On Pedantry aims to offer a kind of historical therapy, making its readers aware of enduring patterns. Seen across the long sweep of history, these patterns help us understand why hostility to intellectuals is still so familiar today.

Learn more about On Pedantry at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Hall's "Power and Powerlessness"

Edward Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. He works on three main research areas: political ethics, liberal political thought, and realist political theory.

Hall applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty-First Century, with the following results:

Page 99 of Power and Powerlessness is near the beginning of Chapter 4, which focuses on torture. On this page, I distinguish between three reasons why agents of the state torture. These are, first, to intimidate torture victims or third parties; second, to force confessions; and third, to secure valuable intelligence. I also remind readers that all three forms of torture occur in liberal-democratic regimes today.

Does page 99 give readers a good idea of the whole work?

Not really. The central aim of my book is to argue that the liberalism of fear – the negative and cautionary vein of liberal thinking, most famously articulated by Judith Shklar, which urges us to prioritize the avoidance of public cruelty – has something significant to teach us about politics in the twenty-first century. This matters because many prominent critics dismiss the liberalism of fear as an outdated form of “Cold War liberalism” that has little to say beyond blandly insisting that liberal democratic regimes are less terrible than their authoritarian alternatives. In contrast, I suggest that because contemporary liberal democracies invest people with coercive power that is routinely used in cruel ways, liberals today should be preoccupied by the question of how public cruelty can be mitigated.

The book is split into two parts. In the first part (chapters 1-3), I offer a detailed reconstruction of Shklar’s writings on the liberalism of fear and offer a defence of the liberalism of fear from various objections. In the second part (chapters 4-7), I employ this perspective to reflect on four issues of pressing political concern that all liberals should be deeply perturbed by today: torture, policing, immigration control, and hate speech. Here I depart from Shklar and engage with these issues in first-order terms, offering novel arguments about what the liberalism of fear suggests for these vitally important political matters.

Page 99 is, therefore, near the beginning of Part Two where my argument pivots. This is a crucial moment in the overall argument. However, page 99 does not typify what the book is about. Does Power and Powerlessness therefore fail the Page 99 Test? Perhaps not. Even though this discussion of torture is not very revealing of the overall project, I hope the page does reveal something about the quality of the book.

Learn more about Power and Powerlessness at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan S. Jones's "Opium Slavery"

Jonathan S. Jones, an assistant professor of history at James Madison University, is a historian of the United States Civil War and Reconstruction era (1820-1920) as well as American medicine and health.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis, and reported the following:

Page 99 presents evidence that the Civil War contributed significantly to the spread of opiate addiciton in the 19th century United States. This page presents evidence that the contemprary Americans blamed a surge in addiction on the war, while also noting that many Americans used drugs for a variety of reasons that were not connected to the lingering affects of war.

The Page 99 Test works moderately well for Opium Slavery. It gets at half the argument—that the Civil War caused an epidemic of opiate addiction among veterans. However, the other takeaways from the book—how addiction negatively affected veterans, what they did about it, and the epidemic’s lasting significance—are missing here. Perhaps that’s unsurprising, considering the multifaceted nature of America’s first opioid crisis. But certainly, the Page 99 Test gives a good snapshot of the book.

Opium Slavery is the first comprehensive history of the Civil War’s opioid epidemic. Schlolars and other interested folks, like medical doctors, have long been aware that some Civil War veterans used drugs. But we’ve never been able to guage the scope of addiction, let alone its lived experience or consequences. By reconstructing this history, we get the most detailed portrait of 19th-century drug users to date and a tragic view of the Civil War’s unexpected legacies.

Visit Jonathan S. Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Justin Randolph's "Mississippi Law"

Justin Randolph is Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history. His work has appeared in Southern Cultures and the Journal of Southern History; he has received prizes such as the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. His current research includes an oral history project with the first Black police officers after Jim Crow segregation as well as a cultural history of the Taser.

Randolph applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Mississippi Law drops readers into a local fight against America's regime of Jim Crow apartheid during the 1950s. In some ways I think it provides a fairly accurate snapshot of the book. The ingenuity of everyday people. A scope of violence too easily described as "segregation." Activist recognition of the police as part of a system of inequality. These are all historic truths I emphasize on page 99 and throughout the book. Yet this page should also leave readers wanting more.

Page 99 falls in Chapter 5, “The Cattleman’s Massive Resistance.” This chapter establishes the connections between new forms of rural economic power and so-called massive white resistance, the racist fight against a new phase of Black freedom struggles. Page 99 begins in Columbus, Mississippi, a small city by rural Southern standards. And there we meet two important activists, Emmett Stringer and Flora Ghist Stringer. The page covers the years in their lives between World War II and ends in 1954, the year the US Supreme Court invalidated racial segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. Black Mississippians like the Stringers drove civil rights movements in a time before civil rights icons like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. took center stage. The page shows us a world of possible futures. Will white elites simply implement Brown and desegregate the schools? Will Black Mississippians be allowed to continue to register to vote in larger numbers? Will segregationists find enough pro-segregation Black leaders to attack civil rights activists on the government’s behalf? The page ends in a moment when the future was far from certain.

None of these imaginable outcomes came to pass, and so page 99 should leave folks wanting more. Readers who continue in Chapter 5 and the rest of the book will find how the everyday campaigns against Black human rights came from all directions. Bankers canceled activist lines of credit. Insurance brokers refused to renew activist policies. Civil rights activists turned on each other. Police and courts amplified their criminalization of Black life in historic proportions. And yes, as the chapter title implies, Mississippi’s beef cattlemen frequently led the effort. One created the global white Citizens’ Council movement. Another expanded the state police force, a central topic of the rest of the book.

Learn more about Mississippi Law at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Mason's "Seeking the High Ground"

Matthew Mason is Professor of History at Brigham Young University and the author of Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World, with the following results:

On page 99 of Seeking the High Ground, fortuitously enough, readers will find the opening of a new chapter in the book, chapter 5, entitled “Humanity.” “The concept of humanity played a central role in both the imperial crisis and the Revolutionary War,” the chapter begins. After defining that ideal for 18th-century Anglophone thinkers, I note that “humanity’s most politicized manifestations in the imperial crisis and war included ideals connected to civilization, moderation, and the proper locus of sovereignty throughout these conflicts, and to military discipline during the war. To lay successful claim to it was to be safely within all the right categories in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, including proper religiosity as well as the cult of sensibility.” The rest of this chapter explores how the politics of slavery connected to all these angles for humanity as both Patriots and Loyalists, and their respective British allies, sought to lay claim to this virtue for their cause.

As such, the Page 99 Test works uncannily well as an indication of the kind of things I’m arguing in this book. For the five chapters of it dedicated to the American Revolution, I try to show how debaters on both sides connected slavery to the moral (and thus political) high ground for which they contended. They did so in complicated ways linked to the multiple facets of those ideals that constituted the high ground.

This is my contribution to the debate over slavery’s relationship with the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. Some historians argue that the traditional explanations of the American Revolution, centering on issues and taxation and representation with their accompanying high-sounding ideals, do not capture the way in which the defense of slavery and white supremacy drove the Patriot movement. And as such, these historians argue, the Revolution strengthened American slavery. Their opponents argue that we should take the traditional explanations, and the stated idealistic motives of the Patriots, seriously, and that the rise of antislavery was the really notable impact of the Revolution. I argue that it is better to see how slavery naturally and pervasively connected to those traditional issues and ideals. And I contend that for that reason, the Revolution had both specific antislavery and specific proslavery consequences for both the new United States and the remaining British Empire. So in short, the Page 99 Test works very well in my case.

Learn more about Seeking the High Ground at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward E. Andrews's "Newport Gardner's Anthem"

Edward E. Andrews is a Professor in The Department of History and Classics at Providence College. A scholar of early American history, his work explores issues related to race, religion, and slavery in early America and the Atlantic World. His first book, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, was published in 2013. His new biography, Newport Gardner's Anthem: A Story of Slavery, Struggle, and Survival in Early America, reveals the remarkable history of an important but forgotten African leader in early New England.

Andrews applied the “Page 99 Test” to Newport Gardner's Anthem, and reported the following:

Flipping to page 99 of Newport Gardner’s Anthem will reveal two of the major themes of the book: struggle and survival. A formerly enslaved African living in post-Revolutionary Newport, Rhode Island, Newport Gardner became a key leader, organizer, and activist for a community that had been historically oppressed and marginalized. In these pages we see Gardner’s struggles to keep a school running for Black children in the first decades of the nineteenth century, as well as his crucial role as a leader in the town.

Newport Gardner helped to found the African Benevolent Society in 1808, an organization primarily dedicated to the education of the people of color in the town of Newport. Not only did Gardner serve as president of this Society for years on end, but he was also one of the teachers in this promising school. But, as page 99 makes clear, the school had a rocky history. Opening with excitement and optimism, by the late 1810s the Society barely had enough money to keep it going. They even shuttered it temporarily and used the meager funds left over in the treasury to pay for private tutors instead. By the early 1820s it was back in action, but by that point Gardner was also looking to other reform projects, like creating a free Black church and, eventually, emigration to Liberia.

So, yes, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Newport Gardner’s Anthem, as we witness Gardner’s struggles to help his community survive in a city that offered no public education for Black children, dismal economic prospects, and limited civic rights. It highlights Gardner’s critical role as a Black leader in the region and foreshadows some of the other initiatives he will take on – church building and African emigration – towards the end of his long, fascinating life.

Learn more about Newport Gardner's Anthem at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pamela Walker Laird's "Self-Made"

Pamela Walker Laird is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin, which won the Hagley Prize; and Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Self-Made: The Stories That Forged an American Myth, and shared the following:

The American Revolution created openings and incentives for ambitious men to assert self-made success following centuries when that claim would have risked both their souls and social capital. Page 99 captures this transition in the evolution of the myth of self-made success. It describes how the label “aristocrat” shifted from a mark of esteem and authority to a “catch-all political pejorative, contrasted against ‘self-made’ as a catch-all political encomium” when the new political order required elites to seek votes from among recently enfranchised men. Aristocracy’s loss of cultural authority was one of many competitions for political authority fought in cultural arenas, as Self-Made reveals.

Page 99 also describes how Andrew Jackson’s opponents reframed the story of Roger Sherman as “A SELF-MADE MAN.” In the rough electoral politics around 1830, these partisans claimed this important Founding Father as a model of self-improvement and citizenship.

Throughout, Self-Made mixes ideas, such as America’s anti-elitist rhetoric, with stories about people, some still famous, some not. In that way, page 99 is a good measure of my approach. It also reflects one of the book’s arguments, namely that stories about self-making initially presented positive connotations by highlighting men who served faith and community. Sherman’s story is one of many that confirm that the materialist, individualist values now associated with “self-made success” are neither natural nor representative of the long stretch of American history.

Page 99 does miss several essential elements, however. It lacks a milestone to indicate that it’s only part-way along a four-century narrative, so readers might think the book is all about the Revolutionary era. Nor does it promise to explain how “self-made success” came to be associated with individualist economic success. Most of all, page 99 misses the book’s “So What?” If your hypothetical browsers were to look two pages ahead, they would see that as early as 1830, apologists had already begun using the myth to justify inequality and the regressive distribution of common resources.

Learn more about Self-Made at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gerard N. Magliocca's "The Actual Art of Governing"

Gerard N. Magliocca is Distinguished Professor and Lawrence A. Jegen III Professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. He has written six books and many articles on American constitutional history. His book, Washington's Heir: The Life of Justice Bushrod Washington (2022) won the Erwin N. Griswold Book Prize awarded by the Supreme Court Historical Society.

Magliocca applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, The Actual Art of Governing: Justice Robert H. Jackson's Concurring Opinion in the Steel Seizure Case, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Actual Art of Governing talks about how the invention of nuclear weapons increased executive power. Harry Truman was the first president with the exclusive authority to blow up the world. Moreover, President Truman argued that his unilateral decision to seize and operate the nation’s steel mills during the Korean War was justified in part by the need to safeguard America's nuclear program. Taken to its logical conclusion, the President’s nuclear authority could justify almost any unilateral executive action. If the President can destroy mankind by himself, then why can’t he do something less consequential on his own like raising taxes?

Turns out that page 99 nicely captures one of my book’s central themes. The Actual Art of Governing is about Justice Robert H. Jackson’s concurring opinion in the Supreme Court's Youngstown decision rejecting President Truman’s steel seizure as unconstitutional. Justice Jackson’s concurrence is the most influential opinion ever written on the separation of powers between Congress and the President. One reason why is that the opinion self-consciously updated the Constitution’s structure for an age in which the President was far more powerful at home and abroad than the Framers could have imagined. For example, Jackson wrote about the fact that Congress could and sometimes did give the President significant (though temporary) emergency powers. He also explained that the President was fully capable of persuading Congress to give him additional authority through his role of the head of state, the leader of his party, and his dominant media presence. As a result, courts should exercise great caution in giving the President emergency authority without such a statute or in circumstances that were at odds with legislative practice. At the same time, Jackson said that the President must have broad latitude to act on his own overseas given America’s role as a global superpower.

Learn more about The Actual Art of Governing at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan: Constitutional Law and the Politics of Backlash.

The Page 99 Test: American Founding Son.

The Page 99 Test: Washington's Heir.

--Marshal Zeringue

John R. Haddad's "Thrill Ride"

John R. Haddad is Professor of American Studies and Popular Culture at Penn State Harrisburg. He is the author of America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation and Cultures Colliding: American Missionaries, Chinese Resistance, and the Rise of Modern Institutions in China.

Haddad applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thrill Ride: The Transformation of Hersheypark, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes near the start of chapter 4. That chapter begins with Hurricane Agnes striking Central Pennsylvania in 1972. In Hershey, the torrential rains caused the creek that runs through Hersheypark to overflow, which led to massive flooding. The first part of page 99 catches the very end of a very touching story. Hersheypark employees rather heroically tried to save all of the animals in the nearby zoo and in Hersheypark. The park had two trained dolphins, Dolly and Skipper, whose lives were at risk because their saltwater tank had filled with muddy flood water. Since they would not survive in there for long, these heavy animals had to be physically lifted out and carried by a group of men up a steep hill to a pool – in a driving rain! Page 99 then introduces the main topic of the chapter, which is the demolition of Hersheypark landmarks. The backstory here is that, in 1972, the park was under construction because they were converting the old amusement park into a modern theme park in the model of Disneyland. Page 99 explains that this overhaul required the destruction of cherished landmarks inside the park – the Picnic Pavillion, Bandshell, and Starlight Ballroom. These structures had been built by Milton Hershey generations ago and had become sites of community memory. Thus, it was jarring for the community to watch them get razed. This chapter, in sum, is about a very emotional and tumultuous time in Hershey history!

This test does not work in the most obvious sense in that page 99 does not capture the larger idea of the book. However, if you read between the lines, you will discover that the Page 99 Test actually does work – though in very subtle fashion. Let me explain. The book tells the story of Hersheypark, from 1906 to the present day. However, the focus is squarely on the 1970s, because this was a transformative decade in the life of the park, one filled with big changes. The demolitions of landmarks and the construction of a modern theme park were two changes, but there were others. All this change was especially hard on the local community, which preferred Hershey “the way it was” and struggled mightily to adjust. The book explains how Hersheypark’s leaders really cared about the local community. In building a theme park, they opted for a sensitive design that used architecture and theming to honor the past and persuade local residents to accept change. Even though page 99 does not explicitly convey this point, I think that the love and dedication of park officials for the town’s beloved park does shine through in the heroic way they sought to save animals. Park officials invested that same level of caring in designing and operating the new theme park, which opened in 1973 – the year after Hurricane Agnes.

I hope readers will enjoy this book. By conducting interviews and reading company records and oral histories at the Hershey Community Archives, I uncovered lots of stories like this one. Taken collectively, these stories tell the remarkable history of Hersheypark. It is a unique place – unlike all other theme parks. The book was a joy to write, and I hope people find it informative and fun to read!

Learn more about Thrill Ride at the Penn State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue