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

Edward Watts's "Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville"

Edward Watts is professor emeritus of English at Michigan State University. His previous book, Colonizing the Past: Myth-Making and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing (2020) was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2021.

Watts applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds the reader late in chapter four, a chapter that looks at the creeping suspicion among readers that “Indian Haters” might not be the uncritical heroes they become in dozens of stories, novels, poems, plays, histories, and travelogues between 1820 and 1860. Based on the legends of historical figures like Tom Quick or Lewis Wetzel, “Indian Haters” were white men on the American frontier between 1760 and 1830 who purportedly responded the loss of family members at the hands of a few “Indians” (strawmen of settler fantasy, nothing to do with genuine indigenous peoples) by vowing to kill all Indians and then largely succeeding, “out-savaging the savage,” in the terms of one scholar, marking racial superiority at an atavistic level. For decades, Indian Haters had been portrayed in sensational texts as heroes and martyrs, doing the necessary dirty work of settler colonialism, sacrificing personal safety for the race and nation. However, as Indian Haters were depicted more and more sensationally, skepticism crept in. On page 99, my discussion of Charles Averill’s ridiculous novel Kit Carson: Prince of the Gold Hunters (1849) concludes. Averill portrayed Carson as an Indian Hater, an obnoxious attempt to cash in on public interest in both the California Gold Rush and Carson’s celebrity after his depiction in John C. Fremont’s popular narrative. As the page ends, Carson’s own refutation of his textual exploitations begins in a responding text supposedly dictated to Dewitt Peters: the historical Carson was not an Indian Hater and, in fact, would marry two indigenous women, though his much later actions in the 1863 massacre of the Navajo cannot be forgiven.

While page 99 accurately represents the work, it does so in a minor key, as this chapter examines a broad variety of texts that celebrate Indian Haters into virtuous heroes. Averill’s book was soon forgotten, thankfully. Furthermore, his book was part of a broader effort to transpose a legend born in the eastern woodlands to the far West in order to establish a unifying narrative for the increasingly geographically disparate US. Other chapters offer more sustained readings of major Indian Hater fictionalizations by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Herman Melville. However, the book is mostly about the function of print culture and public media in the larger project of antebellum settler colonialism as seen through the example of the trope of Indian Haters. Averill wanted badly to profit from participating in the triumphant settler agenda. However, as Peters’ redemption of Carson on page 99 shows, this process was not monolithic or unilateral (as settler culture is often theorized to be). Averill’s Kit Carson stands as a dubious attempt to create a mythology suited to the racial and cultural goals of the settler nation as it aspired to subjugate the lands and peoples it intended to control and exploit. Peters’ pushback, in microcosm, reveals an intra-cultural tension that symbolizes the fragility and incompleteness of settler nationhood, even as it so wanted stability and totality

While Carson has come down (mostly) as a hero, it is not because he was or was not an Indian Hater. In Milford, Pennsylvania, there is still a Tom Quick Inn, named for a local Indian Hater who boasted of killing ninety-nine Lenape to avenge his father. Until recently, a monument to him in a public park that explicitly celebrates those killings. Currently, the monument remains in storage, its resurrection challenged by the descendants of the Lenape Quick never got around to. In other words, while my book studies an old story, even as shown on page 99, its subject pertains in 2025, as the settler nation still struggles about what parts of its past to embrace and which to disavow.

Learn more about Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Satya Shikha Chakraborty's "Colonial Caregivers"

Satya Shikha Chakraborty grew up in India and is Associate Professor of History at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). Her research and teaching focuses on histories of South Asia, British Empire, gender and sexuality, colonial medicine, and visual culture.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India, with the following results:

Page 99 of Colonial Caregivers contains an image, and very little text. The image shows an oil portrait of a British family fleeing during the violence of the 1857 Indian Rebellion (fought against the British East India Company’s rule in India). It was painted in 1858, in commemoration of the rebellion’s anniversary, by the British artist Abraham Solomon, who had never visited India. The reason I have included this painting in my book is because of the depiction of the British family’s Indian ayah (nanny/maid). She is shown carrying one of the British children, as she faithfully follows her British employers, even as her own countrymen are rebelling against British colonial rule. The painting, following the tradition of European art, places the brown ayah in the shadow of the trees, while moonbeams bathe the British women and child, who are thus resplendent in a surreal white glow, in contrast to the dark shadowy figure of the ayah. The rest of the page introduces a British fiction from 1872, where the plot centers around the sudden disruption of the “very happy home” of a British family, the Ogilvies in colonial Calcutta, when the 1857 Indian Rebellion breaks out. The Ogilvies are saved thanks to the intervention of their loyal Indian ayah Tara, who hides them from the rebels. The page ends with quotes from the fiction highlighting the supposedly “strange contrast” between the white “little golden-haired girl” of the Ogilvies, and the dark “faithful ayah” Tara.

While a random snippet, nevertheless, I feel, page 99 does give a good sense of some of the core arguments of my book – how the darkness of the South Asian ayah was used as a foil to highlight the white racial purity of the British family, particularly the British child. The chiaroscuro technique used by the British painter and the “strange contrast” mentioned by British writer demonstrate the visual and literary construction of race in a colonial context, particularly whiteness. The figure of the ayah, as my book shows, played a crucial role in British attempts to highlight their own racial purity at a time when inter-racial concubinage and “mixed” race children in the empire caused moral anxieties in Britain. The fidelity of the ayah to the British family, which we see in both the painting and the fiction, showcases another point my book makes – the sentimentalization of the love and loyalty of the colonial Indian caregiver, particularly during moments of anti-colonial violence (such as the 1857 Indian Rebellion), provided moral legitimacy to British colonialism in India.

So, the Page 99 Test sort of works for my book Colonial Caregivers, which argues that the South Asian ayah provided not only domestic labor, but also moral labor for the British Empire. The idealized ayah archetype, my book further argues, erased the precarious lives of real-life ayahs. Elsewhere in the book, we see numerous case-studies of ayahs who were sexually assaulted by their European masters, physically chastised by their mistresses, not paid their promised wages, taken to Britain to provide care-labor to British families during the long ship-voyage, but then abandoned without return-passages to India. The book also shows how colonial medical archives naturalized the care-labor of hardy brown women for fragile white women in the tropics, and upheld caste-based discrimination of ayahs in the name of hygiene. British cultural veneration of the ayah (which we see on page 99) obscured the vulnerabilities and everyday experiences of colonial domestic workers, which the book exposes.

Visit Satya Shikha Chakraborty's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scot Danforth's "An Independent Man"

Scot Danforth is the Jack H. and Paula A. Hassinger Chair in Education and Professor of Disability Studies at Chapman University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights, and reported the following:

A reader opening to page 99 would almost get an accurate understanding of my book.

Page 99 glimpses the preliminary sparks that foretell the blazing fire to follow. My book tells the story of the origins of the American disability rights movement through the life of activist leader Ed Roberts, a quadriplegic man who organized disabled students at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960’s. He helped develop a national network of over four hundred independent living centers, self-help units where disabled people assist one another to live successfully in the community. Roberts traveled the world spreading the outrageous idea that people with all kinds of disabilities could live full and rich lives.

On page 99, the graduate student Roberts met with his mentor, the brilliant Professor Jacobus tenBroek. Roberts and his hippy friends, an activist crew of a dozen students with physical disabilities, crafted the radical idea that their troubles were not caused by their failing bodies. Late night rap sessions in the infirmary campus housing yielded the crucial idea that what held them back was the many social and architectural obstacles in the larger society. The students planned a new kind of organization uniting people with many disabilities to work for dramatic social change.

Jacobus tenBroek seemed the perfect person for the upstart Roberts to consult. A blind man, the great scholar was the dedicated leader of the National Federation of the Blind, a coalition of blind people advocating for their own well-being. His prescient speeches presaged the political path forward that resulted ultimately in the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

TenBroek blasted the paternalism of the traditional blindness charities. Looking down upon blind people with pity, the nondisabled charity leaders acted to control a population they viewed as deficient. TenBroek called for blind people to lead the way to their own emancipation.

Roberts asked his mentor if people with other types of disabilities could join the National Federation for the Blind to create the revolutionary, multi-disability political organization that Roberts envisioned. Sadly, the Professor disagreed.

Roberts knew tenBroek was wrong. The disability rights revolution required unity. In 1980, Roberts worked with Canadian activists Henry Enns and Jim Dirksen and hundreds of disabled advocates from across the planet to found Disabled Peoples International, the first worldwide organization fighting for the rights of all disabled persons.

Learn more about An Independent Man at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mitchell B. Cruzan's "Looking Down the Tree"

Mitchell B. Cruzan is Professor of Biology at Portland State University. He received his BA and MA in Biology from California State University, Fullerton, and his PhD from Stony Brook University. He is currently an associate editor for Molecular Ecology, a leading journal in the field. He has previously published an advanced textbook, Evolutionary Biology: A Plant Perspective (2018).

Cruzan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Looking Down the Tree: The Evolutionary Biology of Human Origins, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Looking Dawn the Tree – The Evolutionary Biology of Human Origins we get a taste of how this book explores different ideas for the origin of human characteristics. This page introduces proposals concerning the origin of the clitoris and female orgasm in humans and sets up subsequent pages that evaluate these ideas. It discusses suggestions from previous authors on the origin of the clitoris. One is that that it is simply an artifact of development like nipples and non-functional breasts in men. Another suggests that we inherited it from a common ancestor that was similar to bonobos, where sexual interactions – and especially between females – were important for social bonding. In subsequent pages we come to understand that human clitoris is not just an accident of development or a leftover from an ancestor, but is a highly functional organ. We learn that it has a high density of nerve endings and is one of the most complex organs in the human body. The fact that orgasm releases hormones that make a woman feel relaxed and safe with their partner suggests that it has a function that was favored by natural selection in our ancestors. We come to the conclusion that the clitoris and female orgasm contributed to pair bonding and the maintenance of stable relationships for male-female and female-female couples. This was critical for the survival of our ancestors because, as brain volume tripled from Lucy’s species to ours, infants were born much earlier in development and required more parental care than could be provided by a single parent. We ultimately learn that stable relationships and cooperation within the clans of our ancestors was critical for their survival.

So yes, opening this book to page 99 would give a reader a good idea of the writing style and content of this book. I think that most readers would be intrigued enough by what they read on this page to continue with subsequent pages to see where it led. But this single page is not representative of all of the content of Looking Down the Tree. As the cover suggests, there’s more to this book than just a discussion of science. As a non-fiction book, this one is unique because it includes vignettes into the life of a fictional character who lived around 70,000 years ago. The story of her life serves to vividly illustrate the struggles and challenges that our ancestors faced. By the end, my hope is that readers will have a much deeper appreciation of the circumstances that led to our unique appearance and behaviors; like any other animal, our species is the product of the environments experienced by our ancestors as they struggled to survive.

Visit the Cruzan Lab website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Davis's "A Biography of a Mountain"

Matthew Davis is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale, and the first English-language children’s book published in Mongolia, The Magic Horse Fiddle. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among other places. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Davis lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, a diplomat, and their two young kids.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book dives into the politics of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, and begins to explore how his politics impacted his art. A representative sentence from this page is: “Borglum’s own politics were antiestablishment and championed the individual against overarching systems, beliefs he extended towards his art.”

In this sense, page 99 is both representative of the book as a whole while also limiting the book’s aperture. It is representative in that the relationship between politics and art is crucial to the meaning of Mount Rushmore—how Gutzon Borglum’s politics influenced his ideas behind the memorial, and how today’s politics influences its contemporary meaning is an important element of A Biography of a Mountain. But it is limiting in that what I hope to accomplish with this book is expand the story of Mount Rushmore beyond the actual sculpture itself. It is why the work of art is decentralized on the cover in favor a broad picture of the mountain of Rushmore, and why so much time is spent reporting from the present-day Black Hills. The actual sculpture is essential to any book about Rushmore, as is Gutzon Borglum. But what I hope to do in my book is tell a fuller picture of how the memorial came to exist in the Black Hills, how it represents the complicated conversations we are having today about the narratives of American history, and how it reflects the processes by which we memorialize those narratives. In this sense, page 99 limits that perspective.

Visit Matthew Davis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Griswold's "Resurrecting the Past"

Sarah Griswold is Associate Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. She has published articles in the Journal of the Western Society for French History, War & Society, and the Journal of the History of Collections.

Griswold applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate, and reported the following:

From page 99:

...the latter dynasty having displaced the Umayyads, moved the seat of Islamic power to Baghdad, and encouraged a historicization of their predecessors as despotic and decadent. German scholar Julius Wellhausen’s Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902) most influentially chipped away at the old paradigm, his book asserting the bias of Abbasid historiographers. Meanwhile, the Jesuit priest Henri Lammens, a historian of early Islam at the Université. Saint-Joseph in Beirut, became a leading public apologist for reinterpreting the Umayyads, doing so on either side of World War I; his La Syrie (1921)—written at the behest of the French High Commission—repositioned the long-discredited Umayyads as both Syria’s best Islamic legacy and Islam’s apogee, characterizing the religion as in moral, political, and cultural decline ever after.

It was thus amid this broader reformulation of the Umayyads that work at the Great Umayyad Mosque took shape, the site becoming a showpiece of the French regime’s focus on the Islamic past, and for multiple reasons. For one, it remained geographically axial and religiously dynamic in present-day Damascus. Built from 706 to 715, the Great Mosque continued to anchor the old city in the 1920s.

Does the Page 99 Test work in the case of Resurrecting the Past? I think so: oui. Page 99 drops readers into my 300-page book, which focuses broadly on heritage work in the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon, a regime set up after WWI. The page distills a critical shift that the book traces from the Christian preservation projects that anchored France’s initial claims in the Levant to projects about the Islamic past that seemed more politically serviceable by the late 1920s. The page, moreover, is neatly half text, half image--a layout that, if not all that common in the book, is still telling about its methods and arguments.

The text alludes to how French officials in Damascus had started to rethink what heritage should mean in a mandate setting that no longer felt "controlled" or practicable in the long-term. The image—a 1931 aerial photograph taken by France's aviation forces—shows Damascus' Great Umayyad Mosque, whose rediscovered 8th-century mosaics were suddenly being hailed by French heritage specialists as proof of earlier Christian and Islamic coexistence. The glittering tiles, French officials suggested, showed historical cooperation—and, by implication, justified French involvement in Syria and Lebanon.

It's also noteworthy that my page 99 suggests how images work in Resurrecting the Past. The book depends on images because the mandate’s heritage work did also. And this particular photograph illustrates a point that I make throughout the book: that heritage was produced through a dialectic relationship between representation and materiality.

Here we get a classic “view from above" of the Mosque that was shot by French military photographers and appeared in magazines back in France. The image is a reminder that the French wanted to frame how the Mosque was presented to French publics back home. But the Mosque is also, very clearly in its own right, a massive structure anchored in the heart of Damascus, and those properties gave the site qualities that often eluded French attempts at control.

You can see here, all on page 99, how real materiality and representational framing both defined heritage-making.

Learn more about Resurrecting the Past at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna-Luna Post's "Galileo's Fame"

Anna-Luna Post is a historian of knowledge at Leiden University. She is interested in all facets of the world of scholarship and learning in the early modern period. Trained as a cultural historian and Italianist, she is also fascinated by the intersections between early capitalism and environmental history, especially in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Post has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, Cambridge University, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, and the Medici Archive Project and the Netherlands Institute for Art History in Florence. She studied in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Bologna.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Galileo's Fame: Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century, and shared the following:

Readers opening my book on page 99 will be met by a black-and-white portrait of Galileo smiling at them. The portrait, made by Francesco Villamena, appeared in his 1613 work Letters on Sunspots, a polemical work flowing out of a dispute between Galileo and a German Jesuit, Christoph Scheiner, over the nature of dark spots that could be observed on (or near, according to Scheiner) the sun’s surface. Villamena’s portrait captures Galileo, dressed in a fur-lined robe, below two putti holding the instruments of his scholarly fame: his geometrical compass, the telescope, and the books he had published thus far. Most of the page is taken up by the portrait and caption, leaving space for just five lines of text. These lines let readers know that this was the first of Galileo’s works to include an author portrait, and convey the idea that an author’s portrait often served to capture readers’ attention and establish a sense of familiarity. The last line tells readers that the Accademia dei Lincei “paid for the design and worked—”, but then the page cuts off…

Alas, I don’t think the Page 99 Test works too well for my book, as it may give readers the wrongful impression that the book consists of 80% images and 20% text. Still, page 99, which appears in the middle of the third chapter, does showcase my book’s approach and thematic focus.

Galileo’s Fame recounts how a remarkable cast of characters, including artists, poets, philosophers, popes, lower clergymen, cardinals, courtiers, and, yes, the members of the Accademia dei Lincei, shaped Galileo’s fame through a variety of media. The book consequently embraces a wide variety of sources, pays careful attention to the visual culture of the time, and is not afraid to pursue in-depth analysis of poems written in Galileo’s honor: page 99 lies in the middle of a chapter that focuses especially on such poems and the visual artefacts of Galileo’s fame. I use these sources to show how people with different relationships to Galileo could try to latch onto his fame, in order to advance some of their own career goals, and argue that this could be beneficial (the poems meant attention!) but also detrimental (the poems did not always give him full credit) to Galileo.

That said, within the book, chapter 3 (“Admiration and Appropriation”) stands out as it discusses a full cast of characters for whom fame was a good thing. The other four chapters, meanwhile, show that for many seventeenth-century observers fame usually elicited some form of suspicion as well, as they associated it with gossip, the unreliable and unruly opinion of crowds, and with pride. In this way, the book captures the highly ambiguous nature of scholarly fame in this period, showing that fame was at once a highly coveted, and a controversial asset.

Learn more about Galileo's Fame at the University of Pittsburgh Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue