J. Paul Kelleher's "The Social Cost of Carbon"

J. Paul Kelleher is an Associate Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

His research and teaching explore ethical and other philosophical dimensions of public policy, especially climate policy and health policy.

Kelleher applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Social Cost of Carbon: Ethics and the Limits of Climate Change Economics, and reported the following:

If readers opened my book to page 99 they would definitely get a good feel for the thing as a whole. They would quickly see that the book is technical and not an easy read for the layperson. I realize this admission is not going to help me sell books, but I also believe in full disclosure! Still, even the uninitiated reader can get a good sense of the book's motivations and aims by reading its accessible and short stage-setting preface, the preprint version of which is available here.

Page 99 of the book has me discussing an important topic in climate change economics, namely the "pure time discount rate." Evaluative economic models of climate change typically assume that if a benefit or harm will come later in time, it is for that reason less worth caring about than if it would be experienced today. Page 99 considers one of the arguments for holding this view, an argument concerning uncertainty. Later in chapter 5 I provide a much longer discussion of pure time discounting in climate change economics and in welfare economics more generally.

After that discussion of pure time discounting, page 99 also kicks off my explanation and analysis of a very important theorem of welfare economics, John Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem. (Harsanyi won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994, but for work done in another area of economics.) Harsanyi's theorem provides an axiomatic basis for broadly utilitarian welfare economics, which is the economic framework that underpins many evaluations of climate change policy. But most climate economists do not draw on Harsanyi's theorem. If they give any consideration at all to the theoretical foundations of their models, they are likely to invoke distinct utilitarian theorems that I analyze elsewhere in the book. The discussion that begins on page 99 ends with my commending Harsanyi's theorem to climate economists. I think it is the proper foundation for evaluative climate change economics, and the book as a whole argues for this.

Visit J. Paul Kelleher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Wallace's "The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto"

Benjamin Wallace is the author of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto, an investigation into the murky origins of cryptocurrency.

Earlier work includes his book The Billionaire’s Vinegar, an instant New York Times bestseller which The Economist called “a great tale, well told” and the Times described as “one of the rare books on wine that transcends the genre.”

Wallace applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto finds me coming to doubt that computer scientist Nick Szabo, a usual suspect in the perennial efforts to figure out the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto (in 2015, the New York Times called him the person Silicon Valley insiders believed to be Nakamoto), is in fact Nakamoto. My creeping doubt is both forensic and intuitive. I point out inconsistencies in the details of the case for Szabo as Nakamoto, and also some personality discrepancies.

To the extent that page 99 shows me as the narrator-investigator, in the weeds evaluating a particular candidate and bringing fresh eyes to a stubborn problem, and captures the book's milieu of libertarian computer science, it’s fairly representative. This is a detective story, and there I am detecting. On the other hand, it’s one of the more heady moments in the book, in contrast to plenty of more visceral moments—including a car chase, a visit to a room full of frozen heads and bodies in the Arizona desert, and a bloody incident with a machete—so I wouldn’t say it perfectly captures the experience of reading this book.

One other way in which page 99 Isn’t entirely representative: I wrote this book because I became convinced that the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, and the efforts, including my own, to crack it, was both a gripping story in its own right and an organic way for a civilian to gain an understanding of the whole crypto phenomenon. It’s a Trojan horse of sorts, which I’m not sure comes through clearly on this particular page.

Learn more about the book and author at Benjamin Wallace's website.

Writers Read: Benjamin Wallace (February 2008).

The Page 99 Test: The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mia Bloom's "Veiled Threats"

Mia Bloom is a Professor of Communication and Middle East Studies at Georgia State University and the International Security Fellow at New America. She conducts ethnographic field research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. Author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing, with Roy Licklider; (2007), Bombshell: Women and Terror (2011), Small Arms: Children and Terror (2019), and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon, with Sophia Moskalenko (2021).

Bloom applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Veiled Threats: Women and Global Jihad, and reported the following:

If readers opened Veiled Threats to page 99, they would read both about how ISIS abused and exploited Yazidi sex slaves as well as whether ISIS should be charged with the crime of genocide because it engaged in ethnic cleansing of Yazidi areas, but also the capture of women during combat, requires the implementation of the Geneva accords, that they would be protected from predation. In fact, ISIS did quite the opposite. Page 99 describes the process of selection, where the female prisoners were separated from the men, the combatants separated the old from the young. ISIS terrorists treated the women like chattel, as ISIS evaluated them based on age, eye color, and even breast size.

While the majority of the book is dedicated to the women who exercised agency and joined the jihad, perpetrated acts of terrorism, or recruited others to do so, page 99 explores the ramifications of women’s involvement with Jihadi groups and offers the reader detailed information about the victims.

The book as a whole explores whether women in Jihadi groups were nothing more than victims of men or the patriarchal society. In some instances, the woman have been drugged or manipulated, especially the very young girls who were operatives for Boko Haram. Perhaps the most surprising part of the book, is that what we think we know about women in Boko Haram, or ISIS or Al Qaeda is superficial and stereotypes. The women in these militant groups exercised considerably more agency than the literature has previously allocated them. While women in ISIS did not fight on the front lines, many were as radical if not more radical than their husbands. The lesson patriarchal groups learn is that if you get the women on board, you guarantee the next generation of extremists and make the organization immune to counter terror policies like targeted assassination.

The book also probes how jihadi groups legally differentiate between female hostages (rahina) versus sex slaves (sabayya), drawing on Islamic law and applied to the events of October 7, 2023, in Gaza and Southern Israel. By the Islamic rules of war, what occurred in Southern Israel in 2023 violates multiple hadith and surahs in the Quran. The book presents a theory of why gender-based violence occurs during certain types of ethnic wars in which the ultimate goal is the control of territory, making violence against civilians intentional to force them to abandon their homes and flee. Thus Veiled Threats offers a corrective to the inaccurate stereotypes about veiled women being powerless, voiceless and faceless in the global jihad.

Learn more about Veiled Threats at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Bombshell: Women and Terrorism by Mia Bloom.

The Page 99 Test: Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom & Sophia Moskalenko.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Todd's "Living with Jane Austen"

Janet Todd has been thinking and writing about books for more than half a century. She has been a biographer, novelist, critic, editor and memoirist. In the 1970s, she helped open up the study of early women writers by beginning a journal and compiling encyclopedias before editing the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, and Jane Austen. She has worked in English departments in Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK. A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is now an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish and Newnham Colleges and an Emerita Professor of the University of Aberdeen.

Todd applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Living with Jane Austen, and reported the following:

This is part of page 99 where I look at Jane Austen as a letter writer, mainly to her beloved sister Cassandra , her other self, as she calls her:

I have become a fan of Jane Austen’s letters, mischievous portmanteau accounts of a life filled with people – some too fat, some too short-necked, some just too nondescript for comment – and random things, from muslins and sofas to honey, cakes and wine. The letters are unpredictable, skipping from lace collars to a brace of pheasants, from ale to ailments. Austen displays in herself those little grievances we all have as duty bangs against desire, but she never stays long in irritable mode. Soon, she’s off and away to green shoes or missing gloves.

The letters are captivating, with their spurts of excited or tremulous life. A niece has a ‘purple Pelisse’; it may be a secret but not kept well enough to avoid the snooping of an aunt in the bedroom acting like a naughty, middle-aged Catherine Morland poking around Northanger Abbey. Not much escapes this aunt, not much is unrecorded. She’s eager to share the most enticing trivialities.

Page 99 occurs in the chapter called ‘Poor Nerves’. It is part of the section on Jane Austen and the body, the next chapter being labelled ‘The Unruly Body’. In ‘Poor Nerves’ I describe my joy in reading Jane’s letters meant only for her sister’s eyes—or sometimes the eyes of other close family members and friends—but not for ours in the 21st century. Where the novels are the result of careful revision and rewriting, these letters are spontaneous and undoctored. Jane Austen is thrifty with paper, so there’s little question of her jettisoning first attempts; in one letter she chides herself for not writing a smaller hand so that she could get more on to her single page. Paper and postage are expensive.

In the quotation above, the interweaving of my personal response to Austen’s writing and more distanced critical comment is typical of the book as a whole, although elsewhere I provide more background historical and literary material. This includes detail on Regency houses, on the fashionable way of looking at external nature, on contemporary responses to money and the making of money, on the uneasiness over girls’ education and manners in a changing world--and on the anxiety over ailments that result from a seeming interaction of mind and body.

For this topic I put Jane Austen in the context of other writers worried about physical ailments. In this context, her attitude in novels and letters can often seem bracing, sometimes less than sympathetic! She shows how often headaches and nervous diseases result from emotions like jealousy or self-pity; instead of running to physical remedies—many of which, such as bloodletting with leeches and drinking concoctions including mercury, would have worsened the problem—she advises exercise and a change of scene. As so often, there’s much useful advice in Jane Austen--though she never presses it on you!

Austen’s ‘global’ fame means that many people know her from the films and many spinoffs and dramatisations rather than her writings. I hope that my book might draw readers back to the wonderful novels—and that they will share my enduring enthusiasm, and be challenged by some of my unorthodox ideas. (Did Cassandra burn most of Jane’s letters?)

Visit Janet Todd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Rosino's "Democracy Is Awkward"

Michael Rosino is assistant professor of sociology at Molloy College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside American Grassroots Political Organizing, and reported the following:

Democracy is Awkward is a study of grassroots political organizers and how they respond to racial inequality in politics and society. It focuses on a political organization I call the “Grassroots Action Party.” This matter is clearly relevant to our contemporary struggles to protect rights and democracy through the power of multiracial coalitions that take racial justice seriously. Page 99 of Democracy is Awkard lies in the middle of the chapter on how whites participants racial habits shape grassroots political strategies, it specifically tells the stories of participants who regard conversations about race with people of color as inherently stressful and conflict-laden. As an ethnographer, I have many tools in my toolkit for studying the social world of my participants. In this case, I used a vignette during interviews where I presented them with a hypothetical situation where a white person is uncomfortable discussing racial issues with people of color and therefore avoidant. The vignette seemed to resonate with several of them. In particular, a participant that I call Jacqueline connected it to the following story,

“I had a dear friend, and I still consider her a friend, but I haven’t talked to her in many years. We just hit it off, you know, and had a wonderful friendship, and she was having some struggles at a certain point, and we were in a phone conversation, and it just kind of went down this road where, you know, she was really upset, and she just got more and more upset and she ended up screaming at me which I mean she is one of the sweetest people I know she just screamed 'fuck you' at me and hung up. […] I was kind of like, wow, what happened and what is going on, and I couldn’t… I sort of… it is like do I call her back or do I not? […] She called me back, and she was really upset, and she is like, 'you know, I am really sorry,' and I am like “'it is not a problem, it is really not a problem.'”

Jacqueline told me that if she could talk to her estranged friend now, she would say,

“I love you. You are one of the people that I have been closest to in my life, and I know I am a white person with stupid white person stuff, and I am sorry, you know, and, you know, I am responsible for my behavior at the same time, but there is a way that nobody is to blame for growing up, you know, being born into a racist society […] my guess is that she was angry or, you know, she knew, and you know, knows that I have privilege as a white person, as a middle-class person.”

This page illuminates a critical example of the argument in Democracy is Awkward – that our feelings of discomfort, particularly around unwieldy confrontations with the reality of racial injustice, can undermine real strategies for building grassroots democracy amid racial oppression. The book examines the overall situation and the promise of cross-racial coalitions for grassroots organizing, the shared motivations and experiences of organizers, and the distinct awareness, habits, and strategies of white organizers and organizers of color. Documenting and theorizing the stark contrast between participants of different racial backgrounds is a major plank of the book’s contribution. It represents how racial oppression produces social distance and inequalities that shape our everyday lives and underlying assumptions.

White participants avoided situations that took them out of their comfort zones. Their organizing stuck to the neighborhoods they knew well, the people they felt they had commonality with, and the rituals and routines that they’d come to expect. In contrast, in the next chapter, I highlight the many participants of color who recognized and leaned into productive conflict and attempted to rectify the contradictions and limitations of the organization. These participants, for instance, noted that although the party advocates for racial justice and the empowerment of people of color, it remains overwhelmingly white and struggles to actualize its antiracist agenda. In many ways, navigating conflict, awkwardness, and ambiguity was an inherent aspect of their lived experiences. The point of this book is not simply to describe what people in the Grassroots Action Party did or theorize why it happened but to build real and practical insights about how confronting these racialized contradictions, awkwardness, and conflict inherent in building coalitions for democracy can be a catalyst for making grassroots organizing more effective and inclusive.

Visit Michael Rosino's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacy Torres's "At Home in the City"

Stacy Torres is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), core ladder rank faculty in the sociology doctoral program, and affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at UC Berkeley.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America, and reported the following:

Readers who flip to page 99 of At Home in the City will receive a glimpse into core themes at the heart of my book: grief, loss, place, memory, coming together, and unconventional place- based communities. This snippet showcases the voices of older adults I met during my five- year ethnographic study, trying to understand how they navigated a range of late life challenges, including health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges.

On this page, they share the complex emotions stirred in mourning a special place they’re about to lose—a mom-and-pop bakery in Manhattan that had become something of a public living room. At this point in the book, the store hadn’t yet closed, but as lease renewal negotiations broke down between the bakery owner and the landlord, its patrons began to ponder a future without their special place. They share deep sadness, bitterness, and dark humor as they react to the store’s imminent closure. The mood of this page reflects anticipation of their expectant loss and hints at their growing recognition of what they will lose and how important this “third place” had become to them, allowing them to connect with neighbors and avoid social isolation in retirement.

As I nervously applied this test, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the page captures the stakes of crisis they confronted and their deep attachments to place and to each other. I also found myself on page 99, as a chronicler of their story and a participant observer. Here, I reflect on my own attachments to them and their place, “Their kindness also stirred a twinge of anticipated loss for me as their parting words for the evening reminded me of how they had pulled me into their web of care. I also felt unease, on the precipice of a changing world that had in some ways become my own.”

What’s missing from page 99 is an explicit mention of people’s advanced ages and how their circumstances in old age heightened the significance of neighborhood places to them, as they spent more time closer to home due to financial limitations, surplus time in retirement, and health and mobility issues that constrained traveling far from their residences. But this page capably sets the stage for their unfolding journey—one that I hope readers will join—as they reconfigure long-held routines around new places and people, while also working together to preserve the vital bonds they forged in their lost home away from home.

Visit Stacy Torres's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessie Cox's "Sounds of Black Switzerland"

Jessie Cox is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University and received his doctorate from Columbia University. Active as a composer, drummer, and scholar, his work thematizes questions at the intersection of black studies, music/sound studies, and critical theory. From Switzerland, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, Cox thinks through questions of race, migration, national belonging, and our relation to the planet and the cosmos. His first monograph Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices addresses how thinking with blackness and experimental musical practices might afford the opening of new discourses, such as thematizing Black Swiss Life.

Cox applied the “Page 99 Test” to Sounds of Black Switzerland and reported the following:

From page 99:

Thus, to be with blackness is to be together in music, together in sound, even when not together, both at the same time, because togetherness cannot, here, imply beings reduced to one among others that meet. Rather, Blackness is that which speaks of a together-apartness that is before and out of which all singularities come from—it is radically before any togetherness in contradistinction to apartness. It is like Mighty’s music. This book is not by itself, even when it appears as such: it is always with those who are named within it and those who came before it, but also those who touched my life, the lives of the readers, as well as those yet to come, yet to be unearthed in it, who will Shift the timbre of my voice. Blackness bespeaks an incompleteness theorem, that asks us to keep digging, as a continual reworking of our stories and us. It is not that the future is radically open, marking something that is closed in the past or present—rather, everything is always open, even in its closedness. How otherwise could infinities calculate into singularities from nothing, like in Jérémie Jolo and in Chénière’s musics?

Page 99 is only half full. By itself it is not reflective of the whole book. But in some ways, it is quite an exemplary page. It in fact conveys a key theme found within the book: the importance of the listener (or reader) as part of that which we call the book, or the musical work. This idea is how I approach joining the opening of discourses around Black Swiss life with the unique possibilities of music. As an artform music always asks for listeners’ inventiveness—for people to listen and to do so in new ways. To me this means also to rethink how we hear, which includes recognizing how we can never hear everything and need each other, tools, materials, and experiences (or performances) to re-learn to listen. Music is radically refusing one way of listening, an end to listening, or a claim over what may be audible. This kind of musical listening practice is imaginative and, as Afrofuturists might say, world transforming. While this might seem at first to be about simply our own private worlds, it in fact, as an born in encounters, always also means a transformation of more than us. New sounds means new instruments, means new arrangements of materials, means new spaces (like for different acoustics)... Music is the sound of changing the world. Thus, this page hints to how this book petitions a re-learning to listen to unthought lives and worlds so as to make a better world. How can we critically engage in imaginative practices that create new ways of listening, sounding, making, and living, in and with the world and each other? Listening opens the question of us and our world, it is the not yet heard possibility to an unthought music.

Visit Jessie Cox's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Athanasopoulos's "Black Iconoclasm"

Charles Athanasopoulos is Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Communication from the University of Pittsburgh, and his research interests lie at the intersection of Black rhetorics, media, and culture. He has published numerous peer reviewed articles in venues such as Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association and the Western Journal of Communication.

Athanasopoulos applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Following Sharpley-Whiting, tracking the slippages in Fanonian thought is fruitful for meditating on how we can use parts of Fanon’s theories against Fanon himself given the limitations presented by his own personal investment in Western icons of gender and sexuality […] Engaging Spillers’ addendum to Fanonian theory, Fanonian slips highlight how Western conceptions of family and gender are inextricable from the racialized construction of Western humanity.

A reader who opened Black Iconoclasm on this page would be thrust into a complex conversation surrounding my concept of a “Fanonian slip” in relation to Fanon’s own commentary on gender and sexuality. Page 99 opens by finishing a paragraph which begins on page 98 and interrogates Fanon’s comments about cross-dressing and that “he know[s] nothing” about women of color in Black Skin, White Masks. It ends by beginning to read Fanonian thought through the addendums provided by Hortense J. Spillers in Black, White, and In Color. I imagine that the reader would likely have to pause and decide to gain a fuller context of the chapter to fully apprehend the unfolding argument on this page. However, I think this page demonstrates that this chapter wrestles with the limitations of Fanonian thought as it relates to gender and sexuality.

In this broader chapter (pp. 89-127), I unfurl the concept of “Fanonian slips” as moments of slippage which accidentally emerge in the attempt to smoothen racial tensions. For example, I interrogate former president Biden’s statement that “poor kids are just as bright as white kids” as a Fanonian slip which accidentally announces his correlation of rich/white, poor/BIPOC. In this chapter, I unfurl three examples across the interpersonal, political, and internal to consider how racial icons – public symbols which reflect Western values of race, gender, class, and sexuality – operate on every level of Western subjectivity and communication. Engaging Fanon and psychoanalysis, I articulate the slippage between Black skin and white mask in, for example, the public address of rapper Killer Mike and former president Obama. Fanonian slips thus reflect how Black iconoclasm manifests as a critical practice to be taken up within the flow of lived experience. This fourth chapter of the book, works in tandem with chapters on activism (Ch. 2), Black radical theory (Ch. 3), popular post/Ferguson films (Ch. 5), and BLM street art (Ch. 6) to unfurl a broader orientation of Black iconoclasm across different cultural arenas. Each chapter discerns the ways Black radicalism exceeds Western Man while also remaining reflexive about how those theories or practices may still contain residues of the very iconography we are trying to unsettle. This ritual process of Black radical discernment thus performs a lived orientation toward Fanon’s call for a “program of complete disorder” which eschews both linear narratives of racial progress and teleological blueprints of Black liberation.

Visit Charles Athanasopoulos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary Watt's "Shakespeare and the Law"

Gary Watt is Professor of Law, The University of Warwick. He co-founded the journal Law and Humanities and is general editor of Bloomsbury's Cultural History of Law. He has held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship on rhetorical performance and as a National Teaching Fellow and national "Law Teacher of the Year" (2009) for many years delivered rhetoric workshops for the Royal Shakespeare Company. His books include Shakespeare's Acts of Will, Dress, Law, and Naked Truth, Trusts and Equity, The Making Sense of Politics, Media, and Law, and Equity Stirring.

Watt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Shakespeare and the Law, and reported the following:

Page 99, which appears in a chapter on Shakespeare’s props, contends that “To appreciate the performance of legal and governmental power through stage props requires us to appreciate material performances in their wider social and religious contexts”. Two examples are given of props that performed the Elizabethan passage from Roman Catholicism to the Protestant idea of the priesthood of all people. The first is a wooden altar that was moved towards the congregants during the church service. The second is a provision in the burial ritual that empowered attendants to throw dust upon the coffin where this had previously been the exclusive function of the priest. Page 99 then considers the crown as an exemplary instance of a legal and governmental prop in Shakespeare’s history plays, quoting the Duke of Gloucester (the future Richard III) where he says ‘[h]ow sweet a thing it is to wear a crown, / Within whose circuit is Elysium / And all that poets feign of bliss and joy’ (3H6 1.2.29-31). That word “feign” has connotations of dishonesty but here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, it also refers to the poet’s art of using rhetorical “figures”. This brings us to the key argument of page 99 and of the chapter on props, which is that Shakespeare’s stage props perform rhetorically. The Crown, for example, performs as synecdoche, which is a figure through which a part represents a larger whole. An endless circle of incorruptible gold, the physical crown expresses exquisitely the deathless sequence of regal authority wherein queens and kings die but the monarch never does. It is a small hand prop, but it signifies a large idea.

The question is whether page 99, as a small part of my book, performs synecdochally as an effective representation of the whole. I think it performs quite well in that regard, since the larger argument of the book is that rhetorical performance is the key connection between Shakespeare and the law. Page 99 considers only one Shakespearean prop – the crown – but this invites us to consider other legally significant props (sword, book, seal etc) discussed in the same chapter. Alongside the chapter on props, we will naturally go on to consider the chapters on Shakespeare’s legal “stages” (his historical and physical place), his “roles” (his lawyers and other legal personalities), his “script” (the binding magic of his legal language), and the judgment of his “playgoers”.

Learn more about Gary Watt and his work, and read more about Shakespeare and the Law at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott Spillman's "Making Sense of Slavery"

Scott Spillman is an American historian and the author of the book Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today (2025). His essays and reviews have appeared in The Point, Liberties, The New Yorker, The New Republic, n+1, the Chronicle Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has published academic articles in Reviews in American History, History of Education Quarterly, and North Carolina Historical Review.

Spillman has a PhD in history from Stanford University, and before that he studied history, English, and political philosophy at the University of North Carolina (and Duke University) as a Robertson Scholar. Originally from Atlanta, he now lives in Denver with his partner and their twin daughters. He also spends part of his time in Leadville, where he serves as chair of the city’s historic preservation commission.

Spillman applied the “Page 99 Test” to Making Sense of Slavery and reported the following:

Page 99 of Making Sense of Slavery introduces Francis Lieber, an early political scientist in the United States who wrote an influential code of army conduct during the Civil War. The page gives some background on Lieber’s journey from Germany, where he was born, to the United States and shows him wrestling with the question of how war affects the status of slavery.

This turns out to be a perfect encapsulation of my book, which is all about how scholars like Lieber have studied and wrestled with slavery over the course of American history. In fact, the specific question that interests Lieber on page 99—the question of slaves as people versus slaves as property, or the mixture of “the two ideas Man and Thing,” as he put it—is one of the central themes of the first part of the book. Lieber believed that war washed away the status of slaves as property, leaving only people whom the US government and military should consider free. This was one of the arguments that the Union used to justify emancipation during the Civil War.

The way Lieber approaches that question about the status of slavery in the midst of the war also provides a good example, I think, of the way that the book always tries to connect ideas to lived experience. In other words, this is not just a story of books or arguments flying back and forth, but of embodied people struggling to make some sense of their own lives.

In addition to ideas and individuals, the book is interested in the institutions in which they take shape. Lieber’s background on page 99 provides a nutshell summary of some of the broader changes in the landscape of American intellectual life during the early republic, particularly the influence of German ideas and educational models after the 1820s. The very bottom of the page hints at an even more transformative institutional change that will come after the Civil War—the rise of the research university. The rest of the book deals largely with how the study of slavery would become incorporated into the research university, and with what consequences.

Visit Scott Spillman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue