Andrew K. Scherer's "As the Gods Kill"

Andrew K. Scherer is Pierre & Patricia Bikai Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology & the Ancient World, and Director of Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World at Brown University. He is the author of Mortuary Landscapes of the Ancient Maya and coeditor of Substance of the Ancient Maya and Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice.

Scherer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, As the Gods Kill: Morality and Social Violence among the Precolonial Maya, and reported the following:

Page 99 jumps in the middle of an important component of the book: – a discussion of how precolonial Maya fighting forces were organized. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this one-page glimpse misses the broader breadth and depth of the book, including its central aim: to think through the interplay between violence and morality. On page 99, I draw largely on early Spanish colonial sources from the 16th century AD to show that the Maya of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico amassed increasingly large armies following each expedition, relying on ever-wider political alliances to resist the earliest of Spanish incursions. The point being that Maya armies were potentially large and likely comprised of large swathes of the adult male population, as needed. While the evidence for military organization for precolonial times is more opaque, I do draw comparisons between some of the military titles employed at the time of the conquest and those that we see written in Classic period texts of the seventh and eighth centuries AD to suggest some parallels. At the very end of the page, I note that women were probably not involved in war as trained combatants, but likely were participants in ritual violence. Beyond page 99, I highlight how the use of some of these military titles provides a glimpse into the broader morality of killing at war and in ritual violence among the precolonial Maya, including the ambivalence felt towards some killers.

Learn more about As the Gods Kill at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Baring's "Vulgar Marxism"

Edward Baring is professor of history and human values at Princeton University. He is the author of Converts to the Real and The Young Derrida.

Baring applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931, with the following results:

Page 99 of Vulgar Marxism takes us to the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács and more particularly to my reading of his famous argument that “orthodox Marxism” can be found not in any of Marx’s “conclusions” but rather in his “method,” an argument he directs against the “vulgar Marxists.”

The page offers a pretty good example of my central claim. In the book I argue that, though many of the most prominent Marxist theorists of the twentieth century—like Antonio Gramsci, José Carlos Mariátegui, Karl Korsch, as well as Lukács—are normally read as esoteric intellectuals hawking a sophisticated theory accessible only to the university-educated, they were actually deeply involved in the institutions and practices of mass worker education, and their work takes on new meanings if we take this into account. In the first two chapters, I detail the most prominent model of worker education at the time, which was articulated by the German Marxist Karl Kautsky. He argued that under the conditions of capitalism, the party’s educational apparatus (schools, textbooks, lecture series, reading circles etc.) could only hope to transmit Marx’s “conclusions” to the workers and not his “method.” In redefining “orthodox Marxism” as method first and foremost, Lukács was suggesting that Kautsky had got it back to front. If the workers learnt Marx’s conclusions (especially about the impending collapse of capitalism) without the method, they might think that the revolution would happen all by itself, and then they would fail to do their part. Only by understanding Marx’s method would they realize that the power to change the course of history lay in their hands. Of course, this raised the question of how exactly the Communist Party should go about teaching Marx’s method (which is notoriously difficult) to millions of workers, especially given its limited resources. Over the rest of the chapter, I follow Lukács’s attempt to answer this question and show how it shaped his developing politics.

Learn more about Vulgar Marxism at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susannah Wilson's "A Most Quiet Murder"

Susannah Wilson is a Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick. She focuses on French cultural history from the fin de siècle to the mid-twentieth century, with an emphasis on women's lives, pathology, criminality, and drug cultures. Wilson is the author of Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book is the opening page of Chapter 5 entitled ‘The Trial’. It is the last chapter before my conclusion, ‘Afterlives’.

This chapter’s opening immediately places the reader inside a historical true‑crime narrative. Opening with a trial in Dijon in 1883, it tells us that the book deals with a violent crime and its legal consequences. Even without prior context, a reader would understand that they are reading a story inflected by law, justice, and the societal reverberations of a mysterious death, a murder for which two people are standing trial.

The page also shows that the book is as much about people and surrounding society as it is about the crime itself. The detailed portraits of legal advocates Étienne Metman and Paul Cunisset reveal key facts about the personalities and social positions of those involved. Their backgrounds, beliefs, and later achievements suggest that the legal world of provincial France is not just part of the mise-en-scene, but at the foreground of the story.

Although it reveals quite a lot, the page does not uncover all the elements that are to be found at the emotional or thematic heart of the book. It misses the centrality of womanhood, female suffering, and the broader social a medico-legal meaning of the crime. The reader does know that the case centres on a woman accused of abducting and killing a child, nor that the narrative explores the fragility and vulnerability of women’s and children’s lives in the 1880s. The eventual acquittal of Pierre Fiquet and the moral complexity it introduces also remain hidden.

Because of this, the Page 99 Test is only partially successful for my book. It offers a compelling moment, a clear sense of genre, and a strong historical tone, all of which could entice a reader to continue, or to flip back to find out the details of the story as it unfolds in the early chapters of the book. It mirrors the book’s prevailing tone, which keeps the reader engaged through its emphasis on human experience. But it withholds many of the deeper themes, strange mysteries, and dark places of human motivation that give the book its full power.

Learn more about A Most Quiet Murder at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Diamond's "Governing the Excluded"

Alex Diamond is assistant professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory, and reported the following:

A reader who opened Governing the Excluded to page 99 would find herself transported to a government meeting in Briceño, a small village in the mountains of Colombia. The meeting centers on a crop substitution program, negotiated as part of a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, that promised to provide farmers with goods to replace their coca (the plant that’s used to make cocaine) with legal crops:

In a July 2019 public meeting in Briceño to evaluate two years of the substitution program, I get my first in-person look at the new Duque-installed national director of the substitution program, Hernando Londoño. Eduardo is one local leader chosen to speak on behalf of the community. “Our whole economy was illicit,” he says. “And when you were telling us to pull out our coca, you promised productive projects in the first year. But now you’re telling us to wait. We don’t have resources to buy fertilizer, there’s no economy, there’s no work for the youth. So when will the projects arrive?”

After listening to more than an hour of complaints about state incumplimiento [broken promises], Londoño responds… “Briceño received $14 million in little over a year. But you’re saying the economy stopped because coca ended. Of course.” His voice drips with sarcasm. “But you should know there are no other municipalities in Colombia that have received this level of investment. And their economies haven’t been destroyed. With this reflection, you realize that you are privileged.... You need a change in attitude. A change in mentality. We need a substitution of people who are dedicated to licit crops.”

Beginning with this vignette would give the reader a reasonably good idea of the rest of the book, as well as the value of its ethnographic approach. By ethnography, what I mean is that while this is a book about drug economies, a landmark peace process, and capitalist development, its analysis is rooted in the stories I tell about the lives of Briceño’s farmers, stories I witnessed and collected over three years total of living in the village. This lets me show how for Eduardo (a pseudonym), growing coca lifted his family out of poverty—but also exposed them to terrible levels of violence. It shows how, in voluntarily pulling out their coca and joining the substitution program, he and his neighbors put their faith in the state, providing the basis for state authority to take hold in an area that had long been under guerrilla control. But it also shows the tremendous frustrations produced in local engagements with the state, which not only failed to deliver promised resources, but shifted blame to the farmers themselves. And finally, putting local experiences in historical context allows me to show how they speak to broader shifts: the changes in rural economies that explain why smallholding farmers like Eduardo across the world cannot simply make a living by growing legal crops without turning for help to armed groups or the state.

Visit Alex Diamond's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Hlavacik's "Willing Warriors"

Mark Hlavacik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism and Texas A&M University.

He studies controversies about education and education about controversies using historical, rhetorical, and qualitative research methods.

Hlavacik applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars, with the following results:

Page 99 of Willing Warriors contains some exposition about how the Common Core State Standards were developed to address the shortcomings of the standardized testing regime imposed under No Child Left Behind. It is important information for understanding that chapter, but not the most thrilling page in my book. So, in lieu of page 99, I’d like to suggest a few other pages that will give prospective readers a better sense of what’s in my book.

Page 2 tells the story of a suburban man who tried to ban an erotic thriller from a school library. It turned out that the library did not have the book, which made his decision to read a sexually explicit passage from it aloud at a schoolboard meeting kind of awkward.

Page 22 recounts the gruesome details of a hunting documentary that was shown to 10-year-olds, including the successful spearing, drowning, and dismemberment of a mother caribou and her calf.

Page 58 begins an analysis of Allan Bloom’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1988. The episode was titled “How Dumb Are We?” and rather than Pontiac G6 sedans, the studio audience was given the opportunity to answer for their ignorance of basic history and science on national television.

Page 75 includes excerpts from a memo written by a research assistant who was working for the Chair of the NEH, Lynne Cheney. The RA had been attending academic conferences and reporting what she saw to Cheney. At the College Art Association’s annual convention in 1992, she saw 15ft projection of “women’s genitalia” which had been “lifted from porn magazines.”

On page 114, David Barton worries aloud on The Glenn Beck Program that the Common Core will make cursive “a language as foreign to students as hieroglyphics.” Cursive is not a language.

Finally, on page 158, you get to find out what happened to the guy from page 2.

Visit Mark Hlavacik's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ronald Angelo Johnson's "Entangled Alliances"

Ronald Angelo Johnson holds the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History at Baylor University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution, and shared the following:

When opening to page 99, the reader enters the book mid-sentence, encountering a discussion of the petition from Felix. “…the cruelties of enslavement and white supremacist attitudes. He then summarized the condition of Black life plainly: “We have no Property. We have no Wives. No Children. We have no City. No Country.” In 1773, Felix, a Black Bostonian, like White American rebels in that day, submitted his grievances in writing to Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson and the House of Representatives. Felix’s call for the end of slavery during the American Revolution represents the first public, Black-authored antislavery petition to the Massachusetts legislature—and perhaps the first in American history.

A reader opening to page 99 gets a good sense of the book. There, the reader engages themes discussed throughout the book. Some are Black and White American patriots, the importance of early newspapers, the power of citizens in an American democracy to critique government leaders, the search for justice in courts, and the US’s interconnectedness with people across the world.

One sentence captures an important theme: “The revolutionary period created a sense of optimism that Felix exhibited in his petition.” The American Revolution did not solve the problems in the United States. The revolutionary moment gave people hope that problems could be solved. The sharing of news about liberties being won across the Atlantic world encouraged prominent White American men to push for independence, White American women to advocate for greater rights, free Black people to seek enfranchisement, and enslaved Africans to demand freedom.

An important part of the book is absent on page 99. This book illuminates the strong ties between the US and the French Caribbean colony Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) during the American Revolution. It would be a shame for readers to miss narratives about the Dominguan rebel Jacques Delaunay, the justice seeker Marie-Jeanne Carenan, and the future Haitian Revolution leader Toussaint Louverture.

Another sentence is instructive: “Felix submitted his petition in the hope that enslaved people could join their white neighbors in the enjoyment of articulated rights for all humankind.” The American Revolution stoked the desire for freedom and equality that lived within the hearts of Atlantic world inhabitants. In 2026, the year the US celebrates its 250th anniversary, the desire for freedom and equality lives on. That never-ending search is the inheritance—from the Founding Generation—to all citizens and immigrants who love, labor, and sacrifice to help the United States live up to the truly revolutionary ideal “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

Learn more about Entangled Alliances at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Derby's "Bêtes Noires"

Lauren Derby is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo and coeditor of The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics.

Derby applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, and reported the following:

Page 99 showcases one of the central questions of Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands – why animals figure so prominently in the popular culture and religion of Hispaniola which I explain through the prominence of hunting and extensive cattle ranching in the island’s history. Contraband sales of cattle peaked in the late eighteenth century as Dominican cattle and oxen were sold to the neighboring colony of Saint Domingue when it became the largest sugar producer of the French Atlantic since the sugar mills were driven by oxen. Due to the vast expanse of feral herds formed over centuries of pigs and cattle originally brought by Columbus as seed animals, the Dominican Republic developed a vibrant hunting culture. Hunting has not been explored much for Caribbean history but it was an important feature of Dominican everyday life and one that enabled these peasants the luxury of remaining outside of slavery and sugar plantation labor while it continued into the late nineteenth century in neighboring Cuba and Puerto Rico. Dominican hunting skills also shaped the army since troops were not provisioned as they were in Cuba, a detail also noted on that page. Hunting and extensive ranching has left its mark on popular culture from animal nicknaming practices to horned carnival costumes and most importantly storytelling about spirit demons in animal form. The fact that the animals from the Columbian exchange have become spirit demons I argue is a material manifestation of what Dominicans call the fukú de Colón – the curse of Columbus – and represent trauma since these animals were used to dispossess the indigenous population and were terrifying since the largest animal on the island had been a hutia – a large rodent - before the massive horses and cows and the violent boars and slave catching canines arrived.

Learn more about Bêtes Noires at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek J. Thiess's "American Fantastic"

Derek J. Thiess is an associate professor of English at the University of North Georgia. He is the author of Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction; Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach; and Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography.

Thiess applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, American Fantastic: Myths of Violence and Redemption, with the following results:

This is the last page of chapter 3, which is an analysis of the John Henry legend, especially as it appears in popular culture. As such it contains some final thoughts about a short story by Balogun Ojetade from 2012 titled “Rite of Passage: Blood and Iron.” The culmination of this analysis notes how this story invests “Henry with a violent agency that both activates the spirit of the legendary forms and flies in the face of the critics of redemptive violence that would reduce that violence to futile resignation.” It then nods towards a prior chapter (and a prior book of mine) discussing violence in sport, putting Ojetade’s text in a martial and sporting context. The text notes that the “relationship between sport and violence” indicates how “denouncing redemptive violence in this case would directly mean Henry’s accepting the status quo. It would mean openly accepting the violent historical context that the historian makes central in their work on Henry.” This paragraph also notes that Ojetade’s story and the other fantastical reinterpretations considered in the chapter highlight “the importance of taking seriously the ‘recycling’ of the folktale.”

The last paragraph is transitional, looking forward to the next chapter, which takes up the legendary figure of Blackbeard, noting that at this point the book is “transition[ing] us to a more overt entanglement of colonialism, religion, and capitalism.” However, it also underscores that “there is a tendency in the work of criticism to emphasize certain violences...over the potential of resistant violences and to co-opt such legends as John Henry within existing Christian mythic traditions.” A co-opting that will be even more overt in the coming chapters.

Because this page is signposting between two (of my favorite!) chapters it actually does a good job of highlighting most of the central concerns of the book. The random browser may, however, feel a little lost as the “Myth of Redemptive Violence” is not elaborated upon on this page—it’s an idea first developed in Religious Studies by Walter Wink, but that has become popular throughout historical and social scientific work. The general idea is that violence has become a kind of mythic (as myths are stories that authorize belief) focus of our society and has supplanted traditional religious, Christian, morality. The longer arc of the book demonstrates how this notion is revisionist, overtly working against Richard Slotkin’s germinal work on regeneration through violence, in order to carefully hold Christianity apart from its historical role (whether directly or apologetically) in those very violences. The central thesis of this book, then—that attempts to erase violence from our society often betrays a continued pacification strategy, via religious myth, to obscure religion’s role in colonial violence. This thesis is expressed in this chapter both in how Henry is uncritically recorded in the historical record as a quasi-biblical figure (i.e. Samson) and in how the wholesale denial of (systemic) violence obscures the potential for violent resistance in the various versions of Henry’s story.

Noting those various versions also does a decent job of explaining the methodology of the book, which is a comparative approach between folkloristic and fictional forms (“recycling” is a nod to Frank de Caro’s Folklore Recycled). This approach is heavily theorized in the introduction, so lacking that context, the browser will intuit this method, but perhaps still wonder why. Furthermore, they may be turned off by what is clearly an etic approach to the topic (as an early reviewer was). Yet again in the framework of the book, this is addressed as rather necessary to avoid criticism’s continued contribution to Christian supremacy via insider apologetics.

Visit Derek J. Thiess's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fabricio Tocco's "Precarious Secrets"

Fabricio Tocco is an assistant professor at the School of Literature, Languages & Linguistics at the Australian National University and author of the prize winning Latin American Detectives against Power: Individualism, the State, and Failure in Crime Fiction.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford’s test works remarkably well for Precarious Secrets. A glimpse of page 99 would offer a browser a very accurate idea of what the book is about. It features a scene analysis of one of the most significant Latin American political thrillers ever made: Jorge Fons’ Rojo amanecer (Red Dawn), a Mexican film made in the late 1980s. The thriller, a unique portrayal of the Tlatelolco Massacre held in Mexico City in 1968, is a paradigmatic case study of the theories that I develop throughout the book: it serves as a central example to explore how Latin American filmmakers have used precarity in favor of storytelling. I understand “precarity” in a very broad way. From the most obvious point of view, there’s the financial constraints, as Fons operated with a very tight budget. As a result, the film was shot indoors almost in its entirety. From a less evident perspective, I examine how precarity informs political censorship, too. The polysemic nature of precarity paves the way for discussions on filmmaking choices regarding sound and offscreen techniques, but also around interiority and exteriority, fiction and archive, affect and infrapolitics, motherhood and gender, as well as the invasion of the political in the personal, all explored in page 99.

This page includes a review of what important critics such as Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Samuel Steimberg, and Jorge Majfud have previously written about Rojo amanecer. I build on their arguments to go beyond them, offering a new reading of the film. Much like in the rest of the book, I engage in this page with a central concept I coined to study political thrillers: the “grammar of secrecy,” a category defined in the introduction as “a particular way of thinking about secrets, utilizing prepositions of space, such as ‘under’ and ‘above’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘behind’ and ‘in front of.’” This concept sheds light to the understudied ties between secrecy and space: if secrets are always stored somewhere, it is through this grammar and its prepositions that political thrillers hide and eventually showcase secrets. In page 99, the secret in question has to do with state-sponsored violence, a key theme that obsessively reappears in Latin American renditions of the genre.

Learn more about Precarious Secrets at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Esther Eidinow's "Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth"

Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol; she has also taught at Newman University and Nottingham University. Her research explores ancient Greek culture, especially ancient religion, magic, ritual, and belief, drawing on theories from different disciplines, including anthropology and cognitive science, and she has published widely on these topics and their intersections with the history of emotions, gender, women's histories, and environmental humanities. Her latest project, funded by the AHRC, co-created (with teachers) is an accessible virtual reality experience of visiting the ancient Greek oracle of Zeus at Dodona in the fifth century BCE, for use in classrooms.

Eidinow applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth, and shared the following:

On page 99, the reader plunges into the chapter headed ‘Air’, that is, myths of metamorphosis that culminate in the body of a man or woman changing into a form related to this element. The three other chapters in the book cover myths that describe metamorphoses related to 'Earth', 'Fire', and 'Water'.

The page opens with reflection on different versions of the Greek myth of Prokne and Philomela: in the canonical version, they are sisters who have suffered terribly at the hands of Tereus, Prokne’s husband. Before they flee him, the sisters kill Itys, Prokne’s son by Tereus, cook him, and serve him to Tereus as a meal. At this point, the gods turn Prokne into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow, and Tereus into a hoopoe. This is just one version of the myth, but as page 99 elaborates, myth is both mutable and unchanging. Even the very different versions by other ancient writers maintain the key narrative thread of the rape of a sister and the killing and cannibalism of a son.

The discussion then turns to an overview of the other stories of transformations into birds studied in this chapter—and how they depict men and women in the most extreme of situations, removed from human society. Many of these stories portray the breakdown of family order; and one argument suggests that metamorphosis is prompted by the need to exclude from a community those who have committed dreadful crimes, lest they bring down the anger of the gods.

Alongside that perspective, page 99 offers another way of reading these myths—that is, that they relate metamorphosis to the experience of intense and unbearable emotions. This chapter highlights the emotions of grief, pride, excessive and misplaced desire, and the trauma of fear and anger provoked by sexual assault.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book: page 99 includes a number of its key themes, including the nature of myths and myth-telling and how myths of metamorphosis reinforce cultural conventions and religious beliefs. But, above all, page 99 incorporates the book’s main argument—that myths of metamorphosis evoke human experiences of extreme emotion or trauma, which we now discuss in medicalised terms as fight or flight, freeze, faint and flop.

In this book, I suggest that ancient Greek men and women also experienced these physiological responses, but since they lacked our medical knowledge, they evoked these experiences through stories about bodies literally changing. For example, in the chapter ‘Air’, rather than depicting a traumatic ‘faint’ response, or describing an experience of dissociation, these stories portray men and women falling, and/or turning into birds, being snatched by winds and/or changing into stars.

As the rest of the book argues, in the ancient Greek mind, transformations like this made a sort of sense. Ancient Greek philosophical and scientific writings suggest that the elements, air, earth, fire and water, were understood to be the building blocks of everything—including humans. In ancient stories of metamorphosis, the human body’s elements are forced into another form, in moments of extreme and violent emotion; they become part of the surrounding landscape. Both men and women undergo these changes, but it is women who are the primary protagonists, deeply vulnerable both to the violence of gods and men; and to profound emotions, especially grief.

The book’s other chapters explore the mythic relationship of emotions and elements. We have all at some point talked about being so frightened that we are rooted to the spot, or turned to stone with fear. We might now understand this as a traumatic ‘freeze’ response, but in the stories described in the chapter ‘Earth’, men and women literally turn into stone, or are rooted in the earth as plants or trees. Stories in the chapter ‘Fire’ describe the power of rage at secrets revealed. Finally, the stories explored in the chapter ‘Water’ evoke the ceaseless flow of traumatic memory, and a repeating story pattern of violent separation, change and rebirth.

These myths of metamorphosis are specific to the ancient contexts in which they were told and heard, but they can also, I argue, offer insights into embodied experiences that are shared across cultures, including our own.

Learn more about Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue