Brahim El Guabli's "Desert Imaginations"

Brahim El Guabli is an associate professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and an associate professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences, and reported the following:

I wrote Desert Imaginations to explain why what happens in deserts is almost expected to unfold in them. Given that the abundant literature about arid lands has not really been able to furnish a concept that can connect its variant threads, I have defined Saharanism as the ideology that undergirds the myriad ways deserts are perceived and acted upon. Accordingly, Saharanism is always at work in the manner deserts are talked about and (mis)used whether we are thinking about their exploitation for extractive industries and their use for storage of lethal waste or whether our attention focuses on approaching them as loci for experimentation with new technologies or as areas outside the realm of law and ethics where anything can be undertaken.

Interestingly, this except from page 99 is the start of my chapter on “Experimental Saharanism,” which an important theme that runs throughout the book:

In April 1927, botanist Walter T. Swingle, who worked for the US Department of Agriculture, was invited by French authorities to participate in an investigation into Fusarium oxysporum’s infestation of palm groves in the Moroccan desert. Swingle, who happened to be affiliated with the University of Lyon, was asked by his French contacts to accompany them to Figuig and Boudnib, which had a reputation for the high quality of their dates, but whose groves suffered from this illness that made palms wilt and die. This proved to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Swingle to set foot on what he called “the single date planting place in all Africa.” In addition to learning about Bayoud disease, Swingle observed how local people tended to the groves, pollinated the trees, and cleaned them in preparation for the harvest season. During his time in Boudnib, he met a tribal leader who gave him eleven Medjool palm offshoots that he sent to Washington, DC. Once there, the offshoots were quarantined on a Native American reservation in the Nevada desert for a period of two years. A hundred years later, Swingle can be said to not only have imported a new plant but also to have placed the Sahara at the heart of the multibillion-dollar Medjool (pronounced Mejhoul/ljihl in Morocco) date economy in the US. Swingle’s story is only one manifestation of a practice that I propose to call “experimental Saharanism,” which subsumes all endeavors to test new ideas and undertakings in desert spaces.

Page 99 of Desert Imaginations gives a clear idea about what the book is about in two ways. Firstly, it demonstrates the extractive and experimental as well as the inter- desert nature of Saharanism through Swingle’s and his contemporaries’ endeavors to transplant plants and husbandry from other deserts to the American west. Secondly, the passage takes us to France, Morocco, Algeria, and the United States, indicating the imbrication of histories of Saharanism and the existence of an trans-desert grammar that the book delineates to help readers understand why deserts across different geographical

Learn more about Desert Imaginations at the University of California Press website.

Read an interview with Brahim El Guabli about Desert Imaginations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Adamson's "Projecting America"

Patrick Adamson is Associate Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Editor at Open Screens, and Assistant Editor at Film Journal.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Projecting America: The Epic Western and National Mythmaking in 1920s Hollywood, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds me moving between two major case studies from Chapter Two of Projecting America, wrapping up a discussion of North of 36 (1924)—a film that looked to present the first post–Civil War cattle drive from Texas to Kansas in 1867 as a decisive episode in America’s national story—and beginning one centered around The Pony Express (1925)—which looked to do similar for the eponymous mail service. A heading, “‘Saving California for the Union’: The Pony Express (1925)”, divides the two and hints at what they look to do with their respective topics. As is indicated here, both the cattle drive linking the postbellum South with markets to the north and the express riders racing west to California against the backdrop of a looming Civil War are presented on film as episodes where “the very course of national history is at stake”. In turn, page 99 signals why 1920s Hollywood was attempting to contribute to, and even reshape, popular understandings of what was then widely seen as the most important period in American history, quoting Billboard magazine’s assessment of North of 36’s success: “That the public is not supporting socalled [sic] sex pictures, society dramas, stories of beer-drinking revels, petting parties and whatnot overloaded with Boccaccio frankness is borne out in blazing proof.”

Here we see why the Page 99 Test works well for Projecting America. One of my book’s larger arguments is that silent-era Hollywood turned to epic Western production in a moment in which the morals of its films and stars were under scrutiny, and the chapter this page comes from is a detailed exploration of what this actually entailed in terms of film production and promotion. My quotations and framing here give a sense of how this effort was received and what the intent behind it was: by linking the nation’s most pervasive form of mass entertainment to a stated aspiration to educate the public, the new American film capital positioned their historical films about the frontier as interventions in the period’s pressing debates around cinema and, in particular, its social influence.

The result was that epic Westerns were acclaimed by many at the time as a new, distinctly American way of engaging with history that could unite diverse filmgoers via inspiring lessons in the “making” of the nation. What the Page 99 Test highlights is that, in doing this, the film industry of the 1920s actively looked to expand standard narratives of Westward expansion, presenting those responsible for the Texan cattle drive and the express riders delivering news to the frontier as “pioneers” comparable to those who had traversed the Oregon Trail in The Covered Wagon (1923)—the film that inaugurated the cycle. This was a major aim of my study. While it is tempting to assume that the film industry simply restated the favorite myths of American audiences, the idea that cinema could offer a new way of engaging with history—visual, wide-reaching, and understood across linguistic and national divides—was a crucial part of these discussions. Revisiting this page brought me back to the simple questions that first guided my research: what did it mean to make a successful historical film in the first decades of Hollywood, and why did it matter?

Learn more about Projecting America at the University of Oklahoma Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert E.C. Davis's "Lieutenants and Light"

Robert E. C. Davis spent twenty-five years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps and retired in 2008 as the colonel of an artillery regiment. He holds a BS in geography from the University of Utah, an MA in national security and strategic studies from the College of Naval Warfare, an MS in geographic information systems technology from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in remote sensing and earth observation from Penn State University. He is certified as a mapping scientist by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

Davis applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Lieutenants and Light: Mapping the US Army Heliograph Networks in Late Nineteenth-Century Arizona and New Mexico, with the following results:

On page 99 there is a map of the Lyda Spring heliograph station. On the map, the station is located on elevated terrain west of the small village of Mule Creek, a village that still exists. A single sightline connects the station to the heliograph station at Siggins’s Ranch. Nearby features include Mule Spring and the Lyda ranch house, both situated along Mule Creek. Present-day Highway 78 is labeled to the north. An inset map shows the station’s position within the broader heliograph network.

The Page 99 Test reflects the character of the book. The map shows how a remote corner of New Mexico fit into a broader system of military communication and introduces the heliograph, a form of wireless communication that uses reflected sunlight to send messages. It also underscores a central feature of the project, since much of the book focuses on mapping each station and interpreting its role within the wider network. Page 99 offers a small view of the system, yet it represents the larger story.

The Lyda Spring (also called Mule Spring and Lydia Spring) was one of the most difficult heliograph stations for me to find (even then, its location is only speculation, but based on the best available data and analysis). This station is part of a group of heliograph stations extending up the San Francisco River valley, all emplaced in late August 1886. Alone and off to the west, the Lyda Spring station was placed almost three weeks later after considerable difficulty and effort by the soldiers tasked to establish it. I surmised that the connecting station at Siggins’s Ranch was not positioned to support a station to the west, which likely would have been the case if this site had been part of the original plan. Nevertheless, this station, emplaced on September 15, 1886, eleven days after the surrender of Geronimo, as well as another complete line of stations running to the east from nearby Fort Bayard to Fort Stanton, built by Lieutenant John J. Pershing in November, shows that the Army’s interest in the heliograph networks did not wane as the Apache War ended. The heliograph networks emerged from the 1886 campaign as an important communication tool that enhanced the Army’s ability to effectively command and control tactical forces and secured a lasting place within the Army’s field practices into the early twentieth century.

Visit Robert E.C. Davis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Al Filreis's "The Classroom and the Crowd"

Al Filreis is Kelly Family Professor of English, founding faculty director of the Kelly Writers House, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, codirector of PennSound, and publisher of Jacket2 magazine, all at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent books include 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (2021), and he is the host of the podcast PoemTalk.

Filreis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book happens to be the final page of a chapter about a massive open (free) online course (a MOOC, called “ModPo”) that drew tens of thousands of people to it during the lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why did they come? What did they want from this (already existing) online community set up for the purpose of collaborative close readings of poems? (Yes, poems!) Well, they came because they were lonely. Because (for those in schools at the time) classrooms didn’t or didn’t yet know how to accommodate remote, quarantined citizens. Because they needed the kind of connection some of them were used to having in conversational spaces (living rooms, restaurants, coffee shops, and seminar rooms). Page 99 describes and defines a variation of MOOC—the weird and iconoclastic “bMOOC.” The bMOOC pushes back against instruction-led learning. In bMOOCs the learners shape the material from which they are to learn. Ken X., one of the 90,000 ModPo people, was alone one night. He entered the ModPo discussion forums and was worried that no one was there. It was late. He needed to talk. He pondered the meaning of loneliness, and the poem he chose to discuss, seemingly by himself, was about loneliness. The primary teaching choice of teachers who set up bMOOCs is to create a learner-centered course that includes content meant to disorient learners. Ken learned to live with disorientation. And, by the way, he wasn’t alone. I was there that night too. We talked. To this day, I don’t know where he was located, nor what his personal situation was. Nonetheless, I felt a connection to him, because…weren’t we all at least a little bit lonely. In a successful online community, no one is lonely for long. ModPo is not truly a bMOOC but on page 99 we happen to encounter an example of what an open online course could look like if we all took seriously the idea that a crowd can not just fit into a classroom but indeed can assume the role of teacher.

Learn more about The Classroom and the Crowd at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rebecca Jumper Matheson's "Artisans and Designers"

Rebecca Jumper Matheson is a fashion historian. She is the author of The Sunbonnet: An American Icon in Texas and Young Originals: Emily Wilkens and the Teen Sophisticate, among other publications. She is an instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in the Fashion and Textile Studies MA program.

Matheson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps is part of a discussion of Phelps Associates’ 1944 American Fashion Critics’ (Coty) Award win, and their contribution to the fashion show during the awards ceremony.

About three-fourths of the page is Figure 4.3, a page from the Coty Awards program, with my caption and the image credits to the Coty Archives and the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Special Collections and College Archives (SPARC). The awards program shows photographs of the Coty Award statue by Malvina Hoffman, as well as photos and bios of the award winners: “Claire McCardell, Casual Clothes Designer,” “Sally Victor, Millinery Designer,” and “Phelps Associates, Accessory Designers.” At the bottom of the program, there is text explaining the award criteria, “These Awards are made to the most outstanding American fashion designers who, in the opinion of the Jury, have best interpreted the fashion trend in 1943, under the restrictive influences of war-time economy.”

At the top of page 99 there are two partial paragraphs of my own text about the types of bags that Phelps Associates showed at the Coty Awards, including a bag “of worsted surcingle webbing with llama hide gussets,” with my observation that this combined a woolen textile used in horse harness with leather not in demand for military use. The second paragraph begins a discussion of how the Coty Awards publicized Phelps Associates’ production of leather shoulder bags that met the WWII-era women’s uniform specifications for branches of the US military, including WACs, WAVEs, SPARs, and Marines.

Between my text, and the text and images of the Coty Awards program that is reproduced on page 99, readers are introduced to several important themes in the Phelpses’ work and in Artisans and Designers. Firstly, the working partnership between Elizabeth and William Phelps is evident in their joint award, photo, bio, and even the name of the business. This page also highlights the Phelpses’ work in leather shoulder bags inspired by historical military forms and the hands-free freedom these bags give their wearers. Another theme is the way that Phelps Associates reused vintage metalwork in their pieces—a concept that was an innovative way to handle wartime scarcity, but also resonates with today’s interest in sustainability. Readers will also learn about the influence of hand-worked horse harness on the Phelpses’ work, and the related theme of the Phelpses’ interest in hand craft traditions from both the US and Europe. Finally, the page emphasizes that William and Elizabeth Phelps designed from the perspective of being makers themselves, and that they personally worked out the initial design samples for their accessories.

However, 1944 is only at the beginning of William and Elizabeth Phelps’s years in American fashion. Reading page 99 alone, the reader would not know about later developments in their careers, from workshop moves (New York to Pennsylvania to North Carolina) to the introduction of sportswear in the post-war period.

In terms of my methods, what the reader can see from this page is research using archival materials such as ephemera, but readers would miss out on the object-based research that is also key to the book. Each chapter of Artisans and Designers is anchored by an introductory object or objects—extant garments or accessories that I have studied in person, each object telling more of the story of Phelps Associates and their clients.

Learn more about Artisans and Designers at the The Kent State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Edward Huth's "A Sense of Space"

John Edward Huth is the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard University. He has done research in experimental particle physics since 1980 and is currently a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). He participated in the discovery of the top quark and the Higgs boson and is the author of The Lost Art of Finding Our Way.

Huth applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Sense of Space: A Local's Guide to a Flat Earth, the Edge of the Cosmos, and Other Curious Places, with the following results:

Page 99 in A Sense of Space is the close of chapter 5 on spatial and cultural/social connections in Dante's Divine Comedy. It represents a segue from the end of that chapter to the next chapter on the concept of extraterrestrial intelligence that emerged with the invention of the telescope.

Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already—like
a wheel revolving uniformly—by
the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

(Par. 33 133–45)

Here, we have the final writing of le stelle.

Three centuries after Dante, the telescope was invented and revealed structures associated with the planets, like the rings of Saturn, phases of Venus, and the moons of Jupiter. Observations triumphed where pure reason could not solve riddles, which spelled the end of Aristotle’smodel of space.

But our inclination to project human-like qualities onto space persisted. Where Dante populated the heavens with virtuous souls, some astronomers contemplate whether the universe could be home to intelligent beings like us.

This captures the theme of the book quite well: that social concepts are interwoven with spatial concepts. Here is an additional detail. Dante was very taken by astronomy, and the last word(s) in each of the books (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) is "the stars" (le stelle). I wove this into A Sense of Space as well. The first words are "the stars" in my preface and "the stars" at the end of the concluding chapter. Stars also feature prominently throughout the book in various guises: Ancient Greek astronomy, astrology, cosmology, and the fundamental forces of nature.

The book examines the interplay between visions of space and associated social/cultural manifestations over the eons from the Ancient Egyptians to modern physics and cosmology. I lead off with the cognitive psychology underpinning the interplay. Dante adopts Aristotle's model of the universe, with the earth at the center and spheres of the moon, sun, and planets in the heavens surrounding. I explore his spatial/cultural connections in the context of the Divine Comedy. Likewise the astronomers later speculated on whether the planets were home to intelligent beings. HG Wells, partly inspired by an astronomy report of a strange light from Mars, wrote War of the Worlds, which was a jump-off point of our modern culture of extraterrestrial aliens.

Learn more about A Sense of Space at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Rob Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Hall's "Power and Powerlessness"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan S. Jones's "Opium Slavery"

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Jonathan S. Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue