Thomas J. Main's "Reforming Social Services in New York City"

Thomas J. Main is Professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Rise of Illiberalism, The Rise of the Alt-Right, and Homelessness in New York City.

Main applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Reforming Social Services in New York City: How Major Change Happens in Urban Welfare Policies, with the following results:

In my case The Page 99 Test comes very close to working but not quite. On page 98--close enough, I think--there is an important exchange I had with J. Philip Thompson, who was Mayor de Blasio's deputy mayor for Strategic Initiatives. I interviewed Thompson and many players in New York City's welfare policy community. My big question was how to get the myriad set of agencies, bureaucracies, governments, and other players to coordinate their efforts to help the city's poor find work. Here's what was said:

Main: "You're saying, well, yes...the system is fragmented. But you're working to make it less fragmented....What other initiatives are you undertaking to try to reduce fragmentation?

Thompson: Well, vision...workforce [policy] is tremendously underdeveloped.... In terms of vision, I think there's general unclarity over what the future of work will look like.

Very interestingly, Thompson did not say what is needed to make government systems for employing people work better is more money, or more political will. No doubt he would like to see work development programs get more money and political support, but those were not his immediate answer to my question. His answer was "vision," that is convincing ideas, backed up with good field testing, about what actually works in helping people find jobs.

One of the main themes of my book is that the power of public ideas in policymaking is much underrated by many observers. By a public idea, or vision, I mean a pithy concept, backed up with a lot of rigorous research, about what government should do. In the 1990s, welfare policy was dominated by the public ideas of "end welfare as we know it," and "work first." They sound pretty vague, but they were backed up with high-quality research that showed welfare agencies put too much emphasis on making sure only eligible people received benefits and not nearly enough on helping people find jobs and succeed at them.

My point is that, whatever one might think of 1990s welfare reform, the combination of a simple formulation with plenty of good research to support it, is a powerful way to reform dysfunctional bureaucracies and to coordinate a fragmented system. When policy entrepreneurs can come up with such a vision, major change in government is possible.

Learn more about Reforming Social Services in New York City at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Obst's "Saving Ourselves from Big Car"

David Obst is a former journalist, publisher, screenwriter, and film producer. He worked as a literary agent for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, among others. Obst is the author of Too Good to Be Forgotten: Changing America in the ’60s and ’70s (1998).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Saving Ourselves from Big Car, and shared the following:

Page 99 lands in a chapter titled Car Dreams that details how Big Car – the network of industries, insurers, lawmakers, and lobbyists that my book reveals are not so slowly killing us with car crashes, lead poisoning, and toxic emissions – sold the American people on the idea that a car in every driveway is the epitome of successful living.

The page starts with an ending. Bertha Ringer arrives home after driving 60 miles to visit her mother and launches a new craze – the family road trip. But we reveal that the husband who welcomes Bertha home is none other than Carl Benz – as in Mercedes Benz, and that “The accompanying publicity helped bring Bertha and Carl’s company its first sales.”

This road trip trend demonstrates how Big Car drove culture which then drove big business: “Motor tourism was literally a get-rich-quick scheme that worked. In fact, road trips became so popular in America that a National Road Trip Day was established and is still observed every Friday before Memorial Day.”

Of course, this suited Big Car’s needs, too, and it’s clear our cars were going to cost us, one way or another: “Big Car didn’t hesitate to serve these new motorists. . . automobile laundries began to appear [that] cost the equivalent of a typical office worker’s hourly pay ($1.50) for the service.”

Unfortunately, while a fun story, page 99 will not give readers a sense of what the book is about. The remainder of the book explains the tremendous cost we’ve paid, which is that Big Car, in the last hundred years, has killed more humans than World War II and destroyed our environment.

This is a well-documented exposé on how a conglomeration of the automobile, gasoline, insurance, construction, and lobbying industries has dominated our lives over the last hundred years. It proves that the key decisions made by Big Car were exclusively to increase their bottom lines, and that, even when they knew what they were doing was wrong, they continued to do it in the name of profit.

The book is an easy read, with a wealth of anecdotal material, and the final chapters examine people and communities that are trying to develop alternatives to our long-standing reliance on the personal automobile.

My hope is that, like Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed, this book will start a new awareness of the critical need for us to take action before it’s too late.

Visit David Obst's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ayoush Lazikani's "The Medieval Moon"

Ayoush Lazikani is a lecturer at the University of Oxford. A specialist in medieval literature, she is the author of Cultivating the Heart and Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, and an associate editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages.

Lazikani applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing, and reported the following:

If you open The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing at page 99, you will find a discussion of how surgical practice was influenced by the position of the moon. I discuss the works—or adaptations of works— by authors and surgeons such as Lanfranc (c. 1250-1315) and John Arderne (b. 1307), who stress the importance of knowing the moon’s position when undertaking surgical treatment.

This gives us a glimpse into the deep significance of the moon to medieval people: knowing about the moon and its position in the heavens even impacted healing practices. But because there was such a rich range of ideas about and attitudes towards the moon in the medieval world, page 99 can only indicate one aspect of the moon’s significance. The Medieval Moon explores a spectrum of ways in which the moon was important to medieval people: from its impacts on the tides and the growth of trees to its role as a place of adventure to its resonance for people in love. Its role in surgical treatment is only one dimension to its significance.

There is also another problem with attempting to see page 99 as representative of the whole book. The sources discussed there are in English. And The Medieval Moon seeks to take a global perspective of the medieval world, discussing sources in a range of different languages and from many parts of the world. The book does not do so perfectly, but this is its goal. Page 99 thus gives us only a fraction of the global perspective the book embraces.

In sum, I think page 99 offers us only a partial and fragmented view of what the moon meant to medieval people around the world.

Learn more about The Medieval Moon at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda Laury Kleintop's "Counting the Cost of Freedom"

Amanda Laury Kleintop is assistant professor of history at Elon University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War, with the following results:

The first thing the reader sees on page 99 is the heading “Compensation and the Limits of Constitutional Change.” The previous section, which concludes on the same page, explains how Republicans in Congress in 1866 added a section to the Fourteenth Amendment to invalidate former enslavers’ claims for compensation for enslaved people freed during the Civil War. It also notes that Republicans’ political opponents downplayed the financial and legal need for the section. The subsequent section begins, “Republicans opposed paying enslavers and successfully mobilized uncompensated emancipation as a political tool; however, their stance on emancipation and eminent domain remained ambiguous,” referring to previous discussions in the book.

The Page 99 Test works well for Counting the Cost of Freedom by dropping the reader into one of the book’s core arguments. It is in the middle of Chapter 4, the book’s narrative climax. Previously, the book demonstrates that many enslavers and their political allies insisted that the Constitution, doctrines of property law, principles of fairness and the need for regional economic stability dictated that they be reimbursed for the lost value of the enslaved people they legally held as property prior to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. However, there had been no doctrinal consensus on whether that was true in peacetime, let alone after the Confederacy seceded and lost a war over slavery. Chapter 4, and page 99 specifically, summarizes the congressional response to their claims.

If the Page 99 Test fails, it is because the reader will enter the book in the middle of the action. The drama and humanity of post-war politics is lost on readers who haven’t read Congressman John Broomall’s speech railing against paying enslavers, who “murdered two hundred and ninety thousand of our fellow-citizens.” He continued, “Let our political opponents call the dead to life. . . . We will then pay for their slaves.” This page leaves out other major characters in and outside of Congress involved in this debate.

It’s also difficult to gauge why section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment was so important or why “the limits of constitutional change” matter without understanding enslaver’s long-standing claims for compensation based on their self-proclaimed property rights in people. The Fourteenth Amendment invalidated former enslavers’ claims for compensation, but subsequent sections and chapters argue that Republicans stopped short at instigating lasting economic reform. Section 4 created a constitutional framework that retroactively expanded federal authority for immediate, uncompensated emancipation without suggesting that the US could permanently confiscate other forms of property. That enabled former enslavers to profit from other vestiges of slavery’s economic system. Eventually, the book argues, this ambiguity enabled Lost Cause propagandists to minimize the history of white southerners’ resistance to emancipation only after they had succeeded in focusing attention on what the nation owed enslavers, not what it owed the formerly enslaved.

Learn more about Counting the Cost of Freedom at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark LeBar's "Just People"

Mark LeBar is Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is the author of The Value of Living Well (2013), and the editor of Equality and Public Policy (2015) and of Justice (2018).

LeBar applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Just People: Virtue, Equality, and Respect, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book is a tough place to start, as it is the middle of a complex discussion. It considers the possibility of relying on the judgments of people who are far from virtuous to determine what is the right outlook for particular cases of injustice — say, the issue of the legal subordination of women in a society in which very few people see anything wrong with it. That really matters for the view I defend in the book, because an essential part of the case is that there is no standard beyond the judgments of virtuous people as to what being just people requires. Even if that is so, since the virtuous are scarce on the ground in the best of societies, is my account just a recipe for loss of hope in justice?

On the other hand, the passage on page 99 is a useful lens for engaging with the project of the book. The core aim of the book is to bring back into the foreground thinking about being just as something that we can and must undertake as individuals — entirely independently of the justice of our societies. Sometimes that means being a just person in an unjust society. On page 99 I defend the view that it is the judgment of the just and virtuous — even if they are thin on the ground — that matters, so that we can say that even in a society in which people see nothing wrong with slavery or the subordination of women, we have a metric that shows them to be wrong. All people impose obligations in virtue of what they are, that we are bound to take equally seriously, and to respect. That means our thinking about how to carry out our plans must take them into account as constraints. Being just people means respecting the authority of people equally, and that is something we can do irrespective of the dispositions of others. In that way the Page 99 Test is a useful lens for considering what my book is about.

Learn more about Just People at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast's "Wheat at War"

Rosella Cappella Zielinski specializes in the study of conflict with an emphasis on how states mobilize their resources for war. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University and non-resident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at Marine Corps University. She is the author of How States Pay for Wars (2016), winner of the 2017 American Political Science Association Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award in International History and Politics. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania and held fellowships at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin and the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. Paul Poast is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he specializes in alliance politics and the political economy of security. An award-winning author, he holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, a MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA from Miami University. He has taught at a variety of universities, including Rutgers University and The Ohio State University.

Zielinski and Poast applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War, and reported the following:

How do allies coordinate economically during war? What happens to their efforts once the wartime crisis is over? These are the big questions Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War addresses in the context of World War I. And, lucky for us, we passed the Page 99 Test! Page 99 provides an example of the nature of cooperation problems allies face during wartime (for page 99 its allied shipping).

Wheat at War explores how the allies (led by the British, French, and Italians) coordinated wheat and shipping during World War I. By 1915 the war had destroyed French and Italian wheat fields and cut off Russian wheat imports leaving the European allies in peril. Turning West, the allies had to rely on wheat from the Americas, yet this solution was not without its problems as German attacks on shipping made transporting tonnage difficult and crop disease in 1915 created additional shortages. Something had to be done. The British and French decided they must hang together or hang apart. By 1916 they solved this wheat crisis by creating an impressive organization, the Wheat Executive. Here a handful of bureaucrats were given the power to decide all aspects of grain purchases, shipments, and deliveries for countless countries and millions of people.

Page 99 lands right in the middle of the book and at the apex of our narrative. While the wheat crisis was solved, a new and bigger crisis emerged, shipping. In 1917 shipping was in increasingly short supply. In April 1917 one out of every four vessels that left the United Kingdom for a foreign port failed to return due to German attacks. Exacerbating the problem was American entry into the war. As Edward Hurley, who would become Chairman of the US Shipping Board, wrote in his memoir, “We realized that transportation was the life-blood artery of the Army, the Navy and of essential industries. The United States needed raw materials required for producing military supplies. Farmers demanded nitrates from Chile, and so did manufacturers of explosives. Steel plants wanted manganese ore from Brazil and chrome from Australia. The World had to be scoured for essential raw materials, which had to be carried in ships under our control. Every industry was crying for coal, which of necessity had to be carried by water so far as that was possible because of railway congestion” (quoted on page 99!).

How did the allies solve this shipping problem? Did they invoke the lessons and institutions of the Wheat Executive, or did they go another way now that Americans were now officially part of the coalition? Start on page 100 to find out!

Learn more about Wheat at War at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: How States Pay for Wars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Devoney Looser's "Wild for Austen"

Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author of several books, including Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës and The Making of Jane Austen. A Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar, Looser has published essays in The Atlantic, New York Times, Salon, Slate, and The Washington Post. She is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America and played roller derby under the name Stone Cold Jane Austen.

Looser applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, with the following results:

Unfortunately, page 99 is not a full page of text in Wild for Austen! It includes the final paragraphs to the book’s 9th chapter, which describes features of wildness in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). Page 99 concludes the chapter. It features musings on the little-known legacy of the novel's heroine, Catherine Morland, which start on the previous page of Wild for Austen.

In the 1970s, the name Catherine Morland was chosen as a pseudonym by the writer of two mass-market novels. The first one published was Castle Black (1972), with the melodramatic tagline, “Was her own unanswered past a part of their tragic family history—or was she just a pawn in their deadly game?"

Page 99 continues the exploration of the pseudonym Catherine Morland:

Morland turned author again in 1976 with a second gothic novel of suspense. Its cover blurb asks, "Was her brother-in-law’s death an accident . . . ? The terrible secret is revealed in The Legacy of Winterwyck." These novels joined the late twentieth-century vogue for cheap Gothic fiction.

I end the chapter (and page 99) by revealing the identity of this 1970s Gothic novelist:

I’m almost sorry to reveal that, once the veil was lifted from Catherine Morland’s Castle Black and The Legacy of Winterwyck, the pseudonymous author who wrote them turned out to be, in reality, John D. Schubert. I, for one, wish it had been otherwise, but I leave it to be settled by whomever it may concern whether such a tale of literary cross-dressing makes for a worse or a better outcome for this curious heroine. Or perhaps this chapter should end by riffing on the words with which Austen began Northanger Abbey: No one who saw Catherine Morland in her infancy would ever have supposed her born to be a man’s pseudonym.

The Page 99 Test is a partial success in revealing the thrust of Wild for Austen. It definitely gives readers some idea of the tenor and tone of the whole. It provides an example of the level of research involved in the book (uncovering this 1970s Catherine Morland’s identity) and provides a sense of the book's tongue-in-cheek tone.

But page 99 reveals only elliptically the theme of the book—exploring evidence for Jane Austen’s legitimate wild side through her writings, life, and legacy. Readers of page 99 wouldn’t know that the book includes 25 chapters, with one on each of Austen’s six major novels, her juvenilia, and lesser-known or unfinished writings.

Readers of page 99 wouldn’t know that the second section of the book goes into Austen's connections to wild relatives and a social circle that was lot more cosmopolitan, vibrant, and interesting than readers today may understand. I describe not only her aunt who stood trial for a capital crime. I describe her London acquaintance with an international spy and his opera diva wife, both of whom were ultimately assassinated. The book tells stories that overturn the myth of Jane Austen as the simple, sheltered figure we’ve long been sold.

The last third of the book is well previewed through the page 99 test. The final set of chapters in Wild for Austen explore Austen’s legacy--who’s gone wild over her--over the past two centuries. These chapters look her and her fiction in popular culture, through the first imagining of her ghost (in 1823) to the first known mention of her fiction in a court of law (1825). One chapter investigates the screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice that almost were, including the time Judy Garland was set to play Elizabeth Bennet in a big budget musical.

Taken together, Wild for Austen’s chapters—like its page 99—show us that we ought to move the dial from milder to wilder where Austen is concerned. There is hard evidence for overturning the story of Austen’s fiction, social circle, and afterlife as boring, prim, and proper. She, like most of her heroines, could be positively wild.

Visit Devoney Looser's website.

The Page 99 Test: Sister Novelists.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Vellend's "Everything Evolves"

Mark Vellend is professor of biology at the Université de Sherbrooke and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Theory of Ecological Communities.

Vellend applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics, and shared the following:

On page 99 of my book, Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics, there are two figures. The only text on the page is in the figure captions. The two figures contain graphs that illustrate different forms of evolutionary selection. In the simplest scenario (Figure 5.1), one type of entity (e.g., an iPhone or the Omicron variant of the virus causing Covid-19) has higher fitness than another (e.g., a BlackBerry or the Delta variant) because of some characteristic: the ease of internet access for cell phones and the ease of transmission for viruses. The second set of graphs (Figure 5.2) shows more generalized forms of selection. Directional selection is illustrated by the evolution of the shape of violin sound holes, which gradually changed from semi-circular to the now-familiar cursive f-shape shape, based on improved sound volume and quality. “Balancing selection” is when evolutionary fitness is greatest for intermediate trait values, in this case the size of cell phones: medium sized ones are more successful than tiny ones or very large ones. “Divergent selection” – maximum fitness of extreme trait values – is illustrated by bird beaks, which might be favored when small or large (if the seeds the birds eat are small or large) but not in between.

On the Page 99 Test, I would say that Everything Evolves gets a grade of C. If a reader opened the book to page 99, they would get a reasonably clear sense of one key argument in the book: Evolutionary processes – in this case selection – apply equally to cultural or technological change (cell phones, violins) as they do to biological change (viruses, birds). That said, gleaning this message would be difficult without some background in evolutionary science (provided in the book), and there is no indication of other evolutionary processes (variation generation, drift, movement), or of the arguments as to why generalized evolutionary science is important and historically underappreciated. So, on page 99 alone a reader would get some sense of one key aspect of the whole work, but little sense of other central themes. Not a failing grade, but a long way from an A+.

The study of violin hole shapes, communicated originally in a publication led by biomedical engineer Hadi Nia, is one of my favourite examples of cultural evolution. It’s always difficult to infer the precise nature of evolutionary processes that connect distant ancestors to specific present-day entities, but there is a compelling case here that major improvements were driven by trial and error based on random changes in hole shape that happen during production. Contrary to frequent assumptions, there was no genius violin maker that looked at a simple hole centuries ago and envisioned the elegant f-shape to maximize what researchers now call “air resonance power efficiency”. Rather, just like the way much of biological evolution occurs, improvements were discovered by random happenstance, accumulating gradually over a period of centuries.

On the flipside, biological evolution can involve processes often thought to be specific to cultural evolution, such as non-random variation generation and multiple pathways of inheritance. In short, while we might think of cultural and biological systems as evolving in fundamentally distinct ways, in fact they overlap on all possible axes we might think distinguish them. In Everything Evolves, I illustrate these axes by analogy using the “Evolutionary Soundboard”, which contains a series of dials that characterize the key processes that underly all evolutionary systems. Whether we’re considering the evolution of cells or cell phones, violins or violets, the same fundamental processes are at play.

Visit Mark Vellend's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Andersson Burnett and Bruce Buchan's "Race and the Scottish Enlightenment"

Linda Andersson Burnett is a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden. Bruce Buchan is a professor in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750-1820, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test is a useful exercise in opening up key themes in our book that connects the effervescent history of ideas in the Scottish Enlightenment during the middle to late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to intensifying European colonial engagements across the globe. Ours is a different kind of history of ideas attuned to the resonance of concepts, and especially race, beyond the familiar canon of published works by leading intellectuals, and outside the lecture theatres where they were first imbibed. Page 99 of our book presents one such study of how Scottish Enlightenment ideas travelled, within the walls of the university and far beyond to the islands of the Pacific ocean.

On page 99 we discuss the travels of a little-known naval surgeon and naturalist, William Anderson (1750-1778), with James Cook on two of his momentous expeditions to the Pacific between 1772 and 1780. What brought the two men together, and it seems Cook respected Anderson so much he made use of his journals to write up his own, was the nexus linking the study of medicine at the University of Edinburgh to the practice of natural history (the systematic observation of nature and humanity) aboard vessels of the Royal Navy, or in other imperial and colonial expeditions across the globe.

Our book traces a surprising number of lesser-known figures such as Anderson who exemplified these connections. What was particularly notable about this group of men was that they studied at one of the intellectual powerhouses of the Scottish Enlightenment, and in its famed medical school. At the University and in the city of Edinburgh itself, these students imbibed Enlightenment thought from many of its leading exponents (such as David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Alexander Monro, and others). Their education equipped them not just with medical and scientific knowledge, but also with ideas drawn from studying history, literary style, and moral philosophy. Anderson was no exception. On page 99 we explore his personal library which included key texts on anatomy and medical practice, as well as the latest French natural history, and an eclectic mix of Scottish thought such as Hume’s philosophy and history, Lord Kames on literary criticism, and Lord Monboddo’s speculations on the origin of language.

In microcosm, Anderson and his reading represent a far wider intellectual, social, and professional network. Running through it was a disposition cultivated in Edinburgh to employ the methods of Scottish Enlightenment thought to study nature, and humanity as part of nature, to identify the causes of what was called the “varieties of the human species”. Those varieties were both physical and social, corporeal and historical, but each was understood to have material causes subject to rational explanation, careful comparison, and systematic classification. By these means, men such as Anderson paved the way for the gradual emergence of the notion of race and the supposed separations and hierarchies of racial classification. The knowledge these men compiled on various travels, to America, Africa, Asia and far off Australia, was often communicated back to their professors and mentors at Edinburgh. Anderson sent specimens to his former teacher of anatomy, Monro. Anderson’s story thus opens a window into a little-known, and often fragmentary, but vivid trace of the genuinely global impact and colonial imprint of Scottish Enlightenment thought.

Learn more about Race and the Scottish Enlightenment at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hannah Kim's "Ties That Bind"

Hannah Kim is an associate professor of history and a co-coordinator of the social studies education program at the University of Delaware, Newark.

Kim applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Ties That Bind: People and Perception in U.S. and Korean Transnational Relations, 1905-1965, with the following results:

When opening to page 99, the reader would learn about Moon Lee who draped a Korean flag on the gate of the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C. in March of 1942, a few months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II. Lee was in the city attending the Korean Liberty Conference. Korea had become a colony of Japan in 1910, and an independence movement had been gaining momentum over the decades. Lee’s “hostile takeover” of the Japanese embassy by a Korean was reported in newspapers around the country and exemplified the efforts of Korean nationalists to persuade Americans and U.S. government officials to support Korean independence.

A reader opening to page 99 in the book would get a good sense of the monograph. The selection shows how Koreans tapped into anti-Japanese sentiments to garner sympathy for Korean independence. Moon Lee was not a famous person and nothing else is known about him. But Koreans like Moon Lee and other supporters rallied behind the cause of Korean independence and worked tirelessly to persuade the general public and people in positions of power to recognize Korean independence. The selection also shows the types of evidence that I used in my book and my focus on cultural history.

My one caveat is that a reader may misinterpret the book as being focused on Korean independence movement and Korean nationalism. While this is an important part of two of the chapters of the book, it is not a focus in the first chapter and does not appear at all in the last two chapters. The book is about how interested parties, including Korean nationalists, American missionaries, political pundits, and others, influenced American perceptions of Korea and Koreans over a larger span of time. This book is firmly in the field of U.S. history and shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a book on Korean history.

I found it interesting that some newspapers carried the same misinformation about Moon Lee being a naturalized citizen of the United States. This would have been nigh impossible in 1942 because Asians were forbidden from becoming naturalized citizens (this would not be overturned until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952). The only way for an Asian to be a citizen was to be born in the United States as was decided by the Supreme Court in the landmark case, U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898. I didn’t realize how newspapers used articles from news services such as UPI and AP. The same article could appear in the Grand Forks Herald or the Pasadena Star News with slight variations or different titles, depending on what the editor wanted to emphasize. I suppose when small local newspapers carried syndicated news, they didn’t have the time or resources to fact check the sources.

Learn more about Ties That Bind at the University of Nebraska Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue