Stephen J. Ramos's "Folk Engineering"

Stephen J. Ramos is a professor of urbanism at the University of Georgia. His first book, Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography (2010) received wide acclaim for its contribution to infrastructure studies, and it continues to be an important reference for Gulf urban research.

Ramos applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism, with the following results:

Fortunately, page 99 of my book Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism provides a rich representative sample of its broader claims and concerns. The Southern regionalists were a group of social scientists at the University of North Carolina, who during the interwar years developed the concept of regionalism for the South, and regional planning as its operational practice, to navigate pressures for progress and recalcitrance. Page 99 finds us in the center of the action, beginning, “Myth in the South was nothing new.” The mythos of folk was central to regionalism going back to nineteenth-century European movements, and in the South the regionalists combined myth with social sciences and literature as construct for traditionalism. Page 99 continues: "The 'progressive evolutionism' of turn-of-the-century social sciences, with their faith in those sciences to improve society, was met in the New South with the countervailing force of traditionalism. All regionalists called for balance, but in the South, this balance between progressive and traditional culture and ways of thinking was the one the white elite needed to maintain. The contradiction between these two epistemological approaches is glaring: If the claims of modernity were based on progressive evolutionary assumptions about culture and thought, how best to balance them with Victorian and even earlier modes of traditionalism? How could a balance be struck between Old South and New South? Like William Faulker, Odum believed that the South needed time for its white society to 'go slow' in evolving toward the modern egalitarian cultural demands often viewed as imposed from the North. Against his training in the ameliorative organic social sciences of the early twentieth century, Odum struggled 'to articulate a kind of planning at cross-purposes to time.'”

Against this apologist, organic view of history at an evolutionary pace, I then quote James Baldwin’s 1956 response, after a lifetime of hearing this position, countering “this pleasant 'go slow' mythology with acerbic skepticism. In response to Faulkner’s assertion that 'emotional' white Southerners would move gradually away from segregation if left on their own time, Baldwin pointed out, 'The question left begging is what, in their history to date, affords any evidence that they have any desire, or capacity to do this. And it is, I suppose, impertinent to ask just what Negroes are supposed to do while the South works out what, in Faulkner’s rhetoric, becomes something very closely resembling a high and noble tragedy.'”

Learn more about Folk Engineering at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Aiello's "Return of the King"

Thomas Aiello is a professor of history and Africana studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey and Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947–1979.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Return of the King describes the racial state of play in Atlanta in January 1970, wherein a new administration was sworn into city government with more Black representation than ever before, but with court-mandated teacher desegregation mandates causing a furor among white students and parents, protests eagerly celebrated by Georgia’s governor, Lester Maddox. It was a city in transition, as white flight to suburban areas created Black majorities in the city, but the majority of money and power in Atlanta still remained with white leaders, many of whom were antagonistic to Black social and political gains.

The book itself is about Muhammad Ali’s return to boxing after a three-year forced exile for refusing his draft notice for the Vietnam conflict, and Muhammad Ali does not appear on page 99. Nor does boxing. Or sports more broadly. But the book is also a story of race in Atlanta and the conditions that created the possibility of Ali’s return to the ring in a Deep South city beset by racial contradictions. Page 99 goes a long way to demonstrating those contradictions at the beginning of a year that would see, by its conclusion, the revival of Ali’s boxing career. The racial contradictions depicted on page 99 weren’t new in January 1970. Atlanta had long cultivated an image of itself that stressed business-friendly racial moderation. It was, in the words of mayor William Hartsfield, “The City Too Busy to Hate.” When the civil rights movement began, it did not experience the kinds of televised violence that beset Birmingham, New Orleans, Selma, and other southern cities. But under the surface of that moderation was a seething mass of Black frustration at the limits placed on Black economic development, the continued segregation, and the social neglect of city officials. Ali’s return to boxing in Atlanta, facilitated by Black state senator Leroy Johnson, representing a district in the city, would be one of the first and most effective uses of Black power, a channeling of that anger into a legitimately successful venture that would have an outsized and indelible influence on the city and its national and international reputation. And the efforts of Black Atlanta to make the fight happen would come despite attempts to thwart them by segregationist governor Lester Maddox, who was, back in January 1970, celebrating white students for protesting against teacher integration in public schools.

In that sense, even without an appearance by Ali himself, page 99 of Return of the King does demonstrate much of what the book is about—racial transition in the Deep South’s most important city at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s.

Visit Thomas Aiello's website.

The Page 99 Test: Jim Crow's Last Stand.

The Page 99 Test: Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration.

--Marshal Zeringue

Antwain K. Hunter's "A Precarious Balance"

Antwain K. Hunter is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865, and shared the following:

Page ninety-nine of A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865 features an image and consequently, has limited text. The image, courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, is Alfred Waud’s 1871 sketch of “A Snipe Shooter.” This image, which is also used on the book’s cover, depicts a Black man hunting in a marsh, gun at the ready. The text on that page reads:

The food that Major acquired for his fellow laborers was also important to him for a more personal reason. It allowed him to assume the “patriarchal mantle of provider,v and it thereby affirmed his manhood, which both his enslaver and the broader institution of slavery had otherwise deeply circumscribed. The Woods’s enslaver had sold Major’s first wife away from the plantation. It is not clear where she was sold to, but she seems to have been removed from the area, perhaps making Major part of one of the over 300,000 interstate sales…

Readers who opened straight to page ninety-nine would get a glimpse of what my book is about. While there is a limited amount of text, readers would see some important themes around firearms, manhood, and race. This short section is part of my third chapter, “Armed Labor,” which highlights how free and enslaved Black people in the antebellum era used firearms in a number of labor applications. The image which dominates this page shows the quotidian nature of Black Southerners’ gun use. While rebellion and resistance are an important part of this story, free and enslaved Black people labored with their weapons, both with or without their enslavers’ or the state’s permission. This chapter explores how some enslaved men were able to provide food for their communities via hunting, which thereby bolstered their masculinity. While tangential to my book, page ninety-nine also references the interstate slave trade, which wrought havoc on enslaved Black families.

The Page 99 Test works... sort of. While it illuminates an interesting aspect of the book, my larger arguments are about how free and enslaved Black people used firearms for labor—feeding themselves and their families, protecting crops and livestock, and defending their communities from threats. Still, many white people saw firearms as yet another tool through which they could exploit Black labor. As a result, the state legislature’s laws permitted enslavers to arm their laborers from the colonial era through to Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, though some white people ignored the law or used their armed slaves for illegal purposes. Unsurprisingly, many white people were frightened at the prospect of gun-totting enslaved people. Some of their concerns were real but others were merely the anxieties of white people living in a racialized slave society. Enslaved Black folks acquired their weapons from a number of sources, ranging from their enslavers to an illegal arms trade, and were able to push back against enslavement’s constricting grasp and make better lives for themselves and their families. Firearms hold an incredibly complicated place on our current sociopolitical landscape, but our nation’s relationship with them across time is often misunderstood or intentionally mischaracterized. We should all learn more about it!

Learn more about A Precarious Balance at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick J. Doyle's "Carolinian Crucible"

Patrick J. Doyle teaches US History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research has been published in the Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of Social History, and Civil War History.

Doyle applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Carolinian Crucible: Reforging Class, Family, and Nation in Confederate South Carolina, with the following results:

If one were to open up Carolinian Crucible: Reforging Class, Family, and Nation in Confederate South Carolina on page 99, they would find themselves on the final page of Chapter 3, which deals with conscription and its consequences. Although only half a page of text, I think it would give the reader a good idea of the book and its wider claims. The page picks up my point that conscription and its operation in South Carolina reveal much about the state’s society and its responses to the demands of the Confederate war effort; in particular, it demonstrates how certain class-based privileges linked to conscription generated frustration among lower-class whites but did not foster a fundamental rejection of the Confederate cause. As I write,

Tensions of course existed, and one can find gripes about “big men” during the war. The critical point, though, is that conscription was not popularly interpreted as the rich shirking their duty while callously forcing the poor into the military. The many sons of wealthy enslavers in the armies of the South, the efforts of the Confederate government to correct defects or areas of abuse within its conscription legislation, and the identification of most South Carolinian whites with key tenets of Confederate nationalism all helped ensure that momentary frustrations never coalesced into a more tangible and sustained opposition to the central government.

While page 99 of the book would give a browser a good sense of my wider takes on class, nationalism, and Confederate loyalty in the Palmetto State, the experiment would be less effective in other respects. Seeing as it brings you to the concluding paragraph of a chapter, it doesn’t meaningfully introduce the reader to the rich material the book has regarding the lived experiences of lower-class whites in the Civil War South. Where possible, I strive to foreground the perspectives and lives of this class in South Carolina, often through close consideration of their correspondence, but page 99 only reveals the outcomes of this analysis rather than the more quotidian insights and intimate stories pertaining to common white folk that can be found throughout the book. Put another way, jumping to page 99 of Carolinian Crucible is rather like looking over the final calculations of a math student but not their intricate workings. Nonetheless, the Page 99 Test certainly seems like a useful shortcut for glimpsing a book’s core claims.

Learn more about Carolinian Crucible at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Pooley's "Discovering the Okapi"

Simon Pooley is the Lambert Reader in Human-Wildlife Coexistence at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the coeditor of Histories of Bioinvasions in the Mediterranean and the author of Burning Table Mountain: An Environmental History of Fire on the Cape Peninsula.

Pooley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Discovering the Okapi: Western Science, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Search for a Rainforest Enigma, and reported the following:

On page 99, I explain how in 1902, the German Egyptologist Alfred Wiedemann created the myth that Ancient Egyptians depicted the okapi (discovered in 1901), identifying it with the god Set (the identity of this god’s sacred animal was disputed). Wiedemann claimed okapi had once inhabited the Nile valley. This was perhaps an unsurprising claim considering that Egyptology was in vogue in Europe at this time. In the previous page I note that both Bible scholars and eugenicists sought evidence for their stories and theories in the evidence being unearthed by Egyptologists in this period.

On page 99, I also discuss the earliest of several rebuttals of this idea that the okapi is depicted in Ancient Egyptian art. One rebuttal is based on habitat: the okapi is a rainforest species (never found in the Nile Valley) and Set was associated with the desert. Another argument notes that the depicted okapi are missing key anatomical features (no horns; Set is male). This seems surprising given the Ancient Egyptians’ incredibly lifelike depictions of the region’s fauna.

Ford Madox Ford’s test doesn’t reveal the contents or intentions of my book particularly well. The chapter it comes from, “Okapis in African Art, Ancient and Modern”, is somewhat of an outlier in a book focused more on Western scientific and popular representations (and misrepresentations) of the okapi, and the peoples who first taught them about this mysterious rainforest giraffid – as well as the current state of okapi knowledge, keeping and conservation.

The chapter touches on cryptozoology, the international society of which adopted the okapi as its emblem. Supposedly, the discovery of the okapi was a vindication of the cryptozoologists’ method: the discovery of myths about fantastical animals which lead to the discovery of an actual undiscovered species. Harry Johnston, in this interpretation, discovered the okapi based on ‘parataxa’ (fragmentary evidence, physical or verbal), including travellers’ tales of a rainforest unicorn, Mbuti peoples’ report of a rainforest equid, and bandoliers of stripy okapi skin. Harry however sought more evidence, leading to the identification and description of the okapi, dispensing with unicorn myths. The okapi is of course wondrous and strange enough in real life, without association with unicorns, or Ancient Egyptian gods (regrettably, this latter story persists).

This episode chimes with my larger theme on the entanglement of various kinds of knowledge in the discovery of species for Western science, notably African indigenous knowledge about okapi.

Learn more about Discovering the Okapi at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Larsen's "The Fires of Moloch"

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College and an Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity at Edinburgh University. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls College, Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford. Larsen's books include The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (2014) and John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life (2018), and he has edited 14 volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Christmas (2020). He is also the president of the American Society of Church History.

Larsen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One, and shared the following:

Page 99 is in a chapter titled, “The Moral Theologian,” which is a biographical study of Kenneth Kirk, who, after serving as a military chaplain in World War One, went on to become a professor of Moral Theology at Oxford University, and then bishop of Oxford. This page is presenting his Anglo-Catholicism, that is, his desire for the Church of England not to be thought of as Protestant, but rather to be closer to Roman Catholicism in its beliefs and practices. The first half of the page focuses on Kirk’s enthusiasm for orders of Anglican nuns and monks. The second half of the page opens a new section. It presents Kirk’s opposition to theological liberals in the Church, and his unyielding, zero-tolerance stance on divorce.

I don’t think this page either strongly supports or contradicts the Page 99 Test. It is less lively than a lot of the book, and so not the page I would have chosen. Still, it does reveal what much of the book is doing, which is giving the life stories of priests who served as military chaplains in the First World War. One sentence, which passes the test well because it keeps war and the military in view (as the book hopes to do throughout) is: “The bishop of Oxford observed that he thought of the Religious communities as the ‘commandos’ of the Church.” It is certainly a revealing choice to tell a group of cloistered, contemplative, elderly nuns that they should think of themselves as a crack military unit. The connection of the issue of divorce to war is explained elsewhere, “Both world wars tempted people into ill-advised marriages and created strains which led to divorce.” The theme of divorce continues in the next chapter which, in a playful interaction with the previous chapter, is titled, “The Immoral Dean.” It is about a prominent Anglican priest whose marriage broke down because of his serial adultery.

Learn more about The Fires of Moloch at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda Shubert's "Seeing Things"

Amanda Shubert is Teaching Faculty in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches and writes on Victorian literature and culture.

Shubert applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture, with the following results:

Page 99 of Seeing Things comes midway through a chapter that discusses the virtual aesthetics of the Koh-i-noor diamond. The Koh-i-noor was the nineteenth-century’s most infamous diamond, both for its large size and its history of violent conquest. The British East India Company pillaged the diamond from Lahore in 1849 at the culmination of the Second Anglo-Sikh War, which saw the annexation of the Punjab. Today, many view the Koh-i-noor as a symbol of British colonial rapacity. But in the mid- nineteenth century, British people were thrilled to learn that Queen Victoria now possessed this supposedly dazzling jewel. It was put on display at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 as a symbol not of rapacity, but its opposite: Britain’s moral and civilizing conquest of an allegedly barbaric subcontinent.

My chapter tells the story of how the attempt to fashion the Koh-i-noor as an imperial symbol failed for aesthetic reasons: the Koh-i-noor did not sparkle. Page 99 begins by arguing that “the British East India Company and the British Crown were promoting brands of empire that were not speaking to the tastes of the British public. Rather than plunder empire or moral empire, the British public expressed a desire for an optical empire that would express itself through the diamond’s virtual aesthetics.” At this point, the chapter pivots from an analysis of the Koh-i-noor’s media aesthetics and its reception history at the Great Exhibition to an analysis of literary texts that that re-enchanted the Koh-i-noor by imagining “large colonial diamonds as technologies for ‘vision at a distance’—diamonds that made empire perceptible through their optical properties.” On that same page, I introduce a short story by the Irish-American writer Fitz-James O’Brien called “The Diamond Lens” (1859). In subsequent pages, I argue that this story is a parable of the Koh-i-noor that satisfies the cultural demand for a diamond that would act as a portal to India through its virtual aesthetics of sparkling and magnification.

A reader who turned to page 99 would certainly get a good view of the chapter’s main argument! This page also accurately captures my overall method in Seeing Things. Readers would see that I portray Victorian virtual aesthetics as a set of discourses and practices found at the intersection of optical media formats and imaginative fiction; and they would come away recognizing that imaginary media—such as diamonds with impossible, science fictional properties—are crucial objects of study that can illuminate both the history of optical media and the role of empire in everyday British life.

Visit Amanda Shubert's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthias Egeler's "Elves and Fairies"

Matthias Egeler is professor of Old Norse literature and culture at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, after years at Oxford, Cambridge, and Munich. His research focuses on Old Norse literary, cultural, and religious history; the literary and religious history of medieval Ireland; and the world of Icelandic folk tales.

Egeler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld, and reported the following:

Page 99 starts with Shakespeare – Puck is speaking – and the impact of Shakespeare’s fairies on the later development of their cultural history, but then switches over to King James I (he of the King James Bible) and the role of fairies in the Scottish witch trials.

King James saw himself as the foremost enemy of Satan on earth, and in this capacity he both acted as a persecutor of witches and wrote a theoretical treatise about the wiles of the Enemy (his Daemonologie, 1597), which among many other unpleasant things also elucidates how Satan creates illusions of fairies that seduce human beings to all manner of unchristian acts. In the writings of King James, we meet the perspective of a ruling elite that condemned fairies and any kind of interaction with them as satanic and deserving the harshest punishment possible. Puck, on the other hand, is a figure of English folk belief that is attested already in early medieval documents, centuries before King James; and Shakespeare does not condemn Puck, but playfully uses this figure to create a delightful world of miracles and illusions. So page 99 opens up a triangle between folk belief, its condemnation by the ruling powers, and its transformation into art – and these are exactly the three basic pillars around which the book is constructed. I am astonished that this test works so well. It must be fairy magic!

Learn more about Elves and Fairies at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Indira Ghose's "A Defence of Pretence"

Indira Ghose is emeritus professor of English at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She is the author of Women Travellers in Colonial India, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History, Much Ado About Nothing: Language and Writing, and Shakespeare in Jest.

Ghose applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Defence of Pretence: Civility and the Theatre in Early Modern England, and shared the following:

For a thumbnail idea of the book, page 99 is a bit of a mixed bag. It is part of a chapter on city comedy, a satirical type of drama very much in vogue at the turn of the seventeenth century, teeming with prodigals, con artists, and social aspirants. Plays set in London were a novelty, and offered the audience a frisson of excitement at seeing their own lives displayed onstage. The most resourceful characters were often the prostitutes, canny businesswomen with an eye to the ultimate prize: marrying rich. The way to achieve this goal was to adopt the manners, deportment, and style of a gentlewoman. Everyone in these plays is playacting, faking it until they make it. The plays catered to the fantasies of self-reinvention and social climbing that had the entire society in its grip.

Civility is, however, much more than about acquiring cultural capital. It relates to both manners and citizenship. The book as a whole looks at the radically divergent ways civility has been pressed into service: in the pursuit of social distinction and as a tool to entrench hierarchies by excluding others from the club, or to forge a community with a shared purpose, reminding us that we all have a stake in society. Manners are simply a repertoire of conventional words and gestures that we use to demonstrate mutual esteem. Civility is an art of performance. The drama of Shakespeare's time is deeply vested in exploring the way our lives are shaped by dissembling—and suggests that human beings are always playing roles. Pretence might be an inescapable part of social life. In an ideal world, sincere sentiments of reciprocity would be desirable. In a polarized society, how we really feel about other members of society might be irrelevant. What matters is the purpose our pretence serves—rampant self-interest or the interests of the wider community.

Learn more about A Defence of Pretence at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark S. Cladis's "Radical Romanticism"

Mark S. Cladis is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where he is a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies, the Center for Environmental Humanities, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination, with the following results:

Summary of page 99: Rousseau, in his epistolary novel Julie, revolutionized Western aesthetic and religious sensibilities. Once considered barbarous and godforsaken, the Alpine landscape became for him a site of beauty, revelation, and moral awakening. His heroine Julie embodies a “worldly religion”--a lively faith bound to the Earth and to the suffering and goodness of human and more-than-human life. Her husband Wolmar, by contrast, stands for a cold, detached rationalism, a moral reasoning cut off from the vitality of the world. Rousseau’s transformation of the “ugly” into the divine helped shape Romanticism’s spiritual and aesthetic imagination--from Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft to Emerson and Thoreau.

The Page 99 Test: Page 99 offers a remarkably good window into Radical Romanticism. It captures the book’s central claim that Romanticism is not a flight from the world but a radical reorientation toward it--a spiritual and political renewal grounded in earthly relations. Rousseau’s inversion of ugliness and beauty, alienation and belonging, prefigures the democratic and ecological visions that the book traces across later writers and movements.

Still, the page shows only one part of the book’s landscape. Other sections expand beyond Rousseau’s Europe to include feminist, Black, and Indigenous reimaginings of the sacred, the political, and the ecological--traditions that widen the very meaning of Romanticism, ecology, and of democracy. Rousseau’s Alps are an early instance of what I call “radical Romanticism”: a mode of world-making that treats care, vulnerability, and interdependence as spiritual practices. His mountains mark the moment when what had been dismissed as barren and broken becomes a place of belonging and revelation, when the world, once shut out, is allowed to speak. Other sections, however, shift from mountains to more precarious terrains--sites of slavery, gendered oppression, and dispossession--but the same pulse endures: the conviction that beauty and justice begin in how we inhabit the Earth.

If Rousseau teaches readers to look again at what they had dismissed as barren, later writers push the question harder: What does beauty mean in a world structured by inequality? Where does revelation occur when land itself has been stolen, polluted, or enclosed? Those voices--feminist, Black, and Indigenous--stretch the Romantic impulse toward care and relation into new ethical registers. They ask not only how the world speaks, but how we learn to listen when its speech is fractured by violence and loss. In that listening, we stand to learn how care, land, and emancipation are braided, and how the sacred becomes legible in places marked by dispossession as much as by beauty.

Learn more about Radical Romanticism at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue