Andrea Horbinski's "Manga's First Century"

Andrea Horbinski began studying Japanese in college after she started watching anime in high school, and went on to research hypernationalist manga in Kyoto on a Fulbright Fellowship. While pursuing her PhD in history and new media at the University of California, Berkeley, she harnessed her love of manga and pop culture, writing a general history of manga in its historical and global contexts for her dissertation. Along the way, she uncovered the role that fans of manga have played in the medium’s development since its earliest decades, mirroring her own experience in sci-fi and online fandoms since childhood.

Her new book, Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989, is the result of ten years spent researching, reading, and thinking about manga on three continents, including research stints in Belgium and Japan.

Horbinski applied the “Page 99 Test” to Manga’s First Century and reported the following:

Page 99 of Manga’s First Century takes readers to the 1930s, discussing the ideals and leading figures of the Shinmangaha Shūdan (New Manga Faction Group). The group rose to prominence in this decade by expanding manga for adults to new publication venues under the slogan “market acquisition” (shijō no kakutoku), and sought to avoid political content in their manga—a wise move amongst the escalating censorship of wartime Japan. Although they were quite well-paid for professionals at the time, two of the group’s leading figures, Kondō Hidezō and Sugiura Yukio, apparently saw the Shinmangaha and its activities as complementary to their interest in anarchism. The remainder of the page briefly discusses the nature of anarchism in imperial Japan, and how it was easily twisted to serve the wartime state.

In one sense, this page literally lives up to Manga’s First Century’s subtitle of “creators and fans,” as the Shinmangaha members were upstart young creators seeking to expand manga’s ambit beyond what the establishment thought was wise—a recurring phenomenon in my discussion of manga’s history in the 20thC. And insasmuch as I sought to explain how manga became manga, it is representative of that aspect of the book too; although the Shinmangaha and its creators are not well-known outside Japan (and are somewhat forgotten nowadays there too), they played a key role in manga in the 1930s and 1940s, and themselves became the manga establishment in the 1950s. Bringing otherwise obscure creators and developments in manga to light, and explaining how they fit together and led to the manga that people around the world love today, is the book’s project.

At the same time, this isn’t the page I would necessarily pick to sell readers on the book, even if it does reflect significant aspects of the whole. The Shinmangaha’s leading members achieved a kind of soft landing and were co-opted into the so-called New Order by the end of the 1930s; Kondō Hidezō became the central figure at Manga (1940-45), the state-approved manga magazine that was one of the few outlets in which publishing manga was permissible after 1940. Their experience was thus atypical of manga on the whole, which was censored nearly out of existence as many creators were drafted, blacklisted, or simply driven out of the profession in these years. In this straitened era, manga fans kept manga alive by avidly rereading older manga, either from each other’s personal collections or through used and rental bookstores—which laid down consumption patterns that exploded into new modes of manga entirely after the war. As one excerpt from a largely chronological account, page 99 is only a snapshot; there’s far more to manga history in the book than this one page contains, and readers will learn a lot more about many other people and developments in that history by picking up the book.

Visit Andrea Horbinski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan A. Stapley's "Holiness to the Lord"

Jonathan A. Stapley is an award-winning historian and scientist. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University and has been active in the field of Mormon History for two decades.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship, and shared the following:

In a famous line from “I Believe,” one of the catchiest songs from The Book of Mormon musical, Elder Price declares, “that God has a plan for all of us. I believe that plan involves me getting my own planet.” It’s funny. It is also a flawed caricature that largely does not map onto the beliefs of individual members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (more commonly called “Mormons”).

Latter-day Saints are constructing temples throughout the world. They excitedly take the public on tours of these iconic buildings once they are complete. But after the prayers of dedication, the public is excluded and church members make promises not to talk about what happens inside. The result is often awkward. Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship is a detailed explanation of the religious ceremonies that occur within these temples, their history over the last nearly 200 years, and an exploration of their religious meaning in the lives of church members. There is a bit of ritual theory and religious studies, but it is mostly history.

Page 99 notes how “it can be tempting to focus on the exotic beliefs” of nineteenth century Mormons. I write this after describing in vivid detail the religious cosmologies of Brigham Young—the leader of the church from 1844 to 1877—and perhaps his most prominent wife, Eliza Snow. Their beliefs about the afterlife and eternal destination of the human soul are the seeds for Elder Price’s goofy Broadway declaration. Page 99 deals with perhaps the most “exotic” elements of Latter-day Saint history. These beliefs are largely irrelevant to the lived religion and beliefs of the millions of practicing Mormons who worship in temples today. But they are also necessary to understand the trajectory of those beliefs and practices.

Page 99 fails at being representative of Holiness to the Lord as a whole. But it is still key for the book to represent the history of the Latter-day Saint temple as a whole.

Visit Jonathan A. Stapley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek Edyvane's "The Politics of Politeness"

Derek Edyvane is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. He was previously a lecturer and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York where he earned his PhD. He works on incivility, injustice, citizenship, and the ethics of political resistance and is the author of two books: Community and Conflict (2007) and Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil (2012). He was awarded the Political Studies Harrison Prize for his article 'Incivility as Dissent' (2020).

Edyvane applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Politics of Politeness: Citizenship, Civility, and the Democracy of Everyday Life, with the following results:

Politeness is often imagined as a stuffy affair of rigid conformity to social rules and conventions. But when we look more closely at how politeness actually works on the ground of everyday living, a much more interesting picture emerges.

Page 99 of The Politics of Politeness, which falls almost exactly halfway through the book and somewhere in the middle of Chapter 4, explores what happens when the usual norms of politeness are unclear or contested. In moments like these, politeness doesn’t retreat - it gets creative.

Taking the example of a shop-keeper who code-switches his manner depending on the customer, page 99 contends that this isn’t just savvy customer service, but rather a kind of social improvisation. In many everyday settings, politeness actually consists in the wisdom to depart from rigid etiquette and to adapt. It’s about crafting interactions that honour a deeper ‘civilizational’ ideal: the will to live decently alongside other people.

In this way, page 99 informs the reader of one of the book’s central ideas: its sense of the ritual-like nature of politeness and the suppleness of the ritual in the face of urban superdiversity. It also captures the book’s insistence on the embeddedness of the politeness ritual in a larger (and more controversial) civilizational bedrock.

Still, the Page 99 Test is not wholly satisfactory as a browser’s shortcut. It doesn’t quite capture the book’s core claim: that politeness is political. The book argues that the way we navigate politeness in daily life has real consequences for the health and vitality of democracy. And it argues that we can therefore use political theory to help us better understand the dilemmas of everyday civility.

That said, page 99 does offer at least a clue. After all, politics is often the art of negotiating difference and diversity. And what is politeness, if not a quiet, everyday way of doing just that?

Learn more about The Politics of Politeness at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maxim Samson's "Earth Shapers"

Maxim Samson is a geographer and the author of Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World. An award-winning educator and researcher, he has taught and presented keynote lectures at universities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Indonesia. In addition to working as an adjunct professor at DePaul University in Chicago, he is the immediate past chair of the American Association of Geographers’ Religions and Belief Systems research specialty group and serves as associate editor of the Journal of Jewish Education. In his free time, he enjoys long-distance running and exploring the culture and language of his favorite country, Indonesia.

Samson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, from the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way, and reported the following:

Page 99 brings readers about three quarters of the way through the third chapter, which examines how people have molded and remolded the planet to make travel more convenient. Specifically, the chapter draws attention to the somewhat controversial development and administration of the Panama Canal; the excerpt quoted below covers one of the final episodes before the USA handed over control to Panama:

And so, when insistent words and the withdrawal of economic and military aid failed to pressure Noriega to stand down, in late 1989 the United States opted to initiate its last assertive hurrah in Panama. Contending that democracy, US citizens’ lives in Panama and the very integrity of the Torrijos–Carter Treaties were all threatened by a military dictator who had turned the country into a loathsome hub of drug trafficking, President George H. W. Bush’s forces succeeded in chasing down and ousting a former ally in a matter of weeks, via a highly unorthodox method. Having learned that this notorious drug smuggler with a penchant for prostitutes was hiding out in the unlikely confines of the Holy See’s diplomatic offices in Panama City, the Americans’ successful strategy involved blaring out a playlist of rock anthems with a common theme: ‘Manuel, your days in charge are numbered’. Though many international observers were outraged by what they viewed as a flagrant violation of Panama’s sovereignty and international law – the invasion, that is, not the refrains of ‘No More Mister Nice Guy’ by Alice Cooper or ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ by Bon Jovi – and the United Nations General Assembly condemned the invasion by a vote of seventy-five to twenty, few in Panama seemed to care. Finally, Americans and Panamanians appeared to be on the same page, assured that with the strongman out of the picture, the connective infrastructure the United States had built and managed according to its own interests could now work to Panama’s benefit as well.

This excerpt offers readers only fragments of Earth Shapers’ central theme—how through our fashioning of geographical connections, humans have guided the course of history—as it focuses rather narrowly on one of the book’s eight case studies. One can learn far more about how the Panama Canal fits within the book as a whole by reviewing the following page, which commences the conclusion to this chapter. Even so, a reader of page 99 can glean certain insights about Earth Shapers, not least my (hopefully) accessible writing style and my commitment to finding surprising and intriguing events relevant to my book, as I portray the farcical story of US forces passive-aggressively playing rock music to smoke Panama’s controversial general Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican’s embassy. While the following page is more explicit about this point, page 99 also hints at the USA’s close interest in Panamanian political affairs, a reality that endures, albeit primarily now in relation to China’s geopolitical influence, to the present day.

Visit Maxim Samson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Ivermee's "Glorious Failure"

Robert Ivermee is a historian of British and wider European colonialism in South Asia. He is Associate Professor at Sciences Po Grenoble, and the author of Hooghly: The Global History of a River.

Ivermee applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India, and shared the following:

Page 99 introduces one of the most important Indian characters in Glorious Failure, the Tamil merchant and official Ananda Ranga Pillai. The page presents Pillai’s background and explains how, through his family connections and commercial dealings, he became one of the wealthiest residents of the French colony of Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast. It then outlines Pillai’s involvement with the French East India Company, first as a commercial agent and later as chief advisor to the governor at Pondicherry, Joseph François Dupleix. The page notes that Dupleix relied heavily on the polyglot Ananda, who spoke Tamil, French and Persian, to organise the Company’s trade with the local Tamil community and conduct diplomacy with Indian courts. It adds that Ananda kept a journal covering some twenty-five years of his life. For historians, this journal is an outstanding primary source on events at Pondicherry and in wider south India from 1736 to 1761.

Readers opening Glorious Failure to page 99 would understand that Ananda and Dupleix were important figures in the history of French India. They would get an insight into French eighteenth century commercial operations in the Indian Ocean. Some perceptive readers might note that the French presence in South Asia was not only commercial, as the presence of a French governor at Pondicherry and the mention of diplomacy with Indian courts suggests. However, readers turning directly to page 99 would get little sense of how, during the governorship of Dupleix, France became a major territorial power in southern and central India. The key argument of Glorious Failure – that France acted as an aggressive imperial power on the subcontinent, establishing an empire through force – is not clearly stated on this page. The Page 99 Test therefore does not work very well for the book.

Page 99 falls early in chapter five of Glorious Failure, which is devoted to the crucial years of French imperial expansion on the subcontinent (1739-1751). The pages that follow explain how, capitalising on its military superiority over local powers, France installed compliant rulers in different Indian courts before taking direct control of large swathes of territory in the Carnatic and the Deccan. Within a decade, however, France’s nascent empire in India had collapsed in the face of internal weakness, hostility from Indian powers, and conflict with Great Britain.

Learn more about Glorious Failure at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jake P. Smith's "The Ruin Dwellers"

Jake P. Smith is associate professor of history at Colorado College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Ruin Dwellers: Progress and Its Discontents in the West German Counterculture, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Ruin Dwellers is peculiar in that it serves as the last page of a chapter and only contains two complete sentences. The sentences — which read: “In order to keep the feeling of perpetual breakthrough alive, then, youth activists needed to engage in ever more radical acts of transgressive destruction and consistently widen the scope of negation. As the next chapter shows, this strategy proved very difficult to sustain.” — are meant to serve as a connecting thread which gather up the ideas from one chapter and project them into the next. Although rather cryptic when taken on its own, I nonetheless feel that this page does indeed provide the reader with a good sense of the book.

I say this for a few reasons.

First, the lines on page 99 introduce the main protagonists of the book, namely the youth activists of the early 1980s who, taking inspiration from the apocalyptic aesthetics emerging from the punk and New Wave movements and from the forms of domestic world building being cultivated by housing activists, developed novel modes of urban activism and novel ways of engaging with (and critiquing) progressive time.

Second, the lines on page 99 mention some of the central theoretical concepts of the book including transgression, negation, and perpetual breakthrough, all of which point to the book's overarching theoretical interest in the temporal logics of modernity. The overarching argument of the book is that leftist activists in the early 1980s challenged and modified some of the ascendant temporal logics associated with progressive modernity and that the oft-derided temporal shift towards the past evident in late twentieth-century leftist thought and practice should be understood not as a romantic rejection of futurity but rather as part of a critical occupation of the logics of progress, one that explored the potential of what Svetlana Boym has called the “off modern.”

So, while page 99 might not give readers a full sense of the book's arguments, it does indeed reflect some of the book's larger concerns.

Learn more about The Ruin Dwellers at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ning Leng's "Politicizing Business"

Ning Leng is an Assistant Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University. For the year of 2025-2026, she a Wilson China Fellow at the Wilson Center.

Leng applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Politicizing Business, the book is just beginning a comparison between two cities and the divergent fate of their private bus firms. It’s starting to dig into a short history of the bus sectors in these two cities—full of fun stories (though not quite on this page yet)—to introduce one of the book’s key concepts: “visibility projects.” These are political showcases dreamed up by politicians and bureaucrats, and a political service often demanded of firms in China, and as this book shows, they can be damaging to the private sector.

And so, no, if readers open my book and turn straight to page 99, they will not get a full sense of the entire book. But readers will immediately see that “visibility projects” is an important concept and that it contributes to the demise of the private bus companies in Chinese cities. If readers are not deterred by the mundaneness of the bus sector, page 99 might prompt them to flip backward to learn what visibility projects are—a salient feature of China’s economy and urban planning—and then forward to discover how such projects “killed” a private sector. Upon landing on this page, some might wonder: is the whole book just about buses?! Should I put it down now? In fact, buses occupy only two of the book’s eight chapters, and in this author’s humble view, the sector is anything but dull. Those who read on from page 99 into the heart of Chapter Five will find vivid accounts of how bus firms interact with city governments and attempt to resist official projects in an authoritarian system, where firms do not have full property rights protection.

And just to keep readers on their toes, the next two chapters venture into another thrilling sector: waste incineration. These four chapters (Chapters 4–7) form the empirical core of this political economy book, which examines how the Chinese government politicizes business and what happens when firms become politicized. As readers may have guessed by now, the kind of politicization described here goes well beyond the usual examples—such as pressuring companies to create jobs or assist in monitoring and surveillance. Politicization, much like these seemingly unremarkable sectors, can be quiet yet transformative. When firms are treated as part of the political system itself, they are asked to alter their operations in subtle but far-reaching ways to serve the state and its officials.

Visit Ning Leng's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc James Carpenter's "The War on Illahee"

Marc James Carpenter grew up in Oregon and now works as associate professor of history at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. He has published in American Indian Quarterly, Oregon Historical Quarterly, and Settler Colonial Studies.

Carpenter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest falls at the end of Chapter 3, and thus has only a few sentences of text:

...[it was] the invaders who started the wars, and the invaders who threatened to 'war forever' until they had gotten what they wanted. American aggression, not Native resistance to that aggression, caused just about every escalation of the War on Illahee—and arguably, just about every U.S. war for land fought across the North American continent.

Although this excerpt doesn't capture the core of the book, it does point to central themes of violence, deception, and manipulated narratives. One point I am making in this chapter is that the habit in American history of periodizing "Indian wars" from a given act of violence from a Native person tends to obscure deeper reasons behind that violence. The 1855 Yakima War portion of the War on Illahee, discussed here, is typically periodized as beginning with the killing of American agent Andrew Jackson Bolon, rather than with the trespassing American rapists whose executions Bolon was threatening genocide to avenge, or with the American decision to respond to a suspected murder with massive military force rather than investigation or diplomacy. More broadly, I argue, there is a norm treating American invasion and "Indian wars" differently than we discuss other invasions and other wars. Elsewhere across history, invaders are usually presumed to be the aggressors. Why not talk the same way about Americans invading Indigenous lands?

We still depict American invaders as defenders in part due to a longstanding culture of cover-ups. I have been able to show that a number of historians, politicians, and pioneers deliberately created false histories for profit and posterity. In a way, this book project began from a place of angry bewilderment, wondering how I, as an Oregonian passionate about history, had lived more than a quarter century without hearing much about the often-genocidal violence perpetrated in my home state. Deep in the archives, I found a big part of the answer: legions of people who preferred honor over truth had skillfully and deliberately distorted history, while keeping enough private records that I could still figure out what they did. My hope is that by proving these cover-ups, I can spur readers to more broadly reconsider histories they thought they knew.

Learn more about The War on Illahee at the Yale University Press website.

--Mashal Zeringue

Denise M. Walsh's "Imperial Sexism"

Denise M. Walsh is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Women's Rights in Democratizing States, a former editor of the American Political Science Review, and has actively advocated for and published on how to diversify the profession. Walsh specializes in comparative politics, gender, human rights, and feminist theory, focusing on how democracies can become more inclusive and just. Her research has been funded by many organizations, including the Institute for Advanced Studies at Notre Dame, the National Science Foundation, and the Institute for Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.

Walsh applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Imperial Sexism: Why Culture and Women's Rights Don't Clash, with the following results:

Page 99 from Imperial Sexism offers a vivid and troubling account of how well-intentioned legislation can reinforce the very inequalities it seeks to dismantle. It focuses on South Africa’s 1998 Recognition of Customary Marriages Act and its failure to protect rural women in polygynous marriages. Despite promises of legal recognition and rights, the law’s implementation was marred by bureaucratic hurdles, patriarchal norms, and the enduring legacy of apartheid. Women were often unable to register their marriages, and when they did, courts invalidated them, leaving them without access to pensions, property, or legal recourse.

This page is a strong reflection of the book’s core themes. Imperial Sexism explores how the compounding effects of colonial-era racism and sexism continue to shape contemporary gender policy debates. It shows how state institutions, even when reform-minded, often reproduce structural inequalities when they fail to account for the lived realities of marginalized women. Page 99 exemplifies this pattern: the state’s attempt to modernize customary marriage law ends up reinforcing rural African women’s second-class status.

So yes, the Page 99 Test works well for this book. A browser landing on this page would immediately grasp the stakes of the book’s argument—how gender, race, and power intersect in policy, and how women resist, navigate, and are often failed by democratic institutions. The page also reflects the book’s method: close analysis of legal reforms, public discourse, and the lived experiences of women across different national contexts.

Imperial Sexism analyzes policy debates about polygyny in South Africa, veiling in France, and Canada’s law stripping Indigenous women of their official Indian status to show how many women around the world challenge discriminatory policies by telling “compatibility stories”—narratives that refuse false binaries and demand both their rights to equality and culture.

Visit Denise M. Walsh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Katz Anhalt's "Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times"

Emily Katz Anhalt is professor of classics at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny and Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths.

Anhalt applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times: Why Humanity Needs Herodotus, the Man Who Invented History, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains the first two paragraphs of Chapter Seven, “On Deception.” The first paragraph introduces the story of the rise to power of the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus (6th cent. BCE) as narrated by the ancient Greek prose writer Herodotus (5th cent. BCE). Briefly situating this tale in the context of Herodotus’s work as a whole, I explain that “In Athens [547 BCE], Peisistratus has gained autocratic power by exploiting factional divisions and religious faith.” This first paragraph articulates the chapter’s central theme: Herodotus explicitly identifies civil strife and unthinking credulity as sources of vulnerability to tyranny. Connecting tyrannical deception to political subjugation, Herodotus ridicules Peisistratus’s contemporary Athenians for their irrational faith and lack of intellectual discernment. Page 99’s second paragraph begins my translation of Herodotus’s engaging narrative of Peisistratus’s use of deception to obtain autocratic power.

Happily, the Page 99 Test works well! My book examines Herodotus’s valuable insights on deception as well as numerous topics of relevance today (e.g. sexual predation, tyranny, freedom, self-restraint). Each chapter includes a translation and discussion of one story in Herodotus’s Histories, an eclectic assortment of tales culminating in the only extensive surviving account of the Persian Wars of the 490s-479 BCE.

As page 99 indicates, Herodotus’s tale of Peisistratus exposes calculated deception as a potent autocratic weapon. Driven from Athens by factional conflict, Peisistratus cunningly costumes a tall woman as Athena, the city’s patron goddess. Accompanied by this woman disguised as Athena, Peisistratus drives his chariot into Athens. He sends heralds ahead to announce that the goddess herself is escorting him back into power. Derided by Herodotus as a deceptive stunt, Peisistratus’s ruse may have been, in fact, a ritual enactment of an Athenian religious ceremony. But Herodotus criticizes the Athenians for their foolish gullibility. Susceptibility to the tyrant’s trick costs the Athenians their political freedom.

Writing in the 440s/430s BCE, Herodotus introduced the vital distinction between myth and history, distinguishing unverified and unverifiable tales of the long-ago past (stories of the Trojan War and the like) from narratives of more recent events verifiable by eyewitness accounts and, when possible, material evidence. Ironically, Herodotus’s own criterion of verifiability enables us to identify many of his stories as fanciful, tendentious, even impossible. Emphasizing the value of evidence-based, rational, critical discernment, however, Herodotus equips us to learn from his less credible as well as his more credible tales.

Today’s online news feeds and social media imperil Herodotus’s vital distinction between myth and history, continuously spewing enthralling, evidence-free, deceptive narratives. As online experience begins to eclipse actual, lived experience, Herodotus’s tale of Peisistratus reminds us that autocratic deceptions and undiscerning credulity make us easy prey for tyrants. Throughout the Histories, Herodotus recalls us to our responsibilities as sentient beings capable of distinguishing fact from authoritarian fabrications.

Visit Emily Katz Anhalt's website.

The Page 99 Test: Enraged.

--Marshal Zeringue