Stephen V. Ash's "A Massacre in Memphis"

Stephen V. Ash is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Firebrand of Liberty, A Year in the South, and other books on the Civil War era.

Ash applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War, and reported the following:

Page 99 offers a revealing glimpse of A Massacre in Memphis.

The scene is a street in South Memphis, a mostly black section of the city, on the afternoon of May 1, 1866. Moments earlier, a shootout had erupted between four white policemen and a boisterous crowd of black men that the officers had tried to disperse. Two of the policemen have fallen, badly wounded; the others are fleeing.

The blacks are exultant, congratulating themselves for standing up to the despised, abusive Memphis police. But as the smoke clears and the excitement subsides, they begin to worry about the consequences. Some decide to lie low for a while.

They are the lucky ones. An hour and a half (and three pages) later---word of the shootout having spread throughout the city---mobs of armed white men descend on South Memphis and begin shooting and beating every black person in sight.

Thus began the Memphis race riot. It stretched over three days, during which white mobs repeatedly invaded black neighborhoods wreaking death and destruction. The toll was horrific: 46 black men, women, and children murdered, many others wounded, robbed, or raped, and every black church and school and many black dwellings in the city put to the torch.

My account of the riot--a minute-by-minute narrative written in the present tense, the better to convey the drama, the kaleidoscopic rush of events, and the sheer horror of those three days--comprises the second of the book’s three parts. The first, written in the customary past tense, is a detailed portrait of Memphis’s inhabitants on the eve of the riot, not only the blacks and ex-Confederates but also the many Irish and Yankee immigrants. It shows how the newly-emancipated people reveled in their freedom while Rebel and Irish resentment toward them and the Yankees festered. The third part, likewise in the past tense, explores the aftermath. The riot was a key event of the post-Civil War era. It outraged Northerners and encouraged Congress to come down hard on the white South, thus helping usher in the controversial era of Radical Reconstruction.

The riot was not only one of 19th-century America’s most significant episodes but also one of the best documented. Three federal agencies investigated it, gathering vivid testimony from hundreds of eyewitnesses. Few other events of that era can be so meticulously recounted. Mine is the first book-length study of it.

Learn more about A Massacre in Memphis at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Firebrand of Liberty.

Writers Read: Stephen V. Ash.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erik Dussere's "America Is Elsewhere"

Erik Dussere is Associate Professor of Literature at American University. He is the author of Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economies of Slavery.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture, and reported the following:

The first piece of good news about page 99 of America Is Elsewhere is that it is not blank—as, for example, page 106 is. Close call, there. If this had been the Page 106 Test I might have been feeling depressed, since the test would seem to suggest that the book is meaningless or incomprehensible. As it is, I can put that worry aside, at least until the reviews come out.

In fact, page 99 is not a bad one to turn to. The big argument of the book is that the films and novels that make up the noir tradition—classic noirs as well as later developments like conspiracy stories or cyberpunk—are always responding in some way to the rise of consumer culture in America, which really gets going in the postwar forties. By page 99, I’m talking about how classic noirs featuring hard-boiled detectives always make connections between local crimes, like murders and robberies, and the larger social systems within which those crimes take place. Here’s what I say on that page:

The hard-boiled detective novel generally begins with a crime; as the detective pursues the investigation he finds that that seemingly isolated crime expands outward, involving larger and larger spheres of social power, until ultimately the distinction between crime and the functioning of society disappears. The detective is left in an ambivalent position, and the story draws our attention to his limited sphere of enforcement. He can solve the local crime in a local way, but he cannot solve the problems of society and political economy that enable the crime at a further remove. He can only act as social critic, pointing to the powerful politicians and businessmen, the Mr. Bigs and Harlan Potters, who bear social responsibility.

So what this leads to, in these books and films, is an attempt at a critique of American capitalism itself, but one that still has to present that critique as an indictment of bad individuals. I go on to argue that in the sixties this critique gets taken one step further as noir evolves into the conspiracy narrative. In those texts—Pynchon’s novels, for instance, or the paranoid films of the seventies—the detective can no longer solve the crime at all. The conspiracy of multinational capital is too large and complex to be understood by the individual, so the noir investigation fails. But that failure still works as an example of noir political critique, since it suggests the presence of the large political and economic forces that it can’t actually represent, when the protagonist runs into a wall as blank and forbidding, in its way, as page 106.

Learn more about America Is Elsewhere at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Bartlett's "Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?"

Robert Bartlett is the Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075-1225, and The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages. He has also written and presented documentaries on the Middle Ages for BBC television.

Bartlett applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?: Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation, and reported the following:

I am particularly pleased to be dealing with page 99 of my book, since it contains one of the most pithy — if also one of the most derisive — descriptions of its subject: ‘“What’s a saint?” ask the devils in Cardinal Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, and answer with glee, “A bundle of bones, which fools adore.”’ Well, the book certainly does not assume that only fools adore saints, but it does start from the assumption that a saint is indeed “a bundle of bones”. The title of the book is a question asked by the great Christian thinker, St. Augustine, as he pondered the miracles worked by the saints. For hundreds of years, and in some places to this day, Christians revered the physical remains of the holy dead. As p. 99 puts it, ‘The corpse was a source not of pollution but of supernatural power. When Elizabeth of Thuringia’s body was laid out after her death in 1231, crowds assembled and cut away portions not only of her clothing, but also of her hair, her nails, even her nipples, which “they preserved for themselves as relics”.’ The book attempts to make sense of these beliefs and this behaviour.

Learn more about Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Worthen's "Apostles of Reason"

Molly Worthen is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Slate, Christianity Today, and other publications.

Worthen applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, and reported the following:

The pressures on faculty and administrators are mounting. Money is tighter than ever. Students won’t enroll without a guarantee of a good job after they graduate. Peer institutions are jostling for applicants and funding, even if it means embracing “innovation” and “creative disruption” with only a vague notion of what these changes might bring.

I’m talking about fundamentalist Bible schools, circa 1947.

The Page 99 test lands on the opening of Chapter 5, “The Marks of Campus Conversion,” and plunges us into this world. Most outsiders think of fundamentalism as an isolated subculture, a Christian fortress secure against the sins of the world. Don’t Bible colleges exist to protect young Christians from the predations of modernity? Don’t they reject innovation in favor of old-time religion? After spending the past couple of years exploring the archives of these institutions, I learned that these stereotypes could not be more wrong: fundamentalists and evangelicals are no strangers to the pressure to change in response to the marketplace, and their relationship to secular learning is complicated, to say the least.

On page 99 we meet Sam Sutherland, president of Biola College, a bastion of fundamentalism outside Los Angeles. He criticizes more liberal-minded Christians who confuse “their egghead enterprises with Bible-based revival.” Yet Sutherland himself was hardly an academic slouch—he arrived at Biola with degrees from Occidental College and Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1948 he complained that the world had gone, “I would dare to say, educationally berserk.” But only two years later we find him crowing to colleagues about the fleet of new PhDs on his faculty. Sutherland’s ambivalence toward higher learning confirms the central argument of my book: conservative evangelicals are torn between sincere respect for human reason and academic achievement, on one hand—and on the other, their deference to a cripplingly narrow understanding of scripture that clashes with the spirit and conclusions of secular inquiry. They are caught between conflicting sources of intellectual authority. This crisis of authority is nothing new: it is as old as evangelicalism’s origins in the years after the Protestant Reformation.

But Sutherland’s savvy transformation of his college—once a fundamentalist Bible institute; today, a thriving Christian university—proves that if this crisis of authority is the scourge of the evangelical mind, it is also a kind of genius: a never-ending balancing act, a source of anxiety and energy that propels evangelicals to constantly revise their relationship to their own traditions and to mainstream culture.

Learn more about Apostles of Reason at the Oxford University Press website.

Writers Read: Molly Worthen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Scott Holloway's "Jim Crow Wisdom"

Jonathan Scott Holloway is professor of history, African American studies, and American studies at Yale University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940, and reported the following:

"Open your book to page ninety-nine and…the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."

Please.

Funny thing, when I opened my book to page ninety-nine I found that it featured a central theoretical claim in the work and that it offered a distillation of the book's unorthodox methodology. In this case, both the claim and the method relate to a still image from the 1970 movie Watermelon Man (the image itself is on page 100). I describe my first encounter with the image this way:

I do not remember if my brother called me into the family room to watch another seminal moment in the era's cinematic cultural race battles, but I recall being there all the same. Previously, at my brother's invitation, I had seen John Shaft give the white man the finger and, in doing so, create entirely new ways to read the black body. My only memory of this second moment—of the entire film, in fact—is an image of a black man sitting in a bathtub filled with gallons upon gallons of milk.

The person in question is dark-skinned actor Godfrey Cambridge. In Watermelon Man—"a social commentary clothed in a comedy built on a fantastical premise"—Cambridge plays Jeff Gerber, a bigoted insurance salesman who wakes up one morning to discover that he has turned black, very black. (Cambridge is in white face for the first fifteen minutes of the film.) This milk bath is one of Gerber's last desperate efforts to become white again.

This page is from a chapter that explores how the black body—fingers, arms, skin—serves as a repository of traumatic memory. Also on this page I am writing in the first person, a voice that is interspersed throughout the book to highlight how official narratives of the past (history) collide with personal narratives (memory). In Jim Crow Wisdom I examine the consequences of these collisions.

On page ninety-nine we bear witness to Gerber's trauma when he discovers his sense of self did not align with others' assessment of how his new, black body would be allowed to navigate the waters of mainstream America. By this point in the film, moviegoers could see that Gerber was sliding toward madness as he realized that he lacked control over the process of narration.

My book explores black memory from many angles—popular literature, social science, dance, the built environment, memoir, and film—and asks critical questions about who gets to write and claim those memories and what's at stake in the process. For Jeff Gerber, the story his body told others (and the presumptions of black memories that were subsumed in his skin) revealed the traumas of a second-class citizenship. For others, people who were black their entire lives, the consequences of these conflicting narratives were so patently obvious and negative that they could not afford the luxury even of the mistaken hope that bathtubs filled with milk could solve their problems.

Learn more about Jim Crow Wisdom at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Jews and the Military"

Derek J. Penslar is the Samuel Zacks Professor of Jewish History at the University of Toronto and the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His many books include Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe, Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective, and The Origins of Israel, 1882-1948: A Documentary History.

Penslar applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Jews and the Military: A History, and reported the following:

On Page 99 of Jews and the Military I write of the effect of the Dreyfus Affair on Jewish career officers in France:

Frustrated and aggrieved Jewish officers became increasingly wont to challenge their bigoted comrades to duels, at times fatal. Many Jews resigned their commissions out of fear that their career advancement would be stifled.... Not surprisingly, at the end of the century the numbers of Jews entering the [military-technical] Ecole Polytechnique and [military academy] Saint-Cyr plummeted.

Nonetheless, even at the height of the affair Jews continued to graduate from the Ecole Superieure de Guerre and receive promotions from lieutenant to captain, battalion chief, lieutenant colonel, colonel and general. Jewish officers who died in uniform continued to receive elaborate and respectful military funerals. At the turn of the century, as the forces of republicanism reasserted themselves, Catholic and monarchist officers, not Jews, were the targets of investigation by the War Ministry…. Jews continued to flow into the Ecole Polytechnique, albeit at reduced numbers, leading to the training of a whole new generation of Jewish officers who would take command during and after World War I.

These passages speak to the heart of my book’s argument: that Jews in the modern world have often been willing, even eager, to serve in the military. In countries such as France and Italy where the officer corps was available to Jews, they sought it out. In eastern Europe Jews were frequently persecuted, and so their attitude to the state was more hostile than in the west, but even here most Jews dutifully performed their military service, and only a small minority were draft dodgers. For Jewish men in any country, military service presented an opportunity to display masculine valour. Jews worried lest their co-religionists face each other in battle, but they celebrated the virility, bravery, and above all the patriotic spirit of their men in uniform.

The excerpt is from a chapter on Jews as career military officers in Europe and North America. Other chapters in the book deal with soldering and warfare in pre-modern Jewish civilization; the relationship between conscription and emancipation; the tension between patriotism and trans-national solidarity when Jews fought in wars in the 1800s; Jewish soldiers in World Wars I and II; and the role of diaspora Jews as volunteers in the fight for Israeli statehood in 1948.

Learn more about the book and author at Derek Penslar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J .J. Carney's "Rwanda Before the Genocide"

J.J. Carney is Assistant Professor of Theology at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska. His research and teaching interests engage the theological and historical dimensions of the Catholic experience in modern Africa.

Carney applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era, and reported the following:

To be honest, I had never heard of Ford Madox Ford's page 99 test, but it was surprisingly accurate for Rwanda Before the Genocide. Namely, page 99 brings you right into the heart of the long-running controversy surrounding Catholic leaders, ethnic discourse, and Rwandan politics. You encounter Mgr. Andre Perraudin, a Swiss Catholic missionary bishop and future bete noire for the Tutsi exile community. More importantly, you encounter Perraudin's most famous writing, his pastoral letter "Super Omnia Caritas" released in February 1959. This pastoral letter explicitly and exclusively linked late colonial social injustice with Hutu and Tutsi categories, establishing Perraudin's reputation as a pro-Hutu partisan. Perraudin later called this statement the "charter of my episcopate" even as he denied that it contributed to the political climate that helped precipitate revolutionary violence in November 1959. In showing the analytical difference between Perraudin and Rwanda's other Catholic bishop at the time, Mgr. Aloys Bigirumwami, page 99 reminds us that social description lay at the heart of Rwanda's late colonial disputes. Namely, the church may stand for "justice for the poor," but the key issue is how the church understands and defines "justice" and "the poor." In Rwanda many political and religious leaders chose to define "the poor" as "Hutu," helping to establish a dangerous ideological justification for revolutionary anti-Tutsi violence. Such discourse helps to explain why many (if not all) Catholic leaders stood by Rwanda's post-colonial Hutu governments even in the midst of major anti-Tutsi massacres in 1964, 1973, and the early 1990s.

Read more about Rwanda Before the Genocide at the Oxford University Press website.

Writers Read: J.J. Carney.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Vout's "Sex on Show"

Caroline Vout is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ’s College. In 2008 she was awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for Art History. She is the author of Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome and Antinous: the Face of the Antique, which won the inaugural Art Book Award.

Vout applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome, and reported the following:

Page 99 is, appropriately, not words but image -- for 'reading' images is what Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome is all about. The picture captures what remains of an ancient brothel at Pompeii, an erotic painting above the door giving a glimpse of the kinds of things that happened on the stone bed inside. It is an unusual image as far as the book is concerned in pointing so directly to bedroom gymnastics. Why? Because most of its 200 pictures reveal less about the realities of Greek and Roman sex than about fantasies, anxieties, propriety… Many of these pictures (for example those of Athenian pots decorated with scenes of athletics, or statues in the shape of beautiful gods) offer subtler invitations to think about the temptations and constraints that affected ancient bodies. They show objects used in elite drinking parties or temples, some of them rediscovered by Hellenists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By understanding their visual mechanics, Sex on Show throws new light on ancient sex and gender, cultural identity, religion, as well as modern collecting practices.

A single page, with its atypical image, inevitably struggles to encapsulate the many aspects of our strange relationship with the ancients as seen through the lens of sex. But its failure to do so captures something of the flavour of the book’s subheading and the power not of sex but the erotic. Unlike the consummation that comes from sex, the erotic is always wanting. It is only apt that page 99 should offer but the merest, even potentially distorting taste of the whole, because desire is always veiled.

Learn more about Sex on Show at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lara Deeb and Mona Harb's "Leisurely Islam"

Lara Deeb is associate professor of anthropology at Scripps College and the author of An Enchanted Modern. Mona Harb is associate professor of urban studies and politics at the American University of Beirut and the author of Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shiite South Beirut, and reported the following:

We were pleasantly surprised to find that page 99 of our book captures many of its key themes. Leisurely Islam is about many things: how and why cafes and restaurants boomed in south Beirut in the twenty-first century; the entrepreneurs who opened these businesses; the usually unsuccessful efforts of the Islamic political party Hizbullah to control this new leisure sector; the views of religious leaders on common cafe practices; the aesthetics of cafe interiors; and, as you might guess from the book title, the ways that pious youth navigate both ideas about morality and the complex sectarian geography of Beirut as they piece together ways to have fun with a clear conscience.

Page 99 conveys a sense of the tensions among the three key agents involved in producing and controlling leisure places in south Beirut and their clientele: Hizbullah, Shi‘ite jurisprudents, and cafe owners. The page highlights the late popular religious leader Sayyid Fadlallah’s view that “seeking a rapprochement between jurisprudence and the contemporary world can also be understood to suggest that jurisprudence should adapt to the social world, and thereby facilitate the needs and desires of contemporary youths.” This is an accurate summation of his opinions that are so important in this community. Page 99 also notes that cafe owners try to “act as self-proclaimed paternalistic authorities, monitoring and regulating” youths’ behavior. But perhaps the most important sentence on the page is: “But youths are not passive recipients and can be quite vocal in contesting authorities that interfere with their lifestyle choices.” This sentence encapsulates one of our key arguments in the book - that pious young Muslims are working out their own ways of living a good and moral life which includes both abiding by (their own interpretations of) religious and social values and tenets and having fun with their friends. This really isn’t an earth-shattering idea, but unfortunately in the U.S. today (and beyond), pious Muslims are often described in one-dimensional terms, so that readers and listeners are left with the impression that religion is the only important thing in their lives. One of the reasons we wanted to write this book was to counter with that assumption.

What is missing from page 99 is our argument about how new practices of leisure are affecting the geography of Beirut as a whole. The page gives the reader a glimpse of that idea when it says “Cafes and restaurants in Dahiya are providing youths with many social and spatial opportunities close to home,” but that barely begins to scratch the surface of how urban space is being negotiated and imagined by pious young people as they seek out different places to have fun.

Learn more about Leisurely Islam at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Hendy's "Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening"

David Hendy is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sussex. He has been a visiting research fellow at Wolfson College and the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge; Marjorie G. Wynne Visiting Research Fellow in British Literature at the Beinecke Library, Yale University (2010); and Helm Fellow at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (2010). In 2011 he was awarded the James W. Carey Award for Outstanding Journalism by the Media Ecology Association of North America for his five-part BBC Radio 3 series, Rewiring the Mind. He worked as a journalist and producer at the BBC. His book Life on Air: A History of Radio Four (2007) won the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award in 2008.

Hendy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, and reported the following:

We’re in the world of bells – surely among the most iconic sound-making devices in the whole of human history. The earliest evidence for their use comes from China. But on page 99, we’re in the Catacombs of Priscilla, one of the less well-trodden networks of chilly underground passages and chambers hidden under the streets of Rome. Some 1900 years ago, it was lined with bodies – a quiet burial place for the ancient city’s earliest Christians. The Catacombs are silent now. But even back then, the only sounds would have come from simple funeral rites – accompanied, most likely, by the faint tinkling of small bells or ‘tintinnabula’.

A rather mute choice of location, then, for a history of sound. But even the modest, long dissipated chimes of the tintinnabula are a vital link in my unfolding story, which is about power: the remarkable power of sounds to shape our emotions and our social worlds over the past 100,000 years. Bells themselves had an extraordinary, sacred power. Their sound was seen as a ‘manifestation of universal essence’, helping to drive away those multitudinous evil spirits lurking all around. In fact, wherever they’ve been rung, bells have supposedly created a Godly aura of safety.

There’s another reason for being in the Catacombs. Some of the rooms here are stuffed full of inscriptions and frescoes: visual clues for lost soundscapes - scenes of banqueting and ceremonies, weddings and prayers - scenes that look Christian, but also perhaps Pagan, Greek, Jewish. In other words, scenes that conjure for us a turbulent melting pot of beliefs and rituals. What they show, too, is that whatever their precise religious persuasion, these earlier Christians appeared to believe that if sound really was an effective means of repelling troubling spirits, or attracting the attention of the Divine, there was no better way to guarantee access to the holy than by making a bit of racket: dancing, speaking in tongues, creating – quite literally – good vibrations.

The bishops of later centuries would soon put a stop to all this – as later pages of the book will show. But for a brief moment in time, religion has a delicious whiff of Dionysus about it. It remains (to quote the chapter’s title) an ‘ecstatic underground’: a dazzling kaleidoscope of sounds and songs somehow making their presence felt in the damp, still darkness below Rome’s noisy Via Salaria.

Learn more about Noise at the publisher's website, and follow David Hendy on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue