Rashi K. Shukla's "Methamphetamine: A Love Story"

Rashi K. Shukla is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Oklahoma. She received her PhD in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University and has served as lead investigator of a multimethod study of the methamphetamine problem for more than a decade. Her research, which focuses on offender decision-making and the evolution of drug problems, has been presented in numerous forums, both nationally and internationally.

Shukla applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Methamphetamine: A Love Story, and reported the following:

Page 99 begins the sixth chapter titled, “An Intoxicating Life.” It is the place where the end of the story begins. Having gone through the dimensions of the methamphetamine immersed lifestyle – using, dealing, and manufacturing – this is the first of three chapters dedicated to describing the lived experience from an insider’s perspective. As with many drug journeys, this one is characterized by pleasure and highs on many levels. Understanding the intoxicating aspects involves moving beyond common conceptions about the pulls and draws of the drug. It is a lifestyle. And it is intoxicating. But that is just the beginning.

A quote by Patrick, a trucker who lived the high life for more than two decades, introduces the chapter. As we discussed his story and the magnetisms of the life, he elucidated the challenge that lay ahead of me in my forthcoming attempts to tell the story that needed to be told, stating:

“It was a glamourous life. You gonna have a rough time telling that story. When I speak to kids, depending on [who] I speak to, kids, adults, I speak to impact panels, I speak to judges, I speak to a lot of people and it’s, it’s a hard story to tell; it’s in the wording. Because it’s a glamorous life, it’s a fun life. You know? But in the long run it’s, it’s trouble. I seen out of my graduating class, it was about sixty-five kids, there are less than twenty of us alive.”

He was right. It would be a hard story to tell…honestly. The first paragraph on page 99 sets the stage for understanding all that preceded this point of the story and all that later follows. It is a critical piece of the puzzle.

The world of methamphetamine is intoxicating. It is filled with highs: meth, money, sex, power, and control. It is as good as it gets. It is, in reality, too good to be true. Use is not the only “addicting” factor. Rather, it is addicting because of what it provides. There is something enticing about the intoxicated life, more than just the drug.

There are very real aspects of the methamphetamine lifestyle that attracts people to it. This is one of the reasons that a number of them referred to their feelings about methamphetamine as love. It is one of the reasons the book would include a chapter titled, “Loving Meth.” Perhaps, in the end, it is one of the reasons that the book would be given the title it did despite the darkness it portrays.
Excerpts from Methamphetamine: A Love Story reprinted with permission.

Learn more about Methamphetamine: A Love Story at the University of California Press website, and visit Rashi K. Shukla's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fay Bound Alberti's "This Mortal Coil"

Fay Bound Alberti is a writer, cultural historian and advisor. She has published widely on the histories of medicine and science, gender, the body and emotions. Bound Alberti co-founded the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London where she remains Honorary Senior Research Fellow. Other areas of interest include the history and ethics of cosmetic surgery, the relationship between mind and body and gender politics – now and in the past.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture, and reported the following:

This Mortal Coil is a cultural history of the human body. It considers how beliefs about the body have been structured by, and reinforce, ideas about gender, race and sexual identity. Though we often consider Shakespeare ‘our contemporary,’ – as seen by commemorations in the 400th year since his death – the ways we view the body have changed. My title is taken from one of Shakespeare’s most famous Hamlet soliloques: ‘To be or not to be’, in which ‘this mortal coil’ that we ‘shuffle off’ after death refers to the social, political and cultural turmoil in which the body is situated.

In Shakespeare’s time a humoral model of the body predominated, in which the body was composed of blood, yellow bile or choler, black bile and phlegm. The proportion of each humor influenced one’s health and psychological state. The soul, which moved through the heart, summoned black bile for sadness and blood and choler for anger, producing the physical effects of emotion: the hair standing up on end, the flushed face, even the gnashing of the teeth. On page 99 of This Mortal Coil I describe how early modern writers invoked these physiological processes when explaining anger’s effects. Thus John Downame’s Treatise on Anger (1609), explained how the passion:

Maketh the haire to stand on end, shewing the obdurate inflexiblenesse of the minde. The eyes to stare and candle, as though with the Cockatrice they would kill with their lookes. The teeth to gnash like a furious Bore. The face now red, and soon after pale, as if either it blushed for shame of the mind’s follie, or envied others good. The tongue to stammer, as being not able to expresse the rage of the hart. The bloud ready to burst out of the vaines, as though it were a raide to stay in so furious a body. The brest to swell, as being not large enough to containe their anger, and therefore seeketh to ease it selfe, by sending out hot-breathing sighes. The hands to beate the tables and walles, which never offended them. The joyntes to tremble and shake, as if they were afraid of the mines furie. The feete to stamp the guiltlesse earth, as though there were not room enough for it in the whole element of the aire, and therefore sought entrance into the earth also. So that anger deformeth the body from the hayre of the head to the soale of the foote.

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, medical understandings of the body were transformed. In the West, writers moved from a humoral and holistic understanding of our selves to one in which the material body was a series of parts, systems and organs. The location of our ‘selves’ moved from the heart to the brain and the soul became irrelevant. Ideas about body parts also changed: from the skin to the bones, from fat to the tongue, new narratives evolved to explain the workings of this complex material structure. These were invested with a series of beliefs about race, gender and sexuality that continue to have impact.

One of the challenges of this broad development, I suggest, is that our psychic selves are more distanced than ever from our bodies at the same time as medical understandings are more specialised. Rates of depression are increasing and our drive for perfect bodies has given rise to dangerous and unregulated cosmetic practices. The ‘modern body’ therefore presents philosophical as well as scientific challenges. Through a series of historical case studies, This Mortal Coil asks: are we really more than the sum of our parts?

Visit Fay Bound Alberti's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai's "Northern Character"

Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai is Assistant Professor of history at Angelo State University. He is co-editor (with Lorien Foote) of So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era, and reported the following:

Page 99 opens with Harvard graduate Henry L. Abbott admitting that he was “constitutionally timid” and “not warlike.” Yet, he felt bound by duty to volunteer to defend the Union in the midst of the American Civil War. Northern Character is about the development and application of a northern code of honor among the North’s elite population of young men who attended and graduated from colleges and universities at a time when few Americans had similar opportunities. I refer to them as the New Brahmins.

The young men who graduated from Harvard, Bowdoin, and other elite schools received not only a classical education but, more importantly, learned how to behave as gentlemen. Their code of conduct revolved around the term “character,” which called for gentlemen to act in accordance with an idealized internal compass based on educated thought. They internalized codes of proper behavior but also articulated for themselves a vision of American nationalism that they drew upon to make the case for the Union’s survival.

Page 99 perfectly represents the moment of crisis for the New Brahmins as they considered their options and wondered whether to join the fight. Would they behave consistent with the sentiments that they had espoused as college men? Here was a true test of their character.

When the Civil War began, these young men had the option of staying on the home front. Their position in society as members of the professional class—physicians, merchants, and attorneys—allowed them the possibility of hiring substitutes. Many of their class did stay on the home front and, as their parents argued, could serve the cause of the Union in other ways. But the New Brahmins took their college lessons seriously. On page 99, we find William Wheeler, a Yale graduate, informing his mother, “I have felt all along that it was my duty to go, and that it would be disgraceful if I did not” while Amherst student Christopher Pennell asked his father, “What is a person worth at such a time, if he do[es] not strain every nerve to uphold the stars & stripes[?]” Driven also by a sense of masculine bravado, Pennell reported that “men of the most talent, the soundest minds, the men, in short, of College are signing [up.]” Meanwhile, former Harvard student Robert Gould Shaw, later the commander of the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, the first African-American regiment raised in the North, wrote that he would “not be satisfied to stay at home idle when such a war is going on.”

New Brahmins, who viewed themselves as society’s leaders, thought that their example would also lead others to join. They feared that complacency in the North would endanger enlistment efforts and hinder the war’s swift prosecution.

The war also offered the New Brahmins a very public way of demonstrating their character. Since the code of character emphasized internal thoughts and actions based on individual analysis, much of it was often hidden from the outside world. This is one key way that northern character differed from southern honor, which was all about the external displays and acting in accordance with the dictates of the crowd. The war allowed New Brahmins to act in accordance with their internal beliefs in a very public manner. “You must feel with me in my happiness!” Yale graduate William T. Lusk exclaimed, explaining that he was “going to see real danger, real privation, real work—not as a mere Carpet-Knight, talking valorously to girls, but going forth in all humility to help to conquer in the name of God and my Country.”

Learn more about Northern Character at the Fordham University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Naomi Schaefer Riley's "The New Trail of Tears"

Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians, is a weekly columnist for the New York Post and a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer whose work focuses on higher education, religion, philanthropy and culture. She is the author of several books on those topics. Her book, ‘Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America, was named an editor’s pick by the New York Times Book Review.

Riley applied the “Page 99 Test” to The New Trail of Tears and reported the following:

Page 99 of The New Trail of Tears contains an interview with Lucy Lowry, a CPA and professor at a local community college here in Robeson County, North Carolina. It is one of dozens of conversations with Native Americans in the book, many of which include deeply depressing stories about the state of their communities today. Lowry and I are sitting at a picnic table in the shade on a blistering day in June on the farm of Ben Chavis. Chavis is running a math camp to help local kids learn the basics of numbers that their deplorable local schools have failed to teach them.

When a nonwhite woman in the South tells you that the schools she attended before desegregation were better than the ones the kids in her community experience today, it should be a wakeup call. And Lowry, knows whereof she speaks. She is a Lumbee Indian, living in one of the poorest and most crime-ridden areas on the country. Robeson County was never rich but Lowry has been deeply disappointed in what seems to be the downward mobility of her tribe over the past two generations. Her grandfather was a schoolteacher. Four of the siblings in her family have PhDs, and the other three have master’s degrees. They are all in their 60s and 70s, though.

If you want to know why American Indians have the highest rates of poverty of any racial group, do not look to history. There is no doubt that white settlers devastated Indian communities in the 19th, and early 20th centuries. But it is our policies today—economic and educational ones—that have turned Indian communities into third world nations in the middle of the richest country on earth.

Today, students in Robeson County scored an average of 1247 (out of 2400) on the SATs in 2012, than 200 points below the state average, which was already 40 points below the national average. Even if students received all Ds and Fs on their report cards, they are sent to the next grade.

Lowry says: "We are failing to educate students to be good citizens, to manage their own affairs, to be confident learners."

How have things wound up in this state for the Lumbee Indians? Lowry and the other elders in this community have some ideas. Some blame the breakdown of the families. Two-parent households are rare. Teen pregnancy is common. Others say that the public education system is plagued by nepotism and corruption. But many trace the problems of the Lumbees—and American Indians more generally—on a culture of government dependence that has developed in the past 50 years.

Ronald Hammonds, a local cattle farmer, tells me that the solution is simple. "Cut out the handouts." He disagrees with fellow tribe members who are trying to get more tribal recognition and dollars from Washington. "Our problems ain’t going to be solved by money. All you’re doing is making it worse. It’s time for people to take responsibility for their lives, but our government doesn’t want them to. They want to be the answer to our problems."


Visit Naomi Schaefer Riley's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hugo Drochon's "Nietzsche's Great Politics"

Hugo Drochon is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political thought and a postdoctoral research fellow at CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, at the University of Cambridge.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Nietzsche's Great Politics, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche explains that it is in the space between master and slave that “pity and similar sentiments can find a place” (BGE 260), and in his discussion of the Laws of Manu he observes that “when an exceptional person treats a mediocre one more delicately than he treats himself and his equals, this is not just courtesy of the heart–it is his duty” (AC 57). I therefore find myself more in agreement with Ansell-Pearson’s alternative view of what Nietzsche’s society could become: a “peaceful coexistence between different human types (say, between the overhuman and the human), in which the former pursue artistic self-creation and self-discipline, and the latter preoccupy themselves with mundane and material pursuit”. I do so, however, with one caveat: the relationship between the two spheres that I have sketched above has to be retained–there remains a degree of slavery and pathos between the two spheres–instead of Ansell-Pearson’s more completely separate, and consequently apolitical, vision.

Is Nietzsche a liberal? That seems counter-intuitive for someone who made an infamous comment about needing a whip around young girls, although that comment is often taken out of context (it isn’t pronounced by Nietzsche’s mouthpiece, Zarathustra, but instead by an older women giving advice to him, if you must know). But Nietzsche is known to have frequented the leading feminist thinkers of his time, and to have voted in favour of the admission of women to the University of Basle, where he was teaching in the 1870s, even whilst his intellectual mentor at the time, Jacob Burckhardt, voted against.

But is Nietzsche a political liberal? His background was in the German liberal-nationalist tradition, which had supported Bismarck’s rise to power. If Nietzsche had been able to vote in the first elections held in Northern Germany in 1867 (the age limit was 25, he was 22), he would have voted for them. But what of his vision for his future ideal society?

This is what I start to get at on p. 99. For Nietzsche, his ideal society would have to comprise of two spheres: one dedicated to culture (‘artistic self-creation and self-discipline’), and the other happy to continue the process of democratisation he had witnessed in his time (‘mundane and material pursuits’). But that democratic process, grounded in ‘herd morality’, claimed that it – and only it – was the only possible mode of life. This is what Nietzsche fought against. Not for the total victory of his own ‘good European’ cultural elite (‘threat a mediocre person with delicacy’) – that would have been to reproduce the same mistake the democrats were falling into – but so that both could have their respective spheres of existence. The question to resolve then was how those two spheres were to coexist, and that is to turn to the question of politics (‘relation between the two spheres’). But in seeing that in modernity different communities needed to be both defended and made to live side-by-side, Nietzsche opened the door to a liberal and pluralist understanding of society. How to balance those two demands – protecting different modes of life whilst at the same time making them inhabit a common political community – remains the challenge to liberal politics today.

Learn more about Nietzsche's Great Politics at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gareth Dale's "Karl Polanyi"

Gareth Dale is senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Brunel University, London. His books include Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market (2010), Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings (2016), and Green Growth: Ideology, Political Economy, and the Alternatives (2016).

Dale applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, and reported the following:

Of the several twentieth century phenomena that this book re-visions through the biography of the Austro-Hungarian sociologist, Karl Polanyi, the most prominent is the story of social democracy. It is no surprise, then, that page 99 finds our protagonist immersed in the theory and actuality of Red Vienna.

Following his childhood and youth spent in Budapest, Polanyi returned to Vienna, his place of birth in 1919. It was a momentous year, in which conflicts roiling European politics merged with his own private hell. The First World War had spat him out—injured, typhus-ridden and perilously depressed—before its end. His move to Vienna was motivated by medical need, but any prospect of return was ruled out when Admiral Horthy’s fascists assumed power in Budapest, following the demise of the short-lived socialist ‘Commune.’

In this cauldron, Polanyi’s worldview underwent an abrupt transformation. He found God and converted to Christianity. He diagnosed the traumatic events on the world stage as symptoms of a spiritual crisis, but one with a secular root: the corrosive and relentless expansion of the market economy. This leap required a change in political outlook, too. He moved away from his earlier Smithian ‘liberal socialism’ and engaged with more radical currents: British ‘guild socialism’ and its Central European cousin, Austro-Marxism.

The strengths and weaknesses of the Austro-Marxist project are encapsulated on page 99. Vienna on Polanyi’s arrival

was in the throes of a popular renaissance. Thanks to the assumption of municipal power by social democracy a remarkable shift had occurred. Kindergärten, libraries and adult education programmes were expanded, and a plethora of cultural associations were established. On any given day, a worker might read a socialist newspaper, take part in mass calisthenics or attend a lecture on the socialist implications of the theory of relativity, while her husband attended a socialist chess club or gardening group. Polanyi was particularly impressed by Red Vienna’s initiatives in the fields of culture and educational reform. When a young activist in Budapest he had been engaged in workers’ education, and in this respect the Austro-Marxists spoke his language. Education was central to their project, which has been described as one of transforming the working classes into ‘a socialized humanity through a politics of pedagogy.’

Whereas Polanyi’s eye was on the mass appeal of social democracy, that of his wife, Ilona Duczynska, was on its elitist propensities, as social democratic parties evolved into the managerial agents of a profoundly elitist system, capitalism. The upshot, discussed in the book’s epilogue, has been a detachment of social democracy from its traditional base, punctuated by occasional upwellings—as witnessed most recently in the Sanders and Corbyn phenomena.

Learn more about Karl Polanyi at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's "Seinfeldia"

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong grew up in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, where she spent most of her time putting on shows in her parents’ garage, studying TV Guide, devouring Sweet Valley High books, and memorizing every note of every George Michael song. This finally came in handy when she got a job at Entertainment Weekly, where she worked for a decade. She’s now the TV columnist for BBC Culture and also writes for several other publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Fast Company, New York‘s Vulture, The Verge, and Dame. She’s the author of the New York Times bestseller Seinfeldia: The Secret World of the Show About Nothing that Changed Everything and a history of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted. She now lives in Manhattan.

Armstrong applied the “Page 99 Test” to Seinfeldia and reported the following:

Bill Masters spent the better part of a year on the writing staff at Seinfeld, helping make scripts for episodes such as “The Movie,” in which the main characters—Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer—keep missing each other at the theater. It was the show’s fourth season, just as it was starting to rise in popularity. And then, near the end of the season, in the spring of 1993, Masters even got to be in an episode.

He was terrified. He had to play a shuttle van driver picking Elaine and Jerry up at the airport, and he had to actually hit the gas of a real van on location, with crew members standing just feet away. What if he hit it too hard and killed them all?

This is the dilemma Masters faces on page 99 of my book Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything. It’s a very specific little anecdote, but it works pretty nicely as an indication of the book, which is built on specific little anecdotes from those who worked on and were affected by the hit ‘90s TV show, which remains outrageously popular today in reruns.

Some of the best parts of the book hinge on these behind-the-scenes stories from the show’s writers. And a lot of them are at least this stressful, if not far more so. Another writer around the same time, Andy Robin, came to the show as a young man fresh out of Harvard who was already a fan of the show—he was sure he’d somehow end up ruining his favorite show. And he was, in fact, sure he did when he wrote the episode “The Junior Mint,” in which Kramer drops a piece of candy into the body of a guy getting surgery. (If you haven’t seen it, you’re too far behind for me to start explaining now.) He thought the episode was ludicrous; his bosses, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, loved it. So did America. Others struggled to get David and Seinfeld to approve their story ideas so they could write scripts. All of them felt the pressure of a show gaining in popularity and brilliance every week.

Masters did not end up hurting anyone. He did end up off the show, however, at the end of the season. David and Seinfeld usually let most of their writers go at the end of each season, keeping only a few mainstays. Writers tended to use up most of their own interesting, story-worthy experiences within a year. Then David and Seinfeld would bring in a new crop the following fall to pick over.

Masters felt grateful for his time on the show. He went on to write for another sitcom, Grace Under Fire. He’d have Seinfeld on his resume for the rest of his career, and that was no small thing.

Visit Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's website.

My Book, The Movie: Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted.

The Page 99 Test: Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted.

--Marshal Zeringue

Analiese Richard's "The Unsettled Sector"

Analiese Richard is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at University of the Pacific.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Unsettled Sector: NGOs and the Cultivation of Democratic Citizenship in Rural Mexico, and reported the following:

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have taken on an increasingly important global role as both representatives of “civil society” and providers of humanitarian aid and social services. In Mexico, the NGO “boom” of the 1990’s and 2000’s was hailed as an indicator of democratic change. But what does the growth of this “third sector” comprised of NGOs mean for the future of citizenship?

The Unsettled Sector examines the contradictions that emerged as NGOs became institutionalized within the complex terrain of Mexican politics. Through a multi-sited ethnography of rural development NGOs in the Tulancingo Valley of Mexico, it contextualizes their role in helping rural people to claim their rights as citizens, highlighting the complex relationships between these new organizational forms and earlier historical models of civic action and social solidarity. Each chapter tells the story from a different angle, beginning with the history of rural cultures of citizenship, and moving through the perspectives of NGO workers, rural project participants, international funding partners, and so on.

In the 1990s, poor Mexican farmers came to be regarded as iconic victims of structural adjustment and free trade policies. The countryside was losing its traditional political importance as both a source of votes and a symbol of national identity, at the same time that NGOs were becoming more involved in both development and civic engagement projects in rural communities. In recent decades, cycles of drought and flooding driven by climate change have combined with the effects of North American economic integration and the privatization and corporatization of Mexican agriculture, to create new forms of political, economic, and social risk for participants in the rural development projects.

Page 99 describes the way political subjectivities in rural Hidalgo have been affected by these changes:

The disaster is interpreted locally through a discourse of desiccation, which diagnoses the premature death of the countryside as a result of human failures to maintain systems of reciprocity. This perceived rupture of a total system has produced a cataclysmic consciousness among many campesinos. Although they resist government attempts to naturalize the disaster by pointing out its origins in changing strategies of rule, the erosion of collective rural institutions leaves them to confront an uncertain future as individuals all the same.

It has become commonplace for Mexican journalists, political commentators, and activists to refer to the countryside as a disaster area. Some have even christened a new category of crisis: the governmental disaster. This term has been used to highlight the social and political implications of recent natural disasters, as well as to provoke discussion around the role of national and local governments in precipitating them. Contrasting governmental disasters to natural ones, Carlos Montemayor of La Jornada emphasizes the increasing use of public power to secure private profit in ways that cause harm to citizens and violate national laws. He suggests that “the disasters occurring within Mexican territory continue to stem not only from natural forces, but from the irresponsibility of the authorities” (Montemayor 2005). Hence misuse of political power and public authority is categorized as a hazard, alongside natural forces like hurricanes and droughts. Rural society is constantly referred to as suffering catastrophic crisis, but the popular mobilizations in 2003 and 2006 demonstrate that many Mexicans reject the notion that the demise of the countryside is simply the result of backwardness or inefficiency on the part of campesinos.

Far beyond a failure of state agencies to prevent or manage natural catastrophe, governmental disaster entails an active reordering of subjectivities and forms of rule. This quote from page 99 shows how at same time that Mexican NGOs were trying to organize rural communities for economic improvement and foment new forms of collective political consciousness, national-level political and economic reforms were eroding the collective basis for rural life. This not only made the work of development harder, but also contributed to the vulnerability of this new sector and of the forms of active citizenship it sought to cultivate.

The “Page 99 Test” is a partial success in that this passage describes the changing political consciousness in rural Hidalgan communities at the beginning of the 21st century. The perspectives of other key actors, however, remain out of view due to the structure of the book.

Learn more about The Unsettled Sector at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Evan Braden Montgomery's "In the Hegemon's Shadow"

Evan Braden Montgomery is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), an independent, nonprofit, and nonpartisan public policy research institute focused on national security strategy, defense planning, and military investment options.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, In the Hegemon's Shadow: Leading States and the Rise of Regional Powers, and reported the following:

In the Hegemon’s Shadow tackles a straightforward but surprisingly understudied question: how does the leading state in the international system respond to rising regional powers? Although the appearance of new great powers has received far more attention, the emergence of new regional powers can also impact world politics in significant ways. Consequently, debates over whether to accommodate or oppose these regional powers have weighed heavily on leading states in the past.

For instance, at the turn of the 20th century, policymakers in Great Britain were trying to manage an increasingly capable Japan. Just a few years earlier, this island empire in East Asia fought a successful war against China, which was not only the stronger power on paper, but was also an informal British ally. Now that Tokyo had supplanted its rival, however, London faced a dilemma. On the one hand, Japan could be a very useful partner against Russia, which was expanding into the region. On the other hand, Japan was also an expansionist power in its own right, and could provoke a conflict that Great Britain was not prepared to fight.

Page 99 finds British policymakers wrestling with this tradeoff:

As an emerging regional power, Japan was also a revisionist power, whereas Great Britain hoped to preserve the status quo, or at least prevent it from deteriorating any further. Admittedly, Tokyo shared many of London’s objectives in China, specifically, restricting Russian influence to Manchuria and preserving what remained of the Open Door. Nevertheless, British policymakers feared the possibility that Japan might instigate a conflict with Russia to secure its dominant position in Korea, where London had few interests beyond preventing St. Petersburg from acquiring a naval base.

Ultimately, Great Britain opted to sign an alliance with Japan—a very capable but potentially very dangerous new partner. With China suffering from both internal and external threats, it was no longer able to withstand Russian aggrandizement. Tokyo, therefore, would take its place as a barrier to St. Petersburg, or so policymakers in London hoped.

Perhaps more importantly, this case is not unique. Leading states have had to choose between accommodating and opposing new regional powers on a number of occasions. Sometimes regional powers have presented significant opportunities. At other times they have presented great risks. And in cases like the rise of Japan, they have presented a complex mix of the two. The central goal of In the Hegemon’s Shadow is to explain how leading states navigate these situations.

Visit Evan Braden Montgomery's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason M. Barr's "Building the Skyline"

Jason M. Barr is an associate professor of economics at Rutgers University - Newark. His areas of interests include urban economics, New York City history, and computational economics. He has published many articles in top peer-reviewed economics journals, and is one of the leading scholars on skyscraper economics.

Barr applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers, and reported the following:

On page 99, I discuss the history of the Five Points neighborhood in Lower Manhattan (modern Chinatown). Though not the main focus of the book, my aim is to argue that we need to reevaluate how we think about, and investigate, its history, especially in light of the growing body of social science research that has studied the benefits to society from dense, urban living.

In 1800, Five Points was an industrial district of tanners and slaughter houses adjacent to the Collect Pond, Manhattan’s largest body of fresh water. By 1811, the pond was filled in and the neighborhood emerged as a working class residential district. Starting in 1845, because of the Potato Famine, Irish immigrants began to arrive in great numbers, making it arguably one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world. Sanitation and housing conditions in the neighborhood were woefully inadequate and Five Points gained a reputation as an infamous slum.

Charles Dickens toured its streets in 1842 and, in his American Notes for General Circulation, he offered this, “Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all-fours, and why they talk instead of grunting?” In 1890, reformer Jacob Riis, in How the Other Half Lives, wrote, “Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the old depravity of the Five Points, is ‘the Bend,’ foul core of New York’s slums.”

The history of Five Points was defined and described by writers like Dickens and Riis. They aimed to motivate, and even shame, elected officials and others to address the district’s serious social and public health problems. In the process, these reformers defined the historiography of New York’s immigrant neighborhoods as predominantly negative. Even today, these historical accounts continue to hinder our ability to view immigrant life in Five Points and other enclaves more objectively.

Life in Five Points was certainly difficult, but the social and economic advantages should not be discounted. Residing there would have meant the chance to live among fellow countrymen, as well as have better access to employment opportunities, and greater chances for social and economic mobility. Research focused on the positive aspects of Five Points is very limited, but work by the historian, Tyler Anbinder, shows, for example, that even some of the most destitute Irish immigrants were able to amass sizable savings accounts after only a few years in the neighborhood. My work on Manhattan demographics shows that by 1900, Irish enclaves in Manhattan had expanded upward along Manhattan Island, suggestive of rising incomes and skills. Using modern social science methods, I’m hopeful we can shed more light on life in New York’s most notorious slum.

Learn more about Building the Skyline at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue