Christopher Herbert's "Gold Rush Manliness"

Christopher Herbert is associate professor of history at Columbia Basin College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Gold Rush Manliness: Race and Gender on the Pacific Slope, and reported the following:

Gold Rush Manliness is an examination of the creation of white manhood in two related gold rushes: California from 1848 to 1858 and British Columbia from 1858 to 1871. Page 99 falls near the start of the third chapter which deals with the development of the colonial state in British Columbia and how that process interacted with the redefinition of what it meant to be white and manly.

Specifically, page 99 falls in the middle of a discussion of a fascinating moment in British Columbia gold rush history when African American immigrants, fleeing the persecution of antebellum America, arrived in Victoria, the capital of the colony. They arrived at an opportune moment. Although the colony did not have a naturalization process, the colonial elite decide to grant African Americans the right to vote because, they claimed, the Dred Scott decision had stripped African Americans of their American citizenship. Not uncoincidentally, the newly-enfranchised black settlers cast their ballots in a solid block for the government, enabling the colony’s elites to hold on to power. This event set off a firestorm within the colony over the meaning of power and identity. Ultimately, the relative privileging of black immigrants over white Americans would prove to be short-lived as British perceptions regarding race and nationality evolved over the course of the rush.

In both California and British Columbia, the social and cultural disorder caused by the gold rushes encouraged gold rushers of all backgrounds to experiment with what it meant to be white and manly within the context of emerging systems of colonial domination and power. Gold Rush Manliness explores these themes through an examination of both locations, suggesting that events like the gold rushes need to be taken seriously as places where race and gender were made and remade in sometimes startling ways.

Learn more about Gold Rush Manliness at the University of Washington Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Winner's "How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration"

Ellen Winner is Professor of Psychology at Boston College and Senior Research Associate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She directs the Arts and Mind Lab, which focuses on cognition in the arts in typical and gifted children as well as adults. She received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts from Division 10 in 2000.

Winner applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration, and reported the following:

On page 99 of How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration, I pose a paradox. Why do we enjoy experiencing pain in art, but seek to avoid it at all costs in “real life.” Why are we drawn to paintings like Picasso’s Guernica, which depicts the horrors of war? Why do we read tragic novels and listen to sad music? And why do we go to movies that make us cry, or movies that shock and terrify us? Page 99 comes after I have explained the studies that psychologists have carried out to answer this question.

Here is part of page 99:

Key to why we seek negative emotions in art, yet avoid them in life, is that art provides a safe space to experience these emotions and to turn inward to savor them— safe because we know it is art, not reality. This knowledge allows us to observe the art and our negative reactions with a kind of disinterestedness, to use the words of Kant.

Art with negative content invites us to introspect about our negative emotions, and to imagine how these responses are shared by others responding to the same work of art. While it’s appropriate to focus on how moved and empathetic and horrified we feel looking at a tragedy on stage, responding this way when witnessing an actual tragedy would be inappropriate— indeed, narcissistic.

The explanation for our attraction to negative themes in art applies across art forms. Knowing that it’s art and not reality makes all the difference.

The evidence shows that when we enter a fictional, make-believe world about pain and suffering and tragedy (and so much art is about pain and suffering and tragedy), we experience both negative and positive emotions. Oddly, the more negative the content, the more it is that positive emotions are evoked in combination with the negative ones. And the positive emotions are due to the feeling of being moved -- and feeling moved is pleasurable. We feel moved by tragedy in art. We do not feel moved when tragedy strikes us personally, and hence we feel nothing positive. Psychologist Paul Rozin has referred to this effects as “benign masochism” in a safe context.

This is an example of one of the many puzzles about the arts that I discuss in the book. Most of the puzzles discussed are ones that philosophers have debated (and have reached no agreement): e.g., Does reading fiction make us more empathic once we close the covers of the book? What’s wrong with a perfect forgery? If I say that Agatha Christie is a greater writer than Shakespeare, could you prove me wrong? To answer these questions, I turn to the growing field of empirical aesthetics – a field in which psychologists are applying the tools of social science (observation and experimentation) to find out how ordinary people untrained in art respond to these age-old questions. And some of the answers about how art works on us may surprise you!

Learn more about How Art Works at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Hart-Brinson's "The Gay Marriage Generation"

Peter Hart-Brinson is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communication/Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Gay Marriage Generation: How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture, and reported the following:

I have to say, page 99 is far from my favorite page in the book, but it does get at the book’s essence. In The Gay Marriage Generation, I explain the historic and unprecedented rise of gay marriage in the United States. I show how young cohorts who reached adulthood after 1992 came of age imagining sexuality as an identity—who you are—rather than a behavior—what you do. And I provide historical, quantitative, and qualitative evidence to show how that generational change caused public support for gay marriage to increase so quickly.

Page 99 only alludes to that, via a discussion of the culture wars. Gay marriage was one of the two main battles in America’s culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s. And unlike abortion, in which the two sides are fairly entrenched and reproduce themselves over time, gay marriage ended in a decisive victory for the supporters. The reason is because of generational change: as older Americans who thought of homosexuality as a behavior died off, they were replaced in the population by younger Americans who imagined homosexuality as an identity.

It took two decades for this combination of births and deaths—what social scientists call cohort replacement—to produce majority support among the American electorate. But once it happened, gay marriage supporters began winning victory after victory. Thus, I wrote, “because cohort replacement is continually strengthening one side and weakening the other, we begin to see why the culture war—as loud and intractable as the fighting seems—ended so quietly and so suddenly.”

For a time in American politics, the culture wars seemed like they would never end. But there’s nothing inevitable about them. They arose under particular historical conditions; they were sustained by how the political and religious groups on each side argued against one another; and the actions of the LGBTQ movement that caused the gay marriage generation to emerge brought one front in the war to a close.

With the resolution of the gay marriage debate, the battleground has shifted slightly: to issues of transgender rights, among other things. But the political power of the religious orthodox in the U.S. has evaporated with the rise of Trump and his brand of xenophobic nationalism. It’s hard to fathom how the Religious Right’s claim to the moral high ground will survive the fact that they have turned a blind eye to President Trump’s moral failings—from putting babies in cages to extramarital affairs with porn stars. But it’s equally hard to fathom a more peaceful political future.

Learn more about The Gay Marriage Generation at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Holly Case's "The Age of Questions"

Holly Case is an associate professor of History at Brown University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond, and reported the following:

The “Page 99 Test” apparently has some followers over at Lapham’s Quarterly, because an excerpt from my book published there includes page 99. The page lays out a paradox. In the words of Emil Hammacher, a young German philosopher writing in 1914, there are “questions and tasks whose solution is felt as a need and a necessity”; he listed the social, woman, and worker questions among them. “[N]ever before,” he continued, “have there been so many riddles storming the people as there are today.” But even as questions proliferated and seemed to demand immediate redress, there was a mounting loss of faith in the Lösung (solution). “[I]t’s not so much that now a question appears with unprecedented intensity,” Hammacher wrote, “but rather that absolutely all handed-down solutions of world- and life-problems have become doubtful.”

Loss of faith in solutions did not turn Hammacher into a pessimist, however. In place of the Lösung, he fantasized about Auflösung (dissolution, or giving over). “[T]he self-same conditions that pave the way to the end also lead to the highest maturation of mystical experience; it is in the state of Auflösung that individuals can achieve a higher perfection than ever.” Hammacher saw the potential for Auflösung in the Great War, in which he fought and died. “Is the war that [a state] fights for its own self-assertion or aggrandizement an amoral or at least fatuous residue of barbarism? […] Is eternal peace the highest ideal?” Hammacher echoed Germany’s emphatic “no” to both questions.

On page 99 we learn that it was not just Germans like Hammacher, but also many non-German Europeans had ceased believing in solutions to the questions of their time. The chapter explains how this general loss of faith in definitive solutions ended in the “Final Solution”—the Holocaust. Genocide, in other words, was the endgame of the “age of questions.”

So yes, page 99 does seem to capture the “quality of the whole.” But The Age of Questions is a wily book. Each chapter makes a different argument regarding the essence of the age, and each is also periodically engaged in an argument (dispute) with the others. The final chapter integrates all these arguments into a single, higher-order one. So the argument that appears on page 99 is a bit like Hammacher; destined to struggle and go under, but with an eye to achieving Auflösung—dissolution, or giving over to something higher—in the final chapter.

Learn more about The Age of Questions at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

George R. Mastroianni's "Of Mind and Murder"

George R. Mastroianni was trained as an experimental psychologist and conducted empirical research in a variety of areas related to human performance as an Army scientist. He taught a variety of subjects in psychology at the US Air Force Academy in twenty years of classroom teaching, and now teaches leadership in the Psychology of Leadership Program at Pennsylvania State University.

Mastroianni applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Of Mind and Murder: Toward a More Comprehensive Psychology of the Holocaust, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Of Mind and Murder occurs at the end of a chapter on the methods psychologists and others have employed in studying the Holocaust. The discussion on this page focuses on the difficulties that may be encountered when scholars in disciplines such as psychology and history cross disciplinary boundaries, as when psychologists take sides in historical disputes or historians favor particular psychological explanations for human behavior in their work over others. There often are subtleties and complexities within disciplinary discourse opaque to the “outsider” that, when brought to light, can enrich and balance discussions that take place at the boundaries or intersections of disciplines.

Surely someone has previously noted the conceptual relationship between the “Page 99 Test” and holography: if you cut a hologram into many pieces and choose one (say, the 99th ) the image reconstructed will be the same one seen had the hologram been left intact, albeit with less resolution and detail. Books are not holograms, though, and had we chosen pages 299 or 399, each of which contain only lists of references, the exercise would have been less informative. Of Mind and Murder discusses many specific topics that are not found on page 99: page 199, for example, addresses the roots of prejudice and racism in basic human cognitive adaptations, the ways we perceive and think about the world, that lead us to categorize and classify the objects and people we find in it.

But the “Page 99 Test” applied to this book does capture one vital and global characteristic of the work: Of Mind and Murder self-consciously attempts to be a psychological book that includes, respects, and sometimes confronts the perspectives of those in other disciplines, especially history, in understanding the Holocaust. Along the way, there is also a fair amount of confrontation with psychological perspectives, both old and new.

Learn more about Of Mind and Murder at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michelle Pannor Silver's "Retirement and Its Discontents"

Michelle Pannor Silver is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Sociology and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Health and Society.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Retirement and Its Discontents: Why We Won't Stop Working, Even if We Can, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Retirement and Its Discontents focuses on Allison, a retired Olympic gymnast, who describes how alone she felt in the wake of her athletic career. At 25 years old, she was recovering from an addiction to pain killers and trying to figure out how to find work that would help her make ends meet and fill some of the void created by no longer being able to perform at an elite level. Though Allison is quite distinct from the other people interviewed in the book, this page sets the stage for the thinking about the deeply challenges faced by accomplished retirees as it illustrates the importance of personal identity in forging sustainable social norms around retirement.

Retirement and Its Discontents is about how we confront the mismatch between idealized and actual retirement. Michelle Silver’s book follows doctors, CEOs, elite athletes, professors, and homemakers during their transition to retirement as they struggle to recalibrate their sense of purpose and self-worth. Drawing on in-depth interviews that capture a range of perceptions and common concerns about what it means to be retired, Silver emphasizes the significance of creating new retirement strategies that support social connectedness and personal fulfillment while countering ageist stereotypes about productivity and employment.

Visit Michelle Pannor Silver's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Segal's "Social Empathy"

Elizabeth Segal is a professor in the School of Social Work at Arizona State University. She is the author of Social Welfare Policy and Social Programs: A Values Perspective, fourth edition (2016) and coauthor of Assessing Empathy (2017).

Segal applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Social Empathy: The Art of Understanding Others, and reported the following:

I opened Social Empathy to page 99 and reread the story about my first year as a college professor when I had a class that involved students going out into the community to learn about a social concern. The students were invited to pick their own topic. When they suggested that they wanted to study homelessness in the community, I was a bit snooty. I had just moved to this small college town from Chicago, and I was convinced that I knew real homelessness. What could these students find in a small college town that looked at all like homelessness? That was my hubris, my arrogance, I knew it all.

Luckily, my newness on the job infused a competing healthy dose of insecurity, and so I let the students go on and convince me that they had a solid topic. That was my humility, that just maybe I was wrong and they were right. The story on p. 99 tells the reader how wrong I was, and in that process of letting my humility overtake my hubris, I experienced empathy. I listened. I took their point of view. I walked in the shoes of my students. I still had a lot to learn about teaching. But infusing empathy into my teaching helped me to see that my students deserved to be treated with the same academic respect that I wanted. From that class I learned the connection between humility and empathy. What a gift my students gave me.

When we are so sure of ourselves that we disregard the opinion of others or the feelings of others, so full of hubris, we are not being empathetic. However, when we respect the experiences of others, no matter how different they are from us, we show humility, we show that we don’t know everything and that their opinions and feelings matter. And that shows empathy.

Learn more about Social Empathy at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Ujifusa's "Barons of the Sea"

Steven Ujifusa is the author of Barons of the Sea: And Their Race to Build the World’s Greatest Clipper Ship. Barons of the Sea tells the saga of the great 19th century American clipper ships and the Yankee merchant dynasties they created. It is a story of high-stakes competition on the high seas, groundbreaking technical innovation in shipbuilding, and intense family rivalries. Nathaniel Philbrick described it as “A fascinating, fast-paced history…full of remarkable characters and incredible stories” about the nineteenth-century American dynasties who battled for dominance of the tea and opium trades.”

Ujifusa applied the “Page 99 Test” to Barons of the Sea and reported the following:

From page 99:

Palmer estimated that his new ship could bring fresh tea from China to New York in fewer than a hundred days, a faster voyage than the Paul Jones and other ships in her class. The relatively flat-bottom contours of Palmer’s prototype created the interior volume needed for greater carrying capacity. His new model would be ideal for hauling the maximum number of tea chests with the minimum amount of wasted space. And there was another factor at work. Some sailors on the China run had noticed how their ships sailed differently with a cargo of tea versus bulk goods. “A ship with a tea cargo is very buoyant and is not deep in the water and sails very well,” the young sailor Charlie Low observed. This enabled tea ships to make nine or ten knots sailing large in a quartering wind—compared with six or seven knots for merchant ships loaded with heavier cargo. Imagine how fast a better-designed ship could be.

Such was the ship that Captain Nathaniel Palmer envisioned while slogging homeward on John Murray Forbes’s brand-new Paul Jones. With luck, Palmer reasoned, a sharp-bowed ship could average twelve or thirteen knots in a fresh breeze—possibly even faster—when loaded with a full cargo of tea. The question was whether a ship with such sharp ends would lose crucial buoyancy and become unstable or structurally deficient in bad weather, especially when fully loaded with cargo.

Late in 1843, a newly disembarked William Henry Low turned up at the South Street offices of A. A. Low & Brother, sadly without the competence he had sought in China, but bearing Captain Nat’s model ship. His brother Abbot controlled the family purse strings, and after careful examination and consultation with the East River shipbuilders Brown & Bell, he gave his approval for building this experimental craft. Captain Nat would design the new vessel and supervise her construction at the shipyard.

Page 99 of Barons of the Sea discusses how a few strokes of imaginative thinking on the part of an experienced sea captain (Nathaniel Palmer) and two brothers from a prominent New York shipping family (William Henry Low and Charles Porter Low) led to the construction and financing of one of the earliest clipper ships: the Houqua of 1843, named after China’s wealthiest merchant. Because of her revolutionary design, Houqua could sail from China to New York in less than 100 days, which became the new gold standard for the passage, when only a few years earlier six months was considered an average run. Houqua helped touch off a race to built the fastest tea clipper, which culminated in the Sea Witch of 1846, which sailed between Hong Kong and New York at an astonishing 74 days, a record which stood for over 150 years.

A clipper ship is a three-masted, full-rigged sailing vessel built for speed at the sacrifice of capacity. To achieve speeds of 13 knots plus, a clipper ship’s bow and stern had sharp lines rather than the traditional full ones. These sharp lines had their origins in the small, schooner rigged “opium clippers” owned by the Lows, fast boats that smuggled the Indian drug into China to pay for the tea. A clipper ship’s keel had to be strong to compensate for the loss of buoyancy at the bow and stern. Clipper ships also carried a much larger spread of canvas than a typical vessel, which meant a larger crew and higher operational costs. To make a clipper ship’s great speed pay, the cargo had to be extremely valuable. First, it was high quality tea from China to be sold at auction in New York or Boston. Then, during the California Gold Rush, this meant dry goods and provisions to be sold to miners in booming San Francisco to be sold at sky-high prices.

The American clipper ship revolutionized world trade similarly to the way Amazon has in modern times by greatly speeding up the global supply chain The men who owned and operated clippers were bare-knuckled, laissez-faire capitalists. Ships were built with great skill and creativity, for speed and profit first, safety last. There were no trial voyages, government inspections, or labor regulation. Crew life was harsh and dangerous: one misstep ten stories above the ocean meant near-certain death.

These innovative clippers made the Lows and a handful of other families (including that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather) fabulously wealthy, and established America as a global economic superpower. Due to the advent of steam, railroads, and changing economic conditions, the clipper ship era only lasted about two decades, but these beautiful ships live on in art, song, and the family fortunes that they produced. They were the perfect blend of art and commerce. As maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morrison wrote, “These were our Gothic cathedrals, our Parthenon; but monuments carved from snow. For a few brief years they flashed their splendor around the world, then disappeared with the finality of the wild pigeon.”

Visit Steven Ujifusa's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helmut Norpoth's "Unsurpassed: The Popular Appeal of Franklin Roosevelt"

Helmut Norpoth is Professor of Political Science at Stony Brook University. He is the co-author of The American Voter Revisited and author of Confidence Regained: Economics, Mrs. Thatcher and the British Voter.

Norpoth applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Unsurpassed: The Popular Appeal of Franklin Roosevelt, and reported the following:

From page 99:

By October 1940, support for aiding Britain was the popular option, while opposition, commonly called isolationism, was in a minority. The balance in favor of aiding Britain was three to two in the October 1940 Gallup poll. Had it been the reverse, this issue would have doomed FDR's reelection prospect in 1940.

This passage from page 99 of Unsurpassed: The Popular Appeal of Franklin Roosevelt highlights the critical importance of public opinion about foreign policy for FDR's approval and electoral success. Had he not run and won a third term in 1940, FDR would not have been commander in chief when the United States entered the war. History might have turned out quite differently.

In 1940, as shown by ample polls, the American people said good-bye to isolationism and embraced a policy of doing everything, even at the risk of war, to help Britain win against Nazi-Germany. For example, in an October 1939 poll, 67 percent opposed such a policy, while a year later, 62 percent approved it. This was not a forgone conclusion. Leaders of the isolationist movement like the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh and Montana Senator Burton Wheeler attacked FDR as a warmonger bent on saving the British Empire at America’s expense. But it was Roosevelt who commanded the “bully pulpit.” A master of the new medium, radio, he appealed to Americans at their homes with his fabled “fireside chats.” It was an invention of his own that typically reached more than turned out to vote. In those chats and other addresses that were broadcast the President pleaded his case that helping England in the war was helping the United States avert grave and imminent peril. It was imperative, in his words, to turn the United States into the “arsenal of democracy.” Almost every time FDR spoke to the American public or gave an address to Congress that was broadcast he chipped away at the rock of isolationism.

Roosevelt also took advantage of a new device for feeling the public pulse. He eagerly embraced polling, not simply what he could glean from reports of Gallup polls in the press. In early 1940, he enlisted the personal services of Princeton Professor Hadley Cantril’s operation to brief him on what polls revealed about the views of Americans on foreign policy issues. So this captain was not operating in the dark about the passages and shoals of public opinion. FDR was able to divine which actions most Americans would support and which ones not, whether it was repeal of Neutrality Acts, military spending, the draft, Destroyers-for-Bases, Lend-Lease or a declaration of war, among other things. At the same time, public opinion in 1940 also registered a reversal on the question of giving FDR a third term. He learned of this change of heart, too, removing what had looked like an immovable obstacle to an unprecedented third term.

Learn more about Unsurpassed at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Connie Y. Chiang's "Nature Behind Barbed Wire"

Connie Y. Chiang is Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Nature Behind Barbed Wire describes the agricultural labor problems in the Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II. The War Relocation Authority (WRA), a federal civilian agency, oversaw the administration of the ten camps and developed extensive agricultural programs at each one. The WRA’s goals were two-fold: to make the camps self-supporting and to provide worthwhile jobs for Japanese American detainees. However, as page 99 makes clear, WRA officials could not secure adequate Japanese American workers to maintain maximum production. At the behest of the WRA, many were leaving the camps to take outside employment. As a result, “the camp labor pool sometimes became drained at inopportune times in the planting and harvesting cycle.” Indeed, it was crucial to find workers at specific times of the year—when the environmental conditions were ideal for sowing and reaping.

Page 99 thus hints at the environmental underpinnings of the WRA’s agricultural challenges. The labor supply needed to align with nature—that is, the changes in the seasons. As I show elsewhere in this chapter, other environmental considerations affected farm production. Some Japanese Americans rejected agricultural work because of the harsh weather. They also found that their previous agricultural expertise—honed in more temperate locales along the Pacific Coast—was not applicable to the arid conditions in the camps. In fact, most of the camps were located in areas that were ill-suited for farming, with short growing seasons or poor soil. The environment, in other words, shaped the quantity and quality of farm labor. This interplay between humans and nature in the operation of the camps is central to the book’s narrative. Nature Behind Barbed Wire argues that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story, shaped by the lands and waters of the Pacific Coast and the inland camps.

Learn more about Nature Behind Barbed Wire at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue