Darius Ornston's "Good Governance Gone Bad"

Darius Ornston is Assistant Professor in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, where he specializes in comparative political economy and innovation policy. He is the author of When Small States Make Big Leaps.

Ornston applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Good Governance Gone Bad: How Nordic Adaptability Leads to Excess, and reported the following:

By describing the startup scene in Finland, page 99 poses a puzzle: Why has Finland (and Sweden) emerged as a center for technology-based entrepreneurship, rivaling Silicon Valley in the (per capita adjusted) creation of billion dollar companies? In sharp contrast to Silicon Valley, postwar economic history was dominated by large, established companies. Even during the 1980s and 1990s, when Finland (and Sweden) pivoted from forestry and heavy industry to information technology, restructuring was driven by century-old conglomerates such as Nokia (and Ericsson) rather than new enterprises.

The startup boom not only illustrates the enduring ability of the Nordic countries to reinvent themselves, but it also speaks to the underlying mechanisms behind this dynamism. Like the main case studies, the rise of heavy industry in postwar Sweden, Finland’s movement into mobile communications, and the financialization of Iceland, restructuring was not imposed by the state, but rather reflected the rapid diffusion of new business models within tight-knit social circles. In Finland, motivated students, inspired by a handful of high-profile successes such as Rovio and Supercell, used bottom-up initiatives such as the Aalto Entrepreneurial Society and the Slush conference, to capture the imagination of policymakers and institutional investors and transform Finnish society.

Page 99 misleads in one sense, though. In highlighting the success of these young entrepreneurs and the dynamism of the Nordic region, it obscures how these dense networks get societies into trouble. For example, the Nordic startup scene is currently supported by low interest rates and abundant risk capital. While more sustainable than the short-lived dot com boom of the past, it is unclear how it would weather a shift in financial markets. This is a recurring theme in the region. As my book title suggests, adaptability is an asset, but the rapid mobilization of resources around new business models can also lead to policy overshooting, overinvestment, and deep economic crises. If this darker and more vulnerable side of the Nordic model interests you, I encourage you to read further.

Learn more about Good Governance Gone Bad at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary R. Bunt's "Hashtag Islam"

Gary R. Bunt is professor of Islamic studies at University of Wales, Trinity Saint David.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hashtag Islam: How Cyber-Islamic Environments Are Transforming Religious Authority, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Hashtag Islam is actually the first page of chapter 5, entitled "Smartphone Jihad". This introduces the section of the book about so-called electronic jihad (e-jihad), and discusses issues associated with concepts of jihad, and the way in which the term has been interpreted and misinterpreted over time. The chapter distinguishes between the militaristic ‘lesser jihad’, and contrasts this with the spiritual and religious striving associated with the ‘greater jihad’. The chapter goes on to discuss the ways in which e-jihad has been articulated by al-Qaeda within diverse contexts, utilising a variety of media forms. A subsequent chapter then looks at the way in which so-called 'Islamic State' drew on e-jihad principles as part of its strategy to mobilise, recruit, finance and attempt to justify its activities to diverse audiences in Muslim and other contexts. While the latter part of the book looks at jihad, this can be contrasted with the earlier section (and majority) of the book, which looks extensively at ideas of religious authority within diverse religious and cultural contexts, and the ways in which these have been expressed online through social media, apps, websites, magazines and other online frameworks.

Hashtag Islam is framed within what I define as 'cyber-Islamic environments', an umbrella term relating to diverse forms of Muslim online expression. Ideas of spirituality and religious identity have been articulated through a variety of digital channels, and have been incredibly influential in terms of shaping how Muslims relate to religious authorities and practices to fulfil spiritual, mystical and legalistic agendas. Muslims are increasingly turning to cyberspace for advice on a variety of important religious questions, and cyber-Islamic environments have challenged traditional modes of authority. This is led to the rise of digitally literate religious scholars and authorities whose influence and impact goes beyond traditional boundaries of imams, mullahs, and shaykhs. Page 99 of Hashtag Islam represents a central discussion on a significant theme associated with Islam and cyberspace, but it is not the dominant conversation for the majority of Muslims online, given the enormous amount of online material on other aspects of religious interpretation and identity.

Learn more about Hashtag Islam at the publishers website, Gary Bunt's Virtually Islamic research website and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anne E. Parsons's "From Asylum to Prison"

Anne Parsons is an Assistant Professor and Director of Public History in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945, and reported the following:

In 1976, Acel Moore and Wendell Rawls Jr., two Philadelphia Inquirer reporters, won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the rampant corruption at the Farview State Hospital near Scranton, Pennsylvania. Page 99 of my book discusses how Moore and Rawls “reported that the institution covered up the violence [there] such as when the staff wrote off a murder as a heart attack.” To Moore, “the fact that the staff was predominantly white while so many people were black made the situation particularly dangerous.” Moore and Rawls’s series of articles led activists to call for the closure of Farview, which the state eventually did.

The campaign to shutter Farview occurred at the very moment that states around the country decreased the size of their mental hospitals, a process called deinstitutionalization. From Asylum to Prison focuses on Pennsylvania as its case study and traces how activism, changes in psychiatry, and new mental health laws coalesced to dramatically shrink mental hospitals in the United States. Not only was deinstitutionalization about mental health, however; it was also about “race, class, and caring about people whom society had discarded.”

From Asylum to Prison charts how at the very moment that mental hospitals like Farview came under fire, the rates of incarceration in the United States began to rise because of harsher sentencing laws, the criminalization of drugs, and the growth of community policing. The expanding criminal legal system absorbed many functions of the diminishing mental hospital system. In this context, Farview closed as a hospital and re-opened as a prison that served people with mental health conditions. Deinstitutionalization had not brought about the system of equitable care that activists and policymakers had envisioned. Instead, mental health became increasingly criminalized and states put their money into police and prisons rather than psychiatric care and social welfare.

Page 99 is particularly important in the book because it reminds us of the power of people to make change. Moore and Rawls pierced the veil of Farview in 1976 and brought to light the ways that institutions dehumanized and mistreated people. Today, as we face a crisis of mass imprisonment, they offer a model of how to shine a light on the ways that people with mental health conditions remain out of sight and out of mind. The book offers us this lesson and a number of others to help address mass incarceration today.

Learn more about From Asylum to Prison at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ted Powell's "King Edward VIII: An American Life"

Ted Powell spent the early part of his career as Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Downing College, Cambridge. Later he qualified as a solicitor, and spent many years as a partner of national law firm Mills & Reeve. He is now a full-time writer and lecturer, and lives in Cambridge.

Powell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, King Edward VIII: An American Life, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford was not wrong. Page ninety-nine captures an important moment in Edward VIII’s American life. It finds him, as Prince of Wales, crossing the Atlantic aboard the Cunard liner SS Berengaria in the summer of 1924 for a vacation in the USA and Canada. Edward had already visited the USA twice before: once on an official trip in 1919 at the end of a tour of Canada, and again in 1920, when the battleship HMS Renown, taking the Prince to Australia, stopped off to refuel in the Panama Canal Zone, San Diego California and Hawaii. On a holiday trip it was inappropriate for the Prince to make use of a Royal Navy battleship, as he did on his official tours. Instead Edward and his entourage booked a scheduled passage. As soon as the Prince’s reservations were announced there was a frantic scramble for tickets on the same crossing. Cunard’s office in London was besieged by American tourists trying to secure tickets for the homeward trip aboard the Berengaria.

Here is a paragraph from page 99:

The Berengaria sailed on 23 August, “filled with women and marriageable daughters”, and with a sizeable contingent of American reporters. Cunard provided the Prince and his staff with a large suite of rooms, and it would have been easy for Edward to stay in seclusion for the whole of the six-day voyage to New York. But he was in holiday mood, and eager for diversion. He threw himself into life on board, taking walks on deck and appearing frequently in the public rooms. He took his meals in the first class dining room, and characteristically rejected the high table in favour of an inconspicuous side table. There were other friends on board, including Lord Louis Mountbatten and the politician Duff Cooper and his wife Lady Diana Cooper. They became his main companions on the voyage, walking, chatting, and listening to jazz records on his portable gramophone. Mountbatten organized a tug-o’-war team from amongst the Prince’s staff, but it was soundly beaten by a beefy squad of American college boys. Duff Cooper, who took part, recorded in his diary that the Americans pulled them over so easily that they thought the rope must have broken. Edward was no more successful in the individual sports, losing to another American in the pillow-fight and suffering disqualification in the potato race. His run of bad form continued when he was awarded the booby prize in the fancy dress contest for his Apache dancer costume.

The voyage on the Berengaria saw the Prince in a relaxed holiday mood. It was the prelude to a wildly enjoyable American vacation for Edward, during which his reputation as the party-loving playboy Prince was truly sealed. There was no shortage of entertainment – the elite of Long Island’s ‘Gold Coast’ fought for the honour of inviting him to their mansions. He regularly attended several parties in one night, prompting headlines in the US Press such as ‘Prince Gets In With The Milkman’. He even found time for a whirlwind holiday romance with a Hollywood star, the silent movie actress Pinna Nesbit Cruger.

The summer of 1924 was a crucial stage in the development of Edward’s deep cultural and personal affinity with all things American. In America he caught a tantalising taste of a life of freedom, opportunity and modernity which was denied to him by the accident of his birth. As he wrote in his memoirs, “America meant to me a country in which nothing is impossible”. By contrast, Britain was a place where many things were impossible for Edward VIII not least his wish to marry the woman he loved. His encounter with America was one of the formative experiences of his life, shaped his destiny and ultimately led to his Abdication.

Learn more about King Edward VIII at the Oxford University Press website and follow Ted Powell on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece's "The Optical Vacuum"

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Optical Vacuum: Spectatorship and Modernized American Theater Architecture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Optical Vacuum contains something uncharacteristic of my typical verbosity: besides three lines of text, a footnote, and a caption, over ¾ of the page is taken up by an illustration republished from the June 1952 issue of International Projectionist. The advertisement is for Ben Schlanger and William Hoffberg’s RCA Synchro-Screen, “the perfect stage setting for motion pictures,” which promised a softer projection image, enhanced beauty and realism, the illusion of a bigger picture, and the elimination of eye strain and fatigue. That’s a tall order for a piece of equipment – but those kinds of misplaced, even bizarre hopes were common in American film exhibition at midcentury. What they tell us expands past the boundaries of the screen into a story of how theatrical architecture, Hollywood and the industry, patterns of American transportation, and even the ways in which we understand citizenship bind together via one of our favorite pastimes: going to the movies.

While most of the Synchro-Screen’s professed appeals are fascinating avenues for considering changes in movie theater design, the spectrum of comfort and pain was an obsession for Schlanger and other industry professionals. The balance between the two – a spectator who is neither so uncomfortable that she blames the movies nor so at rest that she falls asleep – was a sweet spot for midcentury exhibitors, who sought to construct a perfect setting for a perfect stilled viewer. And it’s this combination of utopian thinking, hubris, and futility that I find so intriguing in twentieth-century movie theater designs.

Ben Schlanger, a New York-based architect, designer, and writer, worked on modernized movie theaters from the mid-1920s until his death in 1971. He was witness to and instigator of massive changes in the industry, from the ornamented movie palace to the streamlined “neutralized” theater, and urged a new relationship between spectator and screen that could be delivered by minimal and directional design. One of his (countless) fixations was seating and its relationship to viewing. For Schlanger, all spectators should have an unblocked image of the screen requiring minimal head movement, while chairs should maintain postural alignment and immobility. If a proper bodily balance could be struck, then viewers might achieve a great cinematic…. something.

We’ll never know what that something might be, of course, because Schlanger’s ideal spectator never really existed. Like many great modernists, Schlanger placed an impossible burden on technological design and discounted audiences’ heterogeneity. But his continual efforts to construct a transcendental subject via space and screen are a mesmerizing decades-long narrative of effort and failure that has silently shaped our contemporary relationship to film. Such a dream of relaxing the body to release the mind is, to me, an illustration of the historical limits of transcendence, and a story of the American romance with the movies that tells us about where we came from as well as who we are now.

Learn more about The Optical Vacuum at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Heidler & Jeanne Heidler's "The Rise of Andrew Jackson"

David S. Heidler is an author and retired professor. Jeanne T. Heidler is professor emerita of history at the United States Air Force Academy. They have collaborated on numerous books, including the critically acclaimed Henry Clay: The Essential American and the award-winning Washington’s Circle: The Creation of the President.

The Heidlers applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics provides an overview of Jackson's 1818 invasion of Spanish Florida. While the event forms part of the background in the discussion of Jackson’s political viability, in a way, it defines an important facet of Jackson's quest for the presidency. A strange circumstance that recurs throughout the book is that of negatives — events that would have sunk any other candidate at any other time — becoming positives that burnish Jackson’s luster rather than tarnishing his reputation. His Florida foray was unconstitutional (he made war on a foreign power without congressional authorization) and could have been diplomatically disastrous, but the political establishment confronted in Jackson a man of enormous popularity and decided to let the matter pass. Meanwhile, those who did criticize Jackson came off as quibbling ankle biters and were a stark contrast in the public’s perception of Jackson as a man of action and an unabashed patriot. Widespread approval of Jackson’s invasion of Florida went far in convincing important political operatives that his national appeal was durable, and that realization urged on their redoubled and persistent efforts to put him in the White House, a goal finally achieved in 1828.

Learn more about the book and authors at David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Rise of Andrew Jackson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zachary J. Lechner's "The South of the Mind"

Zachary J. Lechner is a historian of post-World War II southern and US history. He is an assistant professor of history at Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, Virginia.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980, and reported the following:

My book investigates Americans’ fantasies about the white South during a particularly tumultuous time in US history: the 1960s and the 1970s. Even during the civil rights era, as news media accounts and nonfiction travelogues like John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley pilloried white southerners as distinctively un-American due to their backwardness and racial bigotry, alternative visions of the white South proliferated in popular and political culture. Such views often presented the white South not as an albatross that the rest of the country must claw from its neck, but, rather, as the possessor of lost values that non-southerners desperately needed to embrace.

One of the most fascinating of these positive imaginings, which I dub the Masculine South, appeared in the presidential campaign rhetoric of George Wallace in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the motion picture Walking Tall (1973), and James Dickey’s novel Deliverance (1970) and its 1972 film adaptation. The Masculine South addressed palpable concerns about the state of American manhood in the late sixties and early seventies, as the counterculture, the New Left, and women’s liberationists undermined societal gender norms. The Masculine South, then, functioned as a backlash against these challenges, appealing instead to the ideal of manly exertion. The mantra of the Masculine South could have been “When in doubt, kick ass,” a line overheard by rock critic Lester Bangs in a Macon, Georgia, bar in 1974.

Page 99 of The South of the Mind begins by noting how a failed assassination attempt on George Wallace in 1972, one that left him paralyzed and wheelchair-bound, made his “go-to presentation of himself as a virile man, willing to use violence to rescue white society . . . no longer tenable.” But I also argue that Wallace’s message of redemptive violence—deployed, in part, as a way to shore up what he perceived as the nation’s flagging masculinity—seeped into the era’s pop culture, mostly notably, in Walking Tall. The production, made on the cheap, nevertheless thrilled audiences on the drive-in circuit and elsewhere, with its “based on a true story” rendering of the life of Buford T. Pusser, a sheriff in 1960s McNairy County, Tennessee. The movie glorifies the former wrestler as a vigilante with a badge, who “wields an oversized hickory stick that he uses to beat on bootleggers and other lowlifes.” The Pusser character is essentially Wallace’s dream of state-sponsored violence come to life, in the form of a hulking, bear of a southern white man. The lame cries of effete federal officials, who might prattle on about an offender’s civil rights or the social conditions that could have caused him to pursue a life of crime, were silenced by the sharp crack of Pusser’s mighty club. In short, Walking Tall’s “rendering of the politics of violence in the rural South and the coverage it received in the national press reinforced the popular tendency to identify the region as a uniquely antimodern space where the use of force against unruly elements fortified the vitality supposedly necessary to ensure social control” in a nation that seemed to be falling apart.

Learn more about The South of the Mind at the University of Georgia Press website.

Writers Read: Zachary J. Lechner.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Beal's "The Book of Revelation"

Timothy Beal is the Florence Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University. His many books include The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book and Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know.

Beal applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Book of Revelation: A Biography, and reported the following:

Page 99 has me deep within the "forests of histories" envisioned by a medieval Italian monk known as Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202). Much as Ford Madox Ford believed that the whole of a book is revealed in one of its pages, so Joachim believed that the whole of sacred history is revealed in one of the Bible's books, Revelation.

A saint to some and a heretic to others, Joachim was a "picture thinker" whose thick descriptions of his visions were often accompanied by lavish illustrations (see examples from his Book of Figures here).

For Joachim, history was not only linear, moving in one direction from beginning to end; it was also spatial, a landscape of interrelated patterns in which beginnings, middles, and ends interacted with and folded onto one another. Revelation, with its wild descriptions of angels, gods, and monsters was for him the interpretive key to understanding these interrelated forests of histories, a kaleidoscopic lens through which to see God's plan for creation. What Joachim believed he saw was that he was standing at the very edge of the world, moments before its ultimate consummation and rebirth. The end/beginning was near.

In my book I suggest that, for Joachim, Revelation was something like a medieval codec. The first modern-day codecs were hardware devices like CD recorders that encoded analog data into digital form for storage and decoded that data back into analog for users to access (the term itself is a portmanteau of the words “code” and “decode”). Later the term was adopted for computer programs like Quicktime and MPEG. In Joachim’s hands, Revelation works similarly, as a kind of machine for encoding and decoding information about the past, present, and future. Those with eyes to see could discover that information encoded and stored within it, and then watch as it decoded itself into the full meaning of the entirety of sacred history.

My book is about the many different lives of Revelation. Some are fascinating; others are incredibly disturbing. Joachim of Fiore gave Revelation a new lease on life, as the means to seeing and understanding, well, everything. His influence to this day on the visual culture of Revelation is undeniable (run an image search for "revelation" and "diagram" or "chart" for some examples). Yet none of Joachim's theological heirs live up to the stunningly rich intellectual and aesthetic elegance, symmetry, and complexity of his writings and illustrations.

Visit Timothy Beal's website.

Learn more about The Book of Revelation at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregg L. Frazer's "God Against the Revolution"

Gregg L. Frazer is professor of history and political studies and Dean of the School of Humanities at The Master’s University. He is the author of The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, and Revolution.

Frazer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, God Against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy's Case against the American Revolution, and reported the following:

God Against the Revolution is a study of the arguments made by prominent clergymen who remained loyal to Great Britain during the American Revolution. Those arguments had a significant influence in some parts of America until the revolutionaries or “Patriots” mounted a very successful campaign to silence their opposition and suppress their message. Their case has largely been unknown since then because the victors write the history.

God Against the Revolution relies heavily on the actual words and phrasing of the pamphlets and sermons of the Loyalist ministers. Ideally, the reader can assume the role of a typical American in 1776-1783, set aside hindsight, and decide whether or not to support the American Revolution based on the evidence available at the time. The contest of ideas that was cut short by Patriot censorship resumes two hundred years later; and, as Mark Noll notes on the book jacket, the Loyalists receive “the hearing they were for the most part denied two centuries ago.”

There is a sense in which page 99 is noteworthy. One might wonder why this study centers on the work of clergymen. The five clergymen highlighted here are generally recognized as leading spokesmen for the Loyalist cause (along with a lawyer or two), but previous surveys have omitted the biblical arguments against revolution in general and this revolution in particular that many found compelling. Page 99 marks a sort of demarcation between the biblical and theoretical arguments of those ministers and their “facts on the ground” arguments. Specifically, page 99 is the first page of the chapter on legal arguments. From this point on, the emphasis is on British law, the relationship between the colonies and the mother country, the colonial charters, and the actions taken by the Patriots.

In eighteenth-century America, clergymen were leaders of their communities, well-educated and respected scholars, and public opinion pacesetters. They were equipped to address issues from a broad-ranging perspective and effective at doing so. Had they been allowed to compete in the battle of ideas, the American Revolution might well have failed to materialize.

The question for the reader is: do they persuade you?

Learn more about God Against the Revolution at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elliott J. Gorn's "Let the People See"

Elliott J. Gorn is Joseph A. Gagliano Chair in American Urban History at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of several books, including Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year that Made America's Public Enemy Number One.

Gorn applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till, defense attorney Sidney Carlton questions Moses Wright, trying to shake his testimony.

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till came down to the Mississippi Delta from Chicago to spend time with his extended family in August, 1955. At a crossroads store in the town of Money, he whistled at the young woman behind the counter. A few days later, her husband and his brother—Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam—kidnapped Till, beat him until his skull cracked and his eye popped out of its socket, shot him in the head, weighted his body down, and threw it in the Tallahatchie River.

Less than a month later, to everyone’s surprise, including their own, the brothers were tried for murder. Called to the witness stand and asked to identify the men who forced their way into his home and kidnapped Emmett Till at gunpoint, Moses Wright, a sharecropper and preacher, respected throughout his community, rose, pointed to each of his nephew’s abductors, and said twice in a loud clear voice, “there he is.” The all white jury sat dead silent.

No one could remember when if ever in Mississippi, white men stood trial for murdering an African American. And certainly a black man rising from the witness stand and identifying white criminals was unheard of. Renowned New York City journalist Murray Kempton covered the Mississippi trial, and he concluded that Moses Wright, unbowed, had just endured, “the hardest half hour in the hardest life possible for a human being in these United States.”

Wright’s testimony did not matter. The all-white, all-male jury took an hour to find the brothers innocent (for a few thousand dollars, they confessed to Look magazine four months later). But news of the verdict spread, made headlines across America and around the world. The “Emmett Till generation” of black activists carried his memory into the coming Civil Rights struggles. And in our own day, the story of Emmett Till is better known than at any time since 1955, an exemplum of white supremacist brutality, of the failures of the criminal justice system, but also of the hope that racism is exposed, named, called-out and resisted.

Learn more about Let the People See at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue