Molly Rosner's "Playing With History"

Molly Rosner received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. She has spent her career working as an educator at cultural institutions and universities in New York City, where she was born and raised.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Playing with History: American Identities and Children’s Consumer Culture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Playing With History is primarily a 1961 photograph from the amusement park Freedomland U.S.A. Freedomland was a short-lived theme park, with rides and exhibits ostensibly based on American history, located in the Bronx. The photo, from the New York Daily News Sunday Color Magazine, shows park guests (mostly children and couple adults, all of whom appear to be white) holding their hands up in the air in mock terror as an “Indian,” (or, at least, an employee dressed in a Native American costume), stands on top of their covered wagon threatening the passengers with a shotgun. It’s a familiar scene to those who grew up watching Westerns that were particularly popular in the 1950s. This image is a good example of the casual and over-the-top way racism was employed for entertainment purposes at the park (as well as in other children’s amusements). The 1960s clothing of the guests contrasting with the costumes of the employees also highlights a disjuncture and the unreality of the scene’s historical “authenticity.”

This is an apt image to encapsulate the themes of the book because it speaks to how “history” was employed for entertainment purposes touches on a number of the book’s larger arguments that historically-based amusements (whether dolls, books, games, or a park) were used to promote certain racist, sexist, and classist ideologies and sell ideas about American identity. The single paragraph on the page, below the image, explores how Freedomland U.S.A. differed from other Amusement parks in the vicinity of New York City because of its use of history (though that history was treated less than academically).

This page accurately conveys the themes of the book – mixing the playfulness of childhood with the seriousness of the lessons often sneakily taught to young people (though this example is far from subtle). This photo speaks to the important interactions of consumerism, racism, and history in shaping children’s ideas about themselves and others.

The other chapters in the book explore toys, dolls and books from the advent of the American toy industry through today. Beginning with racist toy banks in the late 19th century and ending with global appeal of American Girl dolls in the 21st century, these case studies highlight how the ideas about America have been manufactured, packaged, and sold so ubiquitously that we often take them for granted.

Visit Molly Rosner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Blanding's "North by Shakespeare"

Michael Blanding is a Boston-based investigative journalist, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, Slate, The Boston Globe Magazine, Boston magazine, and other publications. He is author of The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps (2014), which was a New York Times bestseller and an NPR Book of the Year; and The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink (2010). A former writing fellow at Brandeis University and The Harvard Kennedy School, he has taught feature writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, and GrubStreet Writers.

Blanding applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar's Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard's Work, and reported the following:

Page 99 of North by Shakespeare throws you right into the maelstrom of court politics and theater in 16th century England! Subtitled A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work, my book follows self-taught Shakespearean Dennis McCarthy in his obsessive search for the sources of Shakespeare’s plays. He has proposed the bold and controversial theory that for many of his greatest works, Shakespeare used earlier source plays written by another writer, Sir Thomas North, adapting them into the works we know today.

When McCarthy first approached me about his theories, I was very skeptical—I’d always thought Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, period. But the more research I did, the more I learned how little we actually know about Shakespeare, and how many mysteries there are about how acquired the knowledge of life at court, travel in Italy, and other elements that have gone into these great works of literature. McCarthy has amassed an impressive amount of evidence to show that he might have acquired it from North, whose life and writings are reflected in the plays to an uncanny degree.

One example I explore is a play called Arden of Faversham, which many scholars today believe was one of Shakespeare’s first plays. (The Oxford Shakespeare today attributes it to “Shakespeare and Anonymous.”) The play concerns a woman named Alice Arden, who murdered her husband Thomas Arden, with the help of her lover and a conspiracy of other townspeople in the English village of Faversham—not a pretty tale! Many scholars have actually seen the play as a major influence on Shakespeare’s bloody murder play Macbeth. In fact, Alice Arden was Thomas North’s sister, and her husband was the right-hand man of Thomas North’s father, making him intimately familiar with everyone involved.

On page 99, I explore another connection between North and the play, involving the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a cataclysmic event in which the Catholic monasteries in England were destroyed. In the play, the Dissolution is featured prominently as a reason why the townspeople would rise up against Thomas Arden, who played a part in the destruction. In fact, North’s father Edward had been in charge of the Dissolution under the Protestant King Henry VIII. By now, however, the crown was held by the Catholic Queen Mary I, otherwise known as “Bloody Mary” for her relentless persecution of Protestants. McCarthy believes that Thomas North wrote the play as a way to apologize to the queen, painting Arden’s murder as a kind of divine justice for his part in the Dissolution.

When Mary came to power, her first instinct was to restore the monks to their homes and undo the pillaging of the religious houses. She quickly realized, however, that such a feat was impossible. Many of the monasteries had already been torn down, their stones repurposed into the homes of the nobles and gentlemen she now needed on her side to rule the realm. That would explain why North might write a play recognizing his family’s complicity in the Dissolution—signaling his desire to make amends. “He’s showing that the North family is totally on the Catholic boat, and have realized their mistakes,” claims McCarthy. “So he’s using that to get into the good graces of the queen.”

Page 99 doesn’t offer a completely accurate view of my book, as it deals with a little-known play and an obscure historical event. The parts of my book that are the most fun are when McCarthy and I are traveling together across England, France, and Italy, tracing the journeys of Thomas North during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and seeing how his life and works relate to well-known plays such as Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth. In one sense, however, the page offers a glimpse of the larger story my book has to tell, about how literature and history are intricately woven together. By viewing the plays through an unconventional lens, North by Shakespeare, we might perceive new insights that could forever change the way we read some of the world’s greatest literary works.

Visit Michael Blanding's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Map Thief.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Simeone's "The Saints and the State"

James Simeone is a professor of political science at Illinois Wesleyan University and the author of Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois: The Bottomland Republic.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Saints and the State: The Mormon Troubles in Illinois, and reported the following:

Page 99 occurs in the middle of Chapter 3, which details the variations in the civic narrative the two parties in Illinois—the Democrats and the Whigs—retailed to attract voters. Both parties used the “independent producer” narrative to include and exclude certain groups in the state. Settlers used the liberal justification of productive use of the land to distinguish themselves from the indigenous people they encountered and pushed west. Native Americans were recognized as independent but not as producers, and thus, it was argued, they had no right to hold the land. Since republican government was self-government in the name of the public good, independence was a necessary trait of citizens as well. Only independent producers contributed to the public weal and were sufficiently free from dependency to have capacity to achieve it.

On page 99, we learn that the Whigs’ variation on the civic theme included a bias against Roman Catholics, who were deemed insufficiently independent to qualify as citizens since they were under the influence of the Pope. Many Whigs in Illinois were more willing to accept African Americans as citizens than Catholics, who responded by voting for Andrew Jackson. The Democrats used the narrative to exclude African Americans, who they deemed incapable of independence. An important theme of the book is how the Illinois regime delegated to local majorities—and the party elites organizing them—great power to recognize or misrecognize marginal groups in the state.

The Mormons, the group the book revolves around, are themselves absent from page 99, even though the title of chapter 3 is “Saints and Suckers in the Settler State.” Mormons belonged to the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, and the “suckers” was a colloquial name for Illinois emigrants, who tended to keep migrating along the state’s rivers like sucker fish. Both parties vied mightily to win the Mormon vote after the winter of 1839 when the group migrated to the state as refugees from Missouri. Ultimately, local civil society from both parties in Hancock County rejected the Mormons for failing the independent producer test, judging them producers but not independent.

There is plenty in The Saints and the State which this page does not capture. But it does convey one of the book’s key arguments: that the politics of recognition in multicultural democracies makes it impossible for the state and civil society to adopt a neutral stance toward all groups.

Learn more about The Saints and the State at the Ohio University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colin G. Calloway's "The Chiefs Now in This City"

Colin G. Calloway is Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of many books, including Scratch of a Pen and Pen and Ink Witchcraft.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, "The Chiefs Now in This City": Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America, and reported the following:

Page 99 of “The Chiefs Now in This City” tells how Native American delegates avoided traveling to early American cities when there were cases, or rumors, of smallpox in town.

Although page 99 tells part of the story of the book, it obviously does not tell the whole story or there would be no book.

Early American cities were dirty and unhealthy places, and Native American delegates who went there were right to be cautious. Some died of disease while they were in town. Nevertheless, Native Americans frequented early American cities. Men transported furs and deerskins to market; women peddled baskets, brooms, pottery, and food; slaves, servants, and laborers were part of the urban workforce; and migrants escaping disruption of their traditional economies and communities built new lives as urban dwellers. In addition, tribal diplomats regularly and repeatedly traveled to Albany, Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Montreal, Quebec, New York, and New Orleans to deal with colonial powers. They often spent weeks and occasionally months in town. This book explores what they got up to when they were not engaged in official business and what they saw and might have thought of it all. Newspapers kept readers informed as to what “the chiefs now in this city” were doing and where they might be seen. Indian visitors to port cities were on the frontier of the Atlantic world, where they encountered new people, new goods, noisy streets, busy markets, bustling wharves, new sounds and smells, new forms of architecture, new organizations of time, space, and society, and new challenges and opportunities. They slept in hotels and lodging houses, were wined and dined by city fathers, and saw the sights. They went to church, attended the theater, and not only watched circus performances but sometimes also participated in them. In fact, when Indian chiefs came to town, they were often the talk of the town.

Learn more about "The Chiefs Now in This City" at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Pen and Ink Witchcraft.

The Page 99 Test: The Victory with No Name.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason Bruner's "Imagining Persecution"

Jason Bruner is an associate professor of global Christianity in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is author of Living Salvation in the East African Revival in Uganda.

Bruner applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Imagining Persecution: Why American Christians Believe There Is a Global War against Their Faith, and reported the following:

Here is the text from page 99, starting mid-sentence with a quotation that continues from the previous page:

“…cord, leaving both her arms paralyzed. They were stretched out from her body and bent at the elbows, reminiscent of Jesus at his crucifixion.” Her story ends with her promise to make her life a ‘prayer’ for Muslims. It is telling that on the next page is a quotation from the Apostle Paul (Rom. 12:19, 21, NLT): “Dear friends, never avenge yourselves. … Don’t let evil get the best of you, but conquer evil by doing good.”

Here one can see the ways in which persecuted Christians are presented in a terse genre that draws directly from ancient precedents. Mary and her family are righteous, their persecutors irrational in their hatred. They refuse to recant their faith and suffer the consequences, the effects of which literally connect Mary’s suffering with the crucified Christ. Throughout, their innocence is unquestioned and unquestionable. Associating Mary’s forgiveness with the verses from the Apostle Paul then directly contrasts what is perceived to be pure Muslim hatred with Christian forgiveness and pacifism. Details of context (Lebanon, a general date, names, religious identities) are kept to a minimum, seemingly as assurances that the event happened, while the weight of the story lies with the spiritual truth it is meant to convey, the purity of the Christian’s faith in the confrontation of good and evil. Nothing more is said about the conflict, with the verses from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans serving as assurance that Mary was representative of Christians during the Lebanese Civil War. Not mentioned, for example, are the horrific massacres committed by predominantly Christian militias against Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in September 1982, during which as many as several thousand noncombatants were killed, with some having Christians symbols carved into their bodies.

In these ways, and with these elisions, Mary and other Christian martyrs of the 10/40 Window, much like…

In this case, I think the Page 99 Test works reasonably well. While the significance of some of these points might not be fully apparent to someone only perusing this page, many of the basic themes that I explore in the book are represented here. One could correctly infer from this passage that I am interested in how Christians have understood suffering, persecution, and martyrdom throughout history, and especially in how Christians in the 20th and 21st centuries have drawn upon early Christian ideas about martyrdom while dramatically expanding the scope of what constitutes a “martyr.” I argue that this expansion in who counts as Christian and who is regarded as a martyr are central to understanding why many American Christians believe that there is such a thing as a “global war on Christians.

Page 99 from my book gives some idea as to what I think the implications of these changes are. One is that these accounts of violence are often decontextualized in order to prime the “religious” identities of those involved. Simultaneously, those religious identities are often framed in general terms; one can’t readily tell from the tragic case of the young woman whether she was Orthodox, Catholic, or evangelical – so there is an ecumenical, non-doctrinal notion of “Christian” that is being formed as a result. Another issue is that Christian martyrs are, by tradition, innocent and righteous. While I wouldn’t want to suggest that those who suffer for whatever reason are necessarily complicit in their suffering or persecution, when these ideas are leveraged politically, the combination of presumed righteousness with immense power (in the case of the US government, NGOs, and other institutions) becomes dangerous and myopic. For these reasons, my book is an analysis and critique of the historical, theological, and ideological factors that have been woven together to create a perception of global Christian duress.

Learn more about Imagining Persecution at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alison DeSimone's "The Power of Pastiche"

Alison DeSimone is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she teaches courses in music of the Renaissance and the Baroque, opera history, and specializes in eighteenth-century topics.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Power of Pastiche: Musical Miscellany and the Cultural Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England, and reported the following:

Fortuitously, opening to page 99 in The Power of Pastiche introduces the reader to the beginning of Chapter 3: “Shaping English Identity in the Songbook Miscellany.” The chapter opens with a short description of a songbook miscellany, a collection of individual pieces of music published together to create a new whole.

This central chapter of my book does, indeed, prove Ford Madox Ford’s theory of the page 99 test. I intended for this chapter—the longest of The Power of Pastiche—to act as the central focus of my study on musical miscellany. This chapter grapples directly with all that is in the title of my book: in focusing on a type of published musical miscellany, it shows how songs mediated English identity in a variety of ways, from gender, to nationality, to politics, to economics.

The Power of Pastiche: Musical Miscellany and Cultural Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England, grew out of questions that I had while trying to account for the ways in which performers, composers, and audiences influenced the sheer diversity of music available in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. How did audiences receive foreign music in relation to English music? What were audiences actually listening to? How did performers and composers reflect diverse tastes through their performances? Ultimately, I settled on the idea of musical miscellany—the assemblage of hodge-podge musical items into a new whole—as a means of understanding the appreciation of musical variety between about 1700 and 1720.

Chapter 3, revealed on page 99, offers one lens through which I analyze musical miscellany. It focuses on the songbook miscellany, a collection of various songs (and their corresponding texts), that were cobbled together and sold by publishers. These books could include hundreds of different songs. In going through these collections, I observed that their songs covered a wide variety of topics: some focused on love and the relationship between the genders; others made political statements; still others commented upon current events, such as the War of the Spanish Succession or the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. Through these songs, I argue in this chapter, a mutual exchange occurred between songbook and consumer—the songbook miscellanies included a diversity of subjects and tunes in order to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, and consumers might therefore be influenced in their musical tastes and cultural understandings by the contents of these collections. While I am a musicologist, and this is a musical historical study, it is my hope that Chapter 3 will be of particular interdisciplinary interest, especially for those fascinated by literary miscellanies and what they can tell us about those who purchased them.

Learn more about The Power of Pastiche at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathryn Harkup's "Vampirology"

Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. She completed a doctorate on her favorite chemicals, phosphines, and went on to further postdoctoral research before realizing that talking, writing and demonstrating science appealed a bit more than hours slaving over a hot fume-hood. She writes and gives regular public talks on the disgusting and dangerous side of science.

Harkup’s first book was the international best-seller A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, which was shortlisted for a Mystery Readers International Macavity Award and a BMA Book Award. She has also written Making the Monster: The Science of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts.

Harkup applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Vampirology: The Science of Horror's Most Famous Fiend, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Vampirology is all about a genetic condition that affects the blood, some forms of which can make someone extremely sensitive to sunlight. The page describes the cause of the problem, a malfunctioning enzyme that normally helps assemble the heme part of hemoglobin (the all important oxygen-carrying protein in the blood). The result is a build up of heme fragments in the body, which are toxic. These fragments can build up in the teeth to give them a dark brown-red appearance; gums can recede making the teeth look longer, and exposure to sunlight can cause blistering on the skin that heals slowly and can become infected to cause more extensive damage to the tissue. One treatment for the condition is bleeding (phlebotomy), to remove the toxic compounds that have built up in the bloodstream, followed by transfusions of healthy blood to replace the loss. The final paragraph of the page introduces Dr David Dolphin, a chemist who proposed this condition as an explanation for vampires.

This single page of the book might make you think the whole thing is about blood. But, as a vampire's favourite food, it's not that surprising that blood science features quite heavily. In fact the main focus of this chapter is not blood at all, but instead it looks at a vampire's well-known aversion to sunlight and why that might be. However, there is a medical condition with a direct link between blood and sunlight, called porphyria. There are several different forms of porphyria though not all of them cause an extreme reaction to sunlight. The symptoms of one particular form of porphyria have superficial links to characteristics we have come to associate with vampires. Page 99 is focused very much on the science behind this rare blood condition and goes into some detail about it so hopefully the reader will understand why the association was made, but also why it is not a very good theory.

In one respect page 99 is not very representative of the whole book. My overall aim for Vampirology was to look at as many aspects of vampires as possible, such as folk stories of 'real' vampires, as well as films and books representing fictional vampires, to history and scientific explanations of vampire characteristics. However, this single page does represent the way I have tried to examine vampire characteristics and vampire tales. It sets out the facts behind one theory of vampirism and explores how well it matches the traits of vampires from history and fiction to reach the conclusion that it is not a very good theory at all. People with porphyria are people with porphyria, and vampires are vampires. Vampirology is not an encyclopedia of vampires and it doesn't aim to prove whether vampires exist or ever have - that's up to the reader - but it does try to find out if vampires could exist.

Visit Kathryn Harkup's website.

The Page 99 Test: Death By Shakespeare.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Schrier's "We the Gamers"

Kat Schrier is an Associate Professor, Director of the Play Innovation Lab, and Director of the Games and Emerging Media program at Marist College. She is the author of We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics & Civics (2021), and Knowledge Games (2016). She has previously edited two book series, Ethics and Game Design and Learning, Education, & Games. She was a Belfer Fellow with the ADL's Center for Technology & Society, and she is co-PI for a Templeton Grant on designing VR games for empathy. Prior to joining the Marist College faculty, Schrier worked as a media producer at Scholastic, Nickelodeon, BrainPOP, and ESI Design. She has a doctorate from Columbia University, a master’s from MIT, and a bachelor’s from Amherst College.

Schrier applied the “Page 99 Test” to We the Gamers and reported the following:

On page 99 of We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics, I introduce chapter 7, which focuses on identity, and how people see themselves and express themselves as part of a civic community. Here is the page:

Chapter 7: How Do We Understand Ourselves and Our Emotions?

In Fortnite, players can do different dances, such as the Electro Shuffle, the Flapper Dance, or the Robot.1 They can watch performers like Travis Scott and Marshmello at virtual live concerts in the game, they can mount Black Lives Matter protests, and they can engage in conversations on race and politics.2 Yet the goal of Fortnite is not to dance, watch music performers, protest, or discuss, but to be the last character standing in a 100-person Battle Royale standoff. Players parachute down to an island and need to craft fortresses and weapons, avoid bad weather, and remain the last player (or group of players) to survive.

On the surface, it may seem like dancing and protesting in Fortnite is tangential or trivial to its gameplay. Yet players learn the dances in the game, and then perform these moves at school the next day. They post their videos of the dances on TikTok and YouTube, and share them with thousands of others. They meet friends, hang out, watch movies, and participate in events inside Fortnite. The personal and communal nature of the game, and ability to share remnants of the game with others outside of the game, helps to further engage players, establish its cultural norms, and enable personal expression. Fortnite becomes a sphere through which people can express themselves publicly. It also helps players leave their mark on a game that evaporates after each play session.

Game worlds function as their own public spaces, communities, and cultures, which intersect and interact with broader culture, as well as the identities and previous experiences of the player. Players bring in their own preconceived notions of what a game is; what their friends, an esports celebrity or a Twitch streamer, think of the game; and what they expect from a particular genre, game company, or famous designer. They also bring in their own identities and emotional responses to the game, which furthers how it is personally experienced and socially shared. For instance, when I was a kid playing the Super Mario Brothers series, I had names for characters that related to what I was experiencing at that time: the Boo Diddleys became Boo Radleys because I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird; the Lakitu’s Cloud became the name of a sixth-grade teacher, which sounded just like Lakitu. I continue to use these names today. Now, whenever I play newer versions of Mario games with my kids, they call the characters these names, too. My kids have also created their own personal connections with the game, with my daughter always choosing the purple…

This is a fantastic page to start on! Page 99 shares useful anecdotes about how games serve as civic communities where players can express their ideas, opinions, and identities. I relay the specific example of Fortnite, and describe how playing this game can become a form of civics—through protest, conversation, and debate in the game. I also show how even dancing in Fortnite can become a type of civics, where we are able to share, respond to, and communicate parts of ourselves through digital dance moves. And, I even talk about my own personal interactions with games—such as when I called the Boo Diddleys “Boo Radleys” in a classic Super Mario Game because I was inspired by a character in To Kill a Mockingbird—the book I was reading in school at the time. I also share some of my kids’ unique interactions with their favorite games, and how that helps me to learn more about their interests, identities, and needs.

The page 99 test reveals what games (and my book) do best—help to connect us more personally with civics and ethics. Often we feel like civics is done outside of our everyday. It feels very inaccessible, onerous, or off-limits. In our minds, it’s voting, going to town hall meetings, or maybe something that politicians do. But this page reminds us that we can all practice civics everyday, and even with something (and especially with something!) that “kids do”--games!! It also further shows us how both the “me” and the “we” part of civics matters. We all individually need to be able to express our true and whole selves to be able to participate fully in civics. We also need to encourage equity in civics, and enable people with all different types of identities to participate in our civic communities—whether it's our local communities, or in the games that we play. Sharing our unique identities helps us to better design a world where we all belong.

Visit Karen Schrier's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuel Clark's "Good Lives"

Samuel Clark is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University..

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Good Lives: Autobiography, Self-Knowledge, Narrative, and Self-Realization, and reported the following:

A reader who opened my book at page 99 would find herself in the middle of a discussion of how to divide the huge range of theories of the good life into families. I argue that there’s no one right way to do this: we should instead think of taxonomies as sometimes useful ways of lumping and splitting, to be tailored to particular interests. This conveys one of my major topics: what it is for someone’s life to go well for her. It also gives some of the flavour of my writing: my love of lists and conceptual maps, my general geekiness about philosophy. But if the reader stopped there, she would have glanced at the cellars without exploring the main house.

Good Lives is about self-knowledge: our attempts to gain it; the powers and limits of telling and hearing stories in doing so; what we can learn about what we are and about how best to live. I argue that reasoning with autobiography is a way to this self-knowledge. We can learn about ourselves, as human beings and as individuals, by reading, thinking through, and arguing about this distinctive kind of text. Reasoning with Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son is a way of learning about the nature of the good life and the roles that pleasure and self-expression play in it. Reasoning with Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs is a way of learning about transformative experience, self-alienation, and therefore the nature of the self. My book develops and defends this claim, by answering a series of questions. What is an autobiography? How can we learn about ourselves from reading one? On what subjects does autobiography teach? What should we learn about them? In particular, should we learn something about the importance of stories in human life: could our storytelling about our own lives make sense of them as wholes, unify them over time, or make them good for us? Could storytelling make the self? The overall aim of the book is a critique of stories and a defence of a self-realization account of the self and its good. I investigate the wide range of extant accounts of the self and of the good life, and argue for my own account, by reading and reasoning with autobiographies of self-discovery, martial life, and solitude. I conclude: autobiography can be reasoning in pursuit of self-knowledge; each of us is an unchosen, initially opaque, seedlike self; our good is the development and expression of our latent capacities, which is our individual self-realization; stories play much less role in our lives than some thinkers have supposed, and the development and expression of potential much more.

Learn more about Good Lives at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Theodora Dragostinova's "The Cold War from the Margins"

Theodora K. Dragostinova is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University. She is coeditor of Beyond Mosque, Church, and State and author of Between Two Motherlands.

Dragostinova applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book goes to the heart of my argument: that, as seen in Bulgaria, there was a specific state socialist idea of culture during the Cold War that spotlights communist Eastern Europe as the site of alternative modernity. To quote: “The way West and East interpreted the role of culture reflected their competing ideas of state, society, and human rights. … Bulgarian experts used the phrase ‘true arts’ (istinsko izkustvo) to promote their vision of culture, which was essentially seen as high culture aimed at the masses, as opposed to culture in the West, which they saw as split between elite culture reserved for the rich, and cheap, vulgar mass culture.” There is still much value to think what exactly culture is, who gets to define it, and who has the chance to participate in it!

In the rest of my book, I explore how Bulgaria’s communist elites organized a staggering number of cultural events across the globe—from the Balkans to Western Europe and the United States to India, Mexico, and Nigeria. In all of these case—and as stated on Page 99 “there was a dynamic interplay between culture, ideology, and propaganda in the way Bulgaria staged its cultural presence.” In some cases, the Bulgarians emphasized their national uniqueness, as they did in the Balkans. In others, they wanted to be seen as important contributors to European civilization, as they did in the West. And in still others, they showcased their universal contributions to humanity, as they did in India and Mexico.

All in all, the idea was that culture allows a small state to exert global influence and chart an independent path outside of political, military, or economic frameworks. Judging by some of the events and their resonance, the Bulgarians were quite successful!

Yet, we should remember: communist elites largely controlled cultural expression. To return to Page 99, “distrust and vigilance in regard to Western cultural events remained the norm. … At the same time that Bulgaria sought access to the best exhibition spaces and performance halls in the West, requested more publicity in the media, and expected political recognition of its cultural efforts at the highest levels, officials zealously policed what type of Western culture could be shown in Bulgaria.” This quotation captures perfectly the contradictions of the global Bulgarian cultural extravaganza that my book explores!

Follow Theodora Dragostinova on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue