Tanya L. Roth's "Her Cold War"

Tanya L. Roth received her Ph.D. in history from Washington University. She teaches history at Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School.

Roth applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945–1980, and reported the following:

Open Her Cold War to page 99, and you’ll find yourself on the last page of chapter 4, which focuses on women's jobs in the Cold War military. The partial opening paragraph on the page focuses on rank limitations and why they existed. The chapter concludes with this argument:

As long as women had access to jobs deemed suitable for their sex, military leaders believed they offered women equality with men, and few people questioned this conception of equality. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, servicewomen and their advocates would bring that definition under fire.

I’m excited to see that thai is where things end on page 99 of Her Cold War, because this page truly gets at the heart of the book. Her Cold War hones in on the contradiction mentioned above: that in the Cold War, the US military offered women careers based on equality with men, but when we look at these opportunities today, it’s not what we think of when we envision equality. Equality is not a fixed concept: it has a history, too. If you opened Her Cold War to page 99, then, the final paragraph in particular gives you an incredibly clear picture of what this book is about.

Because page 99 begins in media res - not just because it’s in the middle of the book, but also because it’s the last page of a chapter - the first paragraph might not jump out at you. It has details on the highest ranks servicewomen could achieve, but by itself, this might not yet make sense. It’s the full paragraph on the page that really matters if you want to understand Her Cold War as a whole. On this page alone, you’ll find several of the questions that drive the book. Why couldn’t women hold certain military jobs? What did “equality” mean for servicewomen? When and how did things change?

Today, women in uniform are no longer a novelty. They also don’t face the same limitations servicewomen had in the Cold War. Yet it’s only been in the past decade that gender-based restrictions have been eliminated in the US military. Why did it take so long? Read Her Cold War to find out.

Visit Tanya L. Roth's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Woody Holton's "Liberty is Sweet"

Woody Holton is McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches and researches Early American history, especially the American Revolution, with a focus on economic history and on African Americans, Native Americans, and women. His books include Abigail Adams, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize, and Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, a finalist for the National Book Award.

Holton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Liberty is Sweet describes boycott movements in Virginia and South Carolina. It opens in January 1769, when the Duke of Bedford, outraged at American colonists’ refusal to punish their neighbors for rioting against customs agents, proposed to send rioting Bostonians to England for trial. When Virginia’s House of Burgesses denounced Bedford’s plan, Governor Botetourt dissolved the assembly. The representatives gathered in nearby Raleigh’s Tavern to sign a non-importation agreement. It resembled northern colonists’ boycotts in some ways, but the Virginians also agreed to stop bringing in enslaved Africans.

South Carolina’s wealthy merchants balked at the boycott, which would cost them business. But Charleston had a powerful community of artisans, who, on their own, pledged to stop purchasing British luxuries—and also Africans. Men could not enforce non-importation alone. They relied upon women to replace boycotted imports with domestic products like homespun fabric.

This page introduces readers to a main theme in Liberty is Sweet: overlooked actors played key roles in the American Revolution. Women signed non-importation agreements and rioted for food. Enslaved people demanded freedom in exchange for serving in the British army. Most Native Americans who participated in the war fought on the British side, attacking not only U.S. forts and settlements but also those of the Patriots’ allies, both formal (including many Native nations) and informal (especially the Spanish), from Pennsylvania to St. Louis. Colonists resisted the rebels’ military draft, and evangelicals demanded freedom of worship. The Revolution was not just a War for Independence but also a multi-faceted struggle for local power.

This page also reminds readers that the American rebels were not always ideologically-driven and often pursued their economic self-interest. For example, artisans promoted nonimportation (which would increase their business), while merchants resisted it. Washington considered attacking British-held Philadelphia to shore up Continental currency. After the war, such issues as whether the states should levy onerous taxes on farmers like Daniel Shays to pay off the war bonds (most of which had been bought up by wealthy bond speculators) set the stage for the Constitutional Convention.

But page 99 fails to introduce readers to other crucial themes in Liberty is Sweet. For example, I join other recent scholars in challenging the traditional geographic boundaries of the American Revolution. Britain actually had twenty-six American colonies, including many in the Caribbean. By placing the Battles of Bunker Hill and Yorktown alongside conflicts in Florida, the Caribbean, and India, my book considers the American Revolution as an international conflict. Page 99 also fails to reveal my attention to non-human actors, including weather, geography, and especially disease. Liberty is Sweet also offers several features that page 99 doesn’t hint at, including the first map of the eastern North America to include both colonial and Indigenous towns and major boundaries and the first population table to include not only all of the Caribbean colonies but also every European colony and every Indigenous nation in North America east of the Mississippi River.

I submitted one of my previous books to this test and was surprised to see how many of its themes were hinted at on that one page. But page 99 reflects only some of the major themes of Liberty is Sweet.

The Page 69 Test: Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution.

Follow Woody Holton on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Clark's "The Dissolution of the Monasteries"

James Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter UK. He has published widely on the cultural, intellectual and religious life of medieval and Reformation England.

Clark applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History, and reported the following:

For this, the Ford test works well. The book is not only a study of the central drama of Henry VIII’s Reformation. It also aims to explore the place that monasteries had come to occupy in English society in the sixteenth century. They had stood in and around the cities, towns and villages of England for centuries; a good many of them could trace their history back beyond the Norman Conquest of 1066. There had been monks here of one kind or another for as long as there had been Christians. But these ancient institutions amounted to more, far more than heritage landmarks. In the kingdom of the new Tudor dynasty they were still living communities, charged with an uncommon blend of cult and material power. Page ninety-nine, which opens the book’s third chapter, offers a stark illustration of the worst effects of that power. It tells a murder story. Thomas Warner, upstanding resident of the town of Bury St Edmunds in the eastern county of Suffolk, was set upon one dark night when making his way home to his loving wife, Alice. Severely beaten, he somehow managed to reach his own front door but his lifeblood was already spent and by morning he was dead. In the light of day it became clear his assailant was one John Barnysby, a servant of the great Benedictine abbey that stood at the heart of the town. Lord of the borough, the abbot of the monastery lent his protection to Barnysby and the murder went unpunished. But Alice Warner would not submit so easily to such self-serving vested interest. She presented a petition to another wife recently wronged, none other than the queen of England herself.

Warner’s murder, Alice’s impotent appeal, Barnysby’s escape to fight another day and the monastery’s impassive indifference together distil the dynamics of this still medieval, still monastic society of Henry VIII. The monasteries and other religious houses of provincial England were not relics of a remote past from which the king and his subjects had already broken free. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was not the final phase of a process of transformation which had long been underway. It was a dramatic and disturbing tear in the fabric of daily life, which divided communities between the same polarised standpoints seen at the death of poor Thomas Warner: a pragmatic preference for continuity or a passionate zeal for change.

Learn more about The Dissolution of the Monasteries at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liza Gennaro's "Making Broadway Dance"

Liza Gennaro is Associate Dean and Director of Musical Theatre at The Manhattan School of Music. Gennaro is an accomplished choreographer, elected member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society Executive Board, a Tony Voter, and in 2015 she completed a three-year term on the Tony Award Nominating Committee.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making Broadway Dance, and reported the following:

Page 99 appears in Chapter 4 – Jerome Robbins on Broadway: 1944-1951 – and is a pretty good indicator of what’s in Making Broadway Dance. The page addresses a seminal prompt to my writing the book. Thinking back to my early research I remember that as I read through reviews of mid-twentieth century musicals I was struck by how often critics reported that choreography was the most successful part of a show. That discovery flew in the face of most musical theatre history writing which focuses on book, lyrics and score and became a central recognition for my investigations. The page also demonstrates my prodding and unpacking of what musical theatre choreographers say about their work. As purveyors of commercial art, when asked about their dances by reporters who often don’t know anything about dance they mostly offered quick sometimes glib responses. My extensive knowledge of musical theatre dance allowed me to read between the lines and expound on what they were saying. Page 99 also aids in establishing intellectual practice in developing musical theatre dances as well as the emotional stress that choreographers across dance genres experience in a medium in which the human body, which includes a brain and opinions, is the vehicle for expression.

My goal in writing the book has been to legitimize musical theatre dance as a unique dance form within the practice of stage choreography. Page 99 offers a glimpse of that goal.

Learn more about Making Broadway Dance at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dan Cassino and Yasemin Besen-Cassino's "Gender Threat"

Dan Cassino is Professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University and Executive Director of the FDU Poll.

Yasemin Besen-Cassino is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Montclair State University. She is the editor of Contemporary Sociology.

Cassino applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Gender Threat: American Masculinity in the Face of Change, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Gender Threat is towards the beginning of our examination of how men make use of pornography in order to assert their masculinity. There’s lots of work on attitudes about pornography, and use of pornography, but much of it is hampered by a reliance on self-reports about pornography use – and there’s good reason to believe that men and women might be lying about it. We know that the use of online pornography increased dramatically as high-speed internet access spread across the US, but reported rates of US have only inched up, leading us to look for a different way to measure the use of pornography. Instead of relying on self-report, we make use of Google data, and, in particular, Google searches for, and within, the most popular pornography site (and in the top 10 of all sites) on the internet, Pornhub.

Were a reader to open up our book to page 99, they’d get some idea of what the book is about, and our approach, but wouldn’t have much of an idea of why we’re so interested in isolating changes in the rates of use of various genres of pornography. What I like about page 99 is that it highlights some of the things the book does well: it’s setting up a link between masculine gender identity to a common behavior, just as the book has done previously for behaviors ranging from sexual harassment and voting to pornography use. It also gives an idea of how we’re going about this: we’re not drawing on self-reports, but outside sources and experiments that give use better insight into what’s really happening with men’s gender identities. As we show throughout the book, what men say, and what men actually do, are two very different things.

The problem with page 99 of our book is that it’s set up for a punchline that comes a few pages later. Not only is the number of households in which men are feeling economic stress correlated with Pornhub searches a month later, they’re correlated with the use of particular kinds of pornography. In what is the most uncomfortable set of analyses we did for the book (not to mention the sort we really didn’t want to talk about in front of our child), we did a content analysis of the most popular genres of pornography on Pornhub, and found that gender role threat among men led to increases in those genres that were more degrading to women, but not other types (we kept the details of that part to the methodology appendix in the back).

Much of the work that’s been done in studying masculinity has been qualitative, and those approaches are great for answering some questions (and we make use of them, too), but page 99 does a reasonable job of setting up the rigorous quantitative analysis we’re bringing to the table, even if it doesn’t explain why we’re so interested in it.

Learn more about Gender Threat at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Robert McClure's "Winter in America"

Daniel Robert McClure is assistant professor of history at Fort Hays State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Winter in America: A Cultural History of Neoliberalism, from the Sixties to the Reagan Revolution, and reported the following:

From (the end of page 98 and) page 99:

Global markets, according to Business Week in 1963, now distinguished the normative scope for U.S. business. More than this, the overseas-domestic aspect of the multinational created an internal economy for the companies. As Ray R. Eppert of Burroughs Corp. asserted, “The net result of our investing abroad is that we have grown at both ends.... That’s because our overseas subsidiaries serve as captive markets for the parent corporation.” “More than 80% of the U.S. parent’s $25-million in exports,” added Business Week, “goes to its own subsidiaries, mostly as parts for fabrication but also as finished machinery. Internal sales as well as total exports have nearly doubled since 1956.” Reporting on the National Industrial Conference Board’s antitrust conference in New York City in 1965, Business Week observed that mergers continued to be seen “as a technique for growth,” noting the “record 1,700 corporate consolidations last year,” which were expected to “pick up speed, if company earnings keep up their present pace.” Market shares expanded with mergers: “100 largest manufacturing companies had grown from 23% in 1947 to 32% in 1962.” Rather than the traditional monopoly, conglomerates embodied the concept of concentrations Walter Lippmann warned of in his Good Society (1938). They would also become the archetype enterprise for the neoliberal era.

Throughout this evolution of multinationals and finance, an American public increasingly became a part of this expanding world of MNCs or within the employment sectors related to their growth. This new class of managers, technicians, academics, and journalists working in large corporate organizations also raised families in spacious, newly constructed, federally subsidized white suburbs. Consequently, the new middle class, particularly in the West or Sun Belt or the “gun belt” shared “a technocratic culture, an acceptance of Cold War ideology, [and] a relatively conservative politics.” In the context of settler colonialism, the Sun Belt represented a new postwar ideological divide between a stagnant East and a rejuvenated West. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner characterized this geographic identity as “a place outside civility or urban civilization, a site associated with the male subject conceived as a private entity, the bearer of rights of property and propriety whose boundaries must be protected with violence. The exaltation of the male individual in conservative thought is always linked to nature for this reason. Nature is unconstrained.... The more ‘natural’ Sunbelt is thus a metaphor for the conservative ideal of individual freedom, the exaltation of individual rights over collective responsibility.” It would take until the passage of social equality legislation, however, for the Sun Belt to begin truly championing individualism over the collective nature of the welfare state.

Exemplary of the consensus politics at the time, “conservative politics” mostly policed social boundaries related to race, gender, and sexuality—safely secured by pre-1960s federal housing policies—rather than a retreat from federal intervention. Taking advantage of the welfare state, many Americans found prosperity and opportunity through the various housing programs, infrastructure developments (e.g., the interstate freeway system), educational investments, and defense spending—all of which aided the success of big business. 68 Shaping the institutions of federal intervention, of course, was the ongoing institutional racism of de jure and de facto Jim Crow discrimination.

Opening to page 99, the reader wades through the global sales of multinational conglomerates in the postwar era, specifically detailed in an article in Business Week discussing how companies often used their own overseas subsidiaries as “captive markets for the parent corporation.” These “Internal sales” and exports doubled between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, signaling the increased momentum of outsourcing by U.S. corporations overseas. A wave of mergers followed, along with the resulting expansion of market shares. The first paragraph ends with a flashback to an earlier chapter discussing Walter Lippmann’s 1938 concept of “concentrations,” a phrase denoting the concentration of capital and markets via monopoly/oligopoly capital. This paragraph on page 99 underlines an important element of Winter in America: the active role played by multinational conglomerates in shaping the economic practices leading to a space conducive for neoliberalism.

The next paragraph examines the American people—the “managers, technicians, academics, and journalists”—operating through this evolving world of the multinational conglomerate, particularly those living in the Sunbelt or West, where massive Cold War subsidies and defense spending generated an ironic combination of socially conservative middle-class citizens living in federally subsidized spaces and enjoying the multiplier effects of government spending. From this intersection of a globalizing economy and the federally subsidized white suburbs arose a renewed sense of individualism still shaped by the anti-Black legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. The 1960s, however, would interrupt this “Leave it to Beaver” white suburban utopia in the form of social equality legislation (Civil Rights Act of 1964, etc.).

Alongside the usual suspects of Milton Friedman and FA Hayek, page 99 outlines the way neoliberalism evolved after the 1970s through both a white, educated citizenry who both thrived in the postwar economic growth of the Jim Crow Welfare state and, later, felt betrayed after the federal government passed social equality legislation, as well as the larger structural shifts of multinational conglomerates who, through their negotiation of the regulatory environment of the Welfare state, paved the routes to neoliberal globalization. Suspicion towards social equality federal intervention—for example, housing debates, busing, and affirmative action policies—opened a rhetorical window to bring the suspicion towards “big government” by white Americans into the arguments from multinational conglomerates, finance, and economic conservatives and neoliberal economists who had waited since the 1930s to dismantle the regulatory Welfare state.

Learn more about Winter in America at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Melissa Fuster's "Caribeños at the Table"

Melissa Fuster is associate professor of public health nutrition at Tulane University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Caribeños at the Table will take the reader to the initial pages of Chapter 4, Gathering, Cooking, and Eating Comidas, beginning as follows:

The preparation and consumption of certain foods, such as Puerto Rican pasteles, Dominican mangú, and Cuban ajiaco, are facilitated by the movement of foods, cooks, eaters, and ideas between the Caribbean and New York City. The practices behind these dishes emerge from structure, reproduce structure, and can also transform structure. In this chapter, I aim to disentangle these interactions, demonstrating the influence of structure in the practices that help maintain and also change eating behaviors among caribeños in the city. I approach this task by addressing how we interact with food within three interrelated practices: gathering (or buying), cooking, and eating. The examination of food practices provides further evidence of the complexity of dietary changes, reminding us that these experiences can be universal, not just guided or prescribed by culture.

Amazingly, the Page 99 test worked quite well. The page provides a good summary of the work presented in the book. Caribeños at the Table is an interdisciplinary book, intertwining scholarship from public health, nutrition, history, migration studies, social sciences, to take a deep dive at how global and structural forces intersect to create the persisting health inequities we see among immigrant, racialized communities in the United States. Chapter 4 is the last content chapter of the book, based on ethnographic data, coming from experiences cooking and eating comidas – traditional Hispanic Caribbean foods or meals – with Cubans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans in New York. The chapter builds on the evidence presented in the preceding chapters, including archival sources to showcase the histories of the communities via a transnational lens, interviews with dietitians working with the community, and the voices of caribeños. The work demonstrates the importance of structural factors – including race, class, gender, and migratory history – in influencing food practices and health outcomes, while also showcasing how these are often overlooked in food and nutrition scholarship when examining the diets of immigrant communities.

As a Puerto Rican food and nutrition scholar, one of my goals for Caribeños at the Table is to shift how immigrant or ethnic communities are addressed in both scholarship and practice, by showcasing new perspectives from an understudied group within Latin American communities, from a transnational and comparative perspective. I hope this understanding pushes our practice and research to shift the focus on individual behavior change to new social and environmental approaches to address food and health inequities among Latin communities and beyond. Yet, aside from the scholarly aims driving Caribeños at the Table, I also wrote the book for fellow caribeños interested in learning more about our cuisine and history, for practitioners working with the community, and for food lovers in general by showcasing the influence of Hispanic Caribbean sazón within the global foodscape of New York City.

Visit Melissa Fuster's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erich Hatala Matthes's "Drawing the Line"

Erich Hatala Matthes is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Director of the Frost Center for the Environment at Wellesley College. His teaching and research focus on the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of art, cultural heritage, and the environment.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Drawing the Line does indeed offer a helpful distillation of one of the book's key arguments. "Cancel culture" has many possible meanings in the context of the arts, but one way that it plausibly evinces itself is through protests/boycotts/and other actions that focus public attention on the misdeeds of particular artists. One of the main ideas I defend in the book is that this drive to cancel particular artists is often well-motivated, but ultimately ineffectual or counterproductive. The focus on particular individuals can in fact offer an opportunity for people in positions of institutional power to sacrifice those individuals without making any changes to the institutional structures (membership, policies, etc.) that allowed, e.g. a predatory artist to flourish in the first place. In other words, we should be wary of situations in which the notoriety of specific individuals draws our attention away from the work that needs to happen to create lasting change in the art world. Even when activists are sensitive to these issues, prevailing media narratives about "cancel culture" unfortunately continue to distract attention from institutional change. Consider the recent dust up over Dave Chappelle, where countless articles have discussed his "cancelation." But what did B. Pagels-Minor, one of the Netflix employees who organized the walkout in protest (and lost their job!) actually say? "Many people want to boil down this to just 'crazy libs' obsessed with 'cancel culture' who want to harm Chappelle, but that could not be further from the truth. Let me be clear: Within the Trans* team there is no desire to 'destroy Netflix' or 'cancel Dave.' Our goal has always been to create parity in the content available at Netflix to better reflect the spectrum of users" (source). I go on in this chapter to argue that support for more diversely composed and managed arts institutions is important for avoiding the situations that lead to "cancel culture" controversies in the first place.

However, because of cancel culture’s obsessive focus with the individual artist, in the cases where it is effective, it offers an opportunity for those powerful parties in the art world to jump on the bandwagon of pillorying a particular artist without making changes to their own operations. The philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has helpfully described how “elite capture” can take place across the political spectrum, with identity politics as one of its casualties—an idea that is supposed to focus on advocacy on behalf of a vulnerable group can be exploited to ultimately serve the interests of those in power. The internet outrage of cancel culture seems especially susceptible to elite capture. Because of its reliance on social media, cancel culture is part of the attention economy, and attention is a finite resource. When cancel culture directs our attention to the sacrificial destruction of particular individuals, it’s easy enough for those in positions of power in the art world to acquiesce to the canceling of some representative artists without making any significant alterations to who wields power in their organizations or how decisions are made. As journalist Helen Lewis puts it: “Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures ... because they help preserve their power.” Angry Twitter users gain some momentary satisfaction, but nothing actually changes.

The difficulty is that the drive behind cancel culture is not without a reasonable motivation. Ta-Nahesi Coates notes that the ability to cancel people is nothing new; it just used to be the prerogative of the powerful alone. As he puts it: “Any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it.”

Follow Erich Hatala Matthes on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lonán Ó Briain's "Voices of Vietnam"

Lonán Ó Briain is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham. He is the author or editor of several books, including Musical Minorities: The Sounds of Hmong Ethnicity in Northern Vietnam.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Voices of Vietnam: A Century of Radio, Red Music, and Revolution, and reported the following:

This book investigates the historical impact of broadcast sound on geopolitics. The shifting borders and polities of mainland Southeast Asia over the past century provide ample material for examination, especially during and after the major wars of the twentieth century but also following economic reforms and the emergence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. My attention is particularly focused on Hanoi, which served for a time as the capital of French Indochina, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV; North Vietnam) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

The first half of page 99 provides an excellent summary of the key arguments in Voices of Vietnam by describing the activities of a central figure associated with radio music during the Second Indochina War, Dân Huyền, and then summarizing the legacy of wartime musicians, broadcasts and audio technologies in contemporary Vietnam:

…seminal recordings are regularly broadcast to accompany interviews with survivors, and iconic songs are re-recorded by up-and-coming popular artists. Much of the technical and administrative infrastructures described here also remain in place. These mechanisms served as a platform for the invention and propagation of a national communist cultural heritage in the early postcolonial period, and today they buttress the power of the current political establishment.

The page 99 test is less successful on the second half of the page, which shifts to the Republic of Vietnam (RVN; South Vietnam):

With loudspeakers positioned along the seventeenth parallel, wireless radio broadcasts beaming into the South, and pamphlets advertizing the VOV’s schedule, potential listeners in the RVN were inundated with red music and other propaganda from the DRV during the war. But southern listeners had many alternatives...

Only a few pages are devoted to broadcasts from this region. Here, I provide a snapshot of cultural life and music broadcasting in the South, largely based on secondary sources—other scholars are developing important research on the RVN which I briefly highlight. The primary sources for Voices of Vietnam are original interviews with musicians in northern Vietnam, fieldwork in the offices, rehearsal halls, and recording studios of state radio in Hanoi, and archival documents on broadcasting mostly in northern Vietnam/Tonkin. So, this test is only successful if you read the first half of the page!

Learn more about Voices of Vietnam at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hannah Farber's "Underwriters of the United States"

Hannah Farber is assistant professor of history at Columbia University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding, and reported the following:

If we flip to page 99 of Underwriters of the United States, we find ourselves in Philadelphia, shortly after the ratification of the Constitution of the United States. A local insurance group has successfully persuaded the legislature of the state of Pennsylvania to grant it an incorporation, in spite of noisy complaints from its opponents. The Page 99 test works fairly well, because what follows is a transformation that is central to the book: the noisy opponents, placated with an incorporation of their own, immediately discover that collaboration is more profitable than competition. Suddenly, they become a lot quieter. The two new insurance companies amicably exchange insurance rates, collaborate on matters of policy, and begin to build relationships with other insurance companies and private insurance brokerages up and down the eastern seaboard of the new republic.

Over the following two decades, a major shift takes place: the overwhelming majority of American merchants begin buying their insurance at home instead of overseas. As a result, American insurers are able to reconstitute their staggeringly complex, wealthy, and exclusive international business inside the United States. But how "inside" the United States is this business, really? When insurers talk about their business in public, they try to have things both ways. On the one hand, they portray the insurance business as a private project of expert, cosmopolitan merchants, with which the state has no right to interfere. On the other hand, they also try to portray insurance as a civic-minded business that benefits (secures!) all Americans, and that therefore deserves public acclamation and state support.

Learn more about Underwriters of the United States at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue