James Warren's "Regret: A Study in Ancient Moral Psychology"

James Warren studied Classics at Clare College, Cambridge, where he stayed to complete his MPhil and PhD. After two years as a Research Fellow at Magdalene College, in 2001 he took up a Lectureship at the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge and a Fellowship in Philosophy at Corpus Christi college. He became Professor of Ancient Philosophy in 2017.

Warren applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Regret: A Study in Ancient Moral Psychology, and reported the following:

Page 99 is at the beginning of my chapter on Aristotle's account of the relationship between regret and 'akrasia': the character-trait of those people who often act according to their non-rational appetites against the recommendations of their reason. It begins to outline the connection between Aristotle's account and Plato's related discussion in the Republic and cites Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics 2.8 1224b19-21 which shows how Aristotle recognises that the akratic person both takes pleasure in acting akratically and also is pained in anticipation of the regret to come.

Page 99 gives a good indication of the general topic and methods used in the book.

Later chapters build on these foundations to give a general account of the ways in which Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers understand regret (metameleia in Greek) as a pain caused by the retrospective re-evaluation of an action originally performed in a condition of ignorance and how this connects their general accounts of practical knowledge and virtue.

Follow James Warren on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nathaniel L. Moir's "Number One Realist"

Nathaniel L. Moir is a Research Associate with the Applied History Project at the Kennedy School, Harvard University, an affiliate with the Contemporary History Research Group at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, and an Editor with the Journal of Applied History. He was formerly an Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Kennedy School, Harvard University from 2019 to 2021.

Moir applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Number One Realist – Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare reveals the book's essence while evoking the horrific nature of war facing millions of humans today. It recounts the infliction of a brutal, illegal, and unprovoked invasion of one country by its neighbor and how the invasion created a chain of events leading to other wars. The invasion resulted from vast miscalculations, and it directly resulted in renewed German military rearmament as threats to the global security order increased.

The paradigmatic change leading to German rearmament recounted on the page describes how the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 precipitated German rearmament and how this, in turn, generated fear among countries recovering from their destruction during World War II. In a compromise to permit German rearmament in 1951, France demanded that the United States guarantee its position in its colonies in Indochina. In exchange, France would remain committed to collective defense through a proposed European Defense Community united against Russian and Chinese threats.

Bernard Fall, a scholar of the French Indochina and Vietnam Wars and the subject of this book, lived through these tumultuous years. In 1950, Fall was a twenty-four-year-old former War Crimes Commission analyst at the Nuremberg Trials. Page 99 relates how Fall perceived the North Korean invasion as it sparked massive policy changes in the US and Europe. Those effects were so extensive that convicted Nazi war criminals, including Alfried Krupp of the German arms manufacturer Krupp Industries, were released to reignite the German arms industry. The page also describes Fall's frustration in seeing Krupp released from prison. At Nuremberg, Fall had spent years documenting the Third Reich's atrocities, and its victims included Fall's mother and father, among millions of others.

In 1951, the security guarantees the United States thus provided France pulled the United States further into the failing French reoccupation of Indochina. Thus, as one war began, it primed the furnaces for others. Finally, the page hints at a future that would eventually involve an escalating war involving the United States in Vietnam. By August 1964, the murky basis of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution formed a rationale for the invasion of South Vietnam that would eventually undermine American values and result in the death of millions. Ultimately, then as now, invasions initiate unforeseen consequences and constrain future choices, let alone the lives of those living today.

Visit Nathaniel L. Moir's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gerard N. Magliocca's "Washington's Heir"

Gerard N. Magliocca is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. He received his undergraduate degree at Stanford, his law degree at Yale, and spent one year as a law clerk for Judge Guido Calabresi on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Magliocca's other books on constitutional law include The Heart of the Constitution (2018).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Washington's Heir: The Life of Justice Bushrod Washington, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Washington’s Heir: The Life of Bushrod Washington mostly talks about the Supreme Court’s inability to muster a quorum in 1811. Two of the seven justices were unable to travel to Washington DC for unknown reasons, one had died, and another was ill and would soon die. Consequently, for the one and only time in its history the Court was forced to cancel all its arguments. The page then discusses President Madison’s political difficulty in filling one of the new vacancies, as two of his choices refused to accept the nomination and another was rejected by the Senate.

This background fits into the book’s larger narrative in that Madison eventually settled on Joseph Story as his pick, and Justice Story became a pivotal figure on the Marshall Court and a protégé of Justice Washington. The relationship between Washington and Story is one of the central ones in this biography, along with Justice Washington’s partnership with John Marshall and mentorship by George Washington, Bushrod’s uncle.

Follow Gerard N. Magliocca on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan: Constitutional Law and the Politics of Backlash.

The Page 99 Test: American Founding Son.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Clark Mitchell's "Noir Fiction and Film"

Lee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, where he has served as Chair of the English Department and Director of the Program in American Studies. He teaches courses in American literature and film, with recent essays focusing on Cormac McCarthy, John Williams, the Coen brothers, and Edith Wharton. His recent books include Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels (2017), Late Westerns: The Persistence of a Genre (2018), and More Time: Contemporary Short Stories and Late Styles (2018).

Mitchell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Noir Fiction and Film: Diversions and Misdirections, and reported the following:

Joseph Addison notoriously observed that “even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” Ford Madox Ford’s less obvious quip is a tad slippier, though it exactly fits my book in the serendipity of a ninety-ninth page that opens the book’s middle chapter (squarely fourth out of seven). There, as it happens, I pause over my larger thesis to introduce its further unfolding in the chapters to follow. Indeed, as I’m surprised to discover, one could hardly find a better review (save for the book’s Introduction) of my counterintuitive argument about noir fiction and film: that it appeals as a genre more for its descriptive diversions than for its eruptive plot machinations. However fitfully fascinating, noir antagonists lure us on via fleeting gestures rather than force of personality. As page 99 declares, “Compelling as these characters may be as characters, they remain to a large extent blank slates, free of invigorating hobbies or importunate wives, stripped of scarred histories and lofty aspirations. They lack either pasts or futures that press on them in significant ways, or otherwise impede their efforts to solve the crime at hand.”

Not only do I here recapitulate that argument, but extend it, “from the various forms in which description serves as deflection and delay; to heroes as stick figures inclined to lively dialogue and presumptive ‘attitudes’ rather than establishing their presence as psychologically integrated characters; finally, to the idea that detectives can hardly be known at all, or made readily recognizable in a clear-cut way.” The presumptive middle of my discussion here encapsulates the whole, with Noir Fiction and Film categorically passing the Page 99 Test. But in leafing through my other monographs in hopes of further confirmation (that I’m truly a Page 99 kind of author), I am hard-pressed to detect any other clear passes, even near-misses. The stopped clock simply stopped in my favor this time round, making me suspect that this book may have been chosen for this test by someone who had already turned the page.

Learn more about Noir Fiction and Film at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Stokes's "Fear of the Family"

Lauren Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Northwestern University, where she researches and teaches German history, migration and race in Europe, and the history of gender and sexuality.

Stokes applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany, and reported the following:

Page 99 summarizes the previous chapter, which argued that the child allowance reform of 1974 was a pivotal event in how contemporaries interpreted family migration. In the 1960s and early 1970s, foreign workers in West Germany received the same amount of child allowance [Kindergeld] for children who lived in Germany and abroad. Beginning in late 1974, the same foreign workers received more money for children who lived in Germany than for those who lived abroad.

Page 99 shows how the West German state accused foreign parents who brought their children to Germany after this reform of “irresponsibly responding to an economic incentive” and of acting “out of short-sighted desire for financial gain rather than genuine emotional attachment.” Even seven years after the reform, in 1981, the Labor Ministry was gloomy about its ability to stop child migration. It lamented that foreign parents suffered from poor economic reasoning, which caused them to understand bringing their children to live with them as a good financial decision, even though raising children in Germany was obviously more expensive than raising children abroad.

Page 99 is an ideal introduction to the rest of the book, showing that contemporaries interpreted family migration as a form of “welfare migration” rather than as an anticipated consequence of families wanting to live together. This event is both consequence and cause of everything else that happens in the book, as very little strikes “fear” in the heart of the state more than a child welfare migrant.

I was delighted by this test because when I was trying to figure out the book’s argument to write an introduction, I performed my own “page test” where I distilled each MS Word page into a single argumentative phrase. I then used those 402 argumentative phrases to identify that the book’s four primary arguments are about race, gender, neoliberalism, and memory.

This page is centered around the third-most common argument by page count, “neoliberalism.” Page 99 cites Thomas Biebricher in support of my point that the Labor Ministry’s lament that parents didn’t understand economic reasoning was a version of neoliberal governance, which rests on “moral notion partly disguised as economic doctrine.” The problem with the Labor Ministry’s claim was that it had never drawn up a budget of what it cost parents to raise a child in Germany versus abroad. It had never considered the possibility that foreign parents had to pay the people who watched their children in a foreign country, or that it might be more expensive to maintain two households than one.

The claim that parents suffered from financial delusions was not based on economic logic. It was a moral claim, one that allowed the state to judge those foreign parents who continued to migrate with their children despite the fact that the state never missed an opportunity to inform them that those children did not belong. What did these parents think the ritual incantation “Germany is not an immigration country” meant? The West German state rarely agreed with migrants about what migration policy should look like, and for decades it resolved those disagreements by blaming the migrants for being irrational. That’s the conflict on this page, and it’s a conflict that will recur on nearly every page of this book.

Visit Lauren Stokes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Hingley's "Conquering the Ocean"

Richard Hingley is Professor of Roman Archaeology at Durham University and the author of several books, including Londinium: A Biography; Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen (with Christina Unwin); and Hadrian's Wall: A Life.

Hingley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Conquering the Ocean: The Roman Invasion of Britain, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is mainly taken up with a plan of the Roman colony at Colchester in the late first century CE, although there is also some text discussing the Temple of Claudius, which is marked on the plan. This is an important section of the book since the building of this classical temple celebrated the emperor Claudius’ conquest of Britain in the years following 43 CE. Claudius was the first Roman emperor to gain a foothold in Britain, a century after Julius Caesar had crossed the Channel and forced the submission of some British kings before returning to Rome.

Looking at page 99 would give the reader some idea about the content of the book since Claudius’ activities were a central element in the Roman conquest. This temple was the first substantial classical building to be constructed in Britain and was almost certainly built on the order of Claudius successor as emperor, Nero, during the 50s CE. Nero is famous for his misdemeanors and it was during his reign that the uprising of Boudica occurred in Britain. This chapter off the book focuses on Boudica’s uprising and the threat it posed to Roman rule over southern Britain.

An even better page to sample would be page 73 since this has a reconstruction of the Arch of Claudius in Rome, drawn by Christina Unwin. This monumental arch, which has been demolished, included an inscription which emphasized Claudius’ conquest of Ocean. Significantly, one of the main aqueducts that supplied water to the city of Rome flowed across the top of the arch, emphasizing Claudius conquest of Britain which the Roman elite considered was a highly significant island as a result of its fabled location within Ocean.

My book focuses on the activities of Roman emperors and generals as they sought to conquer the Ocean and also the resistance and gradual submission of the Britons.

Learn more about Conquering the Ocean at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea C. Mosterman's "Spaces of Enslavement"

Andrea C. Mosterman is Associate Professor of Atlantic History and Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History at the University of New Orleans.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Dutch American painter Gerardus Duyckinck ordered Henry Rensselaer to sell one of his enslaved women with child “if you can get 60, or even 58 pounds in cash for them, or forty-eight pounds for her without the child.” Not surprisingly, Duyckinck did not direct Rensselaer to consult with the mother before doing so.

Many of these children would have remained in the same county, but there are also plenty of bills of sale that detail transactions in which children were sold to enslavers who lived far from their parents, thus creating long distances between family members. Elizabeth Boelen of New York City, for instance, sold the eleven-year-old Florah to Jacob Van Schaick of Albany in 1752, and in doing so Florah was taken to the upriver settlement far away from her friends and family in New York City. The family of Sare, an enslaved woman in Albany, had been spread out along the Hudson River with her daughter Mace living in Poughkeepsie and her son Bob in New York City. Their separate residencies made the chances that these family members would see each other again highly unlikely.

Page 99 certainly gives a good indication of the book's main idea: Slavery in (Dutch) New York was a brutal system, which in many ways resembled systems of enslavement elsewhere in the Americas. The page details forced family separation at the hands of Dutch American enslavers. Every day, children, some as young as one-year old, were taken away from their parents by the people who claimed to own them. Yet, New York slavery has often been presented as a system in which enslavers kept families together. In fact, some sources suggest that enslaved people were treated as members of the family, though surely Dutch American parents would not sell their own children. Such inaccurate and romanticized depictions of slavery in New York have significantly influenced how we think about slavery in this northern part of the United States. The book looks closely at the system of slavery in Dutch New York, and the experiences of the people who were enslaved through a close examination of spaces of enslavement. In doing so, it shows that just because enslaved New Yorkers often lived in the same home as their enslaver or worshipped in the same church that does not mean that slavery in New York was humane or benign. Page 99 shows this reality of slavery in the region through its discussion of family separation.

Visit Andrea C. Mosterman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Danielle S. Rudes's "Surviving Solitary"

Danielle S. Rudes is a Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology at Sam Houston State University and the Deputy Director of the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence. She was formerly an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University.

Rudes applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Surviving Solitary: Living and Working in Restricted Housing Units, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, Surviving Solitary: Living and Working in Restricted Housing Units, readers will find a representative selection of quotes and observations from my team’s time collecting data with residents and staff in solitary confinement units in several U.S. adult men’s prisons. This particular page highlights several quotes from correctional staff regarding how many (but certainly not all) staff treat residents. One correctional officer notes, “…They have to be caged like an animal. You know, I get to go home, take my kids out to eat, go to the golf course. You [residents] get to stand in a cell and yell profanities for the next twenty-three hours and maybe pass out because you’re retarded.” Another correctional officer describes how he denies residents rights such as showers via a process both staff and residents call “burning.” He says, “Earlier, I yelled 'shower!' He…was sleeping. I go by policy. I announced showers. He didn’t come to the door. He thinks we should be his mom and dad and that we should knock on his door. We don’t have time to wait for you.” In these quotes, the correctional staff openly discuss their views on residents and the ways they navigate their work duties within the unit.

Each topical chapter of the book juxtaposes resident and staff perceptions and actions related to rights, rules, relationships, reentry, and reform. The selection on page 99, specifically considers how staff understand and negotiate RHU rules. While it does not show residents’ views on rules, it provides a telling example of one of the overall messages of the book…that of the masked (or hidden) malignancy (harm) faced when living or working with in RHUs.

The second main message of the book is one of tenacious resilience among both staff and residents as they find both manifest and latent pathways to cope with the masked malignancy of the RHU. The book also provides an overview of daily living in these spaces but told uniquely from both sides of the bars…a rare find in the existing literature on solitary confinement. Finally, the book closes with two powerful chapters: one on suggested reforms/changes and another that painstakingly details the methods and positional choices the researchers made to give voice to the staff and residents who so graciously allowed us access to their world.

Follow Danielle S. Rudes on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lynda Mugglestone's "Writing a War of Words"

Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of the History of English at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Her research explores language history, language change and attitudes, and lexicography from the eighteenth century onwards, as well as on the history of pronunciation and its social and cultural framing. She is the author of Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (2nd ed., 2007), Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction (2011), and Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words (2015), and editor of The Oxford History of English (2nd ed., 2012).

Mugglestone applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Writing a War of Words: Andrew Clark and the Search for Meaning in World War One, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Barbed wire had already made a limited appearance in defensive structures in the Boer War. Nevertheless, across the autumn of 1914, Clark found himself documenting the consolidation, and chilling connotations, of the wire in war-time use, alongside cutters (wire-cutters or nippers) as useful pieces of trench kit, and barbwire as yet another verb for the art of war. ‘We found their barbed wire all right, and got to work with our cutters, when a searchlight began to play all around’, narrates another first-person account. Barbed in OED1 (in an entry written in 1885) had referred to horses, and armaments of a very different kind. Entanglements had been made of wood. ‘Talk about entanglements!’, a reprinted letter from Private Watts of the Cheshire Regiment (carefully pasted into ‘Words in War-Time’) instead exclaimed:

Give me shells and bullets before them. A man never knows how useless struggling is till he gets into loose barbed wire. Every movement mixes him worse, and he is lucky if he can keep his face out of the spikes. Some of our chaps will carry ugly marks all their lives.

By December 1914, as Clark noted with interest, barbed wire entanglements had moreover been appropriated as a war-time metaphor for language itself, deftly reminding of the caution necessary in approaching contemporary songs such as ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’ (briefly popular ‘as a tongue-twister at soldier’s concerts’, he explained). Even a few months earlier, uses of this kind would have challenged popular comprehension. ‘Extremely frequent, 1914‒15’, Clark commented: ‘Not in N.E.D as military term’.

A changing language of space and place was equally evident. Clark in his diary repeatedly documented the departure of the young men of the village ‘to the front’. At the front, Macnaughtan contends, was so common that it might best be seen as a single word. Front, referring to ‘The foremost line or part of an army or battalion’ was, by 1914, familiar and familiarized. Contemporary comment, Clark noted, nevertheless often suggested new specificities as well as new combinatory forms. The red-asterisked fighting front, war front (dated to 1950 in the modern OED), or battle front, another unregistered term in 1914, to particularize the zone of active engagement, as was battle zone (dated to 1931 in the modern OED). These operated, Clark suggested, in contradistinction to the front in general – itself referred to, in other neologism, as the

Writing a War of Words explores the real-time work of Andrew Clark, a historian and logophile extraordinaire, to track the changing language of WWI between 1914-1919., drawing on the series of almost one hundred densely documented notebooks, replete with clippings, annotations, ephemera, and an acutely observant sense of words, that Clark created, and which have hitherto remained largely unexamined. As even a quick glance page 99 readily confirms, for example, Clark’s focus was directed not to canonical writers – the great writers and poets who formed, for instance, main sources of the contemporaneous Oxford English Dictionary, the first edition of which, in 1914, was still making its way through the alphabet, and on which Clark had long been a volunteer. Instead, his notebooks centre on the ordinary and every-day, in a collection that privileges the language of newspapers, advertising, of letters from the front or, say, reported speech and the words of, and about, men, women, and children as Britain navigated new forms of warfare, at home and abroad.

If the opening chapters of the book therefore introduce Clark and his chosen methodologies, alongside a reading campaign of daunting ambition, page 99 takes us to the language of war itself, and the shifting diction and discourse of trench warfare alongside the new salience (and shifting meanings) of entanglements and barbed wire, and of the colloquial cutters and nippers that made up other vital aspects of trench kit. We can, for instance, easily see Clark’s interest in the value of first-person accounts, and his magpie-like salvaging of the kind of information that might otherwise be lost as part of his living history of words in use. Significant, too, is his comparative reading against the Oxford English Dictionary as it then existed, and the gaps and absences that he carefully identified. At the same time, however, page 99, with its focus on the male-orientated world of conflict, is strikingly unrepresentative of the diversity of Clark’s interests as explored elsewhere in the book where e.g. the language of recruiting, or of women and children on the home front, or health and sickness, death and injury, and the discourse of total war – and the terror and terrorism of aerial bombardment on civilian targets -- were all traced with Clark’s habitual zeal. A single page can, in this light, offer an illuminating snapshot – but it will, of necessity, produce silences that are, in a range of ways, contested or removed as the rest of the book unfolds. As in Clark’s original notebooks, the work as a whole investigates a micro-history of English in a period of unprecedented historical change, documenting thousands of words and meanings that have since been lost from view.

Learn more about the English Words in War-Time Project.

The Page 99 Test: Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Cassedy's "What Do We Mean When We Talk about Meaning?"

Steven Cassedy's books include To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America (1997), Dostoevsky's Religion (2005), and Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2014), which won a gold medal in US history at the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY). He retired as a Distinguished Professor of Literature and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, San Diego, in 2018 and now lives with his wife Patrice, a playwright, in Riverdale, Bronx.

Cassedy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, What Do We Mean When We Talk about Meaning?, and reported the following:

What’s on page 99: I’m discussing Tolstoy’s War and Peace and how the hero, Pierre, struggles to find something that he can call the smysl (meaning) of life or of his life. Having always been skeptical of Tolstoy’s moral philosophizing, I show how Pierre’s efforts, like those of the male hero of Anna Karenina, always fall short of the mark.

I’m not sure a browser opening to page 99 would get a good idea of the central thesis of my book. At this point in the book, I’ve already established a history of the concept of meaning as used in such phrases as “the meaning of life.” In the chapter that includes page 99, I discuss Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, more for the impact that English translations of their works had on the use of the phrase “meaning of life” in English than for a discussion of the two Russian giants in their own right. By the end of the chapter, the point is really that, while it might be difficult to find a coherent definition of smysl (the Russian word translated into English as “meaning”) in Tolstoy, the phrase “meaning of life” was closely associated with him in English-language discussions of his works.

The aim of my book is to demonstrate that the English word meaning, as used in the “metaphysical” context that I discuss, is richly ambiguous. Because of its association with signifying, it suggests the notion of interpretation, that is, if there’s something that we call “the meaning of life,” then we may gain access to that something through an act of decoding or interpreting. Because of its association with intention (“What’s the meaning of what you’ve done?”), it suggests purpose and value. Virtually no one who uses such expressions as “the meaning of life” ever pauses to define the word meaning. That, I propose, is because the ambiguity and polyvalence of meaning is its essential property. In the end, it is almost always suggestive, not determinative.

Visit Steven Cassedy's website.

The Page 99 Test: Connected.

My Book, The Movie: Connected.

--Marshal Zeringue