James McGrath Morris' "Pulitzer"

James McGrath Morris spent five years working on his new book, Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power. His previous book, The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism, was selected as a Washington Post Best Book of the Year for 2004 and was optioned as a film and released as an audio book.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Pulitzer and reported the following:

Frankly, I was terrified—well, maybe anxious, nervous, worried, filled with trepidation (hard to find the right word here)—to go and read page 99 of my new book, Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (HarperCollins, 2010).

“What if it is really boring?” I thought.

Whew, it’s not bad.

In fact it contains some of the favorite things I liked doing when writing. For instance, I was able to work in the trial of George “Charcoal” Botts who shot his General O.S. “Pet” Halstead. I mean, who has names like that today?

I also was able to bring dialogue into play. This is hard with biographies of people long since dead but it adds such vitality and life to a book. I spend a lot time reading fiction to figure out how my colleagues on the dark side of writing pull it off. I don’t have to invent the words but I need to learn how to select them and how to weave them into the book.

Lastly the page features a description that one can only write after completing a lot of research. It’s the kind of thing that other writers appreciate but readers rarely notice. My job was to let people know just enough about Charles Dana and the Sun in order to understand why getting a job there was an accomplishment. But I couldn’t spend too many words on this because it would take the reader away from the story. The sentences at the top of the excerpt contain few words but lots and lots of hours of research to have the confidence to distill this explanation down. I love doing this.

So, go ahead and read my page 99. I don’t mind.

original mission, Dana inspired and enforced a regime of tight, coherent, bright, lively writing intended to provide “a daily photograph of the whole world’s doings in the most luminous and lively manner,” as he put it in his first editorial. The paper was a pastiche or quilt of urban tales. It was an irresistible feast of information that won wide attention in an era of generally dull journalism.

Under Dana’s regime, the paper prospered even more, and its circulation rose to new, unheard-of heights. Whereas Joseph could only dream of working for Dana, Albert was not intimidated. He walked up the flight of stairs to the Sun’s newsroom and spoke to the night editor. The editor asked Albert how long he had worked for a city newspaper.

“Only a short time, sir,” Albert replied.

“That’s rather vague,” the editor said, adding, “You have a slight accent.”

“I shall not have the accent long, sir. And I write better than I speak.”

The editor decided to give Albert a test assignment, a rather difficult one intended to discourage the youth. Albert “made a Parisian bow and disappeared,” said the editor. But to his surprise, Albert returned with the story and won himself a trial period on the staff of what many considered the best-written paper in town. In fact, soon after Albert landed this job, a letter appeared in the Sun from one reader in St. Louis. “I read The Sun regularly,” Joseph Pulitzer wrote. “In my opinion it is the most piquant, entertaining, and, without exception, the best newspaper in the world.”


Albert rose rapidly in the ranks of city reporters. His big break came when he was assigned to cover the Halstead murder in Newark, the city’s first murder in four years. General O. S. “Pet” Halstead had been shot dead in the rooms of Mary S. Wilson, described by the New York Times as “a woman of the worst character.” Apparently George “Charcoal” Botts, a charcoal peddler who paid for her lodgings and company, did not take kindly to the presence of Halstead in Wilson’s bedroom. Albert wrote colorful accounts of the courtroom scenes and even obtained an interview with the condemned man a few days before his execution. “It was a kind of reporting that was new in those days, especially in Newark, and made a decided hit in this city,” a writer for the Newark Advertiser recalled.

In February 1873, Albert moved to the New York Herald. Started by

Browse inside Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, and learn more about the book and author at the official James McGrath Morris website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sharon Davies' "Rising Road"

Sharon L. Davies is the John C. Elam/Vorys Sater Designated Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America, and reported the following:

Rising Road is a nonfiction account of the 1921 killing of Father James E. Coyle in Birmingham, Alabama. An ordained Methodist minister named Rev. Edwin R. Stephenson shot and killed Father Coyle for marrying Stephenson’s 18-year-old daughter, Ruth, to a Catholic migrant from Puerto Rico named Pedro Gussman. Stephenson was a Klansman during the time that the revived KKK had expanded its portfolio of targets to include Catholics, Jews and ‘Fern’ers,’ and had successfully rebranded itself as a “patriotic” fraternal organization. Catholics were not “True Americans,” the Klan fumed—they owed their allegiance to a foreign leader (the Pope) whose plot was to “Make America Catholic.”

To the horror of Ruth Stephenson’s parents, Ruth had been attracted to Catholicism from an early age. Edwin Stephenson had tried unsuccessfully to beat the idea out of the girl, and Ruth had run away several times, but she was always forcibly returned with the help of local lawmen sympathetic to the Stephensons’ battle for their daughter’s soul. Page 99 describes one of those failed escape attempts, and Ruth’s decision to marry Pedro as the way out of her troubles:

It is hard to think what the Sisters of Charity must have thought when the companionless youngster arrived unannounced, only to be followed not long after by a group of lawmen and her furious mother. The authorities made it clear that the teenager was to be turned back over to her parent, Ruth told a reporter later, and Mary Stephenson dragged her back to Birmingham more convinced than ever that she could not be trusted. For the next two weeks, Ruth recalled, she was “mistreated many times” and kept “under constant watch,” until finally her parents relented a bit and allowed her to return to her job. But even then it was clear that they believed she would run off again. Every morning Edwin Stephenson walked her to the front door of the department store just to be sure.

That was why Ruth and Pedro had agreed to make August 11, 1921 look like a normal workday. They had agreed to meet at noon, with a plan to take the streetcar to Bessemer where they would apply for their license to avoid running into Ruth’s father at the courthouse in Birmingham. But when the time came for Ruth to meet Pedro that day and she moved toward the front door of the store, one of her uncles was just walking in. She was sure she would be caught, she said later, but by some act of heaven the man failed to see her, and Ruth willed her feet to keep moving until she reached the spot outside where Pedro was waiting.

In Bessemer, they were nearly foiled again. After they had obtained their license from the probate judge, they walked the few blocks to the local Catholic church, St. Aloysius, and asked to speak with Father Callahan, its presiding priest. But the priest was out. He would not be back in time to perform their rites, they were told. How strange the things that can unravel a plan—the possibility that Father Callahan might be away had obviously not occurred to them. After formulating a secret meeting place, dodging Ruth’s relative, sidestepping the place her father was most likely to be, and obtaining the state’s official permission to wed, the last critical ingredient need to accomplish their plan—a priest!—was missing.

It could not have been easy for the couple to decide to return to Birmingham. The Bessemer marriage license authorized any official pastor in the state to marry them, so if they could make it to St. Paul’s unseen, they could ask Father Coyle for his help. But the rectory was terrifyingly close to the courthouse where Ruth’s father conducted marriages in the hallways.”

Read more about Rising Road at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Locke's "Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present"

Brian Locke teaches comparative race studies and cultural studies for the Union Institute & University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from WWII to the Present: The Orientalist Buddy Film, and reported the following:

My book, The Orientalist Buddy Film, focuses on a number of Hollywood movies that debuted between WWII and 9-11, approximately: Tay Garnett’s Bataan (1943), Samuel Fuller’s China Gate (1957), Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958), Lewis Milestone’s Pork Chop Hill (1959), Hall Bartlett’s All the Young Men (1960), several 1970s blaxploition films, Mike Hodges’s Flash Gordon (1980), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon series (1987-1998), Philip Kaufman’s Rising Sun (1993), Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999), Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003), and Paul Haggis’s Crash (2005). Most fit the well-known interracial buddy film plot in which a white buddy and a black buddy face a common enemy. According to the formula, the two hate each other initially because of racial difference, but by the end of the film they realize that they must submerge their animosity in order to defeat the mutual threat. In the process, they recognize their shared humanity. Thus, the villain of the film acts as a bonding agent for white and black.

Part of what makes the villain such an effective bonding vehicle is the figure’s status as even more racist toward black people than the white buddy. A few film scholars, most notably Robyn Wiegman in American Anatomies, argue that the interracial buddy film’s transfer of the stigma of American racism from the white buddy to the villain has two important political effects. It creates a cinematic illusion of harmony between white and black that forestalls rather than promotes actual equality of opportunity; it allows white America to disavow its long history of anti-black behavior. My book argues that after WWII, at least until 9-11, many interracial buddy films represent the common enemy as Asian. This is the Orientalist buddy film, a movie that scapegoats Asians for white America’s history of racism toward black people.

Page 99 is the last page of the chapter that focuses on the Platonic form of the Orientalist buddy film, Rising Sun, which pits two Los Angeles homicide detectives (Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes) against a yellow peril horde of Japanese businessmen who threaten American sovereignty. The page notes that the LAPD’s 1991 beating of Rodney King forces the 1993 blockbuster to create a means of cleansing the stigma of racism from Connery’s character. The scapegoat is a fellow detective, Graham (Harvey Keitel), who refers to the Japanese as “nips” and “Japs.” Like the portrait in Oscar Wilde’s tale of Dorian Gray, Graham carries the defect, in this case bigotry, so that Connery’s figure, the white male who represents mainstream America, may face the world clean.

Read more about Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present at the publisher's website, and visit Brian Locke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joel Mokyr's "The Enlightened Economy"

Joel Mokyr is Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History, Northwestern University, and Sackler Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850, and reported the following:

The page contains, amazingly enough, two statements that summarize much of what the book is about.

The technological revolution that created the modern industrial age cannot be fully understood without its intellectual underpinnings. All the same, inventions and improvements by informed and ingenious minds opened doors but could not force a society to walk through them.

The first statement is the main reason why I wrote the book. Many economists write about economic growth as if what people knew and believed mattered but little. People just want to maximize their income and will learn whatever there is to learn. I argue in 550 pages that this is too simplified a view of the world: some societies have the intellectual and cultural proclivity to do what needs to be done to bring about economic progress. Britain in the eighteenth century had what it took, and hence its economic leadership that lasted for a century and took much of the world into a different economic life, in which more and more people live lives of economic and material comforts that in 1700 only Kings and Popes (if them) could dream about.

A second statement is this:

[e]conomies do not grow just because they want to consume more. Indeed, the desire for more income is shared by all economies; the ability to satisfy it is what makes all the difference.

This, too is central to the argument. Necessity is NOT the mother of invention, which is a statement that manages to be simultaneously a cliché and false. The parents of invention are, above all, the belief in the possibility and desirability of technological progress and the useful knowledge (science, engineering, chemistry, whatever necessary) that was needed to bring it about. The book deals with the question where that knowledge came from, and what incentives and institutions were necessary to produce it.

Learn more about The Enlightened Economy at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary Heimann's "Czechoslovakia"

Mary Heimann is senior lecturer in the history department at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed, and reported the following:

Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed is a revisionist history of the state which preceded today’s Czech and Slovak republics, and which experienced democracy, Nazi rule, Fascist and Communist dictatorships, Soviet invasion and democracy again, all within the space of an average person’s lifetime. The book is based on original research in the national archives in Prague, but is aimed at the English-speaking general reader and assumes no specialist knowledge. Page 99 [inset, click to enlarge] touches upon one of the central themes of the book: how the persecution of minorities came to be justified in the name of nationalism and codified in legal statutes right across Central Europe: not only, infamously, in Nazi Germany; but even in a democratic state like Czechoslovakia, which was brought into being in the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War.

On p. 99 of the book, which falls in 1938, the groups being targeted by the Czecho-Slovak authorities are Czechs living in the (at the time autonomous) region of Slovakia, and Jews (especially German-speaking Jews) living in the territories of Bohemia and Moravia. At other points in the story, the victims of legalized discrimination are Slovaks, Gypsies, Ruthenians, Germans or Hungarians. Sometimes the oppressors in one chapter become the victims in the next; elsewhere it is former victims who become oppressors.

The purpose in showing the darker side of nationalism is not to single out Czechoslovakia as better or worse than other states; still less to try to discredit the Czechs (among whom I count many friends, my husband and my son) as a people. Rather, it is to illustrate for the general reader – of whatever ethnic background or nationality – the danger of perpetuating nationalist myths in which one’s own side is presented as the righteous victim, and the injury done to others ignored or downplayed.

The dramatic, and sometimes tragic, history of Czechoslovakia is fascinating in its own right and deserves to be better known in the English-speaking world. Its achievements were remarkable, and the difficulties with which it had to contend at times exceptional. The variety of ways in which its various regimes were established, suffered, challenged, tolerated, supported or overthrown also sheds light on familiar twentieth-century political problems, from how to protect minorities and sustain democracy to how to account for the Holocaust, understand the spread of Stalinism, or explain the collapse of East European Communism in 1989.

Learn more about Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Metcalf's "The Life of the Longhouse"

Peter Metcalf is professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Life of the Longhouse: An Archaeology of Ethnicity, and reported the following:

Page 99 tells of the chance encounter in 1876 between an English traveller in Borneo and a war party returning from a raid on a coastal village. The Englishman was Hugh Brook Low, a trusted aid of Charles Brook, the second of the famous “White Rajahs” who carved out for themselves a personal kingdom in the great island of Borneo -- larger than France or Texas. The warriors he met came from a longhouse community in the interior led by a larger-than-life character named Aban Jau, who styled himself “Rajah Ulu,” the King Inside. Aban Jau refused to acknowledge the rule of any of the potentates on the coast, either the Moslem Sultanate of Brunei, or the upstart European adventurer. To the Rajah’s representatives he boasted “we are the tigers of the jungle and have never been tamed.” Despite this threat, the encounter – on a river some way inland – passed off agreeably enough. Low was impressed with Aban Jau’s chiefly bearing and intelligent conversation. The raid had, however, been anti-climatic. Thoroughly used to the methods of pirates along the coast, the Malay villagers simply retired inside their stockade, and scared off Aban Jau’s men with musket fire.

This incident, among others, illustrates the kind of warfare going on in this part of Borneo before colonial control. Meanwhile, the threat of attack was one reason for building longhouses – massive structures made of dense hardwoods and accomodating hundreds of people under one roof. Aban Jau’s claim to being a rajah depended on a powerful alliance he had assembled, in a mega-community with three longhouses.

The book shows the factors that allowed some communities to thrive and others not. The underlying factor was access to trade in jungle produce with the coast city of Brunei, and ultimately with China – a trade that had existed for a millenium. It also describes the lively sociality of the longhouses as I knew then from the 1970’s onward.

Read an excerpt from The Life of the Longhouse, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jimena Canales' "A Tenth of a Second"

Jimena Canales is associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Tenth of a Second: A History, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains an image. Under a vaulted ceiling, men in black coats and top hats stand in line to look through an instrument. The men are astronomers, the instrument is a telescope. It is 1874. The astronomers at the Paris Observatory aim their machine not at the sky, but at the Senate, a few miles away, housing an artificial planet and bright star driven by clockwork. They have recently noticed that they cannot adequately time the exact moment when Venus makes an apparent contact with the sun’s border. Their determinations differ by amounts close to a tenth of a second. This error, which may seem tiny from our perspective, had enormous repercussions for astronomy. They tried hard to eliminate tenth-of-a-second errors, employing telegraphy and pioneering pre-cinematographic methods. Astronomers were not the only scientists stumped by the tenth of a second: physicists, psychologists, physiologists and philosophers were equally mystified.

In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that clocks recognized a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the profound impact of these tiny moments on our lives, our history, and our culture became immediately apparent.

Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of technologies that helped define modernity, I attempt to locate the lasting reverberations of this “perceptual moment” for science, philosophy, and mass media. Once scientists associated the value with the speed of thought, they developed reaction time experiments that helped define the field of experimental psychology and spurred advances in physiology and optics. At the same time, astronomers and physicists struggled to understand the magnitude of errors caused by results that were a tenth of a second off. And references to the interval were part of a general philosophical inquiry into time, temporal development, and sensory experience that involved reconsidering the contributions of Descartes and Kant. Featuring appearances by Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein, among others, my book explores ways of writing the history of really, really short periods of time. To find out what the book is about you can read page 99, or simply look at the picture, or—if really pressed for time—close your eyes for a moment and try to grasp the tenth of a second that just flew by.

Read more about A Tenth of a Second at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Garrett Peck's "The Prohibition Hangover"

Garrett Peck is a freelance journalist who has written mostly within the alcohol industry trade circles. Based in Washington, D.C., he also regularly conducts tours of historic sites that hold a significant place in the temperance movement in and around the district.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet, and reported the following:

Page 99 from my book (including a half-sentence starting on page 98):

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell provided $4.5 million in state aid for City Brewing, and promised an additional $7 million toward infrastructure improvements, including wastewater treatment upgrades to help the brewery reopen in May 2007, ten months after closing. City Brewing invested $10.4 million in upgrading the plan; its plan was to ramp up production from an initial 100 employees, eventually reaching 250 employees.

The Latrobe Brewery reopened. It now brews beer, including Samuel Adams for the Boston Beer Company; flavored malt beverages; and nonalcoholic drinks. In other words, Latrobe went from being a single-product brewery [Rolling Rock Extra Pale] to producing multiple products under contract for other companies. This is the niche in which its owner, City Brewing, plays. So the Latrobe Brewery survived another day and even expanded its product line, though it was a roller-coaster ride for the town and the brewery's workers.

Now I'm kicking myself for not buying the Rolling Rock lava lamp.

The Prohibition Hangover is written from a literary journalist point of view, so I included first-hand accounts of visiting places important to the alcoholic beverage industry, while telling the story of how the United States became a drinking nation again in the 76+ years since Prohibition ended in 1933.

The passage you read above is the half-page closing for the beer chapter, "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer." Oh the irony that this falls on page 99! This particular page may read a little factual and dry, but it immediately followed a humorous description of touring the Latrobe Brewery in Pennsylvania. This was a well loved brewer that made Rolling Rock until Anheuser-Busch bought the brand - but not the brewery (the beer is now made in Newark, New Jersey). I was trying to explain how a small business got swept up in a global market, and had difficulty competing against larger companies with much deeper distribution. Though the brewery itself survived, it had to change drastically or shut down completely. In writing this, I showed how globalization has forced many companies to adapt or die.

The punch line to the passage - that I didn't buy the lava lamp (I got a T-shirt instead) - was because the brewery closed its Rolling Rock store. Rolling Rock paraphernalia disappeared. And just how cool would it be to have a green lava lamp that you can't find anywhere?!

Read an overview of The Prohibition Hangover, and learn more about the book and author at Garrett Peck's website.

Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition.

Writers Read: Garrett Peck.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Hinderaker's "The Two Hendricks"

Eric Hinderaker is Professor of History, University of Utah.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery, and reported the following:

For three quarters of a century before its American colonies declared their independence, the British Empire competed with France and Spain for North American territory. In this competition, Indian relations were supremely important, and the Iroquois Confederacy came to be regarded as crucial to the fate of British North America. The Iroquois gained a mythic status as a uniquely powerful and enlightened Indian polity.

How did this come to be the case? And how can the myth of the Iroquois Confederacy be squared with the reality of an embattled string of villages fighting for their very survival?

Two Iroquois Indians, both named Hendrick and long thought to be a single person, help explain this puzzle. Both played important roles in diplomatic relations with the neighboring colonies of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. They also became famous in London and throughout the empire, where they symbolized both the power and the civility of the Iroquois.

Page 99 of The Two Hendricks discusses the impact of the first Hendrick’s visit to London, where he met the queen and many leading men of state, had his portrait painted, and made a dramatic impression on the public. He was seen, not as a savage, but as a civil Christian. This was a transformative moment in the public understanding of the Iroquois Confederacy.

Among their own people, meanwhile, the two Hendricks calculated the interests of their communities and labored to maintain the confederacy’s power. They argued for the benefits of the British alliance even as their circumstances became more and more precarious. From their perspective, a close tie to Great Britain seemed to offer the best chance for survival.

We know enough about only a handful of Indians from the colonial era to support a biography. But the lives of both Hendricks are richly documented, and they emerge from the records as surprisingly vivid characters, with a significance that reaches far beyond the scope of their own lives. The Two Hendricks tells a richly detailed story that will change the way you think of early American history.

Read an excerpt from The Two Hendricks, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Klepp's "Revolutionary Conceptions"

Susan E. Klepp is is professor of history and affiliated professor of women's studies and of African American studies at Temple University. She is author or coeditor of six books and editor of the Journal of the Early Republic.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820, and reported the following:

Lots of people know the story of Margaret Sanger. In the early 20th century she opened clinic after clinic offering birth control devices to the poor. Readers may also remember that clinic after clinic was raided by the police and closed. Eventually the laws would change and the small clinics became Planned Parenthood. That history is the supply-side version--there was a demand for contraception that Sanger supplied.

But when did women and men begin to demand access to birth control information? When did they come to prefer small family sizes? After all for most of history large numbers of children were seen as valuable assets--bringing parents free labor, prestige, support in old age and more.

Revolutionary Conceptions traces that change in attitudes on family size to the era of the American Revolution. Americans were vowing not to be the slaves of Britain, they demanded liberty and independence. These ideas spread, not just among politicians, but among rich and poor, free and slave, men and women. Women came to seek equality in marriage, more options in life, and better treatment of children, especially daughters--goals that could be accompished through family planning.

Pp. 99-100 begin a discussion of how women used humor to spread new ideas. They created "a shared language of laughter, protest and reformation."

Other sections of the book trace changes in medicine and birth control, art and ideas of female beauty, law and the policing of sexuality. There is also a section on early opposition to new ideas on family planning.

Read an excerpt from Revolutionary Conceptions, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue