Rebecca Nedostup's "Superstitious Regimes"

Rebecca Nedostup is Associate Professor of History at Boston College.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity, and reported the following:

In Superstitious Regimes I look at the social and cultural impact of the near-simultaneous development in China of the concepts of nationalism and secularism -- by which I mean the idea that religion is a separate sphere of human pursuit from politics, philosophy, economics, etc. The idea that China’s fate in a social Darwinian struggle of nation-states depended on the beliefs of its citizens dated back at least to the turn of the 20th century, when the Chinese neologisms for “religion” and “superstition” were coined, hinting at the process of cultural critique that was already underway. After the fall of the imperial state in 1911, though, the architects of popular sovereignty began to question the public role of Chinese religion in very comprehensive and material fashion. My book looks at the social effects of the policies of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to regulate religion and eradicate superstition during the 1920s and 1930s. In many ways the Nationalists created the system of state control that remains in the PRC today.

In the most dramatic episodes in the book, party operatives and government officials smashed temples and their contents, arrested monks, and banned fireworks and parades on the lunar New Year. In response, blind fortunetellers organized support from Shanghai powerbrokers and published angry petitions, and displaced worshipers rioted and held government officials hostage. The incidents I recount on page 99, however, are less juicy but perhaps more representative of the everyday transformation of public life that the book portrays. On that page I describe two court cases in which people who had donated money to or oversaw the affairs of City God temples argued in vain to retain control of the shrines. Temples to local City Gods constituted prime real estate in county seats, large towns and cities; they were markets, meeting places and courts of popular recourse as well as ritual centers. Thus the Nationalists eagerly converted them into government and party offices or schools, or merely sold off the property.

Whereas in the late imperial era City God temples served as a nexus between local society and the state – very often, local donors paid for the shrines and their upkeep, but officials recognized and supported them – that bond was no longer of importance to the state. Using slim legal pretext, the government claimed both the property and the roles it once played in public life: economic, educative, social, moral and judicial. Even though much of what the Nationalists attempted during this time did not succeed as expected, this basic calculation about the role of the state and the shape of secular-nationalism seems very much to me to be one of their lasting legacies.

Learn more about Superstitious Regimes at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Howard Jones' "Blue and Gray Diplomacy"

Howard Jones is University Research Professor of History at the University of Alabama. His books include Mutiny on the Amistad, Death of a Generation, and The Bay of Pigs.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations, and reported the following:

Page 99:

The Palmerston ministry clung to neutrality in the face of a growing popular clamor for war. [British foreign secretary Lord John] Russell responded to the three southern commissioners' call for recognition with another affirmation of British neutrality, but his stand did not diminish their expectations. The Bee-Hive of London, whose editors supported the Confederacy because of the Union's restrictive commercial policies, urged the government to break the blockade to secure cotton and ally with France in a war against the Union. Slavery should pose no obstacle. An independent South, the journal argued, would have to accept emancipation once encased by free territory. William S. Lindsay, a shipping magnate and perhaps the Confederacy's strongest supporter in Parliament, called for an offensive and defensive treaty with the Confederacy before England and the Union went to war.

Meanwhile, the French stridently condemned the Union's seizure of [James] Mason and [John] Slidell. Nothing, [Union minister to France William L.] Dayton declared with concern, had matched the 'outburst' of anger in his host country. If the United States did not renounce that action, 'the almost universal impression here is that war will follow.' Dayton had thought the French would stay back and let the British and Union 'fight it out!' But France needed cotton, and the nation's industrial interests might push its government to intervene. Some of the French press wanted the emperor to act with England on the issue. The French joined other Europeans in believing the Union had no respect for international law and had tried 'to pick a quarrel' with England.

The passage above relates to the Trent crisis of November 1861 between England and the Union, in which US Navy Captain Charles Wilkes seized two Confederate diplomats, James Mason and John Slidell, from the British mail packet above Cuba and raised angry cries in England for war. An Anglo-American war would doubtless have led to British recognition of the Confederacy and near certain independence. Fortunately for the Union—not so for the Confederacy—the Palmerston ministry and the Lincoln administration managed to avert war.

The Trent affair highlighted the central importance of foreign recognition in Union and Confederate diplomacy during the Civil War. If one or more European nations had recognized the South as a nation—particularly in the crucial first eighteen months of the war—they would have virtually assured its independence by permitting Richmond's leaders to negotiate military and economic alliances vital to winning the war. Strategists in London, Paris, and other European capitals knew the danger in a premature recognition—that there was a narrow line between the Confederacy's status as a traitor and as an independent nation and that extending recognition before the South had won independence was tantamount to allying with a people rebelling against their duly authorized government. The Union considered the matter so critical that it warned of war with any nation that recognized the South.

Why didn’t the Confederacy win diplomatic recognition? Primarily because it did not possess anything vital to either British or French interests that made intervention worth the risk of going to war with the Union. The Palmerston ministry came close to a mediation offer based on recognition but had no solution to the war and did not want to alienate the Union; Napoleon came even closer with his Machiavellian scheme to restore French power in the New World with the help of a Confederate buffer state, but, like the British, he shied away from fighting a war against either the Union or a reunited American nation. In one of those rare instances in history, nations with histories of acquisitive instincts realistically assessed the dangers of intervention and resisted the temptation.

Thus the Confederacy never resolved its greatest dilemma: To achieve recognition, it had to win a decisive battle; yet to win that decisive battle, it had to have the foreign military and economic assistance that could come only from recognition. In more ways than one, the South had fought a lost cause.

Read more about Blue and Gray Diplomacy at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Edward Green's "The Eyes of the People"

Jeffrey Edward Green is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of scholarly essays on various topics including political apathy, disenchantment, and ignorance, Green has taught previously at Harvard and at Gothenburg University in Sweden.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds me discussing the democratic theory of John Stuart Mill, arguably the greatest student of democracy from the middle of the nineteenth century—in particular, Mill’s claim to be providing a superior, second generation take on the meaning of modern democracy. Whereas the first generation, epitomized by figures like Mill’s father James Mill and Jeremy Bentham who had lived through the rebirth of democracy in the West, had assumed that representative democracy would empower “the people,” John Stuart Mill argued that in fact what representative democracy meant was that only the majority—and not the entire people—would be able to write laws and shape policies. This corrective was important because it showed that minority rights needed to be protected within a modern democratic society.

My interjection into this history is to accept the wisdom of Mill’s revision of an earlier generation of democratic theory, but to argue that we today likewise can and ought to revise Mill’s own findings. Both the first and second generation of democratic thought assumed that the electorate was above all a legislative entity: whether it took the form of the entire “people” or only a “majority”, the electorate’s function, on both views, was to dictate a set of laws and policies the elected representatives needed to take heed of should they wish to stay in office. The third generation view, which I defend, breaks from this assumption. It does not assume that the mass citizenry plays a legislative function. This may seem somber if not outright cynical. But my claim is otherwise. Once we break from the assumption that the “people” or “majority” is a would-be legislator—once we confront the silence of the people on most issues—we can reimagine the meaning of democratic empowerment. Because the mass citizenry is not only a warehouse of preferences waiting to be represented, we should expect from our politicians not only that they say and do the right thing—since it many instances it is simply unclear what this is—but that their speech and deeds be conducted in properly democratic form. I argue that leaders who appear and speak extemporaneously before the public satisfy this extra-legislative democratic need.

Mill was confident that he was right in his critique of his father’s generation because his own generation had more hands-on experience with the actual functioning of democratic life. By the same logic, we today ought to have, on the basis an experience with democracy that probably exceeds that of any other age in history, an understanding of democracy that goes beyond the naïve idealism of nineteenth century authors. Overcoming the naïve view that the majority makes law in contemporary mass democracy need not terminate in despair, but as I have suggested can reset the plane on which democratic progressivism is conceptualized and pursued.

Learn more about The Eyes of the People at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Cressy's "Dangerous Talk"

Born in England and educated at Cambridge, David Cressy is currently Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. A social and cultural historian of early modern England, concerned with the intersections of elite and popular culture, central and local government, and official and unofficial religion, his books include Birth, Marriage and Death (1997), Agnes Bowker's Cat (2001), and England on Edge (2006).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England, and reported the following:

The page 99 test works remarkably well for Dangerous Talk. It captures both the flavour and the argument of the book. We learn here that ordinary Englishmen called Henry VIII "a most vicious king," and claimed that the Protestant Reformation sprang from his codpiece. Some called Elizabeth I a "bastard," a "usurper," or "pisskitchen," a word unknown to OED but which is clearly derogatory. Subjects called James I "an ass" and "a fool," and wished "a turd" to him. These words were typical of the scandalous, seditious and treasonable speech that worried the authorities of early modern England. Dangerous Talk argues that ordinary people spoke vigorously and sometimes disgracefully about the monarchs who ruled them, despite strong cultural pressures for their silence and deference. Under Henry VIII such words could take you to the gallows, though offenders under James I would more likely stand in the pillory. Later chapters show how different regimes handled these offences of the tongue, which by the eighteenth century were considered "the birthright of an Englishman."

Page 99 :

Most outrageously, More said that ‘Henry VIII was a tyrant, a most vicious king, a sacrileger, and that the protestant religion now professed within this realm did spring out of King Henry’s codpiece, and that... King Henry was a very devil in hell’. He also said ‘that Queen Elizabeth was a bastard, a tyrant, an usurper of the throne, a parallel with Pope Joan [who was a whore and had a bastard], and a pisskitchen, and... was in hell with her father’. Each of these insults against the reforming Tudors served to scandalize their Stuart successor.

A Turd to the King

As in other ages, a background murmur of seditious speech echoed through Jacobean England, rising in intensity with changing political circumstances. Country magistrates wrote regularly to London citing ‘words against the king’s sacred majesty’, enclosing copies of examinations, and acknowledging their ‘duty to acquaint one of his majesty’s honorable council with it’, and ‘to acquaint the king with it’ himself. The assize courts heard dozens of cases of this kind, and their records preserve scraps of remarks against royal authority. The Council generally pounced upon every hint of sedition, and attempted to distinguish disloyal language from ill-considered badinage. Seditious utterances were often rooted in local and petty grievances, fuelled by alcohol and fury, as well as religious and political frustrations. The words could be reckless, scatological, and undutiful, though the speakers often pleaded mitigating circumstances.

Thomas Huddeswell, labourer of Bonnington, Kent, allegedly declared to a neighbour in 1605, ‘a turd for thee and the king’, but the assize jury found him not guilty. Another man, Daniel Taylor, appeared before the Middlesex sessions in May 1606 ‘for speaking certain scandalous and traitorous speeches against his majesty’, though the offending words are not recorded. Thomas Gibson, a sailor of Erith, Kent, spoke seditiously in 1607, claiming ‘that the king’s majesty was an ass, and that he, Thomas, would make a fool and an ass of him’.In Jacobean Wales in1613, when the mayor and sergeant of Machynlleth attempted to arrest Humphrey Thomas, explaining that they were the king’s officers, Thomas replied, ‘turd to thee, turd to thy master, and turd to the king for appointing such officers as you to poll the town’.

Read more about Dangerous Talk at the Oxford University Press website, and learn more about David Cressy and his scholarship at his faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Allport's "Demobbed"

Alan Allport is a postdoctoral lecturer at Princeton University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Demobbed is devoted to adultery and murder, and I suppose if that doesn’t grab the reader then nothing will. It’s part of an account of the notorious ‘honour killings’ that took place in Britain in the first months after the Second World War, when returning servicemen who discovered that their wives had been unfaithful to them during their absence killed them, often with extraordinary violence – by stabbing, suffocation, gunfire. These tragic incidents were very small in number – Britain in the 1940s remained by today’s standards a remarkably lawful society – but I think they caught the public imagination because they encapsulated in its most lurid form a widespread anxiety about the state of the postwar nation.

Demobbed is a history of the homecoming experience in 1945 and the ways in which ordinary Britons came to terms with the changes that had taken place in their society and in themselves during half a decade of total war. It examines the release and repatriation of over four million men and women from the armed services, many of whom had been out of contact with their families, friends, and workmates for years. It’s a story about a particular time and place: Britain at the end of the Second World War was exhausted by the long struggle, and the civilian population which had gone through its own fair share of danger and sacrifice was in no great mood to laud the returning troops as homecoming heroes. But it’s also a study of longstanding fears and suspicions about the soldier that have long preoccupied Anglophone culture. The horror stories in ‘Demobbed’ about brutalized ex-servicemen returning from the battlefield to wreak havoc at home aren’t so very different from earnest warnings in today’s American media about disturbed veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s much the same mixture of pity and fear, much the same anxiety about how an overwhelmingly civilian society can hope to reabsorb men who have been through such an alien and traumatic experience as war.

Learn more about Demobbed and the author at the Yale University Press website and Alan Allport's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Tuck's "We Ain't What We Ought To Be"

Stephen Tuck is University Lecturer in American History, Pembroke College, Oxford University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, We Ain't What We Ought To Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama, and reported the following:

Page 99:

In many ways, the final appeals for justice underlined just how weak black southerners had become. In South Carolina, the elderly Robert Smalls took his place as one of just six black delegates, out of 106, at the 1895 state constitutional convention called to introduce a literacy test. For comparison, there were seventy-one black delegates to the 1868 convention. With typical bravery, he spoke up. The Democratic Charleston News and Courier reported somewhat wistfully on the last hurrah of an old foe: “No one can fail to be impressed with Gen Smalls’ earnest protestation, before God.” Maybe so, but delegates failed to be moved. All but the six black delegates voted for disfranchisement. Smalls refused to sign the new constitution. When the convention proposed not to pay the travel costs of anyone who refused, Smalls — in a final gesture of defiance — said “he would rather walk home than sign.” As it turned out, in the rush to disfranchisement the convention failed to vote down his costs.

In a sign of changing times, Democratic publicists — not black southerners, as during Reconstruction — now used southern white violence to appeal to the nation as a whole. It worked. Outlook magazine — a liberal religious journal founded by former abolitionists — published a roundtable on the Atlanta riot. Writing as the “northern black” voice, women’s reformer Carrie Clifford pointed out that violence was “directed at the ... progressive negro [and not] the vicious negro” and reminded white Christians of the command to love thy (Negro) neighbor. But the response of a “southern white” laid the blame for the violence at the feet of black men: “If there had been no assaults upon white women there would have been no mobs.” The editor concluded by calling for black self-restraint, thus accepting the demonization of black men as debased criminals. In the light of the riot, Clifford reckoned the “lecture to blacks on self-restraint becomes indeed a roaring farce.”

To win support, black critics of white supremacy looked abroad. The foremost anti-lynching campaigner of the day, Ida B. Wells, traveled to England. Born a slave and orphaned in her teens, Wells began her career as a teacher while she supported her siblings. She then switched to journalism, and in 1889 she was elected as the first woman secretary of the Afro-American Press Association. Fortune reckoned “she has plenty of nerve; she is smart as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy with humbug.”

Though Wells had long challenged racism (she once bit a conductor who threw her off a segregated train, and then sued the company), it was the lynching of three friends in Memphis on account of their business success that prompted her campaign. She thundered that the charge of rape was a “threadbare lie” — most lynchings were not on account of interracial sex; and where sexual encounters did occur, it was to satisfy white women’s longings rather than black men’s lust.

Both the message and the messenger (a single black woman with a confrontational style) provoked far more criticism than support among white Americans. Her enemies — who included some nervous black leaders — called her a “black harlot.” Not so in England. During a four month tour in 1894, Wells gave over a hundred lectures, breakfasted with MPs in the Houses of Parliament, was interviewed by leading newspapers, and inspired the formation of an influential anti-lynching committee. By now a celebrity, Wells took the opportunity to denounce the leading American white women’s temperance leader, Frances Willard, who happened to be in Britain at the same time. Willard was a social reformer who did not condone lynching, but to boost her cause she criticized black men for their love of “demon rum” and their resulting lust for pure white women.

Sure enough, the p99 test works rather well. The first paragraph reminds us that the long struggle for freedom was not one of inexorable progress, that white supremacy was about more than vigilante violence, and that black resistance continued in downturns. Ultimately what mattered most was not the desire or even strategies of African Americans to seek meaningful freedom, but who had the power to pursue their agenda -- by the late c19th century, the celebrated civil war slave runaway Robert Smalls (who had stolen his confederate ship) could not hope to turn back the juggernaut of white supremacy. This power struggle, between those seeking liberation and those opposed to it, is the main organising theme of the book, and what accounts for the shifting power balance is what makes the African American freedom struggle so fascinating, perplexing and instructive. (The fact that that the convention ended up in such a rush also reminds us how messy and chaotic -- how human -- politics and race often was.)

The second paragraph points us to the fluidity of racism -- where Southern white violence had prompted many white northerners to support freed slaves after the Civil War, the very same violence was now seen as a reaction to black sex crimes ... and thus a reason to endorse white supremacy and segregation. The multiple constructions of race stereotypes throughout the period show the utility of race, and thus its power.

The third and fourth paragraphs show that black Americans placed their struggle in a global frame -- the celebrated campaigner Ida B. Wells took her campaign to England, to good effect. Again, sex and race are inextricably intertwined. Wells claimed that any interracial sex was on account of white women's longings. Meanwhile, criticism of Wells focussed on the fact that here was a single black woman speaking out of place. The fact that she used her platform abroad to land a punch on a leading white women's reformer also points to the complex relationship between black and white women reformers throughout the period, and the narrow ground black women often found themselves on, caught between a (male) race struggle and a (white) womens' movement. What struck me is how often black women managed to clearly espouse a call for full human rights that transcended the narrower agendas of many reform movements.

Learn more about We Ain't What We Ought To Be at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Rooney's "For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs"

The writer and poet Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs, and reported the following:

The Page 99 test appeals to me as a form of bibliomancy—the use of a book in divination. As fate would have it, page 99 of For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs contains the first page of an essay that you could say is about apartment-o-mancy. It’s called “To Build a Quiet City in My Mind,” and in it, I attempt to visit all the New York City apartments of my favorite poet, Weldon Kees (1914-1955?).

Divination, of course, is “the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of a standardized process or ritual.” In New York I was trying to gain insight into what Kees’ life in the city might have been like, and, more broadly, what might have eventually driven him either to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, or to vanish to start a new life in Mexico.

The essay begins with an epigraph from Kees’ poem, “Return of the Ghost”: “Your absence breeds / A longer silence through the rooms. We haunt ourselves,” and the first sentences are: “I am in love with another man, but my husband doesn’t mind. I have come to the city to find this man’s apartments. Over the course of the week, I will seek out all nine—one in Brooklyn, eight in Manhattan—but I will never find the man himself. I am in love with a dead man.”

This piece is the sixth essay (out of eleven total) in the book, and Ford Madox Ford’s method applies in that it does give an accurate impression of the quality of the whole. The book operates as kind of a memoir in essays, but I did my best to avoid making it only about me me me, and to try to give readers a sense of wider subjects. I hope that in reading this particular piece, people who don’t know about Kees might be intrigued enough to seek out his Collected Poems.

Learn more about the book and author at Kathleen Rooney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tim Brookes' "Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment"

Tim Brookes is the author of A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow (one of the Top Travel Books of 2000–the New York Times and Booklist) and Guitar: An American Life (one of the Best Books of 2005–Library Journal).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment, and reported the following:

On the face of it, Page 99 isn’t some quintessence of the book.

The book falls into three parts. The first represents what I initially thought was my subject—namely, weather forecasting, the topic of my initial assignment for National Geographic. The second represents the reason why I went to India—namely, the monsoon. It wasn’t until I had been in India long enough for all my original purposes to fail that I realized I was getting close to the truth, and the truth had something to do with the subject of part three: water. So the book is a journey in many senses, external and internal, intentional and unintentional, and as always it’s the unintended journey that takes us where we ought to be going.

Page 99 turns up not quite halfway into the second section. By this point, the three defining points of my trip have taken place: I’ve gone to India, I’ve seen the monsoon come ashore near the southern tip of the subcontinent, and I’ve discovered that I have been banned from every office of the India Meteorological Department, and I can’t possibly do what I was sent to do. Page 99 can’t possibly encompass my subject because I haven’t yet got a clue what it is.

On the other hand, Page 99 is a close-up of a figure who is central to the book: Rajesh, my driver and guide. Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment is a kind of essay, and any essayist is only half a step away from being an asshole. What redeems me and the book is Rajesh’s affection, his studious concern for goodness and his interest in truth. Page 99 sees us on a long journey into the rural Indian night; it’s the transition between the planned and the unplanned, and he is crucial to my making that transition in safety, my good spirits and my curiosity intact.

How did we achieve this? We talked about the subject that every Brit and Indian have in common: cricket. Cricket was the Englishman’s gift to India, and now it was acting as the Indian’s way of making the Brit feel at home.

“When I think back on that drive, it all seems dark, even the three hours or so before nightfall—the darkness of trees, close on both sides of the road, and the darkness between trees, illuminated only by far-off cricketers endlessly playing famous games in the sun.”

Read an excerpt from Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment, and learn more about the book and author at the official website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kristin J. Anderson's "Benign Bigotry"

Kristin J. Anderson is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Houston-Downtown, in Houston, Texas.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Benign Bigotry: The Psychology of Subtle Prejudice, and reported the following.

Benign Bigotry is about subtle forms of prejudice, so-called benign bigotry. Benign bigotry represents thinking and behavior that appears to be innocent and harmless but actually fosters some of the most insidious kinds prejudice. In the book, I address six common myths that reflect subtle forms of bias. For instance, one chapter is entitled, “They Must be Guilty of Something”: Myths of Criminality. Many Americans believe that the world is a just place--that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Just-world thinking leads people to believe that when someone is accused of a crime, the accused is probably guilty of something. It is too difficult to conceive the possibility of an innocent person wasting away in jail.

Page 99 of the book lands the reader in the middle of a discussion on false confessions. Most people find it impossible to imagine themselves offering a false confession. Why would anyone ever admit to a crime they did not commit? False confessions are not necessary the result of “weak personalities” or a “guilty conscience” but rather the result of specific situations and processes that produce confessions from innocent individuals. On page 99 I describe three specific processes used by interrogators that are most often associated with false confessions. The first step is isolation. When any person is detained, held for long periods, deprived of sleep and rendered exhausted, they become susceptible to influence and their ability to make complex decisions is compromised. Typical criminal interrogations last 3-4 hours, but interrogations that produce false confessions average around 16 hours. Once a suspect is isolated, interrogators can confront them with false DNA evidence supposedly linking them to the crime. Interrogators can present phony eyewitnesses and can claim the suspect failed a polygraph. These techniques are admissible in U.S. courts. Confrontation then is the second process that can induce false confessions. The third process is minimization. To encourage a confession, an interrogator might use techniques to minimize the crime or the suspect’s culpability. For instance, the interrogator might provide a moral justification for committing the crime such as, “I’m sure he had it coming,” or face-saving excuses explaining why the crime was accidental. Minimization techniques can also include promises of leniency by the court. All the while, suspects believe that as soon as they confess, they can go home.

These three processes work together to form conditions in which people are likely to confess to crimes they did not commit. The “They Must be Guilty of Something” chapter addresses other illustrations of the important and often ignored powerful relationship between specific aspects of crime and bigotry, such as the depictions of black and brown criminal suspects in television news, the explanations people use to explain the criminal behavior of black and brown people versus white people, the bias inherent in death penalty cases, and more.

Read an excerpt from Benign Bigotry, and learn more about the book and author at the Cambridge University Press website and at Kristin J. Anderson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christine Haynes' "Lost Illusions"

Christine Haynes is Assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“.... In their effort to obtain absolute freedom and property in the book trade, publishers relied increasingly on associations, both formal and informal.

These early associations were composed of a relatively constant group of publishers. Over and over in the rosters of the petitions and associations organized by publishers, the same names appeared: J.-B. Baillière, Bossange (both Martin and Hector, his son), Didot (both Firmin and Ambroise), Charles Gosselin and later his successor Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre, Louis Hachette, Victor Masson, Panckoucke (first C. L. F., then Ernest), and Treuttel and Würtz. Most of these publishers were located in the 11th (now 6th) arrondissement of Paris. They were thus neighbors as well as colleagues. Members of the generation of éditeurs who came of age with the Restoration, these men would rise to dominance in the book trade by the 1830s and 1840s. As business leaders, many of them served in official institutions such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Bank of France, and the Chamber of Deputies. Firmin Didot, for instance, was a representative in the legislature in the late 1820s and early 1830s. He also served on the government commission on literary property established by Charles X in 1825. His son Ambroise Firmin-Didot was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, as well as of the government commission on literary property of 1836-1837. Drawing on their experience in civic affairs, these men were instrumental in forming associations among publishers.

In the late 1820s, this core group of publishers attempted to formalize their relationship with each other by establishing a cercle, or circle, in the book trade....”

While it is not necessarily the section of the book that I would have chosen to excerpt, this passage does pass the “Page 99 Test” in that it encapsulates the book’s main subject, which is how entrepreneurial publishers used association to persuade the government to liberalize the “literary market” in France. The cercle described here did not last very long, because it was prohibited by the government of the Restoration (1815-1830). However, it would provide the model for a later association in publishing, called the Cercle de la Librairie. Founded in 1847, this second Cercle proved far more successful. Enduring through the end of the nineteenth century (and up to the present day), it was instrumental in obtaining the two main demands of publishers in the post-revolutionary period: the abolition of licensing requirements for printers and bookdealers, which had been instituted by Napoleon in 1810, and the extension of literary property rights beyond the brief term guaranteed by revolutionary and Napoleonic legislation. Under pressure from the publishers in this later Cercle, the government of the Second Empire (1851-1870) moved to abolish licensing and strengthen literary property, thereby establishing a free market for literature in France. By highlighting the role of this association in influencing government policy toward the book trade in nineteenth-century France, this passage—and the book as a whole—emphasizes the importance of lobbying by networks of businessmen in shaping the “market.” This topic is of not just historical but of contemporary relevance, as evidenced by the amount of money spent in recent years by the telecommunications industry to block government regulation.

Read an excerpt from Lost Illusions, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue