Susan D. Carle's "Defining the Struggle"

Susan Carle teaches legal ethics, anti-discrimination law, labor and employment law, and torts at American University Washington College of Law. She writes primarily about the history of social change lawyering, anti-discrimination law, and topics at the intersections between civil rights, employment, and labor law. In the past she has been a community organizer, civil rights lawyer, and union-side labor lawyer.

Carle applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915, and reported the following:

It takes courage to apply the page 99 test to one’s own work with honesty, though honesty may be the most important virtue of a writer. So I will try: Defining the Struggle tells the story of the civil rights leaders of the late nineteenth and earliest years of the twentieth century who started to develop the ideas that would lead to the rich and multifaceted campaign for racial justice in the United States, which eventually grew into the later twentieth century civil rights movement. As a legal historian, I wanted to convince other legal historians of the importance of this largely overlooked “prehistory” of legal civil rights organizing, but I also desperately wanted to write a book that would be accessible and interesting to a more general readership. Did I accomplish this? I believe the page 99 test shows I did, in part. That page begins a discussion of the founding of the longest-lasting national civil rights organization of the turn of the century period: The National Afro American Council, which lasted for a decade before essentially merging with other efforts to become the NAACP. It describes the Afro American Council’s founding in the midst of a celebration of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. Dignitaries in attendance included famous suffragette and good friend of Douglass Susan B. Anthony, thus reflecting the connection some of the more visionary leaders of this period (though not all) saw between the campaigns for racial equality and for women’s rights. Also active in the proceedings was the now-famous anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells. Wells was known for her blunt speaking style, and she shared her ideas about who would be best to lead this new organization; her thoughts were heeded in the appointment of the savvy organization-builder Alexander Walters, the youngest-ever bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, to head this new organizing effort. The “standard story” holds that the African American civil rights leaders of this period were almost all descendants of a free black elite, but this hardly describes the backgrounds of either Wells or Walters, who were both born enslaved and moved into national leadership roles despite very modest economic and educational backgrounds.

Does this snippet whet one’s appetite for more? The answer to that question probably depends on one’s personal taste for historical accounts that seek to revise standard stories and settled judgments of who counts as historical figures of enduring importance. Thus page 99 is a terrific litmus test: This book will appeal if one is interested in the kind of story it tells, but the writer’s talents are such that it might not convert a reader’s interest absent an underlying enthusiasm for stories about history’s forgotten heroes.

Learn more about Defining the Struggle at the Oxford University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Defining the Struggle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ronen Shamir's "Current Flow"

Ronen Shamir is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University and author of The Colonies of Law: Colonialism, Zionism and Law in Early Mandate Palestine (2000) and Managing Legal Uncertainty: Elite Lawyers in the New Deal (1996).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine, and reported the following:

What does it mean to be 'connected'? Or 'wired'? Page 99 is part of the third chapter of a book which aspires to theorize electricity-consumers as sociological types (and internet or cellular consumers as well for that matter). Page 99 invites us to think of the seemingly mundane electric-meter. This age-old device – beyond its official role as a reader of electric consumption calculated on the basis of Kilowatt per Hour – is an object which creates a boundary between the public domain ('the main distribution system') and the private domain (private premises and households). It is a foundational assembly, one among many such micro-sites where the distinction between the public and the private are performed and affirmed. Page 99 also notes that this division allows for stratification: The main distribution system is nominally egalitarian; once in place, it offers equal opportunity for all to 'connect' and consume electricity. The reading of meters, where the private sphere lies, is where asymmetry begins. The reading of meters facilitates the ability to measure and compare different amounts of consumption and to classify types of consumers (big, small, domestic, commercial etc.).

Now consider the sociological status of the consumer in and on such assemblies. Consumers are at once subjects with contractual rights and obligations, and objects which function as crucial contact-points for the circulating electric current. On the one hand, the consumer is a product of an “objective” material connection to a grid; on the other hand, this materiality depended on one’s “subjectivity”: a willing attachment to the grid. The constitution of the electric-consumer, then, may be better captured by considering the irreducibility of social identities on and in grids: at once elements attached to a network and actors whose connection allows such networks to circulate their 'materials'. But of course, in order to understand more about the social properties of electric grids and the social divisions they create, you need to read more than one page!

Learn more about Current Flow at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mical Raz's "What’s Wrong with the Poor?"

Mical Raz, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician and historian of medicine. She is author of The Lobotomy Letters: The Making of American Psychosurgery.

Raz applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, What's Wrong with the Poor?: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty, and reported the following:

Page 99 of What’s Wrong with the Poor? finds us in the middle of a discussion of early intervention programs, and it begins in introducing Project Head Start. This is particularly apt, as Head Start is one of the best-known legacies of the War on Poverty, and as I argue in the chapter, was based on theories of deprivation. The debate over Head Start demonstrates how theories of mental health and development were utilized in discussions of poverty, its causes and its prevention. In particular, these theories highlighted the role of deprivation, focusing on what was it that poor men, women and children lacked.

Throughout the book, I look at different theories of deprivation, which focused on a wide range of experiences mental health experts believed low income children were lacking. These perceptions were deeply stereotyped. Parents were described as non-verbal, mothers failed to adequately stimulate their children, homes were drab and colorless, and there were no books or educational toys for the children to play with. Low income children were seen as lacking the necessary stimuli for mental and psychological development, and hence early intervention programs were designed to provide that which these children lacked in their homes.

Project Head Start set out to combat these deficiencies. While the goal to provide quality educational experience for the poor may have been laudable, it was based on flawed and racialized perceptions of low income families and children, many of whom were African American. Rather than focusing on the strengths and resilience of low income families and examining the structural causes of racial and socioeconomic inequality in American society, theories of mental health provided policy makers a means by which to turn poverty into an intra-psychic deficiency. This view of poverty led to funding priorities that privileged mental health and educational interventions, thus circumventing a discussion of the structural factors that create and perpetuate such disparities within American society. What’s Wrong with the Poor? examines the interrelations between mental health and public policy and asks how can we effectively combat poverty without pathologizing the poor.

Learn more about What's Wrong with the Poor? at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Mayhew's "Wounded"

Emily Mayhew is a Research Associate at Imperial College London and an examiner at the Imperial College School of Medicine. She is a consultant and lecturer to museums including the Wellcome Collection, the Imperial War Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons.

Mayhew applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Wounded: A New History of the Western Front in World War I, and reported the following:

Anyone reading page 99 of Wounded - A New History of the Western Front in the First World War would find the material puzzlingly unrepresentative. There is a nurse, to be sure, but the page is mostly about other residents of the Field Hospital where she worked - a bandy-legged fox who stole from the hospital garbage, a posh French hunting dog rescued from No Mans Land by the chief surgeon- and the social activities that took place when the Field Hospital wasn't receiving battle casualties. The animals patrolled the food stores and kept the rats down and were used as therapy in the wards by the nurses who encouraged patients to get back on their feet by taking them for walks in the nearby woods. Half the page is taken up with a description of a game that was popular among the medical staff: a paper chase, also known as Hare and Hounds, where a trail of paper shreds was laid in the nearby countryside and then one member of staff was chased by the others. The first to arrive back at the Field Hospital was the winner, either a Hare or a Hound. Not much war there - but there are hints. The nurse, Winifred Kenyon, has mixed feelings about encouraging her patients to walk the animals. If they are strong enough to walk, then soon they will be strong enough to go back to their battalions and fight again. It is the patients who lie in bed tearing up old newspapers to make the trail for the paper chase game, testifying to the strong social bonds they have with their carers. Nurses and orderlies move them out of their wards to watch the game in the sunshine, cheer the runners on and keep a surreptitious book on likely winners. The Field Hospital, closer to the front line than it is to any of the towns or military camps to the rear, is a world of its own, self-sustaining and kept both medically and socially effective by its nurses. Closer to the war than any women before them, the nurses developed very particular expertise and skills to respond to the nightmare of casualty on the Western Front. From complex resuscitation techniques, to the care of the dying, the breaking of bad news to soldiers with limb loss or other serious wounds, to the vital social life that kept everyone together and sane, all of it was dependent on the nurses and their dedication to their patients and their colleagues in an extraordinary time of war and sacrifice.

Learn more about Wounded at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Kosslyn & G. Wayne Miller's "Top Brain, Bottom Brain"

Stephen M. Kosslyn was a cognitive neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Harvard University for over 30 years and now serves as the founding dean of the Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute. G. Wayne Miller is an author, filmmaker and Providence Journal Staff Writer.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Top Brain, Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How You Think, and reported the following:

On page 99 we examine a question readers may have as they learn about our new Theory of Cognitive Modes: What determines a person’s dominant cognitive mode? Is it genes or experience – nature or nurture – or a combination?

Some background: Our theory of how people prefer to interact with the world and with others is based on the anatomical division of the brain into its top and bottom parts. Why not left and right, which holds that individuals are either analytical/logical, or artistic/intuitive? Because that pop-culture story has no solid basis in science. In Top Brain, Bottom Brain, we debunk this myth as background introduction to our theory.

Our Theory of Cognitive Modes, based on decades of solid research that until now has remained largely inside scientific circles, states that the anatomical division of the brain into top and bottom parts provides a better foundation for understanding thought and behavior.

The top part is involved in setting up plans, controlling movements, registering changes in where objects are located in space, and detecting when expected events do not occur and updating plans accordingly. The bottom part is involved in classifying and interpreting what we perceive, and allows us to confer meaning on the world. We all use both parts of the brain, but we vary in the degree that we tend to rely on each of the two brain systems for functions that are optional -- are not dictated by the immediate situation.

Unlike left/right, we do not focus on one part or the other. Instead, we focus on how the two parts interact – the brain is a single, interacting system.

Some people tend to rely heavily (in optional ways) on both brain systems, some rely heavily on the bottom brain system but less so on the top, some rely heavily on the top but less so on the bottom, and some don’t rely heavily on either system.

Which leads to four possible Modes: Mover, Perceiver, Stimulator and Adaptor.

You can determine your own preferred mode with a simple test in the book, and also online at www.TopBrainBottomBrain.com. We believe that learning about your preferred mode can help you not only better understand yourself but also help you understand your relationships. So, does nature or nurture determine a person’s dominant mode? As you might imagine, the answer lies in a combination of both.

Visit the Top Brain, Bottom Brain website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen V. Ash's "A Massacre in Memphis"

Stephen V. Ash is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Firebrand of Liberty, A Year in the South, and other books on the Civil War era.

Ash applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War, and reported the following:

Page 99 offers a revealing glimpse of A Massacre in Memphis.

The scene is a street in South Memphis, a mostly black section of the city, on the afternoon of May 1, 1866. Moments earlier, a shootout had erupted between four white policemen and a boisterous crowd of black men that the officers had tried to disperse. Two of the policemen have fallen, badly wounded; the others are fleeing.

The blacks are exultant, congratulating themselves for standing up to the despised, abusive Memphis police. But as the smoke clears and the excitement subsides, they begin to worry about the consequences. Some decide to lie low for a while.

They are the lucky ones. An hour and a half (and three pages) later---word of the shootout having spread throughout the city---mobs of armed white men descend on South Memphis and begin shooting and beating every black person in sight.

Thus began the Memphis race riot. It stretched over three days, during which white mobs repeatedly invaded black neighborhoods wreaking death and destruction. The toll was horrific: 46 black men, women, and children murdered, many others wounded, robbed, or raped, and every black church and school and many black dwellings in the city put to the torch.

My account of the riot--a minute-by-minute narrative written in the present tense, the better to convey the drama, the kaleidoscopic rush of events, and the sheer horror of those three days--comprises the second of the book’s three parts. The first, written in the customary past tense, is a detailed portrait of Memphis’s inhabitants on the eve of the riot, not only the blacks and ex-Confederates but also the many Irish and Yankee immigrants. It shows how the newly-emancipated people reveled in their freedom while Rebel and Irish resentment toward them and the Yankees festered. The third part, likewise in the past tense, explores the aftermath. The riot was a key event of the post-Civil War era. It outraged Northerners and encouraged Congress to come down hard on the white South, thus helping usher in the controversial era of Radical Reconstruction.

The riot was not only one of 19th-century America’s most significant episodes but also one of the best documented. Three federal agencies investigated it, gathering vivid testimony from hundreds of eyewitnesses. Few other events of that era can be so meticulously recounted. Mine is the first book-length study of it.

Learn more about A Massacre in Memphis at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Firebrand of Liberty.

Writers Read: Stephen V. Ash.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erik Dussere's "America Is Elsewhere"

Erik Dussere is Associate Professor of Literature at American University. He is the author of Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economies of Slavery.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture, and reported the following:

The first piece of good news about page 99 of America Is Elsewhere is that it is not blank—as, for example, page 106 is. Close call, there. If this had been the Page 106 Test I might have been feeling depressed, since the test would seem to suggest that the book is meaningless or incomprehensible. As it is, I can put that worry aside, at least until the reviews come out.

In fact, page 99 is not a bad one to turn to. The big argument of the book is that the films and novels that make up the noir tradition—classic noirs as well as later developments like conspiracy stories or cyberpunk—are always responding in some way to the rise of consumer culture in America, which really gets going in the postwar forties. By page 99, I’m talking about how classic noirs featuring hard-boiled detectives always make connections between local crimes, like murders and robberies, and the larger social systems within which those crimes take place. Here’s what I say on that page:

The hard-boiled detective novel generally begins with a crime; as the detective pursues the investigation he finds that that seemingly isolated crime expands outward, involving larger and larger spheres of social power, until ultimately the distinction between crime and the functioning of society disappears. The detective is left in an ambivalent position, and the story draws our attention to his limited sphere of enforcement. He can solve the local crime in a local way, but he cannot solve the problems of society and political economy that enable the crime at a further remove. He can only act as social critic, pointing to the powerful politicians and businessmen, the Mr. Bigs and Harlan Potters, who bear social responsibility.

So what this leads to, in these books and films, is an attempt at a critique of American capitalism itself, but one that still has to present that critique as an indictment of bad individuals. I go on to argue that in the sixties this critique gets taken one step further as noir evolves into the conspiracy narrative. In those texts—Pynchon’s novels, for instance, or the paranoid films of the seventies—the detective can no longer solve the crime at all. The conspiracy of multinational capital is too large and complex to be understood by the individual, so the noir investigation fails. But that failure still works as an example of noir political critique, since it suggests the presence of the large political and economic forces that it can’t actually represent, when the protagonist runs into a wall as blank and forbidding, in its way, as page 106.

Learn more about America Is Elsewhere at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Bartlett's "Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?"

Robert Bartlett is the Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075-1225, and The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages. He has also written and presented documentaries on the Middle Ages for BBC television.

Bartlett applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?: Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation, and reported the following:

I am particularly pleased to be dealing with page 99 of my book, since it contains one of the most pithy — if also one of the most derisive — descriptions of its subject: ‘“What’s a saint?” ask the devils in Cardinal Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, and answer with glee, “A bundle of bones, which fools adore.”’ Well, the book certainly does not assume that only fools adore saints, but it does start from the assumption that a saint is indeed “a bundle of bones”. The title of the book is a question asked by the great Christian thinker, St. Augustine, as he pondered the miracles worked by the saints. For hundreds of years, and in some places to this day, Christians revered the physical remains of the holy dead. As p. 99 puts it, ‘The corpse was a source not of pollution but of supernatural power. When Elizabeth of Thuringia’s body was laid out after her death in 1231, crowds assembled and cut away portions not only of her clothing, but also of her hair, her nails, even her nipples, which “they preserved for themselves as relics”.’ The book attempts to make sense of these beliefs and this behaviour.

Learn more about Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Worthen's "Apostles of Reason"

Molly Worthen is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Slate, Christianity Today, and other publications.

Worthen applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, and reported the following:

The pressures on faculty and administrators are mounting. Money is tighter than ever. Students won’t enroll without a guarantee of a good job after they graduate. Peer institutions are jostling for applicants and funding, even if it means embracing “innovation” and “creative disruption” with only a vague notion of what these changes might bring.

I’m talking about fundamentalist Bible schools, circa 1947.

The Page 99 test lands on the opening of Chapter 5, “The Marks of Campus Conversion,” and plunges us into this world. Most outsiders think of fundamentalism as an isolated subculture, a Christian fortress secure against the sins of the world. Don’t Bible colleges exist to protect young Christians from the predations of modernity? Don’t they reject innovation in favor of old-time religion? After spending the past couple of years exploring the archives of these institutions, I learned that these stereotypes could not be more wrong: fundamentalists and evangelicals are no strangers to the pressure to change in response to the marketplace, and their relationship to secular learning is complicated, to say the least.

On page 99 we meet Sam Sutherland, president of Biola College, a bastion of fundamentalism outside Los Angeles. He criticizes more liberal-minded Christians who confuse “their egghead enterprises with Bible-based revival.” Yet Sutherland himself was hardly an academic slouch—he arrived at Biola with degrees from Occidental College and Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1948 he complained that the world had gone, “I would dare to say, educationally berserk.” But only two years later we find him crowing to colleagues about the fleet of new PhDs on his faculty. Sutherland’s ambivalence toward higher learning confirms the central argument of my book: conservative evangelicals are torn between sincere respect for human reason and academic achievement, on one hand—and on the other, their deference to a cripplingly narrow understanding of scripture that clashes with the spirit and conclusions of secular inquiry. They are caught between conflicting sources of intellectual authority. This crisis of authority is nothing new: it is as old as evangelicalism’s origins in the years after the Protestant Reformation.

But Sutherland’s savvy transformation of his college—once a fundamentalist Bible institute; today, a thriving Christian university—proves that if this crisis of authority is the scourge of the evangelical mind, it is also a kind of genius: a never-ending balancing act, a source of anxiety and energy that propels evangelicals to constantly revise their relationship to their own traditions and to mainstream culture.

Learn more about Apostles of Reason at the Oxford University Press website.

Writers Read: Molly Worthen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Scott Holloway's "Jim Crow Wisdom"

Jonathan Scott Holloway is professor of history, African American studies, and American studies at Yale University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940, and reported the following:

"Open your book to page ninety-nine and…the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."

Please.

Funny thing, when I opened my book to page ninety-nine I found that it featured a central theoretical claim in the work and that it offered a distillation of the book's unorthodox methodology. In this case, both the claim and the method relate to a still image from the 1970 movie Watermelon Man (the image itself is on page 100). I describe my first encounter with the image this way:

I do not remember if my brother called me into the family room to watch another seminal moment in the era's cinematic cultural race battles, but I recall being there all the same. Previously, at my brother's invitation, I had seen John Shaft give the white man the finger and, in doing so, create entirely new ways to read the black body. My only memory of this second moment—of the entire film, in fact—is an image of a black man sitting in a bathtub filled with gallons upon gallons of milk.

The person in question is dark-skinned actor Godfrey Cambridge. In Watermelon Man—"a social commentary clothed in a comedy built on a fantastical premise"—Cambridge plays Jeff Gerber, a bigoted insurance salesman who wakes up one morning to discover that he has turned black, very black. (Cambridge is in white face for the first fifteen minutes of the film.) This milk bath is one of Gerber's last desperate efforts to become white again.

This page is from a chapter that explores how the black body—fingers, arms, skin—serves as a repository of traumatic memory. Also on this page I am writing in the first person, a voice that is interspersed throughout the book to highlight how official narratives of the past (history) collide with personal narratives (memory). In Jim Crow Wisdom I examine the consequences of these collisions.

On page ninety-nine we bear witness to Gerber's trauma when he discovers his sense of self did not align with others' assessment of how his new, black body would be allowed to navigate the waters of mainstream America. By this point in the film, moviegoers could see that Gerber was sliding toward madness as he realized that he lacked control over the process of narration.

My book explores black memory from many angles—popular literature, social science, dance, the built environment, memoir, and film—and asks critical questions about who gets to write and claim those memories and what's at stake in the process. For Jeff Gerber, the story his body told others (and the presumptions of black memories that were subsumed in his skin) revealed the traumas of a second-class citizenship. For others, people who were black their entire lives, the consequences of these conflicting narratives were so patently obvious and negative that they could not afford the luxury even of the mistaken hope that bathtubs filled with milk could solve their problems.

Learn more about Jim Crow Wisdom at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue