Scott Kaufman's "Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party"

Scott Kaufman is chair of the Department of History at Francis Marion University, Florence, South Carolina. He is the author of many books, including Rosalynn Carter: Equal Partner in the White House and Project Plowshare: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives in Cold War America.

Kaufman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party: A Political Biography of Gerald R. Ford, and reported the following:

Gerald Ford was, until 2017, the longest-lived former U.S. president. Three themes marked the overwhelming majority of his 93-year-long life. The first was his ambitiousness. He was a workaholic who put enormous energy into achieving the goals he set before himself. As a child, he joined Boy Scouts, sought to become an Eagle Scout, and did so in three years. He became a starter on the football team at South High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and then at the University of Michigan. During his quarter-century in the U.S. House of Representatives, he sought to become speaker. He never did, but through an unprecedented series of events, he became president. Even as an ex-president, he remained ambitious. He thought about running for the White House again. After deciding not to return to an elected post in Washington, he joined numerous corporate boards.

Second, Ford was loyal to the Republican Party. He grew up in a conservative district of Michigan and was inspired by a father who survived the Great Depression without seeking government assistance. For the remainder of his life, he stood behind the party, though he grew concerned as the GOP moved ever more to the political right. But—and this is the third theme—he was pragmatic. He was not an ideologue. Whether as a congressman, president, or ex-president, he sought to remain loyal to his conservative views. However, he saw nothing wrong with reaching across the aisle and compromising with Democrats.

Turning to page 99 of Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party, one will find a reference to all three of these themes. But one will discover that Ford’s ambitiousness had a price, which was his absenteeism as a father and husband. While in Washington, he spent as many as 280 days each year on the road, which was hard on his wife, Betty, and on their four children. There was never talk of separation or divorce, for Jerry and Betty truly loved one another. Yet taking the work out of the workaholic proved difficult, if not impossible.

Learn more about Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott M. Deitche's "Garden State Gangland"

Scott M. Deitche's books include Cigar City Mafia: A Complete History of the Tampa Underworld, The Silent Don: The World of Santo Trafficante Jr., and Cocktail Noir: From Gangsters and Gin Joints to Gumshoes and Gimlets.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Garden State Gangland: The Rise of the Mob in New Jersey, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Garden State Gangland: The Rise of the Mob in New Jersey is a full-page, black and white photo. The caption reads, “Willie Moretti murder scene”, and it is a gruesome photo of the mobster Willie Moretti laying dead on the floor of Joe’s Elbow Room in Palisades, New Jersey, blood pooling under his head where he was just shot. Though it has no words apart from the caption, the photo does capture the feel of the book. It’s ostensibly about the history of organized crime in New Jersey, from the 1900s through the present, with narratives weaved through important figures and events (like Willie’s death). But, like the murder photo, the book is a few things more. At times, it’s gruesome, with stories of mob hits and hardened criminals. It is also nostalgic, with historic accounts of bootleggers, nightclubs, and Frank Sinatra. It’s matter of fact- I like to research my topics and present information as close to the truth as possible.

But above all else, the photo perfectly illustrates the way people view gangsters and the movies and books about their exploits. There, in the background of the photo, lined shoulder to shoulder, are spectators gazing upon the crime scene, appalled yet absolutely fascinated.

Visit Scott Deitche's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bryon MacWilliams's "With Light Steam"

Bryon MacWilliams is an American writer who was a Moscow-based foreign correspondent for more than a decade. He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, With Light Steam: A Personal Journey through the Russian Baths, and reported the following:

Hah! Perhaps Ford Madox Ford was onto something. Page 99 begins, fittingly, in a Russian steam bath, or banya – the lens through which With Light Steam delivers Russia to readers. The wealthy owner of a private “trophy” banya in the Ural Mountains is telling me about the recent murder of a son, a moment that speaks to the intimacy of steaming: bathers don't always know each other's names, but can come to know (and intuit) crucial details from each other's lives.

In fact, the connection between Igor Ivanovich and me is so sincere that I'm silent – can't bring myself to say what Russians usually say to express their condolences.

Connection is key to the page, and the chapter, "The Banya Is Communion" – a journey from Moscow to Magnitogorsk and Bashkortostan that shows how what happens between steams can be more important than what happens in the steam room. Each chapter in the book, nonfiction that reads more like a novel, is an episode – spanning from several hours to several days – highlighting aspects of banya culture, the most Russian thing there is.

Igor Ivanovich moves from the uppermost bench to the floor, begins to massage himself in 200-degree heat with bundles of leafy birch twigs, the aspect of steaming he likes best. I offer to whack his back with the leafy veniki, but he declines. He knows what he wants the same way I know not to cool in the icy plunge pool, but to douse myself with water: each time is different because each time we arrive in different bodies.

The main thing in the banya is to listen to the body, then to do what it says.

The page ends with an observation reflected in the centuries-old saying, V tot den' ne starishsya, kotoryi v bane parishya – “You don't age the day you steam in the banya.”

It's true.

Learn more about banya culture at the With Light Steam website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Juliet Hooker's "Theorizing Race in the Americas"

Juliet Hooker is a Professor of Political Science at Brown University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos, and reported the following:

Theorizing Race in the Americas analyzes the racial ideas of four prominent nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. African-American and Latin American thinkers: the former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, the Argentinean statesman and pensador Domingo F. Sarmiento, the towering black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois; and the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos. Scores of books have written about each of these thinkers, but they have rarely been read alongside each other. In contrast, Theorizing Race reads them as hemispheric thinkers, showing how they looked to political models in the “other” America to advance racial projects in their own countries. Page 99, in Chapter two—“Mi Patria de Pensamiento”: Sarmiento, the United States, and the Pitfalls of Comparison—is an apt example of the book’s core argument. It traces the lessons Sarmiento learned from observing U.S. debates about black education and black suffrage following the Civil War.

Sarmiento lived in the U.S. for three years (1865-1868) during the height of Reconstruction, while serving as Argentinean ambassador, and it had an important impact on his political ideas. The texts he wrote during that time, which have so far received very little attention, reveal a different Sarmiento, one not solely focused on Argentinean political conflicts as he was in his most famous book, Facundo, and increasingly concerned with the question of hemispheric power relations between the United States and Latin America. Page 99 describes Sarmiento’s understanding of Northern efforts to educate newly freed blacks and poor white southerners, which he viewed as a model for Latin America. It also describes his disagreement with Mary Mann, an important intellectual interlocutor, about black suffrage. Sarmiento’s skepticism about black suffrage in the United States derived from his understanding of how uneducated voters contributed to political instability in Latin America, by becoming credulous followers of caudillos (charismatic military and political leaders who often became dictators). This pattern, of reading U.S. historical events through the lens of Latin American political problems, would be repeated by later Latin American thinkers.

Sarmiento is an example of the way Latin American ideas about race were shaped in key ways by comparisons to the United States. As Theorizing Race shows, U.S. thinkers also developed romantic perceptions of race relations in Latin America. In both cases, to fully understand the development of racial thought in the Americas, we need to read these thinkers’ ideas in light of their shared hemispheric context.

Learn more about Theorizing Race in the Americas at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Ladd-Taylor's "Fixing the Poor"

Molly Ladd-Taylor is a professor of history at York University. She is the author of Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 and the coeditor of "Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America.

Ladd-Taylor applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

Between 1907 and the 1960s, more than 63,000 Americans were sterilized under state eugenics laws. Sixty percent were women. More than one-half were diagnosed as “mentally deficient” or “feebleminded.”

Page 99 of Fixing the Poor asks “who was feebleminded” and targeted for sterilization. To many readers, the answer might seem obvious: anyone who was black, immigrant, poor, unchaste, criminal, disabled, or mentally ill. But that explanation is obviously incomplete: most people from these groups were never sterilized. My book offers a different perspective by moving beyond the usual emphasis on eugenic ideas and analyzing the everyday administration of sterilization policy. My focus is Minnesota, where 2,350 citizens—eighty percent of them designated “feebleminded”--were sterilized under a eugenics law enacted in 1925.

The story of eugenics is often told as a cautionary tale about elite arrogance and the failure of expertise. In Minnesota, however, the determination of feeblemindedness was made by local probate judges, elected officials not required to have any medical or legal training. Most judges knew little about eugenic theories of human heredity, but they understood the usefulness of eugenics legislation as a means for coping with local problems of delinquency, illegitimacy, and welfare dependency. Most people adjudged feebleminded and eventually sterilized in Minnesota were either “sex delinquents" (often unmarried mothers) or poor mothers with large families dependent on relief. A judicial finding of feeblemindedness was the first step toward obtaining the institutionalization or sterilization of indigent county residents perceived as a burden on the public purse. But judgments varied from court to court. There were no consistent criteria for determining who was “feebleminded.”

As Page 99 of Fixing the Poor suggests, eugenic sterilization practices were shaped as much by state and local welfare politics as by concerns with biological degeneracy and “race improvement.”

Learn more about Fixing the Poor at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Queeny Pradhan's "Empire in the Hills"

Queeny Pradhan is a professor of history at the University School of Law and Legal Studies, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi, India. She was awarded the Nehru Memorial Fund Scholarship for doctoral research in 1996 and was a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, from 2010 to 2012.

Pradhan applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Empire in the Hills: Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund, and Mount Abu, 1820-1920, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book has the notes to Chapter 3 ‘Acquiring the Station’ and it gives a diverse range of archival sources and references used with regard to the hill station of Mount Abu in Rajasthan: Abu Municipal Records, Raghunath Temple Records, Records from Sirohi State Archives, Foreign (Political) Department and Home (Public) Department Records at the National Archives of India. This is representative of the entire book where a large variety of historical sources have been used – temple records, tombstones, school records, church records, district collectorate records oral accounts, travel writings, maps, old photos etc. It contributes towards Historical Method.

Page 99 is also representative of one central theme of the book – the contestation of space. An impression that was projected in the descriptions of hill stations of Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund and Mount Abu is that these were empty spaces ‘discovered’ by the European or English officers. The references on page 99, as also the discussions in the book, argue that these hill stations were not empty landscapes but replete with human and historical experiences of the local inhabitants. These hill stations were acquired after much negotiation with the local rulers and chiefs and treaty agreements were drawn up. The local hill people have their own presence and this can be traced in their mythical and origin stories. The place-names indicate their sense of history. There were attempts at the erasures of previous histories by the nineteenth century English settlers. At the same time, the book does not construct binaries of the colonizers and the colonized. It argues that there existed multiple visions, aspirations, and imaginations within the rulers and the ruled and they were not homogenous categories. European and Indians also are not considered as the homogenous categories. The Empire in the Hills examines the unexplored linkages between Empire, Space, and Culture in the specific context of the colonial hill stations in India. In the Victorian period largely and in the context of the Tropical Empire, the hill stations as spaces and a part of place-making contribute to new knowledge and information about the establishment of the empire in India in the nineteenth and twentieth century, moving beyond the stark urban-rural divide to look into other spatial developments that have been taking place simultaneously. It looks into the themes of spatiality and representation, spaces and landscapes, and reproduction of social and cultural spaces.

Learn more about Empire in the Hills at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Henry McGhie's "Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology"

Henry A. McGhie is the Head of Collections and Curator of Zoology at Manchester Museum, the University of Manchester.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology: Birds, books and business, and reported the following:

From pages 98-99:

Background to A History of the Birds of Europe

The instigator of the History of the Birds of Europe was Richard Sharpe, who, early in 1870, proposed to Dresser that they go into partnership to produce a great encyclopaedia on the birds of Europe. The project required access to the very best specimen collections and libraries, whether in museums or private hands, as they were the most basic source of information on what species occurred where. New collections would also need to be acquired from explorers and other collectors. Sharpe had neither the opportunity nor the financial ability to produce such a collection, so he needed a ‘collecting partner’ if he hoped to produce his encyclopaedia. Dresser fitted the bill perfectly: he owned a good collection of European birds and their eggs; he could acquire more good specimens from his contacts and access the collections of other BOU members, and he could make sense of the literature on birds published in other European languages. Just as importantly, he was ambitious and able enough to take on the project.

Sharpe and Dresser intended the book to cover the latest stage of knowledge of the species that were found in Europe. The two partners had plenty to do: the last significant book on the subject in English had been John Gould’s The Birds of Europe, published in five volumes during 1832–37 (his The Birds of Great Britain, 1862–73, covered many of the same species, but did not review the wider literature). Charles Bree’s A History of the Birds of Europe, Not Observed in the British Isles, issued over 1859–67, was an inferior work. These books represented the ‘competition’. Information on European birds was scattered among books and journals in different languages, in the unpublished notes of colonialists and travellers, and on the labels attached to the legs of bird specimens. Information was of variable quality and reliability, and many species were as good as unknown. Large quantities of information had been generated about birds, in Europe and elsewhere, which meant that an authoritative ornithology on European birds was much needed.

Henry Dresser and Victorian ornithology: birds, books and business is an exploration of the life of Henry Dresser, one of the leading, and most productive, ornithologists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book is more than just his story, but is an exploration of science and ornithology when the world was opening up (and being opened up) by travel and exploration, and when wealthy and ambitious private individuals (‘amateurs’) led natural history society, in the absence of professions and institutions. Dresser produced enormous bird books, by private subscription, that were a combination of the very latest scientific information and masterpieces of bird illustration by the most famous scientific illustrators of the day. The ‘page 99 test’ posits that page 99 should give a good idea of the overall standard of a book. In the case of this book, page 99 is unusually well-placed to set out the entirety of the book. The reason for this is that the History of the Birds of Europe, described on page 99, was Dresser’s magnum opus and most famous work. The book was both a bringing together of various strings of Dresser’s bow, and his biggest adventure. If we take a ‘hero’s journey’ approach, the work on the History of the Birds of Europe was Dresser’s quest. The scientific work that resulted from it, presented in his great books, was the treasure that he brought back for science, as a lasting legacy and basis from which further scientific work could proceed; the book, and the collections it was based on continue to provide scientists with a wealth of information on birds and their distribution. Page 99 explains how Dresser – ambitious, able and wealthy, and fascinated by birds – put his full energy behind the History of the Birds of Europe project. This brought him in contact with an incredibly diverse set of travellers, scientists, museum workers, and also country people, farmers, gamekeepers, lighthouse keepers, whalers, missionaries and many more. Dresser gathered their personal experiences and bird specimens and worked them together to produce a standard, globalized set of information on the birds of Europe, and their distribution in other parts of the world, in remote Central Asia, in China and Japan, India, Africa and North America. Quite an adventure, which forms an important part of Henry Dresser and Victorian ornithology.

Learn more about Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Sjoholm's "Black Fox"

Barbara Sjoholm is a writer of memoir, mysteries, fiction, and travel books, and an editor of anthologies and nonfiction.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Black Fox: A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt, Artist and Ethnographer, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The accounts Emilie later gave of keeping house for Turi seem to have been concocted after the fact for her foreword to Muitalus sámiid birra, and the explanation was repeated in reviews and interviews she gave around the book’s publication, and even as late as 1940. In these accounts it is often Emilie who came to live in Turi’s cabin: “I, who have had the pleasure of arranging and translating this work, lived with Johan Turi during the months he was engaged on it. An author should not be disturbed by household cares such as cooking, etc., so a woman’s help was essential.” But in letters to her family in the autumn of 1908 it seems fairly clear that Emilie was the primary occupant of the cabin and its hostess. . .It was Turi who provided most of their meals from fishing and hunting and Turi who cooked these meals (confirmed by a late interview Emilie gave in her eighties and that appeared in a Swedish newspaper with the heading: “Turi Wrote––and Did the Cooking.”) Nevertheless the smoke screen seems to have worked effectively at the time, so much so that for decades, up until recent times, Emilie was regularly described as Turi’s domestic and literary assistant: “The fate of Johan Turi... fulfilled the old rule: a poor, talented storyteller creates immortal literature by freeing himself from the demands of daily chores. That is what happened when Hjalmar Lundbolm, the director of the Kiruna mine, became the writer’s patron and the Dane Emilie Demant began working as his secretary and housekeeper.”

Emilie’s and Turi’s correspondence, however, provides hints of a deeper level of feeling between them, however masked in Emilie’s correspondence to her family. In a letter written at the end of August, Emilie quotes Turi as telling her, “I can’t seem to catch the Danish silver fox,” which she rather disingenuously describes as “proof of the Lapps’ image-rich language.” In reality, the reference to Emilie as a fox that was hard to capture was part of Turi’s ongoing but unsuccessful courtship. In the next few years he would often refer to Emilie as the Black Fox that the Old Wolf could not seem to catch. The black or silver fox is a melanotic variant of the red fox of northern Europe; Turi may have been referring to the color of Emilie’s hair or her quickness or simply her elusiveness.

One lamp-lit day in December, 2001, up in the far northern city of Alta in Norway, a Norwegian writer I know told me a story. In 1904 a Danish woman artist, Emilie Demant Hatt, had visited Lapland and encountered a Sami wolf-hunter, Johan Turi on a train. Later she inspired and helped this man write a book—Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sami), published in a Danish-Sami edition in 1910 and now considered the first classic of Sami literature. Demant Hatt also wrote her own travel narrative, With the Lapps in the High Mountains (1913).

I immediately had questions, but for a long time, few answers. Who was this artist and ethnographer, Emilie Demant Hatt? How did she end up in Lapland, or Sápmi, as the region is now called? What kind of artist was she? Why was so little known about her, except that she edited and translated Johan Turi’s book? And what was her relationship with Johan Turi?

It took over a dozen years for me first to translate With the Lapps into English and do all the required archival research in Scandinavia for my recent biography of Emilie Demant Hatt, Black Fox. Along the way I published a travelogue of my own, The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland, and a pair of novels about Demant Hatt’s once-secret adolescent romantic relationship with Carl Nielsen, Denmark’s best-known composer. I learned a great deal about Sami history and culture in the twentieth century and about Demant Hatt’s unique place in anthropology and folklore, as a participant observer in the tents of many nomadic Sami families in northern Sweden. Her letters revealed the many conflicts and warm feelings between her and Johan Turi, and debunked many of the myths that had grown up around their working and personal relationship.

To my surprise, page 99 of the published biography goes right to the heart of the some stories about them, dating from the late summer of 1908 when they worked together on his manuscript at Lake Torneträsk in Sweden; the page also explores why Turi called her “Black Fox.”

Learn more about Black Fox at the Emilie Demant Hatt website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edwin Moïse's "The Myths of Tet"

Edwin Moïse is professor of history at Clemson University. He is a historian of the Vietnam War, and of modern Vietnam and modern China.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War, and reported the following:

Page 99 could function as a useful introduction to the book, but does not make possible a judgment as to the quality of my argument. The page consists entirely of a list of examples of the way US officials and senior military officers, late in 1967, were claiming that the United States was winning the war in Vietnam, and that enemy forces were weakening. These claims were a big part of the reason the Tet Offensive, a few months later, came as such a shock to the United States.

To judge the quality of the portions of my book devoted to this issue, the reader would need to see my evidence both that the claims of enemy weakness did not match the evidence actually available in 1967, and that those claims were strikingly disproved by the combat performance of enemy forces in 1968. None of that evidence appears on this page.

See online a more detailed description of the book.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jenna Vinson's "Embodying the Problem"

Jenna Vinson is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell where she teaches courses in the Journalism and Professional Writing concentration and also serves as a Research Associate at the Center for Women & Work.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Embodying the Problem: The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother, and reported the following:

I had not heard of Ford Madox Ford’s theory prior to the invitation to do the “page ninety-nine” test. While I was, admittedly, skeptical of the premise, I am pleasantly surprised by the results! I do think page 99 is representative of the focus of my new book Embodying the Problem.

Page 99 is the first page of the conclusion to Chapter 3, “Challenging Experts, Commonplaces, and Statistics: Teen Mothers’ Counter-Narratives.” Here is an excerpt from that page:

The dominant narrative of teenage pregnancy encourages many to see pregnancy as the climactic moment of downfall in a young woman’s life. Commonplaces about teenage pregnancy, including the statistics that render it an urgent social issue, invite people to see young mothers as embodied exigencies—problems to address or prevent—not people who deserve respect and rights. In Talking Back, hooks writes of a need for marginalized people to reclaim and recover themselves by contesting, with authority, the structures and ways of speaking which objectify them. Drawing on poststructuralist theory of language and subjectivity, I have shown that some young mothers use their subject position as “teenage mothers” to craft and publish new stories, assertively reauthoring their lives to counter popular ways of thinking about teenage pregnancy and motherhood. By providing analysis of young women’s first-person narratives about pregnancy and motherhood, I provide a new way of thinking about statements from young mothers—as statements constructed for a rhetorical purpose.

Focusing on edited collections and a website that resist the imperative to sensationalize young mothers’ stories to prevent future teen pregnancies, I examined how young mothers tell counter-stories in order to intervene in popular constructions of who they are as women, students, and mothers. Describing specific strategies employed in counter-stories helps to identify the narrative elements and discursive tactics available to those who want to resist dominant discourses. In order to contest the commonplaces of teenage pregnancy discourses, many young mothers render uncommon the commonplace by re-iterating well-known statements about teenage pregnancy in ironic or satiric ways, questioning the fact that their motherhood is somehow “teenaged” or that their pregnancies determine their economic or educational success. Using narrative characterization, many young mothers also situate people who would construct or repeat such commonplaces as shortsighted or mean. These scenes invite readers to see those statements as barbaric and, as some mothers illustrate, as potentially pressuring teens to make choices they would not otherwise make (such as placing their child for adoption or not applying for college). Considering the current cultural context in which authorized experts—such as scholars, politicians, and medical officials—actively construct teenage pregnancy as a social problem, I highlight that many of the antagonizing characters in young mothers’ narratives are “experts.” This tactic may persuade readers to see the expert as fallible...

Chapter 3 is an important turning point in the book. In the first two chapters I provide a feminist critique of what I call “the dominant narrative of teenage pregnancy” and I ask readers to consider the serious consequences of the way we talk about young mothers (consequences such as everyday harassment of women, pressure on young mothers to leave school, acceptance of sexist assumptions, and more). Beginning with chapter 3, I shift the focus to examine how young mothers resist this narrative.

As I explain in the excerpt, I studied “edited collections and a website that resist the imperative to sensationalize young mother’s stories”—in other words, this is not analysis of MTV’s Teen Mom. These are published collections of personal stories shaped by women who have either experienced young motherhood or who aim to support young parents. An exciting contribution of my book is that it brings attention to the writing of young pregnant and mothering women who have, of their own accord, decided to narrate aspects of their lived experience in order to creatively challenge the idea that they are problems.

I will leave it at that so that readers can determine if page 99 tempts them to read more of the book!

Visit Jenna Vinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue