Sunny Stalter-Pace's "Imitation Artist"

Sunny Stalter-Pace is the Hargis Associate Professor of American Literature at Auburn University. She is the author of Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York Subway.

Stalter-Pace applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann's Life in Vaudeville and Dance, and reported the following:

What’s on page 99 of Imitation Artist? A news story about Gertrude Hoffmann’s cubist dress and a review of her performance in Chicago that compares her vaudeville performance to modern abstract art. Here’s an extract of the review:

“She is ethereal, but it is ether with phosphorescent edges trailing in ugly green and with sibilant hushes around her wraith. She is ghostly past impressionisty.”

Page 99 gives an accurate representation of the whole biography for a couple of reasons. It uses a lot of primary sources from the early twentieth century to tell the story of Gertrude Hoffmann’s stage career. She was born in San Francisco and lived in New York City, but she regularly toured across the U.S., so the setting at this point in the book gives a good indication of that. (Her husband Max Hoffmann started writing songs while he lived in Chicago too.) Most importantly, it talks about Hoffmann as a figure who brings together popular culture and high art. Even if you know a lot about this period in American culture, you might not think that a fast-paced musical comedy would be compared to a painting by Pablo Picasso. But Hoffmann’s performances bring the lowbrow and the highbrow together in unexpected ways.

A weird side note about the cubist gown mentioned in the news story: I have no idea if it existed, and I suspect it didn’t. One of the challenges of writing about theater history has to do with its ephemerality: it’s there onstage, and then it’s gone. The evidence you have to work with might be video, or still photography, or a story – and there’s no guarantee that any piece of evidence is accurate by itself. I don’t know if Gertrude Hoffmann had a cubist dress, but I do know that enough people compared her to modern art that the comparison made sense to the American newspaper-reading public circa 1913, and I wanted to know why that was the case.

Learn more about Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann's Life in Vaudeville and Dance at the Northwestern University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Claas Kirchhelle's "Pyrrhic Progress"

Claas Kirchhelle is an historian at the University of Oxford. His award-winning research explores the history of antibiotics and the development of modern risk perceptions, microbial surveillance, and international drug regulation.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Pyrrhic Progress: The History of Antibiotics in Anglo-American Food Production, and reported the following:

From page 99:

"...the effect of the addition of antibiotic supplements [to domestic feeds] is unlikely to be of commercial importance.” (1951)

To my surprise, page 99 takes us right to the heart of Pyrrhic Progress' exploration of uncertainty, overhasty decision-making, and counter science in 20th century drug regulation. What at first glance appears to be a very unexciting sentence from a technical report is in fact an explosive statement that casts doubt on the science underpinning one of the most significant expansions of modern antibiotic use.

Since the 1930s, antibiotics' ability to treat and manage bacterial infections has saved countless lives. However, it is often forgotten that over 50% of global antibiotic use does not occur in humans but in animals and plants. A large part of agricultural use was initially driven by the so-called 'antibiotic growth effect'. Accidently discovered by US industry researchers in 1949, the 'antibiotic growth effect' stated that regularly feeding low doses of antibiotics to animals and humans could promote their growth and ability to convert food. The discovery drove a major expansion of global antibiotic use and made it acceptable for producers to routinely medicate increasingly large numbers of animals.

But the science behind antibiotic growth promoters was murky. In 1951, British government researchers, who were keen to replicate US findings, found no pronounced benefit of adding antibiotics to rations. However, their concerns about US data and antibiotics' selection for resistant bacteria on farms were ignored. In 1953, Britain followed the US and licensed low-dosed antibiotic growth promoters. Abstract long-term hazards were outweighed by hopes for economic benefits resulting from cheaper meat and new agricultural outlets for the antibiotic market.

Although studies continued to question their efficacy and safety, low-dosed antibiotics became a standard component of animal rations. Their alleged importance for global food security was cited by industry to oppose restrictions when fears about bacterial resistance to antibiotics became more widespread from the 1960s onwards.

Low-dosed growth promoter feeds were eventually banned first in the European Union between 1998 and 2006 and in the US from 2013 onwards. By this time, many producers had begun to doubt feeds' effectiveness and it was clear that agricultural antibiotics had contributed to the emerging global health crisis of bacterial resistance. By reconstructing the turbulent history of agricultural antibiotics, Pyrrhic Progress highlights the difficulties of modern drug regulation and the danger of prioritising short-term gains over long-term health hazards.

Learn more about Pyrrhic Progress at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James P. Woodard's "Brazil's Revolution in Commerce"

James P. Woodard, professor of history at Montclair State University, is the author of A Place in Politics: São Paulo, Brazil, from Seigneurial Republicanism to Regionalist Revolt.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Brazil's Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century, and reported the following:

Flipping through the early chapters of my book with some anticipation, I found the top of page 99 to be a letdown. For the crucial page opens midway through a paragraph describing techniques used by the media- and market-research firm Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião Pública e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics, known universally in Brazil as IBOPE, pronounced ee-bop), founded in 1942 by a Brazilian admirer of George Gallup. These are important details, to be sure, but it is hardly the most exciting passage in the book.

Description of IBOPE’s techniques continues through the next two paragraphs, toward the end of the second of which one finds its scheme for ranking the neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro by the socioeconomic class of their households, using the letters A, B, and C; A denoting the toniest neighborhoods, C the least chic. Now we’re getting somewhere—I thought to myself as my eyes worked their way down the page—for as the next paragraph indicates, the classification of household socioeconomic standing using the letters A, B, and C was something that IBOPE had borrowed from the J. Walter Thompson Company, which had developed the system in the United States before bringing to Brazil in 1929, when the powerful New York–based advertising agency opened its first Brazilian office. By time IBOPE’s operations were in full swing, in the mid-1940s, the A, B, C scheme had reached much wider use in Brazil than it ever did in the United States. And it is there that page 99 ends, in another incomplete paragraph.

If any readers persevered through the discussion of “coincidental radio checking” techniques and reached this discussion of the origins and diffusion of a letter-denominated system of social classification, they would have—knowingly or not—arrived at something that is at once one of the “hooks” to the project, as well as evidence of its central thrust. For it follows up on where the book begins:

Preface.

A classe C vai ao paraíso!

(Class C goes to paradise!)

These words were everywhere in Brazil as the first decade of the twentieth-first century ended. They indicated that, for the first time in the country’s history, its working poor (class C) had arrived and become full participants in its consumer capitalism—its world of getting and spending, of more—built up over the preceding decades by firms the likes of J. Walter Thompson and IBOPE, amid encounters between the United States and Brazil in which Brazilians were the most crucial actors. Along the way, their country and its culture were remade, to the extent that the dominant way of discussing social difference in Brazil today is an artifact of interwar Madison Avenue. That remaking—the cumulative work of decades—is the subject of every one of the pages of Brazil’s Revolution in Commerce. Along the way, readers will even find that the book hazards an explanation for why the A, B, C system caught on in Brazil (today it is ubiquitous, used even by the Brazilian equivalent of the Census Bureau), whereas in the United States it fell into disuse even in advertising circles, never having made any broader cultural impact. But that explanation begins 189 pages after the page we began with today...

Learn more about Brazil's Revolution in Commerce at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leah Cardamore Stokes's "Short Circuiting Policy"

Leah C. Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and affiliated with the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States, and reported the following:

From page 99:

At the state level, there were few renewable energy projects in the pipeline by the early 1990s. Instead, advocates focused their attention on blocking coal plants. Before deregulation, many states had transitioned to IRP processes. In theory, this planning approach was supposed to bring public benefits like environmental harms into utilities’ proposals. It largely worked: advocates advancing energy efficiency and renewables in IRPs were often winning. But with deregulation, the IRP process would disappear from many states (Duane 2002; Wiser et al. 2000). Thus, advocates had to change tactics and find new policy ideas that could be tacked onto the agenda of the day: electricity restructuring.

Advocates working through a cross-state network saw restructuring as a policy opportunity. The Energy Foundation—a foundation started in 1991 that provides grants to clean energy advocates—funded this advocacy network. The group met regularly to discuss policy ideas and political strategies. To build capacity offline, the foundation set up a list-serve where members could share and debate. Key groups in this network in the mid-1990s included the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and the Utility Reform Network (TURN).

In specific states, the foundation would strategically fund groups when policy opportunities arose. This funding strategy involved a blend of insider groups, who could sit at the table and negotiate policy; and outsider groups, who could build grassroots campaigns to pressure the negotiations externally. Over time, this strategy evolved, and eventually the Energy Foundation saw itself as funding three kinds of groups: pillars, specialists, and local groups. Pillars led regional efforts across the country, providing professional staff and technical expertise—these groups included UCS, the Renewable Northwest Project and the Conservation Law Foundation. Specialist groups had a narrow focus, only working on one topic such as energy efficiency. Local groups had relationships and credibility in a given state and the ability to drive grassroots mobilization. In practice, this funding model sometimes failed to incorporate local groups into national campaigns or would result in national groups parachuting into local debates last minute. That said, even those groups that did not receive foundation funding, such as state Public Interest Research Groups and Environment America, built relationships with the network and provided critical grassroots support. Many of the EF-funded groups also worked together to try to get a federal clean energy target on the agenda during the 1990s, although that effort ultimately failed.

The advocates struggled in the early days of this foundation network to agree on which policy to advance (Wiser et al. 1998). There were three main options: voluntary green power purchasing, a system benefits charge, and...

Page 99 is a few pages from the end of Chapter 3, which discusses the institutional history of electricity politics and climate inaction. The page is a decent reflection of the book as a whole. It touches on how an advocacy group network was formed to promote clean energy policies across the American states. These groups, who have worked on trying to advance climate policy for decades, include the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Public Citizen and the Sierra Club. The page ends on a gloomy note: these advocates’ efforts in the 1990s to pass a federal clean energy standard failed. Sadly, this page captures one of the themes of the book: our failure to pass clean energy legislation that is up to the scale of the climate challenge. What the page largely leaves out is the dominant and disproportionately powerful role that electric utilities and fossil fuel companies played in systematically attacking and preventing clean energy policies. This includes trying to roll back Renewable Portfolio Standards and net metering laws, whose implementation was helping to decarbonize our electricity grid and address climate change. I hope that my book can help expose the historic and systematic efforts electric utilities, fossil fuel companies and other interest groups have taken to block and weaken climate policy. Ultimately, we need a federal clean energy standard to ensure that all states are cleaning up their electricity systems. Perhaps we will finally get one in 2021!

Visit Leah C. Stokes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nolan Bennett's "The Claims of Experience"

Nolan Bennett is an Assistant Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. He is a scholar of American political thought, and his research considers why and to what effect historical actors and movements ground their claims for democratic justice in personal experience. He recovers genres like autobiography, slave narrative, and prison writing as appeals to popular authority and representation not found in state or electoral politics. Bennett is particularly interested in issues of prison reform and punishment in the United States, inspired by the long history of prison writing, and with a committed interest to teaching in carceral spaces.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his 2019 book, The Claims of Experience: Autobiography and American Democracy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Claims of Experience is a strange page. For one, it is one of few pages with an image: a picture of the Machinery Hall at the 1900 Paris Exposition. I acquired a stereoscopic print just like this while researching the book, and hoped it would bring readers closer to the experience that Henry Adams was having when he visited that very hall. That’s the subject of the page: Adams’s witnessing there among other technologies the “dynamo,” a kind of rudimentary electric engine. This is recalled within arguably the most famous chapter of Adams’s memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams. On page 99 I explain the dynamo as Adams’s symbol for what he calls “education,” a kind of modern subjectivity whereby individuals process the many multiple forces of the world into a sense of self. As I discuss elsewhere, Adams was one of many in the era overwhelmed by how developments in technology and the sciences (think thermodynamics, the discovery of the atom, lingering implications of Darwinism, advancements in industry and psychology, the rise of secularism) threatened to fragment the individual’s sense of self. At the end of the page I contrast that modern unease with Benjamin West’s famous painting of Ben Franklin: the pinnacle of Enlightenment individualism whose hand served as a conduit for electricity from the heavens through a key on a kite to him. Franklin too famously wrote what some consider the first modern autobiography. Between that image I include in the book and West’s painting, then, you have a good sense of what worried Adams and what I work through in that chapter: as we learn more and more about the world and humanity’s power to reshape it, what then can we know and make of ourselves? And what use is that to others?

Nowhere else in the book do I get so deep into the sciences and technology, and this makes page 99 a strange, idiosyncratic representation of the text. If you were to open the book to this page I do not think you would get a very good sense of what it is about. Were you to come back to this page, though, you would see there a surprisingly good representation of the puzzles that motivated me to write the book. Standing before this massive engine in 1900, Adams describes himself having something like a religious experience, prostrated before a new electric god that he does not understand. The question, then, is not just why this experience mattered to Adams, but why he would write it down in The Education of Henry Adams: why he would write an autobiography (though he would never call his book that). If it took that machine to give Adams this fleeting sense of self, what good would his own recounted narrative be for readers? This question – what is the purpose of life narrative – has motivated a lot of scholars reading works back to Augustine’s Confessions and before. But in The Claims of Experience the question goes further: what makes this political? Adams saw amid those modern developments a sharp decline in political leadership, in national identity: but it is not just in those new technologies that Adams imagines him and other Americans finding a new sense of self, but the very autobiographical form of writing with which he’s experimenting. As is true of the other figures I study – Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Emma Goldman, and Whittaker Chambers – this is what renders his life narrative not just a recounting of the experience but a call to new community formed around experiences like it. But Adams remains the most idiosyncratic among these figures, and this is in part what makes page 99 such a strange point of entry for the book. Though it might not motivate anyone to read further, I will say though that it is also for this reason that page 99 is perhaps my favorite in the book. The puzzle posed there was the most difficult to unravel in my research, and thus it is the chapter I am most proud of. Unlike Adams, I wrote my own book for others – and so while I would recommend they start elsewhere, page 99’s image of Adams in the Machinery Hall in 1900 has inspired me throughout the book’s writing and still today.

Visit Nolan Bennett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zena Hitz's "Lost in Thought"

Zena Hitz is is a Tutor in the great books program at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she also lives. She has a PhD in ancient philosophy from Princeton University and studies and teaches across the liberal arts.

Hitz applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, I discuss the relation between our dignity as human beings and the fragility of our fantasies about ourselves. On the one hand, we fight for our dignity to resist our fragility, like Curt Schilling pitching the game of his life with a bleeding leg, or the Spartans combing their hair before dying at the battle of Thermopylae. But dignity in this sense can devolve into a fantasy that we are invincible or perfect. I relate how I was once in a hotel that caught fire in the night. I would have imagined in such circumstances I would be a hero, but in fact I was useless. A better kind of human dignity, I suggest, might lie in facing reality, not in constructing imaginary forms of humanity that are perfect, shiny and deathless.

It would be very difficult to tell from Page 99 of my book what the book as a whole is about--in fact, the main subject is not even visible there. The page falls in the middle of a digression on the meaning of dignity. My book is not about dignity, or fantasy, or heroism, but about the love of learning for its own sake. Learning matters, not because it helps us to make money or to be better citizens, but because it gives us an inner life, a place of escape and rest, and a place to grow and be renewed. I tell stories of the intellectual lives of service workers or even prisoners who have uncovered their dignity through reading and thinking, or who have used poetry or mathematics to preserve their humanity in dehumanizing circumstances. But that raises a question about what dignity is and why it matters for us: so we need a digression to explore the issues a bit. That said: there are a number of digressions in the book. I wanted the book to be about learning for its own sake, but I also wanted to learn a bit for its own sake while writing it, and to give the reader a chance to learn for his or her own sake. One of the things we do when we read and think is understand better what it means to be a human being and what really matters in life. What's the best way to improve oneself? Is it striving through competition to win at whatever game is being played? Or is it trying one's best to see, understand, appreciate and face the world as it is? Can these be combined? How? Read my book and think about it with me!

Visit Zena Hitz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison K. Lange's "Picturing Political Power"

Allison K. Lange is an associate professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology.

Her new book, Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, traces the ways that women’s rights reformers and their opponents used images to define gender and power in the United States.

Lange applied the “Page 99 Test” to Picturing Political Power and reported the following:

Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement examines the ways that women’s rights activists—and their opponents—used images to advance their cause and change gender ideals. The book features 105 historical images, and page

Figure 6

99 features two: portraits of 19th-century American women’s rights activist Clarina Howard Nichols. The captions [see below] are the only texts on the page.

In a way, this test is a great representation of the book. These portraits appeared in the first volume of The History of Woman Suffrage, a series published by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others starting in 1881. Americans encountered many portraits of men, but few women distributed their portrait because they were supposed to aspire to a domestic, private life.

Suffragists wanted the public to meet their leaders. They featured a portrait of Nichols, a Midwesterner who was one of the founders of their movement.

The first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage was published in 1881, and a second edition was printed in 1887. Anthony was in charge of the portraits, and she spent precious funds on a new engraving that featured an idealized, younger representation of Nichols. Nichols’s curls

Figure 7

have more bounce and her face is rounder. None of the others were updated. Anthony likely thought the new portrait presented a more appealing representation of the movement to the public.

The two portraits only make sense when we understand that most pictures that Americans encountered mocked female reformers and that suffragists were trying to win over the public with these portraits. Suffragists developed one of the first modern visual campaigns—with everything from posters and postcards to photographs—to create an appealing image of female activists. Most pictures highlighted well-off white women, overlooking male suffragists and reformers of color. Picturing Political Power puts portraits like Nichols’s in conversation with the mocking pictures that Anthony was trying to challenge. Even a century later, the themes in pro- and anti-suffrage pictures remain part of modern visual debates about women’s rights.

Figure 6: J. C. Buttre, Clarina I. Howard Nichols, 1881, engraving, published in the History of Woman Suffrage (1881), Vol. 1, facing page 193, Reproduction from Wellesley College, Library and Technology Services, Ella Smith Elbert Collection.

Figure 7: J. C. Buttre, Clarina I. Howard Nichols, 1887, engraving, published in the History of Woman Suffrage (1887), Vol. 1, reprint, facing page 193, Courtesy of University of Toronto Libraries.

Visit Allison K. Lange's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wendy Moore's "No Man's Land"

Wendy Moore is a freelance journalist and author of five non-fiction books on medical and social history. Her first book, The Knife Man, is a biography of the 18th-century surgeon John Hunter. Her second, Wedlock, tells the story of Mary Eleanor Bowes, a rich heiress tricked into marriage by a fortune-hunter. It was a Channel 4 TV Book Club choice and no 1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list. Moore's third book, How to Create the Perfect Wife, is the story of Thomas Day, a philanthropist who trained two foundlings in a bid to create his perfect wife. Her fourth, The Mesmerist, is the tale of the doctor who introduced hypnotism to Victorian London. Moore's new book, titled Endell Street in the UK and No Man's Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I in the US, is about Endell Street Military Hospital, which was run and staffed by women in London in the First World War.

Moore applied the “Page 99 Test” to No Man’s Land and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford was plainly right – at least in terms of the page 99 test on my new book No Man’s Land. The page, roughly one-third of the way through the book, marks a crucial turning point in the story.

Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson, two experienced doctors and former suffragettes, have already set up and run two hospitals in France treating wounded soldiers from the nearby Western Front. Women doctors had never previously treated men or performed military surgery but Murray and Anderson had proved their worth to such an extent that Sir Alfred Keogh, head of the British Army’s medical services, had invited them, in February 1915, to open a major military hospital in the heart of London staffed entirely by women. But it was not plain sailing.

The chapter title at the top of page 99 says it all: Good God! Women! This was the response from the army colonel in charge of converting the Victorian workhouse the women had been allotted - in Endell Street, Covent Garden - into a functioning hospital when Murray and Anderson arrived on site. Other army officers were equally hostile and unhelpful. But, as the opening paragraph on page 99 explains, these two seasoned campaigners of the battle for the women’s vote (who were also life partners), were undaunted.

After weeks of little or no progress on the site, Murray and Anderson finally took matters into their own hands. They directly petitioned Keogh, insisting that the renovations be put under their command, and Endell Street Military Hospital was formally handed over on March 22. Using their customary brand of ‘mild militancy’ which had worked such miracles in Paris and Wimereux, the two women then charmed, cajoled and threatened the workmen so that the alterations which had proved so troublesome were now completed within a few weeks.

By the beginning of May, as the page concludes, the hospital was taking shape with 520 beds in 17 wards, two operating theatres, an X-ray room and, of course, a mortuary. So page 99 provides a perfect example of the way in which these two formidable women persevered in the face of seemingly impossible odds in order to prove that women doctors were just as capable as their male colleagues.

Endell Street Military Hospital stayed open throughout World War One, treating more than 26,000 wounded soldiers. It was hailed a triumph by the press, the public and the medical profession – and, most importantly, by its grateful patients. When the war ended the hospital remained open for a further year, treating victims of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. But when the doors finally closed in late 1919 women doctors – all the women staff – were expected to go back to exactly the same lowly jobs they had had before.

Learn more about the book and author at Wendy Moore's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amber Roessner's "Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign"

Amber Roessner is associate professor in the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and the Sporting Press in America.

Roessner applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign, and reported the following:

On page 99 in [Chapter 5: Front-Running Dark Horse Encounters Resistance in the book] Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign, the reader will find an excerpt from conservative syndicated columnist George Will’s April 1, 1976 column entitled, “The Spirit that Moves Jimmy.” Within the column, Will wrote: “There is a Washington doctrine about the appropriate way to pray. Prayer is fine if done in moderation.... But Carter prays in church, and even while at home and while campaigning, for Pete’s sake.” Will asserted that this tendency was disconcerting to frontline reporters and potential voters not because it belied lack of “intellectual seriousness and emotional balance,” but because it meant Carter was unlike the average politician, who has “no spiritual process more complex than calculation—politicians who can be trusted to obey the First Commandment (revised): Thou shalt worship naught but the Gallup Poll.” Will and like-minded souls were distressed over the idea of a politician who “might occasionally doubt the axiom, vox popull, vox del (‘the voice of the people is the voice of God.’).” They did not consider that Carter was attuned to the voice of God and the people in 1976.

I will admit, just like the reporters following Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976, I did not place much faith in these claims, the page 99 test. However, the last full sentence of page 99 [After encountering deceptions of previous administrations and Carter’s truth-in-politics claims, Broder and his colleagues incisively inspected Carter’s campaign to vet his credibility, but his nuanced background and complex issues stances prompted them to construct Carter as an enigmatic, opportunistic politician.] does get to the very heart of a central theme in Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign –the negotiation of images at the center of what Time magazine hailed as one of the most astonishing political miracles in the nation’s history.

Featuring the signature tagline, “Jimmy Carter: A Leader, For a Change,” Jimmy Carter’s innovative (un)celebrity campaign capitalized on pairing chic, authentic images with two central themes—the New South leader’s commitment to the working man and the Washington outsider’s pledge for reform. “Jimmy Carter had struck a chord with the American people,” NBC News reporter Tom Brokaw recalled. “He was a Washington outsider, a church-going man, a farmer.” Carter’s campaign saturated news media with resonant images, but many journalists shared the consensus of Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Walter Mears: his “garment-bag politics [was a success] . . . but his staying power was in doubt.” You can read more about what Time magazine hailed as one of the most astonishing political miracles in the nation’s history in this book, which features the analysis of more than 25,000 primary source texts, that was more than a decade in the making.

Learn more about Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign at the Louisiana State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Howard Lune's "Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish"

Howard Lune is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the author of Urban Action Networks: HIV/AIDS and Community Organizing in New York City.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish, and reported the following:

I love the page 99 test and have used it many times. In this case, however, it’s half of a good introduction. Page 99 comes in the middle of a chapter discussing the rise of Nativism in the United States in the early to mid-1800s, showing how this impacted the American Irish and altered American Irish organizing. Of the three major themes of the book, this page shows one at work, touches on a second and does not address the third. Overall, that’s not bad for a random page.

The theme that this page (and chapter) most directly speaks to is that the American Irish identity, while strongly grounded in Irish culture, politics, and history, was very much shaped by the American context. The Nativist anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, America-first movement (which appeared to be a mere artifact of that moment, but we now see is not) reoriented the mission of American Irish organizations into a more militant direction. So that is hinted at here. The theme that is only touched on is that my study looks at collective identities through collective organization and collective action. In simple terms, I study groups. Several are mentioned in this one page with indications of how they related. A reader can get a quick sense of how my examination of these events is filtered through the middle-social level this way.

Finally, as the title indicates, the biggest part of the book is the transnational argument. I am trying to show how the organizational and cultural roots of Irish collective identity shaped the American Irish, and how the American Irish in turn reflected this back in support of Irish independence movements. None of that comes up on that page, and relatively little in this chapter. Still, the chapter has some of the most interesting stories in the book.

As for the writing, if you find this page reasonably inviting then you will probably enjoy the book. If not, well, there are some better parts but not way better. It’s a complex case but I try to be clear.

Learn more about Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish at the Temple University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue