Alex J. Kay's "Empire of Destruction"

Alex J. Kay is Senior Lecturer (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) in History at the University of Potsdam and lifetime Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has published five acclaimed books on Nazi Germany, including The Making of an SS Killer.

Kay applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing, and reported the following:

For the first time, Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing offers readers an account of German war crimes against all major victim groups in a single volume. Page 99 is the opening page of Chapter 4 on the "Murder of Psychiatric Patients and Roma in the Soviet Union". It thus introduces the reader to two perhaps lesser-known demographic groups among the Nazis’ many victims. The opening sentences of the chapter inform the reader:

Soviet Jews were the principal victims of the mass-murder campaign waged in the USSR between summer 1941 and spring 1942 by SS and police forces with the active support of the Wehrmacht, but they were not the only population groups murdered there for racial-biological reasons. Soviet psychiatric patients and Roma – both regarded by the Nazis as racially inferior and thus as posing a biological threat, and both targeted in an attempt to ‘purify’ the newly occupied territories – were also murdered in large numbers during this period.

Page 99 is no more or less crucial to my book than any other page. What it does do, however, is bring together on a single page the three victim groups of Nazi mass-killing policies that – of all seven groups addressed in the book – perhaps had most in common in terms of the systematic nature of their persecution, the extent of its geographic coverage and the methods used to murder the victims: Jews, psychiatric patients and Roma.

Between 1939 and 1941, the Nazi regime intended to deport Jews and Roma together as part of the same vast programme of ethnic cleansing and demographic engineering. Both deportation programmes, with notable exceptions, went unrealised. The discriminatory measures of concentration and deprivation of freedom of movement, forced-labour exploitation, isolation and humiliation were often identical. The programme for the systematic murder of psychiatric patients in the German Reich exhibits remarkable parallels to the murder of Europe’s Jews from 1941 onwards. Not only were a large number of people murdered using gas in special killing centres, but a complex process based on a division of labour was developed, by means of which the victims were to be deceived until the last moment, the perpetrators seemingly freed from all responsibility and the secrecy of the entire programme ensured. The repeated transfer of the victims, the deployment of medical doctors for performing examinations or selections and the introduction of the criterion of "unfitness for work" are all elements that illustrate the direct links between the two murder programmes.

Wherever in occupied Europe German forces went, they murdered Jews, psychiatric patients and Roma. Many of the killing operations worked on parallel lines. The perpetrators of Nazi mass killing were spread across a number of state and party institutions. Some of these organisations were involved in several programmes of annihilation, often simultaneously. The SS and police, for instance, played a central role in the mass murder of Roma, psychiatric patients and Jews in the occupied territories. Nazi Germany intentionally killed 5.8 million European Jews, 300,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 200,000 European Roma. Substantial numbers of disabled people, Jews and Roma fell victim to the perpetrators’ three principal killing methods: starvation, shooting and gassing, in that order.

Learn more about Empire of Destruction at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Making of an SS Killer.

--Marshal Zeringue

David N. Gellman's "Liberty's Chain"

David N. Gellman is Professor of History at DePauw University. He is the author of Emancipating New York, coauthor of American Odysseys, and coeditor of Jim Crow New York.

Gellman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York, and reported the following:

Page 99 features a portrait of John Jay by Rembrandt and Raphaelle Peale, c. 1795. The page also summarizes key features of the controversial treaty Jay negotiated with Britain in 1794 to stave off war and to address long-simmering conflict between the US and the former mother country. Opponents viewed the Jay Treaty as a sell-out of US interests which failed to extract respect for US neutrality.

If you can judge a book by its cover, then page 99 fits the bill. The cover of my book strikingly incorporates this very image. And to the degree that John Jay is the Founding Father patriarch whose complicated relationship to slavery sets in motion the national and family drama that the rest of the book narrates, the page works. The text on the rest of the page, however, does not speak directly to the book’s themes. There is no mention of slavery or specific enslaved people on page 99. Nonetheless, what the page does demonstrate is that context is crucial. Among the objections that agitated Jay Treaty opponents was the lack of any compensation for enslaved people who departed with the British at the end of the Revolutionary War, in alleged violation of the very peace treaty that Jay himself negotiated with the British in Paris more than a decade before. Notably, Jay brought enslaved people, Abbe and Benoit to France, and Peet to England to attend to his household during both sets of diplomatic negotiations. The ways in which the lives of the enslaved interweaved with the Jays’ public work, sometimes quite tragically, is a central theme of the book.

Liberty’s Chain is a multi-generational biography. Readers get the opportunity to meet some extraordinary figures—in particular John Jay’s son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II—in the fight for emancipation. The cause these two Jays embraced threatened to tear apart the nation whose founding provided the basis of their famous last name. Their alliances and antagonisms allow me to tell a family story that spans from the colonial period to the early 20th century to think anew about some of the most important events and themes in all of American history.

Learn more about Liberty's Chain at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Trenton Merricks's "Self and Identity"

Trenton Merricks is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Objects and Persons (2001), Truth and Ontology (2007), Propositions (2015), and many articles in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion.

Merricks applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Self and Identity, and reported the following:

Here is page 99 of Self and Identity in its entirety:

what it would be like to be a vampire because you cannot know what it would be like to have a different self, or at least not a significantly different self. (Paul (2014; 2015a) goes so far as to claim that an adult woman who is not yet a mother cannot know what it would be like for her to have the values, desires, and projects she will have as a mother.)

Suppose that you are now a vampire. Back when you were a normal human, you could not know what it would be like to have your current vampiric values, desires, and projects. But you—a vampire—remember what it was like to have the values, desires, and projects of a normal human. So you know what it would be like to have those values, desires, and projects. So I need to qualify my remark that you cannot know what it would be like to have a different self. Let me say instead that you cannot know what it would be like to have a different self unless you had that self in the past and remember what it was like.

You have first-personal access to a person’s point of view at a future time only if you can know what it would be like to be that person at that future time. You cannot know what it would be like to have a different self (unless you had that self in the past). So if a person at a future time will have a different self than you have now (or have ever had), then you do not have first-personal access to that person’s point of view at that future time. So—according to Velleman—that person will not have, at that future time, what matters in survival for you. Thus Velleman’s views imply that you cannot survive a change in self (unless that change results in your reacquiring values, desires, and projects that you once had). So Velleman is (nearly) a Selfer.

I shall take my objections to the Selfer view to be objections to what Velleman (1996) says. So it is important that my objections to the Selfer view are not just objections to the view that you cannot survive any change in self, but are also objections to the thesis that you cannot survive those changes in self that involve your acquiring values, desires,

So that was page 99.

I think the test does not work very well for my book. This is for two reasons.

First, this is not really a book about vampires, but page 99 makes it seem like it is.

Second, page 99 is making a point that is important to the book’s overall argument. But that point all by itself—when not put in the context of the book’s overall argument—leaves the reader in the dark about the main topics of the book.

The book is about this question: what way of being related to a person at a future time explains why it is appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate the experiences that that person will have at that time, and to have self-interested concern with regard to those experiences?

I defend this answer to the above question: your being identical with that person at that future time. The first three chapters of the book defend this answer.

The next three chapters object to competing answers to the above question, answers that all involve some sort of psychological connectedness and/or psychological continuity. The answer Chapter Four focuses on is the “Selfer view,” which answers this question in terms of having “the same self,” that is, in terms of having the same values, desires, and projects. But this chapter also considers another answer in terms of “first-personal access.” Page 99 occurs in Chapter Four, and is part of my argument for the claim that this other answer implies (something really close to) the Selfer view.

Visit Trenton Merricks's website.

The Page 99 Test: Propositions.

--Marshal Zeringue

M. Chris Fabricant's "Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System"

M. Chris Fabricant is the Innocence Project’s Director of Strategic Litigation and one of the nation’s leading experts on forensic sciences and the criminal justice system. Fabricant is featured in the Netflix documentary The Innocence Files and his public commentary has been published in virtually every major media outlet.

Fabricant applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System, and reported the following:

In Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System on page 99 (the sentence begins on page 98):

By the time I began working as a public defender in the South Bronx in 2006 (at the Bronx Defenders), the DNA revolution sparked by the Innocence Project had changed the landscape of the American criminal justice system. Doubt had been introduced; the threat of wrongful conviction was no longer theoretical. My generation of defense attorneys was pushing back on the introduction of unreliable evidence against our clients. Nearly always, we lost. And men like Keith Harward and Steven Chaney—innocent prisoners who later became my clients—continued to be convicted on junk science. Most courts refused to seriously entertain arguments that forensic sciences were unreliable, wrongful convictions notwithstanding. But the same year I started in the Bronx, the National Academy of Sciences began another—much more comprehensive—investigation into forensics, this time focused on the many forms of poor people science.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book. It concludes the first chapter of Part II, which begins to bring my personal experiences more directly into the narrative, concludes the discussion of the DNA revolution, the founding of the Innocence Project and surfaces a theme, “poor people science,” that I explore throughout Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System. Poor people science is the difference between the scientific evidence used in civil litigation, where money is at stake and less likely to be unreliable, and the “scientific” evidence used in the American criminal justice system, where life and liberty are at stake, and junk science is pervasive. The difference speaks to our values as a society.

Follow M. Chris Fabricant on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicole Howard's "Loath to Print"

Nicole Howard is a professor of history at Eastern Oregon University. She is the author of The Book: The Life Story of a Technology.

Howard applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500–1750, and reported the following:

The ninety-ninth page recounts a moment when Christian Huygens, the Dutch astronomer and mathematician, shared copies of his 1656 treatise on Saturn with colleagues in France. This small publication proposed that Saturn had moons, but it also contained an anagram (unsolvable code) which posited Huygens’ theory that Saturn had a ring around it. He wanted to publish this secret to secure credit for it without actually divulging the idea. When, three years later, he had enough data to support this theory of a ring, he published a full book on it, System of Saturn. Copies of this work were strategically sent to astronomers whom Huygens determined were the most useful for assessing and verifying his theory.

Page 99 does not shine a light on the totality of the book’s argument, but it does illuminate one aspect of that thesis: the idea that scientists like Huygens worked to carefully create their own “custom” audiences for a work.

What the Page 99 Test does here is provide the reader with a key point of entry to the larger argument of the book, which is that scientists in the period we often call “the scientific revolution” were not nearly as enamored with the printing press as historians have imagined. Rather, they viewed the press as a liability, a tool that threatened their ideas by making them available to readers who lacked the training or skill to assess them fairly. The introduction describes an array of complaints about printing that early modern scientists expressed. Subsequent chapters explore the ways that authors dealt with these lamentations. Some circumvented the press altogether or manipulated the publication process in order to target readers of their choosing. Page 99 hits on this, as Huygens tried to secure his reputation in astronomy by sending fifty-three copies of his Saturn treatise to specific individuals, each of whom could strategically help him. Other chapters look at scientists who explicitly tried to discourage certain “ignorant” readers, or who developed their own private printing methods in order to reach a narrow audience of their choosing. Ultimately, this is a book about how scientists in this rich period looked at the democratizing tool of the printing press, saw little advantage in it, and worked out various alternative ways to disseminate their ideas.

Learn more about Loath to Print at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katie Gaddini's "The Struggle to Stay"

Katie Gaddini is a sociologist at the Social Research Institute, University College London (UCL) and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Sociology. In 2021-2022 she is a Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellow of the Social Science Research Council. Gaddini holds master’s degrees from Boston College and the London School of Economics, and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge.

Her debut book, The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women Are Leaving the Church, is a book based on over four years of in-depth ethnographic research with single evangelical women in the US and the UK. Her current research investigates Christianity and politics in the US.

Gaddini applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Struggle to Stay and reported the following:

Page 99 is in the middle of the chapter ‘Purity Culture,’ which details white evangelicalism’s approach to dating, sex, and sexuality. I meet Jo, a single evangelical woman in my study, at a bar in New York City, and she tells me, in her characteristic directness, her thoughts on the matter. Here is an excerpt:

Soon after we sat down, I bluntly asked if she ever felt an imposed muteness around sex. She nodded her head and swallowed her juice, clearing her throat before speaking. A few months prior, she recounted, she was talking to a friend and had casually inserted the topic of masturbation into the conversation. Her friend had interrupted Jo midsentence.

“Wait, what? A Christian girl who masturbates?”

“Um, what Christian girl doesn’t?”

“Um, most of them,” her friend answered, her certainty starting to wither as she spoke.

“And so I told her, well, they are either lying or they are fucking dumb!” Jo roared with laughter after this final pronouncement and emptied her glass.

Jo’s friend’s assumption that evangelical women did not masturbate was understandable. As Linda Kay Klein notes in her book about the evangelical movement, “The purity movement teaches that every sexual activity—from masturbation to kissing if it elicits that special feeling—can make one less pure.” Although I had never heard a pastor at Wellspring speak about masturbation, leaders at Bethel Church, in California, certainly did. On day 11 of the “Purity Plan” on YouTube, Caitlin Zick and Jason Vallotton explain, in separate sexual purity messages, that masturbation is a “painkiller” that people use when they feel disconnected from others. They articulate the standard evangelical stance clearly: masturbation violates God’s plan for purity and connection.

Readers who open to Page 99 might think that my book is all about sex. It isn’t. Although my research originally started as an investigation into evangelical women’s approach to sex and sexuality, it quickly bloomed into a larger inquiry into what it means to be a single evangelical woman in the US and UK today – including various struggles, joys, and complexities. Even though the book covers a range of topics, sex and sexuality are a major issue that devout women must contend with, and as a result, ‘Purity Culture’ is the longest chapter in the book. I had so much material to cover! So, I would say all in all that the Page 99 Test works for my book, and at the very least introduces the reader to Jo, a spirited and very likeable character.

Visit Katie Gaddini's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Wilson's "Imitation of Rigor"

Mark Wilson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and the author of Physics Avoidance (2017) and Wandering Significance (2006). He has written widely on how our categories for describing the large-scale world around us have progressively evolved, within both science and our ordinary ways of speaking. He also supervises The North American Traditions Collection of Folk Music.

Wilson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Imitation of Rigor: An Alternative History of Analytic Philosophy, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test lands us in the middle of a somewhat technical example that nonetheless encapsulates the central morals of the book. To sidestep unnecessary details, I will take the liberty of appropriating a simpler example from another book of mine (the most efficient means of explicating page 99 of The Good Soldier may refer to Ford Madox Ford's collaborations with Conrad). A real-life material such as a steel beam is comprised of a hierarchy of smaller substructures [image left], which progressively emerge into view as we descend to smaller scale lengths. Metaphysical orthodoxy claims that our thinking about such arrangements needs to be governed by an all-inclusive “logic of large and small.” But every practical engineer realizes that this naïve approach leads to an intractable descriptive overload. Recent successes in treating complicated materials have suggested a more flexible approach called “multiscalar modeling” in which the task of dealing with large and small becomes allocated to a hierarchy of simpler submodels that treat the dominant behaviors that normally prevail upon their correlated scale lengths. So, we begin by modeling the beam’s normal stretching behavior on a macroscopic level according to simple Hookean rules. But these standard expectations sometimes fail due to events that originate upon a more minute level (e.g., the dislocation lines visible in our third picture may shift position and render the steel brittle). A multiscalar modeling architecture only attends to these lower scale disruptions when necessary, following a general policy of “don’t scratch where it don’t itch.” This simple division of descriptive labor (which usually requires a long sequence of successive corrections) can reduce a complex problem to a set of manageable tasks.

I then argue that our ordinary thinking is frequently structured by similar expedients without much conscious recognition on our parts that we are doing so. Left undiagnosed, these otherwise beneficial intellectual adjustments frequently serve as significant sources of conceptional confusion due to the fact that seemingly identical terminologies (in our example, the words “force” and “cause”) commonly reappear with subtly altered meanings within the component submodels. Much of my book traces our current misconceptions of “what rigorous methodology in philosophy demands" to a historical misdiagnosis of exactly this kind, in which surface “logic” and axiomatics became unwisely prized as universal conceptual correctives when more supple forms of diagnosis in the spirit of multiscalar modeling are actually wanted.

Learn more about Imitation of Rigor at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Justin Murphy's "Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger"

Justin Murphy is the education reporter at the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, New York.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book happens to be the first page of a chapter, focusing on a pair of near-simultaneous events at the local and state level that ended up being very important to the story of desegregation in Rochester in different ways.

In late May 1963, the Rochester City School District superintendent, Robert Springer, flew to Dallas for his brother in-law’s funeral. While staying at his sister’s home, the fifty-one-year-old suffered a heart attack in his sleep and was rushed to the Baylor University Hospital. He died on June 19, a gallstone apparently having blocked his bile ducts and caused an infection. Herman Goldberg, the district’s special education director, was appointed as interim superintendent after the school board’s first choice turned down the assignment.

The day before Springer’s death, the state education commissioner, James Allen, had issued a directive that would come to define Herman Goldberg’s legacy in Rochester. Specifically addressing Malverne, a small, segregated Long Island school district, Allen said that the district needed to redraw the attendance boundaries to create some approximate racial balance among its three schools. More generally, he wrote in an open letter to New York school leaders:

The position of the department . . . is that the racial imbalance existing in a school in which the enrollment is wholly or predominantly Negro interferes with the achievement of equality of educational opportunity and therefore must be eliminated from the schools of New York State.

Does this page give a good sense of the entire premise of the book? One could do worse, I suppose. It captures the way that local and state or national factors have combined, for good or for ill.

In this case, both Herman Goldberg, the Rochester superintendent, and James Allen, the state education commissioner, were considered admirable white liberals who staked their careers on desegregating schools. Both could make a case that they did everything within their power to make that vision reality - and yet their vision did not, in fact, become reality. One can point to crucial moments where each of these white liberal leaders failed to intervene due to political or pragmatic calculations. Could they have made a difference if they’d acted differently? It’s hard to say. I think they could have.

What I’d really like to do is turn to the next page of the book and share a little about Herman Goldberg’s remarkable background. He was born in Brooklyn in 1915 and played baseball at Brooklyn College. From there he was chosen for the baseball demonstration team for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, making him one of the very few Jewish athletes to participate in the games in Nazi Germany. He later recalled sitting just a few feet away from Adolf Hitler in the stands watching swimming or wrestling matches.

I tried but did not succeed in contacting some of Goldberg’s descendants as I was writing the book. Remarkably, just a few weeks before publication, his son emailed me from out of state on an entirely different topic. I was able to direct him to the book and was gratified that he found it to be a fair assessment of his father and the work he did in very trying circumstances.

Visit Justin Murphy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judith A. Green's "The Normans"

Judith A. Green is professor emeritus of history at the University of Edinburgh. Her many distinguished works include Henry I and The Aristocracy of Norman England.

Green applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th Century Europe, and reported the following:

Page 99 gives a very good idea of two of the main themes of the book, power and conquest. Its subject is a man named Robert of Rhuddlan, who came from Normandy to England as a lad. He spent fifteen years fighting in North Wales, carving out a territory for himself at the expense of the Welsh whom he killed, imprisoned or enslaved. He finally met his end by attacking the Welsh king whose ships were stranded on the beach near the Great Orme, even though his men were hopelessly outnumbered. He was a warrior who came to death, we are told, through pride and greed. His story is reflected in those of other Norman leaders, such as William the Conqueror, Robert Guiscard and his brothers who conquered southern Italy and Sicily, and Bohemond and Tancred, commanders on the First Crusade.

What is the reality which lay behind their conquests, and the myth that they were terrific warriors, the ‘stormin’ Normans’? The first part of this book explores various possible explanations, arguing that a great deal of their success was due to timing, luck, and opportunism rather than any qualities unique to Normans. The second considers the effects of their conquests in terms of state building and lordship, power experienced at its most direct, and then looks at the wider context. ‘Cultural encounters’ deals with the impact of newcomers on natives in different parts of Europe and the near East, and ranges from dress and diet to music and medicine. The issue of identity comes up when looking at Norman emigration, and the extent to which they continued to identify with a Norman ‘homeland’. Then the visible legacy of their presence in terms of castles and cathedrals is highlighted. If England was to be studded with far more castles than before 1066, the Normans’ arrival made much less change in southern Italy, for instance, where there were already Byzantine towers. Almost all major churches in England after 1066 were destroyed and rebuilt on a huge scale but in a form that did not simply replicate those in Normandy. In other words, the Normans were catalysts of change, but the old certainties of the nature and extent of change have been swept aside in recent years.

Learn more about The Normans at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Popp Berman's "Thinking like an Economist"

Elizabeth Popp Berman is associate professor of organizational studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Thinking Like an Economist is part of the introduction of chapter 5, which looks at how what I call the "economic style of reasoning" spread into social policy -- in antipoverty efforts and healthcare, among other domains. Page 99 describes how the economic style of reasoning -- a loose way of thinking about policy that centers "efficiency, incentives, and choice" -- came into conflict with the arguments that underpinned the legislation launching the Great Society. As I write, some of those arguments were

grounded in the logic of social insurance -- that is, the idea that universal government programs could be used to protect people against risks associated with old ago, unemployment, and sickness or disability. Others, more recent in origin, emphasized democratic participation or the establishment of new rights, including the right to income, to housing, and to medical care. Still others, emerging from the civil rights movement, sought to ensure racial and gender equality. These values imbued the laws that established a wide range of Great Society programs, even as they ran into resistance from politicians who subscribed to competing American political ideals.

The page goes on to describe how the Great Society facilitated expansion of the economic style of reasoning, despite those conflicts, and discusses how the new experts who came to administer and control the Great Society had effects:

Their influence would prove uneven -- significant in antipoverty policy, expanding in health and housing policy, and initially stymied in education policy. Where they became influential, though, they changed the terms of policy debate. Proposals to politically empower poor Americans, to provide a family allowance to all households with children (as did the U.K. and Canada), or to establish national health insurance started to seem inefficient or irrelevant, while proposals that emphasized cost-sharing, means-testing, and 'institution-building for competition' increasingly seemed natural. The commitments to universality, rights, and equality had been sidelined by an emphasis on efficiency, incentives, and choice.

Page 99 does sum up the core themes of the book quite well -- while the book as a whole covers policy domains from antitrust to transportation regulation, the story it tells is fundamentally about a tension between a new, superficially neutral way of thinking about policy problems, the values embedded within it, and how they conflicted with -- and often squeezed out -- competing values -- in ways that had lasting consequences for policy, and especially for Democrats.

Visit Elizabeth Popp Berman's website.

The Page 99 Test: Creating the Market University.

--Marshal Zeringue