Christian Warren's "Starved for Light"

Christian Warren is professor of history at Brooklyn College. He is the author of Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Starved for Light: The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Starved for Light follows conversations between researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the corporate and institutional funders of a recent clinical trial testing vitamin D-fortified evaporated milk as an “agent for the cure of rickets in negro infants.” The Carnation Milk Company was pleased with the research; in fact they had started promoting the special milk on their national radio program, the Carnation “Contented Hour.” Now they wanted additional research undertaken “with white children to see what the susceptibility of the dominant race is when compared with the colored race.” They went as far as to specify that “all babies used are to be white babies even omitting any that are Italian.” This new study was different from the first one in important ways. First, it sought to test only prevention, not cure; and unlike the first study, the subjects were not placed in a dark ward and given no rickets preventive foods, conditions sure to induce rickets. While in the new study most of the infants were kept in darkness, all received one of two vitamin D-fortified milks (whole fluid or evaporated). The study found that both milks prevented rickets; it was extended in time and space, morphing into a multi-ethnic out-patient study of dozens of infants.

This page comes at a climactic point of two chapters focusing on “The Science of Rickets.” It presents evidence for three topics that are central to the book: the presumed importance of race in understanding rickets; the interaction between “pure scientists” and commercial interests; and the ethical lapses they made in conducting their research. I think this page would be tantalizing to browsers, who might want to know more about the experiment mentioned here, which never would have been permitted just decades later, under the Nuremberg Code.

However, reading this page alone might give the false impression that Starved for Light’s focus is on clinical or laboratory science, when in fact its scope is far wider, examining the vitamin’s role in evolution, the role of such factors as climate, urbanization and migration in producing vitamin D deficiency; and the role rickets played in important developments in medical history, from obstetrics to orthopedics, nutrition science and experimental ethics. Early chapters explore rickets’ burden in the cities of Europe during the Industrial Revolution and in the slave quarters of the Cotton South. It also takes a light-hearted approach to the serious business of providing anti-rickets agents, from foul-tasting cod liver oil of old, to irradiated milk and UV lamps, to today’s Flintstone’s vitamin gummies and—old things new again, “Artisan Extra-Virgin Cod Liver Oil!”

Learn more about Starved for Light at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deondra Rose's "The Power of Black Excellence"

Deondra Rose is the Kevin D. Gorter Associate Professor of Public Policy and Associate Professor of Political Science and History at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on U.S. higher education policy, political behavior, American Political Development (APD), and the politics of identity, particularly in relation to gender, race, and socioeconomic status.

Rose applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Power of Black Excellence: HBCUs and the Fight for American Democracy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Power of Black Excellence provides an account of the background behind the speech that legendary civil rights activist, then-future congressman, and HBCU alumnus John Lewis delivered at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington. Lewis, who was the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had shared a draft of the speech with the White House, religious leaders, and the march’s organizers who urged him to tone down his fiery rhetoric. In one passage, he asserted that:

“The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently.”

Leaders feared that such language would only impede the progress that civil rights leaders had made. Lewis ultimately moderated his rhetoric, but his impatience with the slow pace of movement toward racial justice exemplified the frustration of many Black youth who fought on the frontlines of the civil rights movement and who desired bolder efforts to demand justice and Black liberation. As the example of John Lewis illustrates, HBCU students, their alumni, and their campuses played a central role in the civil rights movement. While this snapshot on page 99 does not offer the best microcosm of the entire work, it does illustrate the energy, deliberation, and purpose that so many HBCU alumni have brought to the long fight for Black liberation and multi-racial democracy.

Visit Deondra Rose's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meryl Gordon's "The Woman Who Knew Everyone"

Meryl Gordon is the director of NYU’s graduate Magazine and Digital Storytelling program. A graduate of the University of Michigan whose work has appeared in New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and the New York Times, she has written four biographies about influential, talented and wealthy women, all born at a time (ranging from 1892 to 1910) when women’s opportunities were limited.

Two of her books -- Mrs. Astor Regrets (2008) and Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend (2017) -- were New York Times bestsellers.

Gordon applied the “Page 99 Test” to her newest book, The Woman Who Knew Everyone: The Power of Perle Mesta, Washington's Most Famous Hostess, and reported the following:

On page 99, Perle is giving a 1948 party in honor of President Harry Truman at the gloomy Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, a time when everyone thought Truman would lose the election. She would go on to raise money that fall for Truman at a crucial moment, helping keep his campaign afloat, and he beat Thomas Dewey in an Election Night shocker. (The Chicago Tribune was so convinced of the likely outcome that an early edition ran the erroneous headline: Dewey Defeats Truman.)

At the Philadelphia party (page 99) Perle declared, “This is no wake. I’m tired of this kind of talk. This is a victory party.” She welcomed an NBC camera crew, the first time the networks had covered a convention. With the Democratic Party bitterly at odds over civil rights and segregationalist Southerners threatening a walk-out, one of the few Black delegates was invited to and attended Perle’s party. Noted on page 99, “As far as Perle was concerned, he was a Democrat, he was a delegate and he was welcome.”

The Page 99 Test gives a flavor of Perle’s commitment to Harry Truman and her support of Civil Rights. She was not a crusader but believed in quietly leading by example, consistently including a diverse array of people at her own parties and those she organized for the Democratic Party, such as co-chair of the 1949 Inaugural Ball.

Visit Meryl Gordon's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Phantom of Fifth Avenue.

Writers Read: Meryl Gordon (October 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Bunny Mellon.

My Book, The Movie: Bunny Mellon.

My Book, The Movie: The Woman Who Knew Everyone.

Writers Read: Meryl Gordon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Mansker's "Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France"

Andrea Mansker is the David E. Underdown Professor of Modern European History at Sewanee: The University of the South. She is the author of Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France. Her research on matchmakers has appeared in Histoire, Économie & Société, French Historical Studies, and the Annales historiques de la Révolution française.

Mansker applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France, and reported the following:

Page 99 analyzes an epistolary exchange in a personal advertisement section of the Parisian classifieds that captured the public’s attention during the Napoleonic Empire. The early commercial matchmaker, Claude Villiaume, had invited his male and female clients to communicate their personalities and preferences for a spouse directly to the newspaper’s readership in a column he mediated. Villiaume’s first batch of published letters included an intriguing missive penned by a young, wealthy, unwed mother he dubbed “Emilie.” Emilie requested a platonic marriage with an aging nobleman who had been “ruined” by the French Revolution. Page 99 features some of the published correspondence surrounding Emilie’s unusual entreaty and makes a few points that are central to the book’s argument.

First, I suggest that one of the most attractive elements of Emilie’s advertisement for male readers was her “self-representation as a sentimental heroine,” which she likely modeled on the celebrated eponymous protagonist of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bestselling 1761 novel, Julie, or the New Heloise. Her case demonstrates that the matchmaker’s anonymous love seekers adopted a writing style that confused fantasy and reality and drew inspiration from the cult of sentimentality when shaping their marriage ads. Emilie’s male suitors responded to her in the guise of Julie’s marriage prospects in the novel. Using a work of fiction as their blueprint, her respondents and the publication’s readers could imagine themselves as characters who had come to life. Page 99 thereby suggests that advertisers used the early personals to experiment with unconventional matrimonial strategies and embrace various personas that may or may not have been rooted in reality.

Second, page 99 also emphasizes the matchmaker’s “formative role in shaping [Emilie’s] story.” Since Villiaume had editorial control over the ads and his client letters exist only in published form, the book argues that we should maintain skepticism concerning the authenticity of these inserts. Rather than attempting to uncover the reality behind these client communications, I ask about the function of these “media fictions” for contemporaries. Why did the public respond to these stories so enthusiastically and how might readers have used Emilie’s tale of forbidden love and revolutionary loss to “make sense of the unexpected” during the First Empire?

The Page 99 Test thereby works rather well to highlight a few principal themes of the book. Matchmaking and the Marriage Market queries how the first commercial matchmakers and their correspondents imaginatively shaped the meaning, format, and allure of the personal ad in an era when the press invited individuals to express their private desires in a newly commodified medium. Like dating apps today, Villiaume’s marriage column blurred the lines between fact and fiction and reproduced the distinctly urban experience of imaginative spectatorship and voyeurism by featuring letters from seemingly real but unidentified authors.

Visit Andrea Mansker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Shoemaker's "The Architecture of Blame and Praise"

David Shoemaker is a Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. He is the author or co-author of over sixty academic papers, four monographs, and an introductory philosophy textbook. He is also the ongoing series editor of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. His publications have been about numerous topics in agency and responsibility, moral philosophy, moral psychology, the philosophy of humor, political philosophy, and personal identity.

Shoemaker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Architecture of Blame and Praise: An Interdisciplinary Investigation, and reported the following:

The Architecture of Blame and Praise is an interdisciplinary investigation into the nature of those responses we have to one another that, in some way, pertain to our exercises of responsible agency. Two oddities motivate the book.

The first is that, until recently, philosophers have focused on trying to understand just blame, assuming that praise is simply its positive symmetrical counterpart. But that assumption seems belied by work in moral psychology suggesting that our actual patterns of blame and praise reveal asymmetries between the two. For example, people tend to reduce their blame of those who do bad things overwhelmed by emotion, but they don’t reduce their praise of those who do good things overwhelmed by emotion. Of course, the psychologists don’t tell us whether these responses are justified or what their connection with responsible agency is supposed to be.

My book aims to incorporate what’s right about both strands while avoiding their problems. I start by explicating a functionalist account of our blame and praise system, and then I go on to show that there is actually an overarching symmetry between blame and praise, but we can see it only after I’ve revealed a crucial but previously unrecognized form of blame: mockery.

This discussion of this point actually begins on page 99, which makes the Page 99 Test an excellent one for its glimpse into an essential part of my overall argument. I claim on the page that mocking’s positive pair is complimenting, and so it starts by saying that both responses are, “paradigmatically, responses to performances relative to some … standards, including aesthetic, athletic, culinary, epistemic, prudential, philosophical, and many more.”

So what is mockery?

[T]o mock someone is to make fun of them for some failure, in a way that could foreseeably result in their feeling the sting of embarrassment, shame, or even humiliation.

And what makes it appropriate?

The first condition is truthiness: the target of mockery must have…the quality for which they are being mocked. I can’t aptly mock the fast for being slow, or the heroic for being cowards. The second condition…is publicity…. It’s in having that flaw exposed that one’s embarrassment is triggered, so the mockery, in order to be apt, must both be expressed and the aimed at that exposure…. A third condition of apt mockery is…that these flaws or failures be significant, that is, ridiculous. If you’ve come in second place in the Olympic finals of the 100-meter dash by 0.001 seconds, you’ve failed to win, but there is nothing at all mockable about your performance. However, if you’re entered in the 100-meter dash at the local charity event, and you trip coming out of the starting blocks and roll head-over-heels into the long-jump pit, then your failure is ridiculous enough to render you mockable.

Mockery and its positive counterpart, compliments, are one symmetrical mode of blame and praise, typically nonmoral in nature, Moral blame and its symmetrical counterpart of moral praise tend to consist, respectively, in anger and gratitude. I then go on to defend the appropriateness of the whole range of responses in a way that does not appeal to whether people deserve these responses. The presumed need for desert as a moral justification for the sting of blame is what has led most philosophers who theorize about it to argue that we need a robust capacity for free will to do so. If I am right, this entire enterprise has been a mistake: we don’t need desert or free will to justify our blame/praise responses to one another.

Learn more about The Architecture of Blame and Praise at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Denbow's "Reproductive Labor and Innovation"

Jennifer Denbow is Associate Professor of Political Science at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and the author of Governed through Choice: Autonomy, Technology, and the Politics of Reproduction.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is in a chapter dedicated to examining non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT) as an example of the “tech fix” in the book’s title. On this page, I analyze how makers of these tests market them as a salve for reproductive anxiety that covers over the root of that anxiety. Here is a quote that encapsulates the page’s analysis:

As the producer of the MaterniT test warns, “anyone can have a pregnancy with a chromosomal abnormality—healthy women, mothers of all ages and all ethnicities can be at risk.” These [NIPT] companies stoke fears about “abnormal” fetal development, even in low-risk groups, and subsequently offer products to ease the very anxiety that they played a role in creating. Thus, while it is true that many people experience anxiety about conception and pregnancy, the idea that a prenatal test can fix this problem obfuscates the industry’s role in fomenting this anxiety. It also covers over the deeper structural issues—such as climate chaos, financial instability, and the crumbling of public infrastructure—that have contributed to an uptick in anxiety for parents and nonparents alike. This reproductive innovation, then, sustains the innovation/reproduction binary’s papering over of structural injustices in favor of “solutions” that bolster the wealth and influence of the biotechnology industry and venture capitalists.

This page does represent a key thesis of my book: that although the state, investors, and companies sell innovations as a cure-all for all sorts of personal and social problems, technoscientific innovations in fact tend to obscure the roots of those problems and often make them worse. This page captures how this works with regard to one technology aimed at reproduction, while other chapters look at other technologies such as digital care work platforms and emerging reproductive biotechnologies like making gametes from stem cells.

Page 99 also provides a good sense of my book in that it briefly explains the book’s main argument regarding the “innovation/reproduction binary.” The book is dedicated to understanding how the overvaluation of technological innovations in the United States has come at the expense of addressing structural problems and valuing reproductive labor: the feminized work of caring for each other and sustaining society. In the case of NIPT, instead of offering collective support for caring for children, including disabled children, we are offered a technology to try to control what our offspring will be like.

Learn more about Reproductive Labor and Innovation at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mariana Chilton's "The Painful Truth about Hunger in America"

Mariana Chilton is Professor of Health Management and Policy at Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She served as the Co-Chair of the bi-partisan National Commission on Hunger. The commission was tasked with advising Congress and the United States Department of Agriculture about how to end hunger in America. She has testified before the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives numerous times and has served as an advisor to Sesame Street and to the Institute of Medicine.

Chilton applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know--and Start Again, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the crux of the Painful Truth About Hunger in America. It’s the culmination of three chapters that carefully bring the reader to understand how trauma is underneath hunger. My narrative moves from people’s lived experiences revealing the transfer of violence and hunger across the generations to a segment called “violence in numbers.” I show how qualitative and quantitative research intersect and support each other to provide the incontrovertible proof that the greatest adversity at the root of hunger is lovelessness. It’s true that page 99 is the best single page to land. But be careful. I’ve invited you to the edge.

The page is like a simultaneous prism and contraction. It is a prism that shows how generations of adversity can land in a single interview at a single moment in time. I refer people to the appendix that shows an image of how a family’s five generations of adversity land in a single report of hunger. I explain,

This depth of experience that people described helps us to begin to see that violence across the generations is associated also with historical, social, and political experiences, which I address in the following chapters.

It is also a contraction, where I show how quantitative research, which reduces people’s experiences to numbers, can sometimes squeeze out people’s humanity. Describing how our quantitative interviews work in the emergency room at the children’s hospital, I say

Often, full stories emerge; sometimes there are tears—mom’s tears or the baby’s—but the survey instrument is a tight mesh sieve, straining out anything quantitative researchers consider extraneous, tears included.

Here, I demonstrate that the suffering of hunger often gets missed or disregarded, because people focus on food access rather than listen for deeper clues. Or they refuse to understand people’s pain. What I found in the numeric research was that people who reported they were depressed and had multiple adverse childhood experiences such as abuse, neglect, or family hardship, are more than thirty times as likely to report hunger.

That contraction creates tension that pushes people to turn the page, where one drops into the middle of the book to learn that one adversity in particular, emotional neglect or feeling unloved, was most associated with hunger.

Because of that lovelessness, we are summoned to find great inner strength and collective courage to bring more love into the world. We can do this through political approaches, such as reparations for slavery and universal basic income, through personal work, by ending our tendency to try to dominate or discriminate against people, and spiritual growth, where we strive to act with compassion and equanimity.

So, yes, please come to the edge with me on page 99. We can leap into action from there.

Visit Mariana Chilton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael McKenna's "Responsibility and Desert"

Michael McKenna is Professor of Philosophy at University of Arizona, having arrived in 2012. He taught at Ithaca College from 1994-2006, and Florida State University from 2006-2012. He has held visiting appointments at University of Colorado, Boulder, and Bryn Mawr College. McKenna works primarily on the related topics of free will and moral responsibility, but also in ethics, moral psychology, action theory, and metaphysics. His book Conversation & Responsibility appeared in 2012, and Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction, coauthored with Derk Pereboom, appeared in 2016.

McKenna applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Responsibility and Desert, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my 2024 book Responsibility and Desert takes up a potential challenge to my proposed theory of punishment. I argue that a justified form of punishment aims to elicit appropriate guilt from the criminally culpable, and that the pain of guilt for the deserving is noninstrumentally good. (Something is noninstrumentally good if its value is not just in the service of something else that is good.) In The Ends of Harm (2011), Victor Tadros argues that aside from instrumental value, it is never good that one feel badly about one’s own wrongdoing. But even if it is, Tadros argues, punishing a person in order to bring about the (supposed) good of their feeling guilty is never itself good. On page 99 I set aside Tadros’s first point for a later chapter devoted to deserved guilt. But I respond to Tadros’s second point. Tadros thinks of the punishments delivered to the criminally responsible as mere deprivations of the goods that the punished would otherwise have access to. In response, I argue that the only harmful forms of punishment the culpable deserve are those that facilitate an appropriate response of guilt for wrongdoing. Mere suffering or harming has no justification. It is, I argue, only punishment serving to communicate to the culpable an expectation of the sort of attitude of guilt they ought to experience. And the guilt they ought to experience should be fitted for the particular harms they have wrongly caused others. No more. As I note, the crude forms of incarceration in current penal systems like the United State are not equipped to dispense such subtle forms of punishment.

Page 99 does not reveal the quality of the whole of Responsibility and Desert. Instead, it narrowly focuses on one potential objection to one particular point about how to justify punishment. Nevertheless, it’s relation to the whole is telling. This book develops a conversational theory of moral responsibility, wherein both blame and punishment are conversation-like responses to culpable wrongdoing. The conversation theory treats blameworthy conduct as having a meaning revealing the quality of the will (the attitude) of an agent when she does wrong. This meaning can be treated on analogy with a speaker who initiates a conversation with other speakers of a shared language. When others blame or punish the wrongdoer, their responses can be understood on analogy with a conversational response to the meaning of the speaker who initiated the conversation. So, blame and punishment, as well as emotional expressions like anger or indignation, have a communicative and conversational character.

But when are blame and punishment justified? The most common justification is cast in terms of desert; the culpable deserves blame, and in more egregious cases punishment. The central argument of Responsibility and Desert is that what a culpable agent deserves is that others communicate their demands and expectations by way of blaming or punishing. If so, what is deserved has to have the right conversational meaning as a fitting reply to the wrongdoer. Mere eruptions of hostility directed at the culpable, or punishments just in the form of dispensing any sort of suffering, convey no meaning of the distinct wrong done. Moreover, for the wrongdoer to appreciate what is conveyed, she must adopt an appropriate—deserved—response. Plausibly, the response involves accepting and experiencing fitting guilt—guilt tailored to the unique nature of the moral infraction.

Many object to desert as a justification for blame and punishment because it is committed to the noninstumental goodness of harming the guilty. Harming any person, it is argued, is never in itself good. I argue that, indeed, desert implies the noninstrumental goodness of harming the culpable. But, I argue, once one appreciates the limited kinds of harms, the seemingly barbaric character of the thesis disappears. What is good, for instance, is that a wrongdoer feels badly about the harms she has caused others. That’s not objectionable. It’s a better world that one feel badly for wronging others as compared to a world where one does not.

Visit Michael McKenna's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric S. Haag's "The Other Big Bang"

Eric S. Haag is professor of biology and director of the Biological Sciences Graduate Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has conducted research on the evolution of sex and reproduction in animals such as sea urchins, roundworms, and hermaphroditic fish for three decades.

Haag applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Other Big Bang: The Story of Sex and Its Human Legacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the second page of Chapter 7, “Land Ho.” Its first paragraph reads:

[As] I rounded a bend, what was left of a puddle a few feet across came into view. I bent down to discover a sad tableau of mass tadpole mortality. One hundred or so whip-tailed, jet-black blobs were cradled in the drying mud, dead or dying and on their way to becoming pollywog jerky. They were optimistically produced by a pair of red-spotted toads a couple of weeks before, and a few even had managed to start sprouting their hind legs before the dry warm air, breezes, and lack of more rain doomed their bid.

While unlucky tadpoles may seem to be unrelated to sex, by the end of the page we learn how the evolution of a different way of reproducing strongly conditions how humans experience sexuality. So, I’d argue that The Other Big Bang passes the Page 99 Test with flying colors.

The passage, recounting a hike in the Mojave Desert, underscores how the need for standing water limits where amphibians can live. It is frankly amazing that any of them succeed there. The vignette sets up the rest of the page, which introduces the evolution of a new type of vertebrate, the amniote. Amniotes include familiar desert animals like lizards, rattlesnakes, tortoises, roadrunners, jackrabbits, coyotes, and other mammals (including humans). They became the dominant land vertebrates by evolving new anatomies that allow internal fertilization (e.g. penises) and new protections for embryos (membranes and the egg shell). With such “reproductive superpowers” amniotes could reproduce virtually anywhere, including very arid or very cold places.

Before amniotes, males and females often differed only in gamete type: males make sperm, and females eggs. In present-day fish the sexes cannot be distinguished until months after hatching, and even then only by closely examining the developing gonads. Fish and amphibians generally lack external genitalia, and the ducts that carry sperm or eggs to the outside are shared between the sexes. Any sex differences in color or body shape develop only with adulthood, under the control of hormones. In the laboratory, adult fish can be easily sex-reversed with hormones. For example, females can be permanently converted into fertile males by adding testosterone to their water. Outside of the lab, hundreds of fish species naturally change sex over their lifetime, with individuals living as both fertile female and fertile males.

In contrast, amniotes develop sex-specific tissues, inside and out, early in embryonic development. At birth it is easy to tell male and female apart (rare intersex cases excepted). This early developmental divergence is associated with the loss of the sexual plasticity found in our ancestors. Like it or not, much of how we experience sex and gender directly connects to these anatomical sex differences, differences that first evolved in our ancient amniote ancestors. Imagine what it would be like if, instead, we humans retained the sexual plasticity of fish. From this one page, the broader message of The Other Big Bang is apparent: we understand ourselves and our human predicament better when we know how we got here.

Visit Eric S. Haag's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's "America Under the Hammer"

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values, and reported the following:

In 1786, lawyer John Antsey was sent by Britain’s Loyalist Claims Commission to the new United States of America on a mission of value. During the war, patriot governments had seized property—land, livestock, clothing, enslaved human beings—from men and women accused of being loyal to Great Britian and auctioned it off to their neighbors. Now in exile with the war over, loyalists demanded that the British government reimburse them for their suffering. Unsurprisingly, they often lacked proper receipts and made questionable assertions about their property’s value. Antsey’s charge was not only to find out how much the goods had sold for, but also to figure out what they had really been worth. Page 99 captures his frustrated conclusion about the relationship between value and price: “The Answer is always in a Circle, it will bring as much as it is worth—and it is worth as much as it will bring.”

Page 99, by summarizing Antsey’s dilemma, highlights one of the central arguments of America Under the Hammer—that value is a social and historical problem, not a number determined by the impersonal forces of the market—and in this way the test works. Antsey could discover the price paid for property, but he knew this was hardly the last word on its value. Rather, it was a product of dozens of forces that my book brings to light. Bids reflected community beliefs, personal jealousy, side conversations, pragmatic deal-making, misinformation, and many more social considerations. Auctions themselves were structured around legal conventions that were designed to uphold social hierarchies, relegating participants to the roles of bidders, bystanders, or property themselves. The shocking notion that a person could be sold in the same way as a chair fundamentally shaped the modern capitalist idea that everything has its price and that price is the measure of value. That modern understanding of markets conceals a long history of sorting out what value itself could or should mean. As they debated the nature of value in everyday life, early Americans deployed auctions to convert familial, labor, and diplomatic relationships into exchanges of goods for money.

In order to trace the history of market-oriented ideas about value, my book investigates many more types of auctions than the loyalist sales discussed on page 99. Auctions in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North America took place on street corners, courthouse steps, and even jail cells, and they trafficked in a wide variety of new, used, and living “goods.” Chapters discuss the fraught public sales of land seized from Indigenous Americans, the bargain auctions of imported overstock by which female retailers stocked their shelves, and the desperate tragedy of slave auctions. The result is a history of early American capitalism that places complex human relationships at its center.

Visit Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue