Mario Erasmo's "Death: Antiquity and Its Legacy"

Mario Erasmo is professor of classics at the University of Georgia and the author of four books on ancient Roman culture and the legacy of classical antiquity, including Reading Death in Ancient Rome and Roman Tragedy: Theatre to Theatricality. His forthcoming Strolling Through Rome: The Definitive Walking Guide to the Eternal City (IBTauris) guides visitors step by step through the historic areas and eras of Rome.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Death: Antiquity and Its Legacy, and reported the following:

The Pyramid of Gaius Cestius (18- 12 BCE) is unique among surviving monuments from ancient Rome. As a funerary monument, it commemorates where Cestius is buried but its form owes to the "Egyptomania" introduced by the emperor Augustus following his victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE. Egyptian monuments included two obelisks that Augustus transported from Egypt - one for the Circus Maximus and the other that served as the sundial of the Horologium in his Mausoleum complex.

That was just the beginning of the Pyramid's interesting history. It was incorporated into the Aurelianic Walls and despite its unmistakable pagan form and function, it survived the destruction of ancient monuments that supplied building materials in the medieval period and that later made the architectural masterpieces of the Renaissance and Baroque possible. It was known as the "Meta Remi", the Tomb of Remus, the brother of Rome's legendary founder Romulus and the counterpart of a pyramid that stood near St. Peter's Square that was known as the "Meta Romuli", the Tomb of Romulus that was demolished in 1499. Yet another pyramid tomb was at the start of Via del Corso in Piazza del Popolo that was demolished for the construction of the church of S. Maria dei Miracoli. The demolition of this last pyramid is ironic since the Piazza would be transformed into a Neoclassical showpiece by Giuseppe Valadier (1816-20) with an Egyptian obelisk at its centre - the very obelisk that Augustus had erected in the Circus Maximus. The Pyramid of Cestius however, as sole survivor, influenced the funerary monument designs of the Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova.

Page 99 follows the Pyramid's "reuse" as a funerary marker for visitors on the Grand Tour to indicate the burial place of the English Romantic poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery. The poem "Rome at the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats (1901) by Thomas Hardy prioritizes the Pyramid's commemorative role:

     Who, then, was Cestius,
     And what is he to me? -
Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous
     One thought alone brings he.

     I can recall no word
     Of anything he did;
For me he is a man who died and was interred
     To leave a pyramid

     Whose purpose was exprest
     Not with its first design,
Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest
     Two countrymen of mine.

     Cestius in life, maybe,
     Slew, breathed out threatening;
I know not. This I know: in death all silently
     He does a finer thing,

     In beckoning pilgrim feet
     With marble finger high
To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street,
     Those matchless singers lie...

     - Say, then, he lived and died
     That stones which bear his name
Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide;
     It is an ample fame.

Today, the Pyramid lends its name to the Piramide Metro Station outside Porta S. Paolo that connects travelers to the trains that go to Ostia Lido, the beaches south of Rome, away from the city centre and its storied past of which the Pyramid has played a unique part.

Learn more about Death: Antiquity and Its Legacy at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Hannigan’s "Disasters Without Borders"

John Hannigan is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Environmental Sociology (1995, 2006) and Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (1998).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Disasters Without Borders: The International Politics of Natural Disasters, and reported the following:

Did Hurricane Sandy tip the 2012 presidential election towards Barack Obama? It’s difficult to know definitively. Still, the ‘super-storm’ was a welcome gift for the Obama campaign just days before voters went to the polls. The incumbent could look ‘presidential’ and the challenger was left to explain why he opposed federal disaster aid. Disasters Without Borders came out in North America only a week before this. Presciently perhaps, the book includes a box comparing the performance of three high-profile east-coast politicians – Cory Booker, Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo – during Hurricane Irene, which struck the very same region the previous August.

On Page 99, I review some key studies by political scientists that uniformly found that governments usually make decisions about how much disaster assistance to approve and where it should be directed not according to victim need, but rather in light of perceived political advantages and imperatives. Domestically, states that are politically important to the President are more likely to be declared disaster areas, making them eligible for federal assistance. In the case of foreign disasters, it clearly helps to be a friend of the United States. Time and again, altruism is trumped by political calculation.

More broadly, Disasters Without Borders is an account of key milestones, debates, controversies and research relating to the international politics of natural disaster. In the book, I highlight the ongoing disjuncture between how disaster has been conceptualized and the institutional architecture put in place to manage it. Mostly governments have ceded responsibility for disaster response and planning to the humanitarian community. Tellingly, with the exception of a minor convention on sharing telecommunication resources in disasters, there are no legally binding, multilateral treaties.

All this may be about to change. Alarmed by predictions of more frequent and extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy that are possibly provoked by climate change, the Pentagon, the World Bank and the re-insurance industry are increasingly engaging with the disaster sector, importing a more aggressive and politicized form of intervention. Soon, we could see the confluence of four trends – securitization, catastrophic scenario building, the privatization of risk, and quantification – that promise to create a new global system of disaster management wherein ‘insurance logic’ will replace humanitarian concern as the guiding principle.

Learn more about Disasters Without Borders at the John Wiley & Sons website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oren Bar-Gill's "Seduction By Contract"

Oren Bar-Gill is a Professor of Law and co-Director of the Center for Law, Economics and Organization at the New York University School of Law. Bar-Gill joined the NYU faculty in January 2005 from Harvard University, where he was a Fellow at the Society of Fellows, as well as an Olin Fellow at Harvard Law School. Bar-Gill holds a B.A. (economics), LL.B., M.A. (law & economics), and Ph.D. (economics) from Tel-Aviv University, as well as an LL.M. and S.J.D. from Harvard Law School.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Seduction by Contract: Law, Economics, and Psychology in Consumer Markets, and reported the following:

Opening Seduction By Contract on Page 99 takes you to the book’s Credit Cards chapter – a case study of contracting practices in the credit card market, how these practices hurt consumers and what the law can do to help. Earlier in the chapter, I explain how the interaction between market forces and consumer psychology distorts competition in the credit card market. Many consumers are myopic and optimistic. They care more about short-term prices and less about long-term prices. Accordingly, issuers compete by offering short term-perks, like no annual fees and low (or zero) introductory interest rates; and recoup their losses by imposing high long-term costs, like late fees and penalty interest rates. Page 99 asks whether this distorted competition hurts consumers. It may be thought that consumers are not harmed by these temporal pricing shifts, that the short-term perks compensate consumers for the long-term costs. But, the chapter shows, this is not the case. The deferred-costs strategy distorts both product-choice and product-use decisions, hurting consumers and reducing market efficiency. Page 99 goes on to evaluate how the pricing distortions in the credit card market increase the likelihood of financial distress or exacerbate the costs, to cardholders, from financial distress.

The credit cards case study is followed by two other, detailed case studies – of the mortgage market and the cellphone market; and it is preceded by a general chapter that offers a theoretical analysis of contracting practices in consumer markets and their normative implications. Consumers routinely enter into contracts with providers of goods and services. These contracts are designed by sophisticated sellers to exploit the psychological biases of consumers. They provide short-term benefits, while imposing long-term costs – because consumers are myopic and optimistic. They are excessively complex – because complexity allows sellers to hide the true cost of the product or service from the imperfectly rational consumer.

The book outlines a promising legal policy solution to these problems: Disclosure mandates. Simple, aggregate disclosures can help consumers make better choice. Comprehensive disclosures can facilitate the work of intermediaries, enabling them to better advise consumers. Effective disclosure would expose the seductive nature of consumer contracts and, as a result, reduce sellers’ incentives to write inefficient contracts.

Learn more about Seduction by Contract at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

M. Todd Bennett's "One World, Big Screen"

M. Todd Bennett is assistant professor of history at East Carolina University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II, and reported the following:

Throughout most of its history the United States remained allergic to international alliances. Heeding the advice given by George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address, Americans traditionally steered clear of foreign entanglements, charting an independent course in the world. However, today’s United States is an international power enmeshed, albeit reluctantly, in a wide array of external relationships, from the UN to NATO to ANZUS.

When and why did this historic shift in U.S. foreign policy as well as the American worldview happen? World War II arguably marked the tipping point. Isolationists were ascendant prior to 1941, and even after Pearl Harbor many Americans expressed reservations about U.S. participation in the Grand Alliance, which grew to include almost four-dozen countries spread across the globe, making it by far the largest foreign entanglement in U.S. history. Within only four short years a remarkable change occurred, however, such that by 1945 most Americans supported not only strong overseas action on the part of the United States but also U.S. involvement in such multinational alliances or organizations as the UN.

Several developments caused that transformation, which affected U.S behavior in the world long after World War II’s last shots had been fired. My book, One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II, addresses one overlooked cause: the extensive wartime propaganda campaign spearheaded by Washington and Hollywood that taught Americans to see themselves as internationalists, as citizens of the world whose well-being depended upon greater connectivity with other, non-American residents of the international community. That campaign depended heavily on cinema, culture’s centerpiece during Hollywood’s pre-television “golden era.” Throughout the war years, 85 million Americans – 85 million, more than three-fifths of the overall U.S. population, which totaled less than 140 million at the time – attended movie theaters each week. Unlike the printed word or radio, films combined audio and video into a sensuous whole projected onto the big screens of darkened theaters, creating an immersive theatergoing experience that, it was widely thought, strongly influenced the behavior as well as the beliefs of viewers. Add to that the fact that Hollywood movies were entertaining, that they educated fans without appearing to do so, and it is easy to understand why wartime officials and filmmakers presumed that motion pictures could effectively “sugarcoat” propaganda and remake the American worldview.

With oversight from the Office of War Information (OWI), the U.S propaganda ministry, Hollywood produced dozens of features designed to model good world citizenship. Some, like Mrs. Miniver or Casablanca, the Best Picture winners of 1942 and 1943 respectively, are considered classics today. Page 99 deals with a lesser-known picture, Action in the North Atlantic (1943), starring Humphrey Bogart. The rollicking Warner Bros. adventure followed the travails of an American merchant vessel that, sailing as part of a multinational convoy, navigated treacherous waters filled with German U-boats to deliver Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union, a wartime ally. Although some opposed Hollywood’s editorial policy – conservatives called Action in the North Atlantic pro-communist propaganda – the film “beautifully and effectively” illustrated internationalism at work, according to the OWI, thereby contributing to the “one world” spirit considered necessary to win the war as well as the peace that followed.

Learn more about One World, Big Screen at the the University of North Carolina Press website.

Writers Read: M. Todd Bennett.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Orrell's "Truth or Beauty"

David Orrell is an applied mathematician and popular author. He studied mathematics at the University of Alberta, and obtained his doctorate in the prediction of nonlinear systems from the University of Oxford. His work in applied mathematics has taken him to diverse areas including particle accelerator design, weather forecasting, economics, and cancer biology. In early 2012, he completed an honorary visiting research fellowship at the Oxford University Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

Orrell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Truth or Beauty: Science and the Quest for Order, and reported the following:

Truth or Beauty is about the role of aesthetics in science. The book is divided into three sections – Infatuation, Complication, and Maturation – which chart the relationship between science and beauty throughout history. Page 99 is found in the first chapter of Complication: the topic is relativity and quantum theory, and this page is discussing the period a hundred years ago when Niels Bohr and other scientists were developing a new model of the atom.

The classical model of the atom had electrons orbiting a nucleus like planets in a solar system. While this picture had an appealing simplicity, physicists knew that it couldn’t be right: according to theory, an orbiting electron should emit electromagnetic radiation, lose energy, and collapse into the nucleus, all in less than a billionth of a second. Bohr got around this problem by asserting that electrons were restricted to certain energy levels – described by so-called quantum numbers – and could only switch between them in discrete hops, emitting a pulse of electromagnetic radiation (light) as they did.

A triumph of Bohr’s model was that it explained in a stroke how atoms of a particular substance (for example, the neon found in neon lights) would emit radiation in certain discrete, characteristic wavelengths, known as spectral lines. As in a musical instrument, where sound wavelength corresponds to the note heard, each element produced a unique mix of tones. This was reminiscent of the Pythagoreans’ idea of the music of the spheres, a music which they believed permeated the cosmos but only Pythagoras could hear (ordinary mortals having tuned it out). On page 99 I quote the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld: “What we are listening to nowadays in the language of spectra, is a genuine atomic music of the spheres, a richly proportioned symphony, an order and harmony emerging out of diversity.”

Unfortunately, further experiments showed that the predicted spectral lines did not quite match observation. More quantum numbers had to be added to the model, a development which (the page continues) “seemed like a step in the wrong direction. The model had so many parameters that it had lost any pretense of simplicity or elegance.”

Page 99 therefore captures the fundamental tension which runs through the book, between the aesthetic desire for simplicity and beauty, and the contingencies of messy reality. The same conflict is found today between the proponents of supersymmetric string theory (a more modern attempt to link physics with vibrating strings) and its critics who describe it as motivated more by aesthetics than by experimental evidence.

Learn more about the book and author at David Orrell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Cunningham's "Klansville, U. S. A."

David Cunningham is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at Brandeis University. He is the author of There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (University of California Press, 2004).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Klansville, U. S. A: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK, and reported the following:

Page 99 closes a chapter that explains one of the book’s key puzzles: why the civil rights-era’s Ku Klux Klan resurgence was not in fact centered in the Deep South, but rather in ostensibly progressive North Carolina. The Tar Heel State was far and away the KKK’s stronghold throughout the 1960s, with its estimated 10,000-12,000 dues-paying klan members eclipsing that of the rest of the South combined by 1965. Page 99 summarizes one key reason that was true:

By 1964 the state’s overriding emphasis on perpetuating an image that was progressive, friendly to business, and – unlike the hard-line Deep South – precluded any coordinated effort to protect and preserve segregation at all costs. The failure of state leaders to employ proactive policing measures to stanch the resulting segregationist furor meant that KKK organizers, prior to 1966, confronted no serious repressive action from state police agencies. As a consequence, [KKK leader and North Carolina “Grand Dragon”] Bob Jones and his organizers found the Tar Heel State to be fertile organizing ground.

On any given night beginning in 1963, often more than a thousand spectators turned out to partake in the KKK’s “skewed county fair”-style rallies, enjoying refreshments and music by the klan’s house band; hoping to win raffled-off cases of motor oil, shotguns, or used cars; listening to a slate of KKK leaders, preachers, and rabble-rousers espouse the virtues of segregation; and gaping at the ritualized burning of a 70 foot-tall cross. Failing to “employ proactive policing measures” to hinder such events meant that officials talked tough about keeping tabs on KKK rallies but in fact limited themselves to passively monitoring klan proceedings and directing traffic to prevent gridlock before and after the events. Records from the state’s Highway Patrol and Bureau of Investigation, and the first-hand accounts offered by former police officials in interviews, make clear that agents frequently developed collegial relationships with KKK leaders and sometimes outwardly displayed their sympathies for the klan’s stances. Such tactics, of course, only emboldened KKK recruiters.

Page 99 also shows how such passive stances played a role in state officials’ broader strategies. By ensuring that a “contained, but nonetheless highly visible” KKK existed alongside the NAACP and other groups operating at the opposite end of the civil rights spectrum, North Carolina’s political leaders were able to “reinforce their reasonable, moderate position.” In a time and place where the governor could routinely refer to the NAACP as a “militant and selfish organization” and win votes by claiming that political rivals were “captive” to civil rights interests, simultaneously demonizing the KKK allowed the state to retain a sheen of progressive enlightenment. Occupying this delicate middle-ground allowed North Carolina’s leadership to promote the state as an ideal destination for new industry: flush with a low-wage non-unionized labor force and also miles away from the unsavory “massive resistance”-style white supremacy espoused by their cohorts in Mississippi and Alabama.

Klansville, U.S.A. shows how such factors created an ideal environment for the KKK’s rise, and also how and why a shift in the state’s policing priorities beginning in 1966 spurred the klan’s spectacular fall later in the decade.

Learn more about Klansville, U. S. A. at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Marzluff and Tony Angell's "Gifts of the Crow"

John Marzluff is Professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington. The author of four books and over one hundred scientific papers on various aspects of bird behavior, he is the recipient of the A. Brazier Howell, Board of Directors, and H.R. Painton awards from the Cooper Ornithological Society. Tony Angell has authored and/or illustrated a dozen award-winning books related to natural history. Their 2005 book is In the Company of Crows and Ravens.

Marzluff applied the “Page 99 Test” to their latest book, Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Gifts of the Crow captures several important themes of our book. First, it extolls an amazing gift that these birds—the corvid family including crows, ravens, magpies, and jays—possess. This is the gift of insight. Yes, some birds use insight, a full understanding of a problem and the steps needed to solve it, to survive in their worlds. The New Caledonia crows I discuss on p. 99 use insight to obtain out of reach food. This brings up the second theme—the reporting of scientific details to back up a claim about brainy birds. Many anecdotes exist about how smart crows are, and I recount many of these throughout the book, but I also review the science that now exists to back up many seemingly impossible observations. I try to bring this science to the reader in an easy to grasp way. Here, with respect to insight, I discuss an experiment done by New Zealand researchers: to obtain food crows had to pull up a string containing a small stick, use that stick to rake a larger stick out of a grill-fronted box, and finally use the large stick to scoop a piece of meat out of a long tube. That the crows did this, on average in minutes without missing a step in the sequence, demonstrates that they fully grasped the problem and the solution mentally. They clearly thought before acting, working out the necessary steps in their minds, rather than with errant physical flailing.

Page 99 intrigues in telling the reader how scientists investigate another being’s mental ability. It highlights one important “gift of the crow.” But it fails to represent the entire book. Missing are the many examples of other gifts: language, delinquency, frolic, passion, wrath, grief, risk taking, and awareness. Missing is a background discussion of bird brains that concludes the term “birdbrain” should now be considered a compliment, not an insult! Also missing are the elegant illustrations by Tony Angell of crow behavior. Page 99 introduces the crow, but it takes a book to fully describe the amazing advances science has made toward understanding the crow. This leads the reader to reconsider the crow, as a companion in our world that challenges and inspires. The true “gift of the crow” is the ability of these birds to take us beyond our technological and urban lifestyles and lead us into an exploration of nature that truly expands our minds.

Learn more about Gifts of the Crow at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: In the Company of Crows and Ravens.

--Marshal Zeringue

C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa's "Crooked Paths to Allotment"

C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa is assistant professor of history at Illinois College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War, and reported the following:

Jumping in to page 99 of my book places readers directly into the heart of the conflicts and contestations that drive Crooked Paths to Allotment. On a basic level, it is a book about the politics of federal Native policymaking following the Civil War. In particular, I seek to interrogate the standard historical narrative that views the nineteenth century in terms of steadily declining Indigenous sovereignty, from removal of southeastern tribes to the 1887 General Allotment Act. I argue that at several particular moments in the mid- to late nineteenth century, Native American reformers and their white allies challenged coercive practices and offered visions for policies that might have allowed Indigenous nations to adapt at their own pace and on their own terms.

The Reconstruction period was especially important because it was a time when white Americans emerged from the Civil War searching for meaning out of their recent traumas and sacrifices and were willing to consider, at least initially, a drastically reconfigured nation that would be fundamentally more inclusive. These moments, though, also illuminate the strength and pervasiveness of American settler colonial thought as state actors consolidated or reconsolidated political power and repressed alternative pathways, and that’s what I’m discussing on page 99. It falls in the middle of a chapter called “A Contentious Peace Policy, 1871-1875” that charts the efforts of mainstream assimilationists (especially the Board of Indian Commissioners and a Philadelphia merchant named William Welsh) to repress the policy alternatives championed by Native activists (such as Ely S. Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca and the first Commissioner of Indian Affairs who was Indigenous himself). Here are the two full paragraphs on the page:

The BIC [Board of Indian Commissioners] could have provided transparency and public oversight of the policy-making process. It did not. Instead, it sought to limit public access to Indian policy, while placing it in the hands of a small circle of respected white elites who shared similar religious, business, and social interests. When the OIA [Office of Indian Affairs] drafted its communications with contractors in 1871, the BIC sought to signify its (perceived) superior position by adding “under the supervision of the Board of Indian Commissioners.” Welsh and the BIC campaigned against and successfully removed federal officials who did not agree with their positions: first Ely Parker and then his successor, E.P. Smith, and Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano. Most significantly, in 1874, the BIC proposed to separate the OIA from the Interior Department and establish it as an independent, executive-level agency. They argued that this would protect it against political patronage, a broader Reconstruction-era issue that had become a rallying-cry for disaffected Democrats and reform-minded Republicans in the Republican-dominated years of the Grant administration. But their proposal also bore the marks of an effort to control access to the mechanisms of political power. Ultimately, it failed, and in response, six of the original members resigned en masse.

Prior to this development, in the years between 1869-1874, Welsh and the BIC established a policy framework that at its foundation held a belief in Indian confinement and assimilation by any means necessary, animated by an expressly elitist, evangelical Christian approach to policy making. Advancing their agenda between 1869 and 1874, these reformers effectively derailed any progress Parker and his compatriots had made in developing an alternative agenda. Indeed, their programs helped cement, for the next several generations at least, the notion that non-Native people understood the best interests of Native communities and the idea that the federal government could, in a short period of time, destroy Indian autonomy and distinct Indigenous communities for the betterment of Indian people and the United States.

Although there are other historiographic contributions I attempt to make throughout, the material summarized on page 99 is an accurate reflection of what the book does. It’s a story of paths that might have been taken in Indian policy, but were not. These paragraphs also represent my effort to connect developments in Indian Affairs to the larger context of the Reconstruction Era and in so doing, to suggest that any attempt to make sense of late-nineteenth-century US history has to take seriously Indigenous histories and experiences.

Learn more about Crooked Paths to Allotment at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Strogatz's "The Joy of x"

Steven Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He holds a joint appointment in the College of Arts and Sciences (Mathematics) and the College of Engineering (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering). He is the author of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos (1994), Sync (2003), The Calculus of Friendship (2009), and The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity (2012).

Strogatz applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Joy of x and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Joy of x gently explains the proof that the angles of any triangle always add up to 180 degrees. What I love about it -- and what makes it so representative of the book as a whole -- is that this proof showcases a side of math that most of us never encountered in school. As I write on the next page,

This is one of the most bracing arguments in all of mathematics. It opens with a bolt of lightning, the construction of the parallel line. Once that line has been drawn, the proof practically rises off the table and walks by itself, like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation.

And who knows? If we highlight this other side of geometry—its playful, intuitive side, where a spark of imagination can be quickly fanned into a proof—maybe someday all students will remember geometry as the class where they learned to be logical and creative.

Learn more about the book and author at Steven Strogatz's website.

Writers Read: Steven Strogatz (August 2009).

Writers Read: Steven Strogatz (November 2012).

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Lohr's "Russian Citizenship"

Eric Lohr is Susan E. Lehrman Chair of Russian History and Culture at American University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union, and reported the following:

Page 99 falls in the middle of my chapter on emigration and denaturalization, a chapter that begins with the sentence “Few countries have had such a deep tradition of opposition to emigration or denaturalization as Russia.” The first section of the chapter explains historically-grounded reasons for that tradition. Page 99 discusses a 1909 proposal to “legalize” emigration and delves into the human costs of the continuing sanctions on emigrants. To leave the country, they had to pay emigrant smuggling rings exorbitant fees. Once abroad, they were often left at the mercy of unscrupulous employers. Page 99 gives a few examples. A group of 10,000 Russian workers ended up stranded on Hawaiian plantations, suffering from tropical illnesses, but were not released from obligations to work for subsistence level wages. The Russian workers spooked the local authorities with their socialist agitation, but still were held in bondage to their unfair contracts. Another group of Russian workers arrived in Germany appalled to find they had been hired as scabs to replace German workers on strike. German employers in this and other cases held Russian workers in the country by seizing their passports and holding them until the end of the work season. But, as later pages detail, despite an overwhelmingly reasonable case to join the rest of the world and legalize emigration, the proposals failed to pass due to fears that the precarious ethnic balance in many parts of the empire could be upset if Russian peasants were suddenly free to leave.

Learn more about Russian Citizenship at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue