Wendy Pearlman's "We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled"

Wendy Pearlman is the Martin and Patricia Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she specializes in Middle East politics. She is the author of We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Syrian Chronicles, Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement, and Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada.

Pearlman applied the “Page 99 Test” to We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled and reported the following:

Between 2012 and 2016, I traveled across the Middle East and Europe, interviewing more than three hundred displaced Syrians. My new book, We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled, uses the narratives that I collected to chronicle the origins and evolution of the Syrian conflict exclusively through the words of Syrians who have lived it. The book is divided into eight parts that respectively probe the suffocating fear under the authoritarian regime of Hafez al-Assad (1970-2000), the rise and fall of hope for change after his son Bashar’s assumption of power in 2000, the euphoric launch of peaceful protests in 2011, the regime’s violent response, the militarization of the rebellion, the everyday experience of living war, the mass flight of refugees, and citizens’ concluding reflections making sense of these tumultuous events. Each part is comprised entirely of personal testimonials which range from poetry-like fragments a sentence in length to anecdotes unfolding over pages.

Page 99 is the first entry in Part IV: Crackdown, which examines both government attempts to repress the popular uprising and how a cross-section of people experienced that repression. The entire page is dedicated to these words from Miriam, a 20-something woman from Aleppo whom I interviewed in Jordan in summer 2012:If Bashar had only come out in his first speech and said, “I am with you, my people. I want to help you and be with you step by step,” I can guarantee you one million percent that he would have been the greatest leader in the Arab world. He had that kind of potential. Instead, he assumed that the Syrian people love him, that they don’t understand anything, and that they’ll follow him no matter what. But we weren’t as foolish as the government thought we were.Consistent with the “Page 99 Test,” this passage reveals the conviction guiding the book as a whole: Syrians’ voices offer not only a way to feel the human dimension of this cruel conflict, but also analysis and insight critical for understanding its complexities. Here Miriam conveys a central, oft-forgotten point of the Syrian tragedy: it was not inevitable. When tens and then hundreds and thousands of Syrians went into the streets in early 2011, they initially called for reform, not regime change. They wanted a greater margin of freedom of expression, removal of brazenly corrupt officials, repeal of the 48-year-old Emergency Law that allowed imprisonment without charge or trial, etc. Bashar al-Assad retained great personal popularity at the time. Had his government eschewed bloodshed and recognized the legitimacy of citizens’ simple demands, it could have avoided war. When it instead chose to treat unarmed protesters as “terrorists” to be killed, tortured, and eliminated, it unleashed the violence that continues to ravage the country until today.

We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled reveals how all of this happened. Page 99 reminds us that it did not have to happen this way.

Learn more about We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled and follow Wendy Pearlman on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Papineau's "Knowing the Score"

David Papineau is a professor of philosophy of natural science at Kings College London and a distinguished professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. The author of eight philosophy books, he lives in London, United Kingdom.

Papineau applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Knowing the Score: What Sports Can Teach Us About Philosophy (And What Philosophy Can Teach Us About Sports), and reported the following:

On this page of the book you will find some examples of rule-stretching in sport, including Fosbury’s Flop, belly-putting in golf, and Kevin Pietersen’s switch-hitting. This is in the course of a chapter that takes a largely tolerant attitude to gamesmanship (in Stephen Potter’s original definition: “How to win games without actually cheating”) – on the grounds that someone who isn’t looking for new ways to win isn't really trying.

Not that the book endorses all kinds of sporting transgressions. The chapter on Gamesmanship is the last of three in a section of the book entitled ‘Rules’, which distinguishes carefully between the formal rules applied by the officials, the code of fair play recognized by the athletes, and forms of sporting behaviour that are genuinely acceptable. My general line is that it’s generally all right to break the official rules, as long as it’s in line with the code of fair play – but that we need to watch out for cases where the athletes’ code starts licensing objectively nasty practices (like rampant drug use in cycling, or faking injury to get an opponent penalized in soccer).

I also use this discussion of sporting ethics to draw some general philosophical morals. Just as codes of fair play trump the official rules on the sports field, so do moral considerations trump the law of the land: it is often morally best to break the law and take the penalty, I argue, in real life as in sport. Similarly, the sporting context clarifies the relation between socially arbitrary conventions and objective morality: by and large, conventions simply specify the means by which different societies, or sports, uphold such universal values as courtesy and keeping your promises (which is why one and the same action can be moral in one society, or sport, but immoral in another).

This illustrates the general message of the book: sports offer philosophical insights that aren’t easily available elsewhere. I use sporting themes to probe a wide range of central philosophical issues: mind and action, altruism and cooperation, citizenship and nationality, identity and tradition. Time and again, the sporting evidence casts a novel light on long-standing philosophical problems. I've come to think of sports as the philosophical equivalent of particle accelerators in physics. Just as particle accelerators allow physicists to find out how matter behaves in exceptional high-energy conditions, so sports show us things about human beings that aren’t normally apparent in less testing conditions.

Visit David Papineau's website.

The Page 99 Test: Philosophical Devices.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Kurlander's "Hitler’s Monsters"

Eric Kurlander is professor of history at Stetson University. His books include The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1989–1933 and Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich, 1933-1945.

Kurlander applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Hitler’s Monsters happens to be the first page of "Chapter Four: The Third Reich’s War on the Occult. Anti-Occultism, Hitler’s Magicians’ Controversy, and the Hess Action." Chapter Four, which is pivotal, explores the Nazis’ contradictory policies and attitudes toward the occult in the years immediately after Hitler’s seizure of power. It opens with three epigraphs. The first, from Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, urges Germans (and Nazis) not to embrace “unclear mythical concepts” propagated by “German prophets” who, per Hitler in Mein Kampf, “like to clothe themselves in bearskins” and claim to have “created National Socialism some forty years before [the Führer].”

The second epigraph comes from a May 1941 exchange between an official in Alfred Rosenberg Party Education Ministry, charged with policing the occult, and the head of Hitler’s Chancellery, Martin Bormann. Even after the Gestapo moved to combat “the overweening spread of astrology for profit” in 1937, the official complained, Hitler’s Deputy Rudolf Hess, not to mention Heinrich Himmler, had insisted that “‘scientific astrology’ be spared from this measure.” “Thereafter it became increasingly clear,” the official continued, that proponents of Enlightenment faced a “struggle” against this “consolidated group” within the Nazi Party “for the sponsorship of astrology and occultism.”

The third epigraph, an excerpt from a 1960 interview with SS professor Ernst Anrich. Looking back on the Third Reich, Anrich recalled that the “whole background of the ban on astrology” as well as the “partial persistence” of occultism in the 1930s “is interesting not only as an individual case, but speaks to the manifold contradictions within National Socialism which I have often related.”

Which begs the question: Why these contradictions? Why did the Third Reich not move more aggressively to curb occultism? Chapter Four begins to answer this question, a central theme in Hitler’s Monsters, by looking at Nazi efforts to police the occult during the first four years of the Third Reich. It then turns to the regime’s haphazard efforts to promote “enlightenment” after 1937, culminating in what I call Hitler’s Magician’s Controversy. This alternately absurd and amusing controversy regarding the legality of “magic” culminated in February 1941, when Hitler and the Gestapo decided to side with professional magicians against debunkers out to undermine popular belief in occultism. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the subsequent 1941 “Hess Action” against the occult–– a June response to Hess’s embarrassing flight to Scotland in May of that year–– which nonetheless ended as quickly as it had begun.

In Chapter Four and throughout later chapters I argue that the Third Reich’s “zigzag course” in policing the occult can be explained by the fact that the Nazis embraced many elements of occult and border scientific thinking. When the regime worked to repress or “coordinate” esoteric groups, it had more to do with controlling and utilizing occult doctrines than eliminating them outright. Like esotericists and border scientists more generally, the Nazis worked carefully to distinguish between commercial and popular occultism, on the one hand, and “scientific” occultism on the other. If Third Reich may have been hostile toward commercial, for-profit, boulevard occultism, “serious” practitioners of “scientific” occultism, Chapter Four concludes, enjoyed remarkable latitude, even extensive sponsorship, by the Third Reich.

Learn more about Hitler's Monsters at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Eric Kurlander's Living with Hitler.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heather Vrana's "This City Belongs to You"

Heather Vrana is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Florida.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944-1996, and reported the following:

This City Belongs to You follows several generations of students at Guatemala’s only public university, the Universidad de San Carlos (USAC). Each chapter explores how students engaged with the university as an institution and Guatemalan and (to a lesser extent) U.S. state apparatuses in the years between 1944 and 1996, a period marked by revolution, counterrevolution, and civil war. Through these encounters, USAC students (called San Carlistas) forged a loose consensus around faith in the principles of liberalism, especially belief in equal liberty, the constitutional republic, political rights, and the responsibility of university students to lead the nation. I call this consensus student nationalism. It was crucial to the meaning of the middle class across the twentieth century.

Student nationalism was a shared project for identity-making, premised on the inclusions and exclusions of citizenship. But it did not depend on the successful formation of a nation-state or even necessarily a territory. Nationalism was less something one had or believed than a way of making political claims. It helped to bring San Carlistas into enduring fraternal bonds with their classmates. As the civil war progressed and the military and police declared war on the university, San Carlistas used student nationalism to wage culture wars over historical memory. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the reactionary forces became ever more brutal. Some students turned away from oppositional politics and focused on their studies, work, or family life. Some left USAC for one of the newer private universities, which were much safer. Others remained involved in USAC politics, often seeking support from international human rights organizations. A small number left the university to join the guerrilla and some of them were killed.

The Coda extends beyond the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, bearing witness to the poignancy of a community’s willingness to die for an idea at the hands of the government. In short, this is a history of many generations of young people: their hopes, their actions, their role in social change; attempts to control them; their struggles against the government; and their encounters with the school as a state apparatus and a crucial site for resistance and celebration.

Page 99 finds Guatemala in a moment of reckoning in late 1957, when the electoral route to political change proved illusory. As such, it marks a poignant turning point.

Visit Heather Vrana's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leigh Fought's "Women in the World of Frederick Douglass"

Leigh Fought is Assistant Professor of History at LeMoyne College. She is the author of Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa S. McCord and an editor of The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series Three: Correspondence, Volume 1: 1842-1852.

Fought applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, and reported the following:

Page 99 begins:

At this point in the tour, Garrison fell deathly ill, leaving Douglass to continue alone and allowing him to meet with others uncensored. If the Boston Clique had rejected Douglass’s proposal as a potential burden and competition, others saw him, his fame, and the financing he brought from England as a possible savior.

This is high drama. We meet nineteenth-century, African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass early in his career, recently returned from two years abroad, flush with the means and desire to begin his own antislavery newspaper. Instead, his allies in the American Antislavery Society have thwarted his plans, insisting that he will better serve the cause as a lecturer and sending him on another multiple-week tour. He dodges them, finding others willing to pool their resources and entrust him with an editorship.

Page 99 concludes a three page expositionary pause that introduces a series of events crucial to the book’s central thesis. Page 100 returns to the main argument that women made Frederick Douglass with the machinations of Quaker reformer Amy Post bringing Douglass to Rochester to establish The North Star. Not long after, English abolitionist Julia Griffiths applied her business acumen to rescue the paper from the brink of failure and mobilize a heretofore dormant group of reformist women to support it. Success of the paper allowed Douglass economic, political, and intellectual independence through which he could prove that African Americans were capable of self-reliance. Furthermore, he used the paper’s office and pages to offer patronage and support to African American causes and leaders, both male and female. The success of this paper made him the celebrity Frederick Douglass.

The Griffiths friendship was also one of many with white women throughout his life, including his second marriage. The prurient interest that these associations have excited (but not those with black women) both then and now only underscores anxieties about black male sexuality around white women. Douglass and the women, therefore, used their acquaintance, public and non-illicit, challenge the hypocrisy and racism inherent in those fears.

Likewise, with his wife Anna, he challenged stereotypes of black families; and these two projects were often at odds. Moreover, his personal development as an abolitionist took him further away from the man that Anna had married. The tension that played out in their home began here and opened a window into the difficulties of life in an upwardly mobile black family subjected to constant public scrutiny.

While page 99 takes a break from the main argument of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, the quality of the whole is probably revealed in the storytelling, prose, and depth of research. If the page bores, infuriates, or intrigues the reader, thus will the book.

Learn more about Women in the World of Frederick Douglass at the Oxford University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Women in the World of Frederick Douglass.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sabine Frühstück's "Playing War"

Sabine Frühstück is Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her publications include Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan and Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army.

Frühstück applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan, and reported the following:

Page 99 describes why contemporary Japanese critics hardly participate in the debate about militaristic and other violent video games and their impact on children’s cognition and behavior. Very briefly: it’s about the extremely low violent crime rate in Japan and about the low profile of its military forces. In the book at large, I interrogate how essentialist notions of childhood and militarism in Japan and, to some degree beyond, have been productively intertwined, how assumptions about childhood and war have converged, and how children and childhood have worked as symbolic constructions and powerful rhetorical tools—particularly in the decades between the nation- and empire-building efforts of the late nineteenth century and the uneven manifestations of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first. The modern figure of the child has emerged from a set of contradictory assumptions about children: that children are innately attracted to war, and that they are exceptionally vulnerable to its violence. This concept of childhood has thus served as a trope of both innocence and immaturity and wildness and uncontrollability. Within this fused view, children have been variably thought of as being simultaneously in need of rescue, protection, guidance, control, and suppression. At one time, children’s bodies were close to the ground, playfully pursuing territorial advances, almost physically one with the soil. They were envisioned as ever-ready soldiers, constantly signaling that war is natural, inherently human, and indefinitely inevitable. At another time, children were seen as all innocence and as equipped with a pronounced moral authority that relies on that very innocence. As carriers of human emotions, children appeared as proof of the authenticity and naturalness of these emotions—and, finally, epitomized by their very (demographically speaking) disappearance, they functioned as signifier and representation of national decline. The book covers the time between Japan’s first modern wars of the late nineteenth century to our current moment. More than 40 images are incorporated in the analysis.

Learn more about Playing War at the University of California Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rick Wartzman's "The End of Loyalty"

Rick Wartzman is director of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society at the Drucker Institute, a part of Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of four books, including his latest, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The End of Loyalty and reported the following:

Page 99 of The End of Loyalty picks up the narrative as two titans of American business history—Lem Boulware, the savvy labor relations chief at General Electric, and Jim Carey, the president of the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers—are squaring off in the early 1950s. Boulware was a master of circumventing the union, making the case to GE’s workers that they were being treated fairly and that being part of the IUE was a waste. “It must now be obvious to our employees,” the company asserted, “that membership in a union will not get them anything they would not be able to get without a union.”

But Carey wasn’t about to roll over:

As a ten-year-old boy, he liked to brag, he had led his Philadelphia schoolmates in a classroom strike against excessive homework. Carey was a bantam, small in physical stature but profane and truculent, once telling a company negotiator in the middle of contract talks: “I’ll break every bone in your body. Damn it, I’ll come over there and bust you right in the mouth.” One union man remembered that they had to change the ashtrays in the bargaining room to aluminum because Carey would smash the glass ones.

This to-and-fro underscores the importance that unions like the IUE had in the forging of the social contract between employer and employee in America —job security, good pay, excellent health coverage, and a pension you could count on. By extension, it also helps to explain why all of those things have eroded so badly, now that less than 7% of private-sector workers in this country belong to a union (down from more than 30% in the 1950s).

To be sure, The End of Loyalty is not focused on labor-management relations. Its lens is much bigger than that—and, as a social history as much as a business book, it looks at a wide array of forces that have caused the weakening of the nation’s middle class. Among them: globalization and heightened competition from low-wage countries; the introduction of labor-saving technology; a newfound willingness to lay off enormous numbers of people even when there’s no crisis at hand; the outsourcing of all manner of work; the decline of manufacturing and the rise of third-rate service jobs. Fueling all of these forces, meanwhile, is corporate America’s obsession with “maximizing shareholder value,” which has explicitly elevated the wants of investors over the needs of employees.

Still, Page 99 is a great reminder of this essential fact: Because of their ability to act collectively, workers across the economy were once able to counterbalance the inherent strength of corporate America. This translated into higher wages, better benefits, and improved working conditions not only for those who carried a union card but for millions more blue-collar workers whose employers followed the patterns set by organized labor. Benefit packages for millions of nonunion white-collar workers were also based on what unfolded at the bargaining table.

In short, the nation never would have had so many good jobs without unions.

Learn more about The End of Loyalty at the Hachette Book Group website.

The Page 99 Test: Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan E. Bernstein's "Hell and Its Rivals"

Alan E. Bernstein is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds.

Bernstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hell and Its Rivals: Death and Retribution among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Early Middle Ages, and reported the following:

Hell and Its Rivals studies the history of belief in hell during the amazingly creative centuries that saw the patristic period in Christianity, the composition of the Talmud in rabbinic Judaism, and the formation of the Qur’an in Islam. All three religions threatened the worst sinners and non-believers with eternal punishment. Still today, many take hell on faith but, as a historian, I go farther and ask what realities in society inspired and maintained the idea. Page 99 opens a chapter that explains how slavery played that role. Slavery subjected its victims to chains, darkness, confinement, branding, dismemberment, and the unending descent of slave status from mother to children. The endless liability of slaves to torture gave hell a fatal plausibility. Many parables therefore used the relationship between slaves and masters to illustrate the system of rewards and punishments in this world and the next. “Things are images through which we consider the nature of their causes” said one leading theorist of the age. All three religions employed this hierarchy of symbols to communicate afterlife realities.

Beyond this common system of signification, the three religions met and similarly resisted the alternatives that became hell’s rivals: relief, end, and escape. One possibility was that the damned could enjoy relief in hell on religious holidays. Another posited an end to hell because its divinely administered discipline would effectively cleanse sinners of fault and thus end liability to punishment. The third proposed that the very pious could intercede for their kin or their friends and pray them out of torment. All three religions met the challenges posed by these rival notions on similar terms to defend eternal, unchangeable punishment. In subsequent centuries, each damned the others in the everlasting hell they defined and defended together!

Learn about Hell and Its Rivals at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Lafi Youmans's "An Unlikely Audience"

William Lafi Youmans is an Assistant Professor at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs. Broadly interested in questions of transnationalism, power and communication, his primary research interests include global news, technology, law and politics. His other areas of research interest include international broadcasting, Middle East politics, and Arab-American studies.

Youmans applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, An Unlikely Audience: Al Jazeera's Struggle in America, and reported the following:

My book is about Al Jazeera’s decade-long ambition to build an American audience. An Unlikely Audience: Al Jazeera’s Struggle in America tells the story of this largely failed effort.

It should have appeared improbable from the start. Could Al Jazeera really reverse the long history of unidirectional news and information flow from the United States to the Arab world? From the cultural politics of US-Arab relations to the barriers of entry in the crowded American TV news market, the Qatar-based network faced tremendous obstacles.

Still, it established three different US-facing news outlets: Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera America and AJ+. The first, an international channel, floundered as cable companies refused it carriage. It withdrew from the US. Then, the America-only channel closed after only a few short years and exorbitant expenditures. Only with its final offshoot, the digital news pioneer AJ+, has the network found success attracting an American audience.

By page 99, the book was several pages into an analysis of one key event that encapsulated the network’s renewed visibility during the Arab spring, which many lauded as “Al Jazeera’s moment.”

In mid-May, 2011, Al Jazeera held a forum in Washington, DC to celebrate its newfound popularity and promote it further. On the first night of the event, senior politicians Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Senator John McCain spoke. They lauded Al Jazeera English’s reporting from the sites of protest that captivated the world. Such accolades were a far cry from the vilification the network experienced during the Bush administration.

Page 99 introduces prominent Al Jazeera figures at the forum who personified the problems and prospects of the channel’s desire to be widely seen in the United States. Their biographies help tell the story of Al Jazeera in America.

Visit William Youmans's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maurice Roche's "Mega-Events and Social Change"

Maurice Roche is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mega-Events and Social Change: Spectacle, legacy and public culture, and reported the following:

Western-originated mega-events like Olympic Games and World Expos are being increasingly affected and challenged by new vectors of global social change in the 21stC. Mega-Events and Social Change aims to illustrate and sociologically analyse three of these dynamics. These are the media shift from mass press and television to the internet; the onset of global ecological crises and ‘green’ policy responses particularly in cities; and the geo-political shift involved in the rise of China and other non-Western world regions. The book is structured into three parts which address each of these social changes and their implications for mega-events in order.

Page 99 is part of the first discussion concerned with the rise of the internet and the challenges this has created for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as a leading mega-event organizer. These particularly include the rise of internet ‘piracy’, or the infringement of copyright involved in unauthorised copying or streaming of live event television. At this point the book explores the IOC’s development of various ‘hard’ (legally punitive) and ‘soft’ (informative) ways of controlling the piracy problem from the 2008 Beijing Olympics onwards.

A few days after the impressive and much-watched Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympics an internet site (TorrentFreak) which monitors and comments on legal and non-legal online video-streaming reported that ‘even though it was free to watch on TV all around the world ......over a million people have already downloaded the opening ceremony via BitTorrent’ (TF 2008a). The IOC seems to have registered this report and responded to it.

The IOC’s response was to try to make an example of a notorious Swedish internet company using BitTorrent, namely The Pirate Bay, which played a leading role in infringing its Beijing Games television copyright. It requested assistance from the Swedish government in blocking the company’s operation. Later the government had the co-founders of the company fined and eventually jailed. Since the Beijing Games although the IOC’s media policy has continued this ’hard’ approach it has also developed a ‘softer’ approach aimed at young people, ‘digital natives’. This has involved live video-streaming of the London 2012 Games on the IOC’s YouTube channel, and the creation of a permanent online Olympic television channel.

These developments illustrate the book’s general argument that mega-event organizers now need to continuously adapt and evolve their events and event-contexts if they are to manage the new problems which contemporary social changes throw at them. However these adaptations, even if temporarily successful, by no means guarantee the long-term survival of the mega-event genres with which we are all familiar.

Learn more about Mega-Events and Social Change at the Manchester University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue