Theresa Kaminski's "Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War"

Theresa Kaminski earned her Ph.D. in history, with a specialization in American women’s history, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has spent more than twenty-five years researching and writing about American women. Kaminski regularly reviews nonfiction titles for Publishers Weekly and has been published with the Wall Street Journal.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women's Rights, and reported the following:

If a book browser opened Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War to page 99, they would find the doctor in the middle of the Civil War, working in a volunteer hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, treating soldiers wounded in the battle at Chickamauga. This is likely where she met Union general George Thomas, who was so impressed by her medical skills that he would later secure for her a paid position as a civilian contract surgeon with the army.

What Dr. Walker longed for was an actual military commission. From page 99:

On November 2, 1863, the doctor wrote to Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, with a bold proposal. “Will you give me authority to get up a regiment of men, to be called Walker’s U.S. Patriots, subject to all general orders, in Vol. Regts?” she inquired. She planned to enlist volunteers from any of the loyal states, with the understanding she would serve as the regiment’s first assistant surgeon.

Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War perfectly confirms Ford Madox Ford’s assertion, "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." The page itself contains an important example of how, throughout the book, I weave historical context (here, the battle of Chickamauga) with Mary Walker’s activities. The whole story emphasizes how Walker lived life on her own terms, rejecting society’s restrictions on women’s activities in pursuit of gender equality. Determined to become a doctor at a time when the profession was dominated by men, she found a medical school that admitted women. After receiving her M.D., she went into private practice, giving that up shortly after the beginning of the Civil War. Walker believed, because of her skills and experience, the U.S. army would give her a commission as a surgeon. Instead, she worked as a volunteer in Union hospitals in Washington, D.C. and out in the field, always holding the belief she would convince the military brass to issue a commission.

Since this fact is part of the book’s subtitle, I am not spoiling anything by saying that Dr. Walker’s medical services earned her the Medal of Honor. To date, she is the only woman to receive this award. After the Civil War, Walker concentrated her attention on the women’s suffrage movement. In Washington, D.C. and in her home state of New York, she became a familiar proponent of women’s voting rights. By the 1870s, she was a controversial one as she clashed with leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony over tactics. This part of Mary Walker’s life provides a unique perspective on the fight for suffrage, which is particularly important in 2020 as we observe the centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Visit Theresa Kaminski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David R. Swartz's "Facing West"

David R. Swartz is an associate professor of history at Asbury University. Areas of teaching and research interest include American religious history, twentieth-century American culture, global religion, Civil War memory, and issues of war and peace.

Swartz blogs at Patheos. His just-released book, Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity (Oxford University Press 2020), deals with transnational religion. His first book, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, earned positive reviews from the New York Times, Journal of American History, and the Christian Century.

Swartz applied the “Page 99 Test” to Facing West and reported the following:

Page 99 features the 1966 World Congress for Evangelism, which convened 1,200 delegates from nearly one hundred nations in Berlin, Germany. In front of hundreds of newsmen, including a reporter from the New York Times, two Huaorani converts from the lush jungles of Ecuador stood on a concrete stage. Komi Gikita and Kimo Yaeti were murderers who had been redeemed. As cameras flashed, the dazed men, who may have thought they were being worshipped, gave their Christian testimony. Rachel Saint, whose brother Nate and four missionary colleagues had been speared in the Ecuadorian jungle by Gikita’s father and others in the indigenous tribe, translated. Twenty-nine-year-old Yaeti, known back home as Red Squirrel, told reporters, “Before knowing Itota (Jesus), we killed. There was much revenge and much madness.” But after the killings, “we heard that the word of God is stronger than the devil. We listened. We were told that God said not to spear other people, only the wild hogs, the tapir, and the fish of the stream.” He concluded, “Before I lived sinning and God has done wonderful things for us and now I live well.” Of the ninety remaining members of the tribe, only five had not yet “received Christ as their personal Savior.” In fact, only a year before, Yaeti had helped baptize Nate Saint’s two children near the spot on a river where the massacre occurred. Now, dressed in suits and ties with their hair parted on the side, they stood as trophies of evangelical mission.

Page 99 describes how American evangelicals during the Cold War sought to reshape the world in their own image by preaching spiritual liberty, economic liberty, and political liberty. Indeed, they exercised immense power as they did things for and to other peoples, even those in the jungles of Ecuador, in their fight against godless communism. While a true story, however, this is not the thesis of Facing West. The story of Gikita and Yaeti in Berlin is a single story that does not account for the pluralistic, participatory, and multidirectional qualities of transnational networks. In short, the Page 99 Test fails.

The “empired,” in fact, struck back. Using case studies from Korea, India, Switzerland, the Philippines, Guatemala, Uganda, and Thailand, Facing West narrates how evangelicals in the Global South shaped religion in places like Kentucky and California. In the 1950s and 1960s many missionaries and their converts, noting the hypocrisies of racial segregation in a supposedly democratic and Christian American South, joined the civil rights movement. In the 1970s others challenged traditionalist methods of missionary work and American-style capitalism. In the 1980s evangelicals in the Global South pushed the humanitarian organization World Vision away from relief work to long-term, sustainable development work. In the 1990s global Pentecostals promoted spiritual enchantment as they critiqued American rationalism.

In more recent years, immigrants from around the world are provoking global encounters even within American borders. They seek to reinvigorate a white evangelicalism that is in demographic free fall. The current influence of international Christians may seem modest compared with 2045, when demographers project that the United States will become a minority-majority nation. It is possible that support for Donald Trump in the 2020 may be perceived in the 2040s as a last gasp of white Christian Americanism within a profoundly multicultural movement.

Visit David R. Swartz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert E. Weems Jr.'s "The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago"

Robert E. Weems Jr. is the Willard W. Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History at Wichita State University. His books include Business in Black and White: American Presidents and Black Entrepreneurs in the Twentieth Century and Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago.

Weems applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago: Anthony Overton and the Building of a Financial Empire, and reported the following:

Page 99 provides a discussion of how Anthony Overton entered into the realm of insurance (by establishing the Victory Life Insurance Company in 1924). This business maneuver was significant in that Overton had no previous experience in the insurance industry. However, Overton, by 1924, was the president of a major personal care products company (Overton-Hygienic Manufacturing Company), as well as the president of the second national bank chartered by African Americans (Douglass National Bank). Consequently, the self-assured Overton possessed the audacious belief that he could establish a successful insurance company.

One of keys to Overton’s commercial success was his control of The Half-Century Magazine, a prominent African American periodical that regularly featured advertisements for Overton-Hygienic products, the Douglass National Bank, and later the Victory Life Insurance Company.

In terms of the Victory Life Insurance Company, Overton, early on, received the support of Rev. Dr. Lacy Kirk Williams, the pastor of Chicago’s Mt. Olive Baptist Church. Mt. Olive was reputed to be the largest African American Baptist church during this period. Moreover, in 1925, Williams became the president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest African American religious organization in the nation. To put this in context, I want to share a couple quotes from page 99 that were taken from Merah Stuart’s classic 1940 book An Economic Detour: A History of Insurance in the Lives of American Negroes. First, “Negro business owes a debt of gratitude to the Negro church, it has received great assistance from it. In the development of all types of commercial enterprises, the doors of the church have ever been wide open…the voice of the ministry has been constantly raised and its influence exerted in active advocacy and defense of Negro owned and operated enterprises.” Consequently, “when Anthony Overton took the initial step to organize Victory Life Insurance Company in 1923, he had no more enthusiastic supporter than Dr. L.K. Williams. Dr. Williams subscribed for a substantial block of the stock when it was first put on the market; and later was elected a member of the board of directors.”

Besides possessing such assets as extreme self-confidence, a popular marketing outlet, and the support of a prominent African American minister, page 99 of The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago also discusses how Overton’s fledgling Victory Life Insurance Company attracted the favorable attention of a New York black investor, Dr. Phillip Maxwell Hugh Savory. Savory not only invested $3,750 in the embryonic Victory Life, but helped facilitate Victory Life’s historic expansion into New York State in 1927.

According to author Ford Madox Ford and the so-called “Page 99 Test,” if a browser were to read page ninety-nine of a book, the entire book’s quality would be revealed. In terms of how this may apply to The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago, I would say that page 99 provides insights as to how Anthony Overton, to quote from the book’s subtitle, built one segment of his “Financial Empire.” Thus, the “Page 99 Test” would have some relevancy. In fact, it would hopefully stimulate the browser to actually buy the book to ascertain what happened to Anthony Overton before he organized the Victory Life Insurance Company and what happened to him afterwards.

A very important aspect of The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago, which is not a part of the “Page 99 Test,” is its examination of “fact” versus “fiction” related to Anthony Overton’s early life. Most pre-existing works situated Anthony Overton as a literal young “renaissance man” between his sixteenth and thirtieth birthdays (1880-1895). During this period, his alleged activities included: being a teenage business prodigy in Topeka, Kansas; earning a law degree from the University of Kansas and returning to Topeka as a municipal judge; working as a Pullman porter; and opening a variety of successful enterprises and being elected to political office in Oklahoma Territory. Moreover, Overton himself contributed to this narrative of his teenage and young adult experiences.

A number of research trips helped me to conclude that the “renaissance man” depiction of Anthony Overton’s formative years was patently false. Ironically, it appears that the development of this genre did a disservice to his legacy. The struggles and frustrations he endured early in life makes his later extraordinary success all the more compelling. Moreover, it appears that the steely determination he developed as a young man helped him to survive later in life when the Great Depression turned his world upside-down.

Learn more about The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Quong's "The Morality of Defensive Force"

Jonathan Quong is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Southern California. He taught previously at the University of Manchester. He is an associate editor for Philosophy & Public Affairs, an associate editor for Ethics, and an area editor for Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

Quong applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Morality of Defensive Force, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book begins my critical discussion of what I call The Responsibility Principle. This principle states: Other things being equal, the degree of defensive harm that it is proportionate to impose on a liable attacker varies in accordance with the attacker’s degree of moral responsibility for creating a situation where at least one non-liable person is threatened with harm. Versions of this principle have been endorsed by many philosophers who work on the morality of defensive force, but I argue that it is false. Instead I defend The Stringency Principle. This principle holds, roughly, that the independent variable that explains what counts as proportionate defensive harm is the stringency of the right that the attacker threatens to violate. The more stringent the right that is threatened, the greater the degree of defensive harm that is proportionate. An important task in this chapter is thus to establish that the stringency of a right-holder’s claim—that is, how weighty or important the right is—is not determined by the duty-bearer’s degree of moral responsibility for a threatened violation.

The material on page 99 wouldn’t necessarily give the reader a good sense of the whole book since it only contains the opening of the critical discussion of the responsibility principle, and this critical discussion is only one part of the broader argument about proportionality in defensive force, which is itself only one part of the morality of defensive force. On the other hand, the reader would, hopefully, get a reasonably clear sense of the methodology that I use in the book. The page contains a pair of examples involving defensive force. Although the degree of wrongful harm threatened in the two examples is the same, intuitively the degree of defensive force it is proportionate for the defensive agent to use differs. The question is then whether the responsibility principle, or some other principle, offers the most compelling account of this pair—and other pairs—of cases. But, I argue, we also need to decide whether the principle that seems to best explain our judgments in various pairs of cases has independent support and coheres with broader views about justice and rights. This is one of the central themes of the book: we cannot understand the morality of defensive force without asking and answering deeper questions about how the use of defensive force fits with a more general account of justice and moral rights.

Learn more about The Morality of Defensive Force at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elyce Rae Helford's "What Price Hollywood?"

Elyce Rae Helford is Professor of English and Director of Jewish and Holo​caust Studies in the Faculty in Women's and Gender Studies at Middle Tennessee State University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, What Price Hollywood?: Gender and Sex in the Films of George Cukor, and reported the following:

On page 99 of What Price Hollywood? Gender and Sex in the Films of George Cukor, readers will find the first page of Chapter 6, entitled “The Theatricality of Gender and Drag Performance.” The chapter opens with reference to the pivot that takes place at this relative midpoint in the book, from discussions of gendered images and representations of gender relations in Cukor’s films to reading gender performatively. This shift moves us from such previously addressed topics as depictions of (white, middle-class) female friendships and (white, middle-class) male alcoholics to the meanings of drag performances and the influence of film noir style.

This test works fairly well for my book. My specific focus on gender and sexuality (inflected by class, ethnicity, and race) in the films of George Cukor means all chapters connect to some degree, and they even overlap in which films are studied. (While I cover a total of 25 films in depth, several pictures are addressed in multiple chapters with differing focus.) Page 99 guides the reader to consider the multiple approaches one may take to film studies from an intersectional feminist perspective. I’m also particularly fond of this chapter’s focus on female-to-male drag acts, which appear in a surprising number of Cukor films over nearly 30 years, from Little Women (1933), Sylvia Scarlett (1935), and Adam’s Rib (1952) – all starring Katharine Hepburn – to A Star Is Born (1954) and Heller in Pink Tights (1960), the former a Judy Garland vehicle and the latter a Western satire showcasing Sophia Loren. In all of these films, gender norms are shown to be socially rather than biologically constructed. Playful delight trumps social approval or cautionary tales denounce adherence to absolutes.

Ultimately, whether one begins with page 99 or any other, know that the greatest pleasure for me as author of What Price Hollywood? has been the exploration of how classic Hollywood gender rules have been bent if not broken and how many ways a gay Jewish-American director such as Cukor could find success and even moments of joy despite the studio system’s heavy restrictions.

Visit Elyce Rae Helford's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Danny Dorling's "Slowdown"

Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. His books include Inequality and the 1% and The Equality Effect. With others, he created the website worldmapper.org, a digital collection of demographic maps.

Dorling applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives, and reported the following:

From page 99:

CLIMATE 99

Thus the worldwide fossil fuel–powered Industrial Revolution could well have begun in China during the Song Dynasty in the eleventh century CE, but in the twelfth century production of iron and steel fell. The costs of transporting these metals had become higher when the canal trade was interrupted by war, and political upheaval led to a drop in demand from the capital city. Invaders from Manchuria disrupted production, and a century later Genghis Khan’s army swept over the most prolific iron producing region. Production was subsequently restricted largely to efforts to “equip the Mogul armies with armor and weapons” (not unlike William Armstrong’s main use of iron all those centuries later for the manufacture of armaments). Weapons of war often play a key role in the rise or fall in iron production. The previous mini-acceleration ended when the Yellow River broke through its dikes in 1194 and forged a new path to the sea, following on from previous extensive floods in 1034 and 1048. We humans have known great catastrophes many times in our history; we are just not that good at remembering them, especially when they happened in faraway places and times.

At any point in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, similar political and environmental fates could have destroyed the nascent Industrial Revolution in Europe, but they did not. The timeline depicted in figure 13 shows the annual additions to CO2 in the atmosphere each year from 1750 to 1910, but what mattered most for global warming was not that, but the cumulative total. Carbon tends to stay in the atmosphere indefinitely, until it is taken up by plants and trees or absorbed by ocean plant life. There are other sources of increased human-made emissions to consider as well, but carbon is by far the most important. Furthermore, the more that forests are cut down, the less CO2 is absorbed back from the air.

It is estimated that by 1807 there were 1 billion metric tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere that were the product of human use of fossil fuels. That doubled to 2 billion by 1827, 4 billion by 1847, 8 billion by 1862, 16 billion by 1877, 32 billion by 1892, and 64 billion by 1908. The gaps between these years fell from twenty to fifteen, and then rose only slightly to doubling in sixteen years. That sixteen-year period included two of the great economic downturns of the U.S. economy (see table 2). Despite such recessions, however, overall industrial pollution did not slow down. It just rose less quickly than it otherwise would have.

The 1870s slump in production is but a mere dent in the timeline shown in figure 13. The effects of the economic depression of 1882–85 are...

Page 99 of Slowdown concludes a discussion about the proto industrial revolution in Song Dynasty China when iron production was recorded as having tripled in the century to 1064CE and then rose even faster in the next dozen years before being brought to an abrupt halt by war and invasion. This is part of a section on the book about the period before what I call “the great acceleration”. I am arguing that it could have happened at other times in other parts of the world, and that it was partly just by chance that it was the acceleration that began in Europe which is not curtailed.

Page 99 then goes to tell the story of how carbon pollution doubled repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century (at least as we can best estimate it today from historical records). I discuss when and why this accelerated the most and what slowed the acceleration down at all. This page ends in 1908 and is setting the scene for a discussion of the huge rise in production and consumption that followed. The book is very long, 400 pages long, and so this page is only a quarter of the way though. It also includes a description – the 13th of 67 illustrations in the book – showing the global rise of CO2 from 1950 to 1910. Two subsequent figures take this to present day. Our capacity to pollute hugely was one of the few things that was not slowing down in our economic and social worlds by January 2020 when the book was published. I end the book by suggesting that it would; but that as we cannot foresee the future we would not know what would cause this next slowdown.

Page 99 works well as a summary as it illustrates how the book does jump between a large number of disparate subjects and examples - some readers might like this approach, others will not.

Visit Danny Dorling's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Natalie Carnes's "Motherhood: A Confession"

Natalie Carnes is Associate Professor at Baylor University, where she teaches feminist theology and religion classes. Her books include Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia, and she is the author of multiple articles and online essays, including pieces on Pope Rihanna and nursing Madonnas.

Carnes applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Motherhood: A Confession, and reported the following:

On page 99, my seventh chapter, “Domination,” begins. Like every chapter in Motherhood: A Confession, it opens with an epigraph from Augustine’s parallel chapter in the Confessions. In this case, the epigraph reads, “What torments my heart suffered in mental pregnancy, what groans my God!” Then the chapter turns to my own domestic drama. “We are locked in a bathroom in a café. While washing your hands, you had elbowed your friend on the nose, and now you won’t apologize for hurting her. It was an accident, you claim; why apologize for an accident? Your friend is upset. Her mother is outside, reserving a table for us. I will not let you out of the bathroom until you apologize; if you refuse, you will lose the pink lemonade we came for.” The rest of the text on page 99 describes an increasingly difficult standoff with my child, as we each entrench in our positions. I am determined she will apologize; she is equally determined she will not.

The page 99 test here does not work as way to find the heart of Motherhood’s argument, though the juxtaposition of the epigraph and the domestic episode could evoke for the reader a premise of the book: the pregnancies of motherhood, physical and mental, generate dramatic and sometimes failed encounters with the divine no less significant than those Augustine experiences. What the page 99 test yields in this case is immersion in an episode that serves as a turning point for the narrative, when I come to terms with my lust to dominate and begin to move towards conversion. In sum, page 99 is an important page in the book, but it does not yield a clear picture of the work as a whole in any straightforward sense.

The (moderate) failure of the Page 99 test in this case likely results from the genre of the book, which is narratival, in imitation of Augustine’s Confessions. While there are arguments throughout the book—about what mercy is, for example, and how motherhood can both open a person to mercy and harden her against it—the book’s most important arguments are implicit in its form: namely, first, that women’s bodies, no less than men’s, are important sites of theological reflection; second, that even texts as patriarchal as Augustine’s Confessions can be taken up, re-attuned, to mediate feminist commitments; and, therefore, that third, women can make themselves insiders to texts and traditions that have construed them as outsiders. Those arguments are the heart of the book, what motivates it and makes it work, and yet they are not stated on an any single page of it.

Visit Natalie Carnes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Mezger's "Forging Germans"

Caroline Mezger is an historian at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. She holds degrees in history from Yale University and Central European University (Budapest), as well as a PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute (Florence).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Forging Germans: Youth, Nation, and the National Socialist Mobilization of Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, 1918-1944, and reported the following:

For much of the twentieth century, childhood and youth became a battleground as states, political activists, social and cultural movements, and even religious agencies attempted to define their own notions of belonging therein. However, even as activists endeavored to inculcate young individuals with certain ideological notions "from above," their initiatives were always forced to contend with the lived realities, aspirations, and practices of the people they targeted. Page 99 of my book, Forging Germans: Youth, Nation, and the National Socialist Mobilization of Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, 1918-1944, describes some of the (often quite comedic) tensions that arose as the grand schemes of Nazi Germany to imbue young ethnic Germans in interwar Yugoslavia with a pro-Nazi German identity faltered when put into practice on a local level. Specifically, it uses German Foreign Office records to recount several instances in which Catholic priests, who had been sent to Yugoslavia to preach the Nazi gospel among young ethnic Germans during the mid-1930s, failed in their mission. Instead of imbuing his sermons with pro-Nazi propaganda, the priest Karl von Koeth, for instance, publicly shamed young Nazi enthusiasts, denounced those ethnic German youth who had been sent (by Germany's Catholic authorities) on propagandistic tours of the Reich, and openly declared the Third Reich's concentration camps as equally criminal to the Soviet Union's. Von Koeth was quickly threatened by the Gestapo. However, the damage had been done, as it became clear that even Reich-dispatched clergymen did not always believe in the Nazi mission.

Page 99 is quite representative of the book as a whole on several levels. On the one hand, it quite clearly shows how ideological projects, as envisioned "from above", found themselves in continuous tension when implemented "from below", as they occasionally encountered resistance not only from the people they had hoped to influence, but from the very activists commissioned with their movement's dissemination. On the other hand, it illustrates the complex array of actors who had become implicated, by the mid-1930s, in transmitting the Nazi cause among Europe's ethnic Germans. Besides the usual suspects of Foreign Office, SS, Hitler Youth, and other agencies — studied more or less successfully by historians dealing with ethnic Germans in other regions — the Churches, too, became deeply implicated in nationalized, even pro-National Socialist battles over the hearts and minds of young ethnic Germans.

What page 99 hardly reflects, however, are the voices of young ethnic Germans themselves. Indeed, throughout the book, my narrative draws extensively on original oral history interviews with individuals who had spent their childhood and/or youth in the two Yugoslav regions that I studied: the eventually Hungarian-occupied Batschka/Bácska/Bačka, and the eventually German-occupied Western Banat. Using oral history interviews, as well as sources produced by and about ethnic German children and youth, the book traces the myriad ways in which youth mobilization schemes, education, and fluctuating conditions of occupation and war affected young ethnic Germans. Placing young ethnic Germans at the center of analysis — indeed, framing them as historical actors in their own right — enables us to see children and youth not merely as the target of (nationalist) ideological movements, but as their active (co-) creators. As such, Forging Germans highlights the multifarious ways in which children and youth themselves had agency, an agency which at times directly implicated them in some of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century.

Learn more about Forging Germans at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Garrett Peck's "A Decade of Disruption"

Garrett Peck is an author, public historian and tour guide in the nation's capital. He leads tours through The Smithsonian Associates, and his Temperance Tour of Prohibition-related sites has been featured on C-SPAN Book TV and the History Channel program "Ten Things You Didn't Know About" with punk rock legend Henry Rollins. He was featured on a two-hour documentary about Prohibition by the Smithsonian Channel.

Peck applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Decade of Disruption: America in the New Millennium, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Hurricane Katrina was the worst natural disaster that ever struck the United States. Eighty percent of New Orleans was underwater. Some 1,500 people drowned. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their homes, and property damages were estimated at $75 billion. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York were contained to a few blocks at the south end of Manhattan, and the rescue efforts were largely led by local police and the fire department. Katrina, on the other hand, caused the wholesale evacuation of more than a million people and had devastated 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Most of the residents of New Orleans—a half-million people—lost everything. The U.S. had never experienced anything like this before.

The majority of New Orleanian evacuees fled west to Texas, about 150,000 of them settling in one city, Houston. Thousands of people ended up at the Houston Astrodome. People from throughout the Gulf region evacuated to other cities. Many of them settled in hotels, and months later, FEMA stopped paying their hotel bills.

Bush addressed the nation from Jackson Square two weeks after Katrina, saying that the United States would rebuild New Orleans. The square was flooded by generator-powered lights (power was still out in the city), but as soon as the president left, the power was cut off. Angry over the inept response, rap artist Kanye West remarked on television, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Bush later wrote in his memoir, “But the suggestion that I am a racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low. I told Laura [his wife] at the time that it was the worst moment of my presidency.”

Katrina exposed the deep fault lines of race and poverty that still undercut the United States. Many people had forgotten about the urban poor—people who were too poor even to own a car, people who barely squeezed by, paycheck to paycheck. Images on the nightly news and on the Internet showed flood victims taking shelter on the roofs of their homes—most of them poor blacks—and thousands of people crowding the inhumane conditions at the Convention Center and Louisiana Superdome.

New Orleans sat in stagnant, dirty water for six weeks before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finished draining the city. When it did, everything was covered in grey muck, a foul line on every house and building showed just how high the flood waters reached. Orange Xs from spray paint cans marked every house where rescuers had searched, indicating the date and if any bodies were found. The stagnant warm water created a huge mold problem.

The Page 99 Test works quite well for my book A Decade of Disruption. As you can probably tell from the topic, this is from a chapter called “Katrina,” which highlights the disastrous hurricane that drowned an American city in late August 2005, and the sluggish federal response that took the shine off the presidency of George W. Bush. Remember him saying to much derision, “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie”?

What I did here was capture the immediacy of the moment, while also putting it into the greater context of a decade in American history. We all lived through this disruptive time. I’m hoping the reader will recall how helpless we all felt when we saw helicopter footage of the drowned city with residents trapped on their roofs waiting for rescue, or the thousands trapped in inhumane conditions, almost all of them poor and black.

As I write this, we are witnessing another massive disruption: the COVID-19 pandemic. It feels like a historic parallel to Katrina, only exponentially worse. Many of the victims are those who are the most vulnerable in our society. The mortality rate is highest among people of color and the elderly. People of color are on the front lines of the pandemic, the “essential workers” in hospitals, nursing homes, grocery stores, and food delivery. They risk their lives to spare the rest of us, and many don’t have the luxury of working from home. In the last forty years, inequality has gotten much worse in our country.

The chapter “Katrina” was actually the first part of the book that I wrote. I visited the Big Easy in January 2008 for my fortieth birthday, and got to see how much of the city was still unopened, as it seemed like so many residents had permanently left. New Orleans is a great American city, and it would be a shame if it died. I’m relieved that the city has mostly recovered, but saddened that Mardi Gras in 2020 became a vector for mass coronavirus infection.

Learn more about the book and author at Garrett Peck's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andre M. Perry's "Know Your Price"

Andre M. Perry is a fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at The Brookings Institution, a scholar-in-residence at American University, and a columnist for the Hechinger Report.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities discusses the Ensley neighbor of Birmingham, AL, and efforts to revitalize this once economically thriving area gutted by racist social policies of the past, “In 2018, the city began working with the Brookings Institution to create a strategy that would revive unused facilities in Ensley, including the former U.S. Steel industrial park. [Mayor] Woodfin also seeks to help landowners develop a retail corridor, extending transit lines to the area and relocating city departmental services in the section of town.”

Page 99 gives only a slight taste to the various issues, i.e. education, school reform, and the importance of black teachers, pitfalls of data and testing, the need for more black politicians-especially black women politicians, importance and value of black-owned businesses in a city’s economy, incubation firms, racism in research, in the cities discussed in Know Your Price, such as Detroit, New Orleans, Atlanta, Washington, DC, Wilkinsburg, PA in addition to Birmingham, AL.

As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., notes, “In this groundbreaking and important volume, Andre Perry brilliantly addresses the importance of fixing the racist governmental policies that have ‘created housing, education, and wealth disparities,’ especially in Black communities. Not only a rigorous analysis of the dynamics of devaluation, Perry has written a powerful personal narrative that will captivate his readers.”

Learn more about Know Your Price.

--Marshal Zeringue