Sara Mayeux's "Free Justice"

Sara Mayeux is associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America, and reported the following:

Page 99 summarizes the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, which held that states are constitutionally required to provide defense counsel for criminal defendants who cannot afford their own legal representation. It quotes an oft-quoted line from that opinion: “The right of one charged with crime to counsel may not be deemed fundamental and essential to fair trials in some countries, but it is in ours.” Page 99 also explains that, by the time the Court issued this ruling, it would not have been surprising to lawyers; Supreme Court case law had been tending in this direction for some time and, in a related development within the legal profession, lawyers themselves had become increasingly receptive to publicly funded counsel, at least in the criminal context.

Superficially, and oddly enough, the page 99 test works perfectly for my book—perhaps because page 99 is right about halfway through. The book examines debates within the legal profession about public defenders both before Gideon (beginning in the Progressive Era) and after Gideon. So, page 99 is, coincidentally, the exact fulcrum in the book’s overall narrative arc.

In a deeper sense, though, I think the page 99 test works less well for my book than it might seem, because the book is not primarily about the Supreme Court or Gideon per se, but rather about the larger iceberg of changes and debates within American legal culture of which Gideon represented only the most visible tip. Certainly, page 99’s brief summary of Gideon’s holding will not be novel or surprising to legally trained readers, but rather familiar law school fare.

Nevertheless, I think a reader who turned to page 99 would get a pretty good capsule summary of what the book is about. On this page, the reader encounters a brief reminder of a point developed earlier in the book, that many lawyers had once considered public defenders controversial or at least puzzling. American legal culture has historically been committed both to an adversarial model of the criminal trial and to a set of vaguely free market, capitalist background assumptions about the legal profession—i.e., that the default scenario is that people hire their own lawyers as needed to help them pursue their private interests. So, how would it work for the government to underwrite its own adversary in criminal cases? But by the early 1960s, lawyers had developed a set of arguments that made sense of the public defender as a means of extending the benefits of adversarial legal representation to everyone. Yet these arguments generally accepted and proceeded from the premise that the government had no general obligation to provide assistance to the poor, outside of unique contexts such as the criminal courts—a limitation of American legal culture also briefly discussed on page 99.

Learn more about Free Justice at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew S. Baer's "Beyond the Usual Beating"

Andrew S. Baer is assistant professor of history with a secondary appointment in African American studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago, and reported the following:

Beyond the Usual Beating appears to pass the test, as page 99 does indeed include core themes of the overall manuscript. While much of the book zooms-in to specific details of police torture against Black criminal suspects on Chicago’s South and West Sides in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, page 99 pulls back to reflect on the larger context of the Jon Burge police torture scandal. This page appears during a narrative of the 1982 killing of two Chicago police officers by an African American man named Andrew Wilson. Following this shooting, officers launched a manhunt for Wilson that quickly turned brutal, as cops ransacked homes, harassed families, apprehended innocent men, and beat or tortured them to enact punishment and gather information. Once detectives brought Wilson into custody, they physically assaulted him, tortured him with electroshock, and coerced a confession that would land him in prison for the rest of his life. Yet evidence of his abuse, including burns and bruises, would surface in a civil suit brought by Wilson years later. This civil suit helped bring one of Chicago’s most impactful police scandals to light.

Page 99 reveals how Black community leaders, including writers for the Chicago Defender and Reverend Jesse Jackson, employed the brutal manhunt for Andrew Wilson in 1982 as evidence that the Chicago Police Department had long turned Black Chicago into a “warzone.” Jackson “alerted city leaders and apathetic whites to the everyday violence of the nation’s racially motivated crime war” and framed the recent manhunt as symptomatic of routine racial harassment by the city’s police. Local atrocities flourished in a national climate of crime panic, law and order politics, and racist disregard for Black lives. One resident wrote to a Black-owned newspaper, “When white people kill blacks, no one cares […] but let a white policeman be killed, regardless of how rotten or dirty he might be, and it’s a city-wide catastrophe.” Another resident added, “Things just don’t balance out. Some folks think it’s time for revenge.” Page 99 offers specific details of police torture in 1982, broader analysis of the national climate that facilitated torture in Chicago, and evidence of local resistance by affected communities.

Learn more about Beyond the Usual Beating at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David M. Carballo's "Collision of Worlds"

David M. Carballo is Associate Professor of Archaeology, Anthropology, and Latin American Studies at Boston University. His books include Urbanization and Religion in Ancient Central Mexico.

Carballo applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Collision of Worlds I provide details on the Aztec narratives of ethnogenesis, which involved accounts of migration from Aztlan (the origins of the ethnonym) into central Mexico. I discuss the framing of Mexica-Aztec identity in particular as a blending of Toltec and Chichimec lineages. Whereas the Toltecs represented the storied urban civilizations that had existed in central Mexico for centuries before the Aztecs, the Chichimec represented the nomadic desert dwellers of arid regions to the north. The content of the page captures some of the essence of the book as a whole in that I draw on a mix of textual sources and archaeology—outlining the origins of the bow and arrow within Mesoamerica, a weapon the Aztecs associated with the Chichimecs—and mention the legendary Toltec ruler Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, whom some authors argue Moctezuma equated Cortés with. Nevertheless, the 99 page test would apply much more satisfactorily if pagination were to include the final paragraph of page 98, which I quote here:

Regardless of the historical accuracy of these migration narratives, the framing of apparently disparate origins projected both the trappings of civi­lized people and the conquering spirit of barbarians. Framing ethnic identity as Toltec and Chichimec could simultaneously appeal to a sense of legiti­mate authority grounded in the past and a sense of restless energy of hard­scrabble newcomers. It is a rags-to-riches story and would be effective for projecting political authority based on both ancient grandeur and a people not to be messed with. Similar origin narratives are familiar to us from states and empires of the West. The Roman version combined the heroic Trojan War of the Aeneid with the half-wild Remus and Romulus suckling from the she-wolf; the version in the United States combines Greco-Roman ideals of governance, rendered in neoclassical styles on the National Mall in Washington, with the humble origins of the Pilgrims and western Pioneers. We will examine Spanish national mythos later in this section.

This passage captures several of the central elements of the book in that it is (1) cross-culturally comparative, (2) temporally deep, and (3) focuses on how selective historical memory framed ethnic and imperial ideologies on both sides of the Atlantic preceding and during the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica. Previous chapters cover the deep histories of Mesoamerica and Iberia, while this explicitly comparative chapter (Chapter 4) examines the parallels and contrasts between Aztec (particularly Mexica) and Spanish (particularly Castilian) societies on the eve of their encounter. Part of the conquistador mythos drew on a Romano-Christian identity that celebrated not only the power of the Roman Empire but also resistance to it on the Iberian peninsula at sites such as the fortified Celtiberian town of Numantia, memorialized later in a tragedy by the author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes. Another drew on notions of a Christian “Reconquista” of the peninsula from Islamic forces, which was extended to Mesoamerica in conquistador accounts of the “mosques” and “minarets” of the Aztec and Maya cities they invaded. Native Mesoamerican narratives of ethnogenesis, in turn, emphasize the distinctiveness of ethnic city-states that underlay a sense of micro-patriotism in affiliation and different strategies regarding whether to resist or ally with the bearded foreigners who arrived on their shores.

Learn more about Collision of Worlds at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin Duong's "The Virtues of Violence"

Kevin Duong is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France, and reported the following:

A reader of The Virtues of Violence finds me pivoting on page 99. It has a section break, and like many such breaks, it doesn’t make for artful reading. However, at the center of the page sits the heading “From the Electorate to the People-in-Arms.” This chapter studies midcentury French socialism’s changing relationship to political violence, and the heart of its argument is expressed here in oversized lettering and bold typeface. France in the 1840s saw the first organized demands for universal male suffrage. Equipping each man with a ballot was beyond the pale of respectable politics, because French elites feared there existed a causal connection between universal suffrage and democratic socialism. A revolution in February 1848 put the hypothesis to the test when its leaders implemented universal manhood suffrage. The experiment did not go well for “Dem-Socs.” The new electorate voted for Louis Napoleon, first as president and then as emperor in 1852. Thanks to the clever use of plebiscites, Napoleon III terminated the Second French Republic to popular acclaim.

This tragedy is well known by students of French history. My own heading “From the Electorate to the People-in-Arms” is meant to draw attention to the way these events betrayed socialists’ faith in electoral politics. As I put on page 99: “As the editors of Le Peuple reminded their readers in September 1848, ‘Socialism is a science, politics is an art; Socialism has principles, politics has only fantasies; Socialism knows only humanity, politics knows only individuals.’ So much the worse, then, for political answers to the social question.” In the chapter’s remainder, I describe how disenchantment with universal suffrage enhanced socialist enthusiasm for insurrectionary violence and the levée en masse, especially during the 1871 Paris Commune.

The book is not organized around the canonical opposition between ballots and bullets, so on its own, page 99 might be misleading. Then as now, French socialists were caught in a tug of war, unsure if their millenarian hopes for an egalitarian society were best pursued in or beyond the electoral arena. Yet that tug of war was specific to the institutional and intellectual conflicts that embroiled French socialists in the nineteenth century. Others I study in the book found their own paths to regenerative popular violence. French revolutionaries like Robespierre and St-Just, for example, turned to such violence because of the limits of constitutionalism, not electoral democracy. Likewise, Alexis de Tocqueville justified colonial terror in North Africa in the 1840s because of commercial society’s centrifugal impact on the French national psyche. Writers and intellectuals of all types came to appreciate the constructive role “the people in arms” played for democratization, but they never arrived at that appreciation in a uniform way.

There is, though, one specific clause on page 99 that speaks to the wider argument of the book: “Socialism knows only humanity, politics knows only individuals.” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon probably wrote this sentence; he was chief editor for the paper in which it appears. The Virtues of Violence is an effort to understand why regenerative popular violence was such a promiscuous trope in nineteenth century France. Proudhon’s contrast on page 99 between “humanity” and “individuals” points to a piece of the answer: the French struggle for democracy was a struggle against the experience of social disintegration. Democracy required the creation of a “humanity” beyond the quantitative aggregation of discrete “individuals.” Violence by “the people-in-arms” promised—and it was never more than a promise—to create those transcendent social bonds. This violence holds less appeal today than it did two centuries ago. Its vision of democracy, however, is still something we grapple with.

Visit Kevin Duong's website and learn more about The Virtues of Violence at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan M. Reverby's "Co-conspirator for Justice"

Susan M. Reverby is the Marion Butler McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas and Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy.

Reverby applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Co-conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman, and reported the following:

In 1978, William Morales was being held in New York’s Bellevue Hospital prison ward. He was accused of being the master bomber for a group of Puerto Rican revolutionaries, and had been caught when a bomb he was making blew up, taking out several fingers in his hands and causing severe facial damage. Morales’ lawyer and supporters called in Dr. Alan Berkman to make sure Morales was cared for properly, and Berkman was horrified by his mistreatment. Eventually Morales’ comrades concocted plans for an escape. He was freed from his hospital cell by being given wire cutters to cut the window bars, lowering himself out and shimming down several stories on bandages and bed sheets to make his escape, eventually arriving in Cuba where he still lives.

On page 99, the reader learns:

After this, the FBI began to realize that Alan might be important. Alan noticed an FBI van nearby as he worked at Betances, the Lower East Side health clinic where Dylcia Pagan, Morales’ partner, was a patient. The police could never determine if Alan had anything to do with the escape. The FBI agent in charge of the case alleged that Alan told Morales about the layout in the Bellevue ward and provided extra bandages. This was never proved, and Alan was never charged. "There was a grand jury," he remembered, "and I was not called." But the FBI van became more ubiquitous in his life. Other Bellevue prison guards were thought to have been bribed, or merely asleep and incompetent, and lost their positions.

Page 99 captures the paradoxes of Alan Berkman’s political and personal journey. Three years after Morales’ escape, Berkman treated a woman who had a gun shot wound after she participated in a robbery/murder action to raise funds for the militant Black Liberation Army, but he did not report the wound as required by law. This time a Grand Jury did go after him for accessory to murder after the fact. Sure he could not get a fair trial in the hysteria around the case, he went into the political underground, joining comrades who did non-lethal bombings of government sites (including an FBI office and a U.S. Senate anteroom.) Caught, and barely surviving two bouts of serious cancers in prison, he would go on to become an important global health activist around HIV/AIDS.

The page shows Berkman’s willingness to use his doctor skills to help those who called upon him. It demonstrates that he worked with those whose principles of anti-racism and anti-colonialism he shared, even when he personally opposed lethal armed struggle they were willing to undertake. What the page does not show is how his principles stayed the same, but his changed tactics and ability to use his doctor position for a global population, not just individuals, would define the last years of his life.

As Americans now of every kind and in every place are in the streets over structural racism, the biography of Dr. Alan Berkman allows us to understand a man who really lived his principles of anti-racism and global solidarity at great peril to himself. Not born into politics, his religious background as a Jew in the first post Holocaust generation and from a family that thought you ought to be principled meant he brought the teachings of resistance to the world. He grew from a brilliant and arrogant man on his way to a renown career as a medical scientist into a loving and sensitive human being, with all the foibles and mistakes we might all recognize. None of us will probably be him, but his life journey is an illumination of his struggle to make solidarity across the world real, and to do so not out of guilt but with real understanding of our joint humanity.

Learn more about Co-conspirator for Justice at the University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Examining Tuskegee.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aya Gruber's "The Feminist War on Crime"

Aya Gruber is Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School. A former public defender, she is a frequent commentator on criminal justice issues. She has appeared on ABC, NBC, and PBS, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, Denver Post, and Associated Press.

Gruber applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration, and reported the following:

Page 99 examines the American crime victims’ rights movement, a late-twentieth century social and political movement that played a significant role in feminism’s turn to criminal law. It appears in chapter four (The Weapon: Ideal Victims), which differs from the other chapters in that it does not tell the story of a particular feminist battle against crime. Rather, it discuss how feminist reformers and victim’s rights activists in the 1980s, sometimes working in tandem, centered “blameless,’ innocent, usually attractive, middle class, and white” women in reform advocacy, with the effect of broadening and strengthening a penal state that disproportionately burdened poor people of color. Conservative lawmakers juxtaposed this victim image with “the image of scary brown men to frighten voters into believing that crime, not lack of stable employment or income, was the main problem to be addressed by government.”

On page 99, I observe that the victims’ rights movement theoretically emphasized protecting victims from an uncaring prosecutorial system, but in practice it became about accruing more power to prosecutors and undermining defendants’ rights:

In principle, the movement was about serving the victims caught up in a stressful bureaucratic criminal system and not about unilaterally strengthen­ing law enforcement. However, even in the early years, victims’ rights organi­zations did not champion the interests of victims who wanted to avoid the criminal system altogether. This may have had something to do with the organizations’ composition. Gottschalk notes that “activists in victims’ organizations tended to be overwhelmingly White, female, and middle-aged—a group demographic that is hardly representative of crime victims in gen­eral.” She goes on, “These activists generally were more supportive of the death penalty and of the police, prosecutors, and judges than were victims not active in these organizations.” So, in theory, victims’ rights are not synonymous with crime control. But as legal scholar Markus Dubber observes, “As a matter of fact, the vindication of victims’ rights has every­thing to do with the war on crime.”

The book, as a whole, recounts the complicated role feminism played in the formation the modern American penal state, and suggests how contemporary feminists can disentangle gender justice aims from the law enforcement apparatus. I am not sure that one could discern those aims from page 99. Nevertheless, the victim’s rights movement was key to late twentieth century feminists’ emphasis on criminal reform and the success of those reforms. Moreover, in this moment of intense worldwide activism demanding a radical reimagining of the role of policing and punishment in society, it is important to understand how essentialist notions of female victimhood historically have been used to maintain the U.S. prison state. In response to current calls to defund the police, many ask, often rhetorically, “What about rape and domestic violence?” Chapter four exposes that the claim that female victims invariably demand policing and punishment—a claim frequently made by feminists in the past—is not an obvious truth but a narrative rooted in racialized tough-on-crime politics.

Learn more about The Feminist War on Crime at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Glosson's "Performing Jane"

Sarah Glosson is director of the Arts & Sciences Graduate Center at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Performing Jane: A Cultural History of Jane Austen Fandom, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Performing Jane provides a glimpse into the scholarly habits of one particular Jane Austen fan, George Holbert Tucker (1909-2005). A beloved journalist in his native Norfolk, Virginia, Tucker had no college education but published several books in his lifetime, including two biographical works about Jane Austen and her family. He was an avowed anglophile, and among the earliest members of the Jane Austen Society of North America.

This page examines Tucker’s opinions on the inherent value of his collection of over one hundred research scrapbooks. Excerpts from correspondence between Tucker and the Special Collections librarian at the College of William and Mary’s Earl Gregg Swem Library discuss the bequest of these scrapbooks. Tucker describes his research collection as “a ready reference archive,” alluding to the fact that he had assiduously organized and curated the materials prior to depositing them with Swem Library. He was particularly keen to have his scrapbooks preserved in an archive for use by future scholars of Jane Austen, and viewed these raw materials as a scholarly resource even more valuable than his published works. In my assessment, “Tucker felt strongly that he was making a substantial contribution to William & Mary’s collections, placing the university in the selective company of other institutions with important Austen-related collections.” But the same page will reveal that, following its acquisition by Swem Library in 1987, Tucker’s collection was virtually forgotten and much of its material made redundant by digital scholarship and the internet.

Here the Page 99 Test illuminates two key aspects of the book, though it does not ultimately represent the book well as a whole. First, the page would likely—and correctly—disabuse readers of the notion that Performing Jane centers Jane Austen or her works, a common expectation of books with Austen’s name in the title. Discussion of George H. Tucker and his research scrapbooks asserts the book’s focus on Austen fans and their pursuits. Second, the page hints at questions that several sections of the book address: What are the distinctions between those we would comfortably refer to as “fans” and those we would perhaps call “experts” or “enthusiasts”? How do those distinctions play out? Tucker was a scholar, yet, as I state on page 99, his habits and affinities are those of a fan.

Performing Jane tackles a wider range of themes and ideas than this single page reveals. I hope that readers of page 99 would find Tucker’s research scrapbooks intriguing, and feel moved to continue reading about the twentieth-century collectors and lovers of Austen who experienced and expressed their fandom through performative acts related to scrapbooking. Other sections in the book consider similarly performative fan practices: going on pilgrimage to bring oneself closer to Austen and her world, and engaging with imitative works, adaptations, and fanfiction as a way of rekindling an experience with beloved texts like Pride and Prejudice. These three types of fan activities are visible throughout the roughly 200-year history of Austen fandom, and reflect continuity in Austen fans’ desires and habits across time and media environments.

Learn more about Performing Jane at the Louisiana State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter J. Thuesen's "Tornado God"

Peter J. Thuesen is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and co-editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. His books include Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine, and In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible.

Thuesen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather, and reported the following:

I appreciate the invitation to participate in The Page 99 Test, though I’ll have to confess to some skepticism about Ford Madox Ford’s device. It strikes me as a bit similar to when some Christians open the Bible to a random page and seek guidance from the first verse they see. That said, such a method is time honored—it goes back at least to Saint Augustine, who famously opened the Scriptures to Romans 13:13-14—so here goes.

On page 99 of my Tornado God, I’m in the midst of describing religious responses to the St. Louis Tornado of 1896. That tornado was a tremendous calamity for what was then the nation’s fourth-largest city. At least 255 people died, a thousand were injured, and 7,500 buildings were destroyed or damaged. Many of the devastated buildings were churches, a stark reminder of the religious questions posed by the tragedy.

Across the country, clergy wrestled with the disaster in their Sunday sermons. I discuss some of those responses on page 99. I quote Ezra Squier Tipple, pastor of Grace Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City and later president of Drew Theological Seminary, who said that God permits tornadoes and other catastrophes to turn people’s attention from “the minor details of life” and to increase “sympathy among men.” I also quote T. De Witt Talmage, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Washington, D.C., who said that the “best thing that ever happens to us is trouble” because it drives us “into the harbor of God’s protection.”

But page 99 only gets at these sunny estimations of the tragedy’s significance. In the next chapter, I show how some twentieth-century theologians began to question whether there is any purpose or plan behind natural events. One such theologian was Reinhold Niebuhr, who was a three-year-old living in St. Charles, Missouri, just across the Missouri River from St. Louis, when the 1896 tornado happened. Niebuhr illustrates a central irony of my story, that despite the ongoing progress of scientific discovery, humans today are still in some sense as confounded by the tornado as Job was by the Whirlwind.

So does Tornado God pass the Page 99 Test? Not exactly, in that page 99 tells only part of the story: the optimism of the Gilded Age clergy who said that God sends tornadoes for human improvement. But whether they were correct or whether Niebuhr was right to be skeptical, page 99 does at least indirectly point to the central argument of my book: that the tornado is both American and transcendent, a national preoccupation but one that gets at questions as old as humanity itself.

Visit Peter J. Thuesen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Geoffrey Plank's "Atlantic Wars"

Geoffrey Plank is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire; Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire; and An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia.

Plank applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution, and reported the following:

Page 99 opens with a law passed by the colonial assembly of Barbados in 1676 banning New Englanders from bringing indigenous American war captives to the island to be sold as slaves. The assemblymen argued that a recent influx of enslaved indigenous Americans, captured during King Philip’s War, had posed an intolerable security risk. They warned that if this branch of the slave trade continued, “greater mischief may happen to this island than from any Negroes.” Page 99 continues:

The moral and pragmatic arguments over the sale of indigenous war captives grew louder in the English colonies following King Philip’s War. Nonetheless the practice continued for several decades. In Charleston, South Carolina, English colonial officials and slave traders paid indigenous warriors for war captives who were subsequently sold abroad as slaves. The Carolina economy relied on slave labour, but the colonists preferred to purchase Africans and send indigenous American captives away. Historian Alan Gallay has estimated that before 1715 the number of indigenous American captives the colony sent overseas exceeded the number of enslaved people the colonists brought in from the Caribbean and Africa. Some indigenous Americans targeted for capture and sale in South Carolina voluntarily sought exile overseas to avoid enslavement. In 1711 a Cuban ship captain named Luis Perdomo carried 270 indigenous men, women and children from Florida to Havana. These exiles were fleeing Yamasee warriors who intended to sell them in Charleston. Perdomo reported that he left behind hundreds of other indigenous people, perhaps as many as 2,000, who had wanted to sail to Cuba to escape the South Carolina slave market. He said he would have brought more of them to safety and freedom “had he had the vessels.”

Perdomo believed that his ships offered some indigenous people in Florida a way to escape danger. The families he assisted, and others who pleaded for his help, hoped that by crossing the water they could place a barrier between themselves and their attackers. Ironically the Virginians and New Englanders who sent war captives to the Caribbean professed a similar aim, to put a distance between themselves and their adversaries and use the ocean for protection. Refugees who crossed the Atlantic to escape religious persecution in Europe thought about the vastness of the sea in a similar way, as did European imperial officials who sent rebels and other convicts to the Americas as bound labourers. The ocean could separate antagonists, but in most cases, rather than diminishing conflict, crossing the ocean or shipping people overseas only transformed the perception of warfare by moving violence beyond the horizon. The African military leaders who took captives and sold them into the transatlantic slave trade had many of the same incentives that motivated the Virginians and New Englanders who sent indigenous Americans to the Caribbean. The slave trade was a business, and large fortunes could be made marketing and exploiting captives, but in the early modern era shipping captives away was also an increasingly pervasive feature of warfare.

Page 99 provides a clear introduction to several of the central concerns of my book. It illustrates the value of studying Atlantic history by recovering dramas that can be revealed only by looking at different Atlantic regions together. Page 99 contains narratives linking New England with Barbados and South Carolina with Cuba. It broadly identifies dynamics simultaneously operating during the early modern period in Africa, Europe and the Americas. In concrete terms, the page emphasises the pervasive, transformative influence of ships on warfare around the Atlantic. The first third of my book is devoted to this theme.

Another aim of my book is to present Atlantic history in as non-hierarchical a manner as possible, not only assessing the motivations and actions of imperial leaders, colonists and slave traders, but also considering events from the perspective of their allies in Africa and the Americas and those they pursued and fought, such as the indigenous American refugees who pled with Perdomo for transportation to Cuba. Considering the refugees’ perspective highlights the formative impact of warfare on life around the Atlantic. Military action exposed whole communities to slaughter, dispossession, forcible removal, enslavement and exile. The impacts varied, often for example distinguishing men from women, children from adults, indigenous Americans from Africans, Europeans and European colonists. But wars were also communal experiences creating opportunities for cooperation among diverse groups of people from different shores, like Perdomo and his crew and the families they carried across the Florida Strait. Warfare did not simply divide people. It also, sometimes in horrifying ways, brought them together.

Learn more about Atlantic Wars at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Uzma Quraishi's "Redefining the Immigrant South"

Uzma Quraishi is assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston during the Cold War, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Redefining the Immigrant South lands the reader in the middle of Chapter Two which broadly examines the second phase of the migration process as outlined in this book—that of getting acquainted with one’s host society. It moderately illustrates the value of the whole book, though it does not directly engage with the regional and local histories detailed in the second half of the book. A casual perusal of the page offers information on the financial solvency of international students in the 1950s and early 1960s.

However, a careful reading of the page reveals much larger processes underway, namely the rising primacy of the United States in the postwar world, the Cold War-driven expansion of American higher education, and the privileges attached to the cultural capital of South Asian immigrants (i.e. advanced degrees). The page casts a spotlight on a moment in American history when the country actively encouraged and invited international students to pursue higher education while simultaneously denying that opportunity to African Americans. Thus, it indirectly draws attention to the paradox of privilege enjoyed by Asian immigrants in a Cold War United States that was deeply concerned with its racial image abroad versus the systemic racism long endured by African Americans across the country but acutely in the U.S. South.

Based on the economically lean beginnings described on page 99, South Asian immigrants often evoke the “rags to riches” trope in reinforcing the American Dream myth. For many of the South Asian immigrants that I interviewed, the resulting false binary, that of their own “success” versus black “failure,” lends legitimacy to their own championing of the model minority myth. This narrative was circulated in the 1960s and 1970s to undermine the radicalism of the civil rights and Black Power movements.

Pointedly, access to American universities was not merely a result of Asian immigrants’ individual effort. Passage of the civil rights-inspired 1965 Hart Celler Act eased anti-Asian immigration restrictions into the country, while the Civil Rights Act of 1964 facilitated Asian American participation in American society.

Furthermore, the rise in international students attending American universities was subsidized by the U.S. government, posing a further challenge to the individualism of the model minority myth. As I note on page 99:

The generous amount of financial support available at American universities—unlike at other Western universities—was an important part of the calculus by which middle-class South Asian students opted to pursue higher education in the United States. In 1963, American universities and the U.S. government paid for one third of education-related costs for international students, regardless of major. Approximately half of all foreign students were supported by scholarships and grants in the 1960s. By the 1970s, British universities began drastic reductions to international student support, further contributing to the rise in international student enrollment in the United States.

The last sentence in the above passage touches on the ascent of American higher education in the global arena. By the end of the 1960s, Indians’ and Pakistanis’ preferred destination for academic advancement was the United States, partly due to the United States’ unprecedented expansion of its university system but also as a result the Cold War promotion of American education through U.S. public diplomacy abroad.

Page 99 offers the reader a sense of the depth and breadth of the historical forces at play in the early decades of the Cold War.

Learn more about Redefining the Immigrant South at the University of North Carolina Press.

--Marshal Zeringue