Andrew Ofstehage's "Welcome to Soylandia"

Andrew Ofstehage is currently a program coordinator for CALS International Programs at North Carolina State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Welcome to Soylandia is the first page of the fourth chapter - “Flexible Farming and the Weediness of Soylandia.” The chapter begins with a paradox of the Cerrado landscape, being that “to supporters of agribusiness, [the Cerrado] is both wasteland and breadbasket.” Further, we are introduced to another paradox, that to US farmers in Western Bahia, farming is “both so easy that it is boring and also requires ‘spoonfeeding the soil’” The reader is re-introduced to Frank, a Missouri-born farmer who now manages a farm in Brazil. Frank complains that “you can’t get farmworkers to do it the American way” and that “no American has taught a Brazilian anything” about agriculture. Coming away from this page, the reader will know that this chapter will explore the complexities of foreign farmers growing soybeans in Brazil.

The content of page 99 of Welcome to Soylandia provides an interesting test of the page 99 experiment. The reader would be right to imagine that this book speaks to agronomic, economic, and social challenges that US farmers face in producing soybeans in Brazil. It speaks to the specific challenges that these farmers face in managing labor and expertise on these farms, even in opposition to their own farmworkers. Further, the reader would be alerted to the fact that Welcome to Soylandia explores various complexities of these farmers’ adventures in Brazil - that their work there is a negotiation with the land and workers.

However, the reader would likely be confused and perhaps put off by the introduction of places and regions that might be unfamiliar to them. Where is Western Bahia? What is the Cerrado? In fact the reader will know that this is a book about Americans growing soybeans somewhere outside of the United States, but unless they possess a knowledge of the geography of Brazil, they will not know quite where.

Still, page 99 captures key themes of Welcome to Soylandia: farmworkers, soils, imperfect hierarchies of work, and flexible farming to name a few. Most importantly, the reader will know that this book, while dealing large-scale agronomic and economic change, focuses on the idiosyncratic farmers who are working with and against the place and idea that I call Soylandia.

Visit Andrew Ofstehage's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Amoruso's "Moved by the Dead"

Michael Amoruso is assistant professor of religion at Occidental College. His research examines race, memory, and urbanism in the Americas, with a focus on the United States and Brazil. His first book, Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil, explores these themes through an ethnography of a devotion to the souls of the suffering dead.

Amoruso applied the “Page 99 Test” to Moved by the Dead and reported the following:

Page 99 lands near the end of Moved by the Dead's fourth chapter, "Sympathy for the Dead." The chapter extends recent scholarship on maintenance, care, and repair to the study of religion. On this page, I argue that as devotees move between religions (one sense of "moved" in the title), they maintain affective ties to the souls and spirits with whom they'd previously cultivated relations. This can precipitate change, such as when Umbanda practitioners who move to Candomblé bring caboclo spirits with them.

This explanation of movement, maintenance, and repair is a major step in the book's overall argument, though I wouldn't say that it gets to the heart of the book. That's partly because the page primarily summarizes some relatively recent scholarship on Black Atlantic religion. That said, page 99 does reflect something of my earlier thinking about the practice that is the book's central focus, the devotion to souls (devoção às almas) or cult of the souls (culto das almas). Initially, as a doctoral student, I set out to rethink religious syncretism. As I talked to devotees, I came to understand that what others understood in terms of mixture or hybridity might be better understood as movement—namely, the movement of religious actors between different spaces.

As I revised the book for publication, my initial focus on religious movement broadened to include affective and political movement. In time, I honed my argument to frame the devotion to souls as a practice of "mnemonic repair." As I relate in the Introduction, "In sustaining a relationship of altruistic reciprocity between the living and the dead, the practice has engendered political movement, motivating devotees and activists to advocate for official recognition of historical injustice—especially, though not exclusively, as related to slavery and its afterlives—through interventions in São Paulo's built landscape" (15).

Visit Michael Amoruso's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Garland's "What to Expect When You're Dead"

Robert Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor Emeritus of the Classics at Colgate University. He is the author of many books, including The Greek Way of Death, Wandering Greeks, and Athens Burning. He has also recorded six courses for the Great Courses, most recently God against the Gods.

Garland applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife, and reported the following:

Page 99 just so happens to be a half-page, headed by the words of the Stoic philosopher Seneca, "Life is just like a play. It doesn't matter how big the part is. It's how well you act it." I wholeheartedly agree. The page also just so happens to fall at the beginning of the chapter entitled "Heaven and Hell," and if there's one very big question that the book raises - apart from whether there is an afterlife - it's how the idea of Heaven and Hell first seeped into the human imagination.

Page 99 stands at the beginning of a journey of exploration to discover how ancient civilizations first came up with the idea of a dualistic afterlife - the otherworldly other worlds that we tend to call Heaven and Hell, which play such a major role in Christian and Islamic thinking. However, it also points out that these alternative universes did not arrive overnight and "were not central to what most ancient peoples imagined to be the afterlife awaiting them." Page 99 also anticipates speculation about that ever-fascinating and perplexing question as to how we will experience pleasure and pain in the world to come, and what we will actually be able to do when we're dead, the answers to which of course depend on whether we will have physical bodies with appetites and desires or whether we will exist in some disembodied form, not to say whether we will even exist at all, which the following chapter will explore. The page references many of the ancient peoples whose ideas feature throughout the book - the Egyptians, Etruscans, Greeks, Mesopotamians, and Israelites, along with the Romans, Early Christians, Hindus, and Muslims, including, at the very beginning of this ancient tour, our distant ancestors, the Neanderthals, who were the first people to practice intentional burial, and who may also have already come up with the idea that death may not mean extinction.

What to Expect When You're Dead offers an animated and lively cross-cultural survey of death practices and beliefs about the afterlife. Its approach is to underscore the essential uniformity of those practices and beliefs, while at the same time emphasizing important and striking variants. This, as it turns out, is exactly what is illustrated on page 99, where the point is made that whereas the Egyptians envisaged the afterlife as a continuation of life on earth, the Greeks initially consigned all their dead to the dreariness and darkness of Hades. Studying what people did thousands of years ago connects us with our cultural ancestors, all of whom without exception asked exactly the same question that we do: is there indeed anything to expect when we're dead? The tone of the book is essentially light-hearted, even uplifting. After all, there's no reason why studying death should be a downer. Mortality and the mortal condition, irrespective of any hope of an afterlife, are precisely what make life so infinitely precious.

Learn more about What to Expect When You're Dead at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Wandering Greeks.

--Marshal Zeringue

Corinna Barrett Lain's "Secrets of the Killing State"

Corinna Barrett Lain is S. D. Roberts & Sandra Moore Professor of Law at University of Richmond School of Law.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, and reported the following:

The first full sentence at the top of page 99 of Secrets of the Killing State is this: “To borrow from one executioner’s articulation of the point, ‘Shit does happen.’ Yes, yes it does, and here are the reasons why.”

Whoa. That’s an A+ on the Page 99 Test!

On page 99, I’m introducing the topic of Chapter 4—“An Exceedingly Delicate, Error-Prone Procedure.” Turns out, lethal injection is hard (as in really hard) to do. Lethal injection retains the delicacy of a medical procedure, with its demand for precision and attention to detail, but adds some things and takes away others, resulting in a Frankenstein version of the medical model. The result is an exceedingly delicate procedure that is also exceedingly error prone. In this chapter, I walk through each step of the procedure and talk about all the ways that lethal injection can, and does, go wrong. Hence the line: “‘shit does happen.’ Yes, yes it does and here are the reasons why.”

But that line is also a great snapshot of the entire book. Note that Ford Madox Ford said that if we turn to page 99 and read, “the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” Not necessarily the big idea—though here, it happens to work on that level too—but the quality of the whole.

What is Secrets of the Killing State like? It’s a tell-all, so lots of tea spilled. It’s a little irreverent and often quotes an executioner or state official’s own words to make a point. And it uses levity in the writing style to make reading about executions just a tad less heavy. By reading a single line on page 99—an executioner saying “shit does happen” when asked about botched executions—a reader can get an accurate idea of the feel of what they’re going to get in this book. Hat’s off to Ford Madox Ford!

Visit Corinna Lain's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Berenson's "Perfect Communities"

Edward Berenson is a professor of history at New York University and director of its Institute of French Studies. His books include Heroes of Empire, Europe in the Modern World, The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story, and The Accusation. He lives in Tarrytown, NY.

Berenson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Perfect Communities is about deindustrialization, specifically the closure of U.S. Steel’s Fairless Works. In its heyday from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, this vast steel mill, one of the largest ever made, employed several thousand residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania. Dick Wilson, laid off in 1991 after working at Fairless for thirty-one years, said, “I thought it was my birthright—to be white, dumb, work in the mill, buy a Levittowner [the original Levittown, PA model].”

I doubt Wilson was dumb. What he meant was that, even without a college degree—or even a high school diploma—men could land well-paying union jobs in the Fairless Works and countless other factories nationwide. These jobs gave workers the income to buy a modest, though relatively comfortable tract home and raise a family there while giving their kids opportunities denied to them.

So, if a reader opened my book to page 99, he or she would get a decent, although incomplete, idea of what my book is about.

Perfect Communities pays due attention to the benefits provided by the five huge U.S. Levitt developments built in the suburbs of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and San Juan, Puerto Rico between 1947 and 1978. These benefits included affordable houses ($6,690 in 1947; $25,000 in 1970) close to plentiful jobs, good schools, public pools, ball fields, and other recreational facilities. For working- and lower-middle-class people, Levittown was a dream come true.

But the dream wasn’t for everyone. William J. Levitt, the mastermind behind the Levittowns, refused to rent or sell his homes to African Americans. The theme of racial exclusion, which figures prominently in the book, appears only fleetingly on page 99—in Dick Wilson’s reference to himself as “white.” So, the issue of race is there, but readers who look no further than page 99 could miss it.

Readers of that single page would also miss the integration of two of the Levitt communities, Willingboro (formerly Levittown), New Jersey, and Bowie, Maryland. They’d also miss the existence of a huge Levittown of 11,000 single-family dwellings inhabited almost exclusively by Puerto Ricans, many having returned to the island after living on the mainland.

Another key element that would escape readers of that single page is the long chapter on the Levitt developments built in the suburbs of Paris. In the early 1960s, the American homebuilder conceived them as an antidote to the massive suburban housing blocks and towers, now known pejoratively as La banlieue, originally aimed at middle-class French families. Those families overwhelmingly preferred single-family houses, especially the ones sporting the Levitt name, and they fled the grands ensembles as soon as they could.

Finally, readers of page 99 would miss the book’s epilogue, which connects Levitt’s success in solving the massive post-World War Two housing shortage to our current dearth of affordable homes. The Levitt ideal of the detached house surrounded by an ample yard and then enshrined in zoning laws makes nearly impossible the denser homebuilding we so desperately need today.

Visit Edward Berenson's website.

The Page 99 Test: Heroes of Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Kinder's "World War Zoos"

John M. Kinder is a professor of American studies and history at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran and the coeditor of Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History and They Are Dead and Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, which is forthcoming in February 2026.

Kinder applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Deadliest Age, and reported the following:

Readers who parachute into page 99 will find themselves in the middle of the action. It’s May 1940. Poland is a smoking ruin. Day after day, Göring’s Luftwaffe is pounding Dutch cities. The fall of France is but a month away. And, as always, zoos are caught in the crossfire: proverbial sitting ducks with no way to run and nowhere to hide.

I like this page quite a bit. It’s descriptive, it has a certain narrative punch, it balances detail and scope—characteristics, I like to think, of the entire book. Plus, in a few short paragraphs, page 99 touches on some of the big themes of World War Zoos. One is that the fate of wartime zoos was random. Few were surprised when zoos located near strategic military targets were destroyed by falling bombs. Beyond that, though, it was hard to predict which zoos would make it and which ones would wind up as collateral damage. The Rotterdam Zoo, discussed on the previous page, was hit hard by German incendiaries. Fire tore through the workshops and set the monkey house aflame. Two juvenile lions asphyxiated in their shelters. It was a living nightmare. Amsterdam’s Artis Zoo, by contrast, pretty much escaped the initial German invasion without a scratch. The difference was luck, happenstance. One zoo was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Page 99 also alludes to wartime zoos’ practice of killing their own animals in anticipation of future hardship. In this case, we see how Artis resisted—well, mostly resisted—calls to slaughter its “dangerous” animals in the early days of the invasion. (The zoo ultimately destroyed four venomous snakes.) Elsewhere in the book, however, I show how many zoos felt the need to kill their darlings. The rationales varied. Some zoos fretted about animal escapes; others sought to avoid sentencing animals to long painful deaths by starvation; still others determined that certain animals were worth more dead than alive. (This way their corpses could be fed to more, shall we say, “charismatic” zoo residents.)

Yet page 99 is not entirely a downer. It introduces ornithologist Jean Théodor Delacour, the world-famous birdman of Clères, site of one of the largest private bird parks in Europe. Delacour pops up at various points in the ensuring narrative. (After escaping occupied France, he spends the war years at the Bronx Zoo.) More important, this page hints at stories of empathy and courage that run throughout the book. For sure, World War Zoos shows human nature at its worst. Again and again, however, we encounter scenes of people risking their lives to save zoo animals and other precarious populations.

Unfortunately, page 99 doesn’t foreground what I consider the two most important questions of the book: Why should we care about zoos in World War II? And what can they teach us about how zoos might address twenty-first century crises? The answers to both questions are complex—far too complex for any single page to unpack—and I tackle them head-on elsewhere. Nevertheless, these two questions are, ultimately, why I think World War Zoos is so relevant. At the end of the day, I see this as a book about how we treat the most vulnerable among us, especially in difficult times. If that’s not a topic worth caring about (both in the past and in the present), I don’t know what is.

Learn more about World War Zoos at the University of Chicago Press website.

Writers Read: John M. Kinder (April 2015).

The Page 99 Test: Paying with Their Bodies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Donnelly's "Confederate Sympathies"

Andrew Donnelly is a literary and cultural historian specializing in the periods of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction and in the field of Southern Studies. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis.

Donnelly applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era, and reported the following:

If you open my book to page 99, you’ll find two paragraphs there quite unlike the rest of the book. The first describes the dogs used by Confederate officers to chase escaping Union prisoners of war. The second focuses on Henry Wirz, the infamous leader of the Confederate prison at Camp Sumter (popularly known as Andersonville), whose use of such dogs and other cruelties to prisoners was described in the judge advocate’s review of the trial that ended in Wirz’s conviction and execution as “This work of death seems to have been a saturnalia of enjoyment for [Wirz], who amid these savage orgies evidenced such exultation and mingled with them such nameless blasphemy and ribald jests, as at times to exhibit him rather as a demon than a man.” What is this page 99 evidence doing in a book ostensibly on cultural narratives of same- sex romance?

I think a browser opening to page 99 would get some interesting stuff—maybe enough to flip back or keep reading, to get more of the book’s main content? Depictions of same-sex romance, in the Andersonville memoirs of these Union prisoners, are but two pages away in this fourth chapter, which is largely about how these white veterans, partly through these homosocial and at times homoerotic narratives, came to be seen as the central sufferers of Confederate atrocity. Here, on page 99, I’m establishing how these memoirs consciously modeled their scenes on abolitionist narratives about slavery’s atrocity. Prisoner-of-war memoirists do not claim merely that they are being hunted by dogs in the manner that enslaved people escaped in anti-slavery narratives but that these are the very same dogs, requisitioned by the Confederate government precisely for their human-hunting capacity. Just as those early narratives pinned the blame for slavery’s worst abuses on demonic individual evildoers (such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Simon Legree or Harriet Jacobs’s Dr. Flint), so does the judge advocate paint Wirz’s singular sadism. I go on from there, but the point is: if enslaved women were the imagined victims of abolitionist narratives, then through the echoing literary form of the prisoners’ memoir (drawing on an argument from historian Ann Fabian), white Union soldiers have taken their place.

One thread throughout the book is about this racialized shift in sympathies. Sympathies cultivated for the figures of enslaved women within antebellum literature entailed many problematic dynamics while they mobilized Northerners toward anti-slavery politics and the Civil War. That those sympathies shifted to the bodies of white male soldiers had devastating political consequences after the war and in Civil War memory. I see it as part of the story by which slavery’s role in the Civil War was diminished in favor of the story of a brother-against- brother tragedy for white Americans.

Visit Andrew Donnelly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Clay Risen's "Red Scare"

Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of The Crowded Hour, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and a fellow at the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of two other acclaimed books on American history, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century, as well as his most recent book on McCarthyism, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.

Risen applied the “Page 99 Test” to Red Scare and reported the following:

Page 99 of Red Scare drops the reader into the early days of the Hiss-Chambers scandal. In 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a journalist and former spy for the Soviet Union, accused the diplomat Alger Hiss of being a Communist, and later of being among his highest-level contacts in Washington. The scene on page 99 is dramatic: Chambers has just told a closed session of the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss was a party member. Richard Nixon, then a young representative from California, and others decide to move to an open session, for the press to see. By the end of the day, these once obscure men were household names, and the fear of Soviet subversion was ratcheted up even further.

A casual browser of page 99 would, I hope, get a sense of the drama that drives the narrative arc of the book. It is full of action and thick description, something I tried to spread across every page. While the story I tell is complex and no single page can reveal it all, page 99 is representative of its flavor and energy.

The book itself is a narrative history of the second Red Scare, showing how anti-Communist hysteria reached into every corner of American life. The Hiss-Chambers affair was high political drama playing out in Washington, but it also showed how the fears inherent in the moment could elevate obscure figures like these two men to fame or infamy.

Visit Clay Risen's website.

The Page 99 Test: A Nation on Fire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes's "The Battle of Manila"

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is a historian specializing primarily in U.S. military, diplomatic, and political history during the World War II and Cold War eras. He is a professor in the Department of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. His books include Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War.

Sarantakes applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War. and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test is an interesting approach to summarizing a book. In the case of my new text, The Battle of Manila—a history of the battle fought between the Americans and Japanese for control of the capital of the Philippines in 1945—the Page 99 Test only half works in trying to capture what is in the book.

Page 99 is the start of chapter seven, which is the section on the 1st Cavalry Division’s liberation of the civilian internment camp at the University of Santo Tomas. The text on the page quickly explains that U.S. civilians and those of other allied nations the Japanese were fighting were located in this prison camp. (They were not prisoners of war, since they were not in the military—but that is a technical, legal distinction.) The Japanese had not done a whole lot to care for the internees and they were slowly starving to death when the U.S. Army arrived in Manila. Reading page 99 gives the readers a good sense of anticipation—far more than I realized until now—of the battle that is to come. It also reflects an approach I use in my writing: the use of good quotes to make events more understandable. (I learned this approach as a reporter for The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at the University of Texas.)

What is missing from page 99, though, is the intensity of the battle. That comes 27 pages later with the start of chapter nine when combat operations begin inside the city of Manila. The book looks at the battle in an effort to use what I call “a whole of army” approach. Battle histories need to focus on the men at the main point of contact, where the actual shooting is happening, but I wondered what were quartermaster, transportation, medical and other support units doing? Answer: they were all trying to support the combat units while getting shot at themselves. (There were no safe areas in Manila). I also used a triangular focus: what were the Americans, Filipinos, and the Japanese doing during the battle? To that end, I did research in Manila, and this book is the first account in English to make use of Japanese-language material.

As a result, I think this book captures—as best as one volume can—the complex battle that took place in Manila in 1945.

Visit Nicholas Evan Sarantakes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gennifer Weisenfeld's "The Fine Art of Persuasion"

Gennifer Weisenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. She is the author of Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923, and Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931.

Weisenfeld applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan. and reported the following:

From page 99:

…Moreover, typographers traditionally considered lowercase types (minuscule) with their pronounced ascenders and descenders to be most legible, enabling easier differentiation between discrete words. Although Asian characters do not have the equivalent of upper-or lowercase, Japanese linguis­tic expression in printed text is polyglot, employing extensive use of romanized scripts, particularly for cosmopolitan cachet and visual emphasis in advertising. Hara responded to this proposition with deep misgivings about the purported benefits of using all lowercase for greater legibility, ultimately dismissing it as a passing fad. Instead, for visual emphasis he would later increasingly employ all-capital roman letters in his title and header designs, both with and without serifs.

Elemental typography was not simply concerned with letterforms but also encompassed the critical relationship between text and image in editorial layout. Hara’s montage poster design for the Hōchi Shinbunsha–sponsored Third Snap Photography Competition of 1935 exemplifies his stark geometric simplification…

When one opens to page 99 of my book, the text and illustration immediately focus the reader on the topic of visible language and the pioneering work of designer Hara Hiromu, a major figure in the history of modern Japanese design, who wrote extensively on modern letterforms and modernist typography. Visible language is a key concept that I develop in the book to explain how designed and aestheticized letterforms, particularly in advertising, communicate through form as well as semantic content. The visible language of letterforms, distinct from text and content but intrinsically allied with them, can also mark different subjectivities and ideological beliefs. Building on expressive native calligraphic traditions and a rich commercial print culture, modern Japanese advertising designers rapidly expanded their lettering lexicon from the late nineteenth century as they encountered Western typefaces and international professional editorial design techniques. This chapter explores the emergence of modern Japanese lettering and typo­graphic design as they were developed in tandem with the professional sphere of advertising. Through close analysis of selected examples of Japanese scripts and types in specific promotional contexts, I illuminate the multilayered and effective mode of visual communication constructed through printed text. The examples range from logotype designs to mass media print publicity. Some are attributed, and others are anonymous. They are sober and whimsical. Em­ploying the distinctive historical, grammatical, morphological, and aesthetic aspects of the Japanese language, designers have been able to create a powerful visible language that has been instrumental in defining product and corporate, as well as cultural and national, identities in modern Japanese visual culture. While this section does not represent the entirety of the book’s content, which spans across twentieth-century Japanese advertising design and its multimodal production for the construction of national brands, it is an excellent example of a key concept and underscores my argument about the importance of language and designed letterforms in advertising.

Learn more about The Fine Art of Persuasion at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue