Melissa Zinkin's "Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason"

Melissa Zinkin is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University (SUNY). She has published articles on Kant, philosophy of art, and feminist philosophy.

Zinkin applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason, and reported the following:

At the top of page 99 of Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason one finds the heading "Comprehension." The rest of the page discusses the passage where Kant defines "comprehension." For Kant, comprehension is the highest degree of cognition. He writes that "to comprehend (begreifen) something (is) to cognize (it) through reason...to the degree that it is sufficient for our purpose." He distinguishes comprehending something through reason from conceiving (concipiren) it by the faculty of the understanding. I note that in German "begreifen" means "to grasp," whereas "concipiren" means "to sketch." From the distinction between these two words-- "grasping" vs. "sketching," we already get a sense of Kant's contrast between how we know something through reason and how we know it through the understanding. The former is a thorough and deep engagement with an object, the latter is preliminary and superficial.

Someone opening my book to page 99 would land on a discussion that introduces a core theme; for Kant, reason is that special faculty by which we have deep cognition, that is, comprehension, of an object. A major aim of the book is to show that for Kant reason is not just the faculty by which we get things "right." As we see today, "getting it right" is an ability that can be outsourced to machines. Human reason is deeper than that. It is that faculty by which human beings learn for ourselves the organizing principles of objects and what makes them what they are. It is also that faculty by which I comprehend for myself why some action is the one that is right for me to perform. By deeply comprehending the "rightness" of objects and actions through reason we make our ideas about them integral to our way of thinking and develop the capacity for good judgment about them in the future.

Later in the chapter that contains page 99, I argue that for Kant the activity of comprehending something is the same activity that is involved in judging something to be beautiful; we think deeply about its central purpose. This is also a central thesis of my book; that our capacity to judge that something is beautiful is fundamental to our capacity to deeply comprehend objects and actions in general.

Learn more about Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Bloom Gevirtz's "The Apothecary's Wife"

Karen Bloom Gevirtz spent nearly three decades as a professor of English at American universities while also specializing in gender studies and medical humanities.

Her new book, The Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity, is one of Kirkus Review's Best Nonfiction Books of 2024.

Gevirtz applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Apothecary's Wife and reported the following:

Page 99 is the end of a chapter, and reads, “and medication between 1650 and 1740. Had the Digbys lived a century later, Kenelm would have had to become an expert in chicken soup, not viper wine, if he wanted to take care of his beloved Venetia.”

The Page 99 Test works quite well for my book, despite the fact that page 99 has only 37 words.

Each chapter centers on two remarkable figures, and on page 99 the browser encounters that device in the form of Kenelm and Venetia Digby. The passage includes a somewhat repulsive medication from the period (viper wine) and what it was used for (helping an ailing person), titillating information that appears throughout. Browsers also encounter the book’s approachable, occasionally wry or humorous voice, especially in the chicken soup line.

Unfortunately, while three central elements do appear on page 99 – that medication is important to the book, that medication changed over time, and that the period of change is 1650-1740 – each element is mentioned so briefly that a browser probably won’t get a sense of what the book is about. Reading page 98 or 100 would reveal properly that The Apothecary’s Wife is about the transition from domestic medicine made and administered at home by women to commercial medication made and sold in shops by men. It explains how the Scientific Revolution provided an opportunity for professionals to take over medication, and how they converted it from household goods like peach preserves and soap into something exchanged for money, that is, how the foundations of Big Pharma and today’s for-profit medication system were laid. Why did people stop getting medication for free, at home, from a trusted member of the family who made it from known ingredients combined in a time-tested recipe and start paying a stranger medication for medication made in secret from mystery ingredients? It wasn’t that the stranger’s medication was better, because it wasn’t, but a reader will not get that from page 99, alas.

Visit Karen Bloom Gevirtz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacob Flaws's "Spaces of Treblinka"

Jacob Flaws is an assistant professor of history at Kean University. He teaches a broad range of classes on modern European history, the Holocaust, and comparative genocide. He is also a nonresident Research Fellow at the National World War II Museum (New Orleans, LA) for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Flaws applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp, and reported the following:

From page 99:

(local residents)…became relatively passive witnesses to what was occurring – only brought into the fold as random interactions dictated. Consequently, how someone responded when a Jewish escapee from Treblinka knocked on their door in the middle of the night truly varied on a case-by-case basis, creating a human space around the camp that was defined by uncertainty. Escapees could be shot at by a Pole in one house while the person next door might provide them food and shelter.

Historians continue to be frustrated by the difficulty in making blanket statements explaining why there was such a variance in Polish-Jewish interactions during the Holocaust…. Nonetheless, when it comes to explaining Polish behavior, it is obvious that each individual case merits its own evaluation and judgment. As Warsaw Ghetto Uprising planner Yitzhak Zuckerman astutely put it, “You can’t generalize about the Poles.” Thus, aside from documenting the widely varying Polish responses to escaping Jews, I am most interested here in exploring how the concept of space also played into the equation. In doing so, I acknowledge that during the war, Poland was actively being colonized by the Germans. Subsequently, Poles lost jurisdiction over many spaces, even their most intimate ones – their homes – a spatial domain that geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues is universally recognized as offering basic security from the outside world. As spatial theorist Tim Cresswell explains further, home is “an intimate place…where a person can withdraw from…the world outside and have some degree of control over what happens within a limited space.” Consequently, as the Germans imposed unlimited jurisdiction over Polish spaces, they stole this control, this simple sovereignty to govern one’s everyday life, from Poles.

The Page 99 Test “worked” remarkably well in the case of my new book, Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp. The page is part of the introduction to Chapter 4: An Interactional Space, a chapter in which I was particularly struck by how each escapee created random vectors of interaction through split-second decisions often made on the run. The natural environment played a major part in this, especially in terms of dictating which spaces offered concealment or which were simply impassable. But it was the happenstance human encounters that often carried the weightiest consequences, usually for both parties involved.

Hence, as you can see on the text from page 99, I am seeking to add nuance to explaining why some Poles helped Jews, others were indifferent, and some even harmed them. Importantly, what’s missing from the page itself, but is included elsewhere in the chapter, is the disclaimer that I am not apologizing for Poles who harmed Jews or seeking to absolve those who are rightfully guilty of impeding Jewish survival. Instead, as the page 99 text does show, I’m arguing each case needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This is especially powerful to remember when we consider that the clean categorization (victim, bystander, perpetrator) of individuals fails in the majority of cases, if for no other reason than these categories are fluid, and many individuals may span the range of all three (or more) within a short time frame.

More broadly, page 99 reflects the deeper perspective the entire book is trying to bring into the conversation – human spaces are very nuanced and are indeed “defined by uncertainty.” The goal of the book is to put German, Jewish, and Polish voices into conversation with one another to help recreate the contemporary spatial reality that comprised Treblinka and its surroundings when it existed from 1942-1943. That reality was multi-perspectival, nuanced, and uniquely individual, but there were also fairly consistent patterns associated with witnessing the death camp as well. If just glancing to page 99, you get a sense of this, but you almost certainly need the rest of the book to help envision the true scope of what Treblinka actually was.

Visit Jacob Flaws's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Myles Ethan Lascity's "The Abercrombie Age"

Myles Ethan Lascity is assistant professor and director of the fashion media program at Southern Methodist University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Abercrombie Age: Millennial Aspiration and the Promise of Consumer Culture, and reported the following:

In The Abercrombie Age, page 99 recaps some of the critiques of teen popular culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s. More specifically, the page frames the film Josie and the Pussycats as a satirical critique of teen brand and consumer culture. It also introduces other criticisms from the era, including Naomi Klein’s No Logo, Alisa Quart’s Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teens and the Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool.

Page 99 is a good — if not quite perfect — representation of the book.

The Abercrombie Age examines and critiques the messages embedded within teen popular culture texts from 1995 through 2008, or roughly the release of Clueless through the global financial crisis, the ending of MTV’s TRL and the release of Twilight. While many of the criticisms leveled at teen culture of the time amounted to a belief that it was vapid and too obsessed with popularity, The Abercrombie Age argues that even if the popular culture was vapid and superficial, its focus on consumer culture as an avenue to success and fulfillment left a lasting impression on the eldest millennials, who were teens of the time.

While No Logo, Branded and The Merchants of Cool helped inform my thinking on the subject, The Abercrombie Age specifically outlines the promotion of privileged frivolity: in which good-looking, well-off and largely white teens were shown having few concerns beyond socialization and interpersonal relationships and rarely faced repercussions for their actions. Coupling this with messages that promoted consumerism as a means to popularity and happiness, pop culture of the time was unyieldingly optimistic and implied that nothing was too serious, and everything would eventually work out. And, even if some teens were not living the dream at the time, movies and TV shows suggested they could certainly secure it in the future through the consumption of college and employment in desirable creative fields.

Although the ethos of privileged frivolity fell out of fashion post-2008 and a more inclusive, accepting teen life made its way to screens, as millennials enter midlife, we are faced with the increasing awareness that life looks little like what we were promised — and it probably never will.

Visit Myles Ethan Lascity's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William M. Wiecek's "The Dark Past"

William M. Wiecek is Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University, where he was appointed the Congdon Professor of Public Law, with a joint appointment in the history department of the Maxwell School. He is the author of The Birth of the Modern Constitution: The United States Supreme Court, 1941-1953 and The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought: Law and Ideology in America, 1886-1937, among other titles.

Wiecek applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Dark Past: The US Supreme Court and African Americans, 1800―2015, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses three cases decided by the United States Supreme Court dealing with the power of Congress to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments. Page 99 restates the general theme of the book, which is that the Court has been disappointing in its failure to protect the rights and opportunities of Black Americans.

Yes, from this page the reader will get a correct idea of what the book is about. The Page 99 Test is a good shortcut to the overall thesis of the book.

The test works in the case of this one book because it will give the reader a good idea of what she is getting into if she reads it. Aside from the general thesis noted above, she will learn that the book is academic; that it is about judicial doctrine as expounded in judicial decisions; that it attempts to convey that doctrine by brief descriptions of the cases and the problems they seek to resolve; that the book is strictly historical, not directly about current events (though, like all history, its goal is to use the past to explain the present).

Learn more about The Dark Past at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Silverman's "Seeing Is Disbelieving"

Daniel Silverman is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology (CMIST) at Carnegie Mellon University. He has published articles on international security, peace, and conflict in a number of leading scholarly journals including International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Peace Research, along with public-facing outlets such as The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, National Interest, and Political Violence at a Glance.

Silverman applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Seeing Is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Seeing is Disbelieving drops the reader in front of a graph showing the core finding of the book’s chapter on Iraq and Iraqi belief in misinformation about the U.S.-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the country. To quote the first paragraph (which starts on the page before) beneath the graph:

55 percent of respondents with no personal experience living in the targeted areas believe each of the factual misperceptions, while the percentage of those who spent more than a year in the targeted areas that embrace the falsehoods is only about 35. People’s exposure to the relevant events thus tracks with a substantial decline in their susceptibility to false perceptions of them.

The page continues by setting up additional tests that the chapter runs with the same data, including efforts to pin down some of the mechanisms that drive Iraqis’ thinking about the bombing and how they shift with personal exposure to the violence.

The results of the Page 99 Test here are decidedly mixed. Being thrust right into the middle of a discussion of the quantitative results of the analyses in this chapter without a word about the theory, methods, and context behind them would of course be somewhat disorienting and confusing for a reader. And yet, the book’s central argument – that war is rife with falsehoods, but those closer to the relevant events can typically see through them – is clear.

This speaks to the fact that Seeing is Disbelieving is not written in the style of a book that surveys a broad range of explanatory variables that contribute in some way to a phenomenon. No, it is one of those that makes a forceful central argument about the key explanation for the phenomenon and threads it through the book’s chapters rather relentlessly. While the book takes readers to a variety of contexts – from Pakistan to Iraq to Syria and much beyond – page 99 does provide insight into the primary argument about the depths and limits of factual misinformation and misperception in war that it aims to advance and push out into the world.

Visit Daniel Silverman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruno Leipold's "Citizen Marx"

Bruno Leipold is a fellow in political theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. From May 2025 he will be an Assistant Professor in Political Theory at Durham University. He is the coeditor of Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage.

Leipold applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Citizen Marx discusses the young Karl Marx’s views on democracy. It sets out how Marx thought that people had a right to political participation, partly because he thought we had a human need to do so. But he also interestingly believed that this didn’t require everyone to directly participate and he thought there were good reasons for some form of representation. Here a brief extract:

Marx first defended the legitimacy of the desire to take part directly in the legislature. That desire reflected a genuine need “of all to be real (active) members of the state . . . to give themselves a political being ... to demonstrate and give effect to their being as something political.” A “member of the state” who is denied the chance to properly participate in the decisions and deliberations of their state “would be an animal.” Political participation was thus, Marx again implies, an important aspect of our human nature. …

The goal of modern democratic struggle was…on Marx’s account, not direct participation but the extension of the right to vote and stand for office. Marx in fact thought that there were good reasons to fight for democratic representation rather than direct participation. He argued that making use of representatives in legislative matters was justified both by the large numbers of citizens in modern states (“the best reason that can be advanced against the direct participation of all”) and the need for a certain division of labor between citizens (otherwise the “individual would have to do everything at once; whereas society both lets him act for others and others for him”).

Page 99 would do a reasonable job of giving readers a summary of the book. It showcases one of my central arguments: that part of Marx’s republican inheritance was his deep commitment to democracy. It also gives readers a sense of his more specific ideas on democracy and his perhaps surprising concession to practical concerns when it comes to the need for representation. But it would also slightly mislead readers because it is not until page 100 that I clarify that Marx also thought that representatives would need to be tightly controlled by their constituents through binding instructions. That’s important because I argue that Marx endorsed a much more democratic idea of democracy than what we are familiar with today.

So in sum, I think page 99 would only do a decent job if it inspired readers to turn to the next page!

Visit Bruno Leipold's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul M. Renfro's "The Life and Death of Ryan White"

Paul M. Renfro is associate professor of history at Florida State University and author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State.

Renfro applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America, and reported the following:

The ninety-ninth page of my book includes the tail end of the introduction for chapter 6, which focuses on the passage of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act in 1990. As Ryan White lay dying in an Indianapolis hospital in April 1990, the US Congress decided to dedicate the bill in his honor. But Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) had actually introduced the CARE Act the previous month, before Ryan had fallen gravely ill for the last time. The rest of the page reveals how certain politicians characterized the CARE Act before the US Congress had attached Ryan’s name to the bill.

While the first few lines of page 99 offer a taste of my main argument concerning the myriad political and cultural uses of Ryan White’s name, image, and story, the rest of the page doesn’t directly address my main claims. (It does provide some important background information, however.)

Although this page deals very little with Ryan White, obviously the main subject of my book, it does spotlight some of the other ways in which politicians and activists discussed HIV/AIDS in the early 1990s. Specifically, page 99 explores the rhetorical “de-gaying” of AIDS, which served “to weaken the association between AIDS and presumably deviant populations, particularly gay men and intravenous drug users,” I write. “In one sense, this maneuver accurately reflected the fact that HIV could be transmitted in a variety of ways,” I note on the bottom of page 99 and the beginning of page 100. Yet, “efforts to ‘de-gay’ AIDS arguably reinforced dominant hierarchies of victimhood by spotlighting more ‘sympathetic’ or ‘respectable’ subjects,” I write on page 101. “Moreover, this tactic obscured the reality that MSM [men who have sex with men] (particularly in communities of color) were, in fact, disproportionately burdened by HIV/AIDS.” This discussion, which begins on page 99 and spills onto the next few pages, remains at the heart of contemporary HIV/AIDS prevention and education efforts, which often fail to reach communities understood to be less vulnerable to HIV infection.

Learn more about The Life and Death of Ryan White at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cruz Medina's "Sanctuary"

Cruz Medina is an award-winning teacher-researcher and Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English department at Santa Clara University. He also serves as faculty with Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. Previously, Medina was an Inclusive Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow at Santa Clara University, and was also Pre-doctoral Fellow at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Medina applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Sanctuary: Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Sanctuary describes some of the specific challenges that migrant English language learners experience such as varying levels of literacy and linguistic abilities within the classes they have access to. These obstacles are compounded and often come as a result of few public resources and an ideology in the US that expects migrants to “learn the language” in spite of under resourced educational environments that contribute to perceptions of migrants as deficient or not working hard to learn English.

The quote below underscores how Indigeneity can be ignored when it comes to teaching English as another language:

At the Sanctuary 30 percent of men and 40 percent of women report speaking Mam as their first language. Teaching English at the Sanctuary, I considered my ability to speak Spanish and explain some of the workbook exercises in Spanish to students as something that made me an especially qualified volunteer; however, during those first several months, I fell victim to assuming I knew the linguistic backgrounds of all students.

The Page 99 Test is relatively effective in terms of identifying major issues at the Sanctuary that reveal concerns with teaching in both privileged and under resourced teaching environments. The diversity of needs students come to learning contexts with can be difficult to discern and dominant expectations about the English language continue to erase these issues.

Volunteering at the Spanish speaking church that I call the “Sanctuary” revealed assumptions about migrants who are often misrepresented in political rhetoric. The historical context of the Guatemalan “civil war” and enduring violence against women serve as exigencies for articulating what I outline as decolonial critical race theory: decolonial theory serves to account for issues of Indigenous displacement outside the US connected to transnational business while CRT helps to explain some of the struggles that individual migrants experience in the US and what the Spanish-speaking Sanctuary church goes through with their lease and potential eviction.

Visit Cruz Medina's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder's "The Revolution Will Be Improvised"

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century transnational American literature and culture. Her teaching and research interests include multiethnic literature and culture, (specifically African American and Latinx Studies), performance studies, women of color feminism, southern studies, and social movement activism. She received her PhD from University of Mississippi in English; an MA in American Studies from Columbia University; and a BA in English/Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton.

Rodriguez Fielder applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism, and reported the following:

The cultural workers of the civil rights movement improvised because they had to, but also because the techniques of improvisation opened space for people to relate to each other in a new way. On page ninety-nine of The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism, I write concluding paragraphs to my chapter, “A New Lesson for Activism,” which traces the creativity of education reform across performance and literacy programs. I make the case that both the education reform and experiments in protest theater were operating in the “same method of fomenting intimacy” (99). The transformation that happens through improvisation moves education from how we teach to how we relate.

The Page 99 Test works beautifully for The Revolution Will Be Improvised. On this page, I argue that improvised performance maintains the right to complexity, in other words, that art made for protest could carry within it multivalent perspectives and ideas. Much of the protest performances I discuss in this chapter, such as the Free Southern Theater’s version of Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson and the actos of El Teatro Campesino, have been relegated to “early work,” suggesting unfinished or underdeveloped art. I write, “The performances of El Teatro Campesino and the Free Southern Theater define ‘fully human life’ as the right to complexity–of interpretations and emotional responses that may be in conflict with one another” (99). I ask us to acknowledge the complexity within the improvisation process and that much of what makes this work so powerful happened off-stage in the process of intimacy-making between activists and the local people they worked with. We are left to interpret the traces of this intimacy left behind in the works of art they created.

Some early readers of my book argued that my chapter on pedagogy/education reform didn’t fit well in a book about art activism. Page 99 proves otherwise and emphasizes a point I make elsewhere in the book about interpurpose art, that improvised social justice-oriented art intertwines multiple intentions together: gathering, relationality, propaganda, consciousness-raising, experimentation, etc. The performances they created to educate also did the work to define performance to how we recognize it today as explosive social commentary. And a chapter about education reform in the civil rights movement has a place within a book about experimental art.

Learn more about The Revolution Will Be Improvised at the University of Michigan Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthony J. Stanonis's "New Orleans Pralines"

Anthony J. Stanonis is a New Orleans native and independent historian. He received his BA in history from Loyola University New Orleans and his MA and PhD in history from Vanderbilt University. His publications concentrate on tourism, foodways, and culture in the American South.

Stanonis applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, New Orleans Pralines: Plantation Sugar, Louisiana Pecans, and the Marketing of Southern Nostalgia, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…. These African American women “seemed, indeed, relics of the good old days before the war every one of them; for their quaint old-time courtesy, so different from the rude manners of the day, their neat old-time blue gingham dresses, with white kerchief and quaint bandana tignon, made up a typical picture that can nowhere be seen but in this dear old Crescent City.”

Any economic strivings by these African American women were buried beneath white nostalgia. The performance of racial supplication erased African American’ opposition to Jim Crow. When the praline “mammies” performed their street cries, one announced “in her broken English how she was a good cook in a fine old family before the war, but now she ‘got ole; no money, no more ole mistress. She got for ter make livin’, and so she go roun’ dem street for sell dose nice praline.” When she then burst forth with a tune in French, the guests “went fairly wild; they applauded and applauded.” Never mind that the local hardware merchants had arranged this racial performance to satisfy the expectations of their guests from around the nation. And never mind that the African American women explicitly voiced that her performance stemmed from financial need, not devotion to the white population. The act resonated.

The popularity of praline mammies convinced local white boosters to make their presence a staple of the promotional repertoire ….

Flipping to page 99 is a quick way of reaching a core argument of the book and works perfectly for achieving a succinct summation of the historical role of the praline and its sellers in New Orleans.

The praline embodied a conflicted meaning. The enslaved on Louisiana’s sugar plantations originated the flat patty formed from brown sugar and pecans. They carried the confection to New Orleans after the Civil War, where it became quickly popularized within the tourism industry.

For African American women, the praline offered economic opportunity and uplift out of enslavement. Black cooking skills converted locally foraged pecans with brown sugar, often acquired from a black market in edibles that thrived in New Orleans during the nineteenth into the early twentieth century. The confection fostered household income while powering bodies with affordable calories and nutrients.

Such street hustle by African Americans, however, threatened the beliefs of Jim Crow-era white New Orleanians ensconced in Lost Cause mythology. White writers and tourism boosters generally transformed the perception of the Black vendors by recasting them in mammy imagery, as seen on page 99. Their colorful headwear became quaint rather than a clever means of drawing customers’ attention. Their white aprons and other clothes conveyed submission to whites’ needs rather than a savvy means of heralding cleanliness.

While the Page 99 Test doesn’t explore the history and cultural meanings of brown sugar and pecans, both major aspects of the book that inform perceptions of the praline seller and the praline, the human roles reflected by cultural debates over the praline vendor and her wares appear in sharp focus on that page.

Visit Anthony J. Stanonis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ashley Lawson's "On Edge"

Ashley Lawson is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Her research centers on twentieth-century American literature and women’s creativity. She has published essays on Zelda Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, Shirley Jackson, Sara Haardt, and Estelle Faulkner. In addition to these specialties, her teaching interests include Iranian and Japanese women writers, femmes fatales, and the American gothic.

Lawson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, On Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett, and reported the following:

From page 99:

...very first issue (Letters 255) and thus before she considered publishing there. Highsmith’s path to publishing works of science fiction was different. Even before The Price of Salt became a lesbian classic in its pulp form, Highsmith already had a familiarity with this side of the publishing industry because her first job as a writer was in comic books. Starting in 1943 and continuing for about six years, she worked first at Michael Publishers, where she wrote text for biographical comics on real-life personages, and then at Fawcett, where she wrote scripts for superhero characters like Pyroman and Captain Midnight (A. Wilson 94–95). Though in her journals Highsmith contrasted pulp fiction to “fine writing” and deemed it “nonsense-taken-seriously” (Patricia 320), Susannah Clapp argues comics were an ideal medium for her, because “her language is not self-consciously elegant. The syntax isn’t supple. She isn’t discursive or elaborate” (97). Though Brackett’s writing proves that science fiction could, in fact, include ornate and beautifully written prose, the genre also commonly made use of the more stripped-down style for which Highsmith became known. Similarly, Noel Mawer has described an overarching pattern in Highsmith’s writing in which “fantasy can be ‘truth,’ can be preferable to reality (or simply necessary); it is all that matters to some people, and may lead them anywhere” (63), an ethos that was also popular among writers of the speculative genres.

The influence of the gothic on science fiction is another useful point of intersection within the diverse range of work all three authors produced. According to Aldiss, “The methods of the Gothic writers are those of many science fiction authors, particularly the magazine contributors of the nineteen-thirties, -forties, and -fifties” because these writers “brought the principle of horrid revelation to a fine art, while the distant and unearthly are frequently part of the same package” (19). Sarah Lefanu has likewise connected women’s sci-fi to Ellen Moers’s influential concept of the female gothic, arguing that both offer “strong-minded heroines” as well as a way to “challenge dominant literary conventions and to produce a literature that can be at once subversive and popular” (25). Though some variations of the speculative genres took a more optimistic approach, all three of these writers were attracted to the end of the spectrum that used the genre as a means of illustrating the darker side of human nature and our tendencies toward self-destruction.

Though Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin has claimed that author wrote “only one published story that truly qualifies as science fiction” (384), she in fact published five pieces in science fiction venues between 1953 and 1958, and these stories should be read according to this generic background. The piece that is commonly cited as an indisputable work of sci-fi, likely because it is so different from anything else that Jackson wrote, is her story “Bulletin”...

The Page 99 Test is a fairly useful way to get a clear sense of my approach and argument in my book. It falls in Chapter 4, which is about the science fiction writing that these authors did (when only Brackett is usually credited with writing in the genre). This page happens to touch briefly on all three authors I cover, and it also shows how I explore the intersections between the usually strictly delineated genres: in this case the connection between the gothic and science fiction.

Learn more about On Edge at the Ohio State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lindsay Weinberg's "Smart University"

Lindsay Weinberg is Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the Tech Justice Lab at John Martinson Honors College, Purdue University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age, and reported the following:

From page 99:

These forms of individualizing self-care that WellTrack encourages students to adopt stand in stark contrast to the self-care practices envisioned by Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde in the epilogue of A Burst of Light. Lorde situates self-care as a strategy of resistance against intersecting forces of oppression that shape the lives of marginalized people: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." In Lorde’s formulation, self-care cultivates a combative form of resilience in the face of social and political forces that seek to stifle one’s ability to survive. It is important to heed feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s warning about treating all forms of self-care as inherently neoliberal, which collapses the distinction between self-care practices indebted to the tradition of Black feminism with the forms of self-care that perpetuate dominant socioeconomic paradigms. WellTrack, however, promotes an understanding of self-care that is separated from an account of the social and economic forces contributing to mental illness, which disproportionately harm marginalized students. Rising levels of precarity under neoliberalism are what intensify insecurity, subsequently increasing efforts to anticipate and predict.

Data Capture and Consent

WellTrack’s design for self-tracking, like most digitized commercial self-tracking apps, doubles as a form of capitalist dataveillance, meaning surveillance that uses technology to generate digital data that can be captured, monitored, and exploited for profit-seeking. While users of this app engage in self-care in that they record information about themselves in order to optimize and improve their mental health, the app also monitors and collects information about users for commercial gain.

Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age is about the proliferation of digital technology within universities, and its implications for economic and racial justice. While there is no universally agreed upon definition of a smart university, these initiatives generally include the use of data-intensive digital technologies to do some or all of the following: monitor and automate aspects of student learning, extracurricular participation, and progress to degree; manage facilities and resources; produce new revenue streams; support research activities that lead to external funding; and purportedly enhance campus security and student wellness.

If a reader were to open the book to page 99, they would encounter a discussion of WellTrack in Chapter 3 on “Wellness.” WellTrack is a mobile phone application modeled on cognitive behavioral techniques, which is used at a range of universities across North America for students to self-track symptoms of anxiety and depression. Page 99 gives the reader a decent sense of the book’s overall critical framing, in that I am critical throughout the book of ways that technologies are used to reframe structural issues in higher education as problems that can be “solved” through students’ individual behaviors and choices. In the case of Welltrack, instead of universities meaningfully redressing issues of inadequate in-person campus mental health resources, financial pressures as a result of skyrocketing tuition, or issues of institutional climate, students are encouraged to self-monitor using a for-profit software tool designed for data capture.

More broadly, the book is concerned with how digital tools that promise to solve some of higher education’s most intractable problems raise issues of student privacy, discrimination, and exploitation, and accept as a given policies that treat higher education as an individual investment rather than a public good. The book is equally concerned with the ways that corporate-backed technologies are becoming default infrastructure for teaching, learning, and researching within U.S. public universities, as well how administrators and campus police forces intensely monitor the lives of those who work and live there.

Finally, while the book details the ways that student recruitment, retention, security, and wellness are being restructured around the production of digital data in ways that undermine racial and economic justice, it also emphasizes concrete examples of resistance that hopefully inspire readers to take on active roles in the struggle against smart universities.

Learn more about Smart University at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margarette Lincoln's "Perfection"

Margarette Lincoln is Visiting Researcher at the University of Portsmouth and Curator Emeritus at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, where she was Deputy Director until 2015. She was a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London from 2015 to 2020, and Visiting Researcher at the University of Portsmouth 2021 to 2024.

Lincoln applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Perfection: 400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty, and reported the following:

Page 99 explains that Victorians often judged a woman’s skin problems to be the result of an irregular lifestyle and therefore a matter of personal failure. From the 1840s, active management of the skin was essential to a woman’s beauty routine, partly owing to new discoveries about the function of the skin’s pores and glands. A growing acceptance that skin had to ‘breathe’ added weight to criticism of tight corsets, and specialists advocated cold bathing to tone the pores.

This page gives a partial indication of what the book is about. Readers using the Page 99 Test would see that the book is about the pressure on women to look their best. They would see that Victorian judgements about a woman’s appearance might be prejudiced and based on imperfect scientific knowledge. They might gather that the book considers body shape and hygiene as well as skin. They might even appreciate that much beauty advice has been whimsical.

But the book actually deals with an extended time span, from 1650 to the present. It is holistic in approach, covering hair, teeth, body shape, diets, spa retreats, makeup and hygiene, as well as skin. It is well illustrated and contains much humorous detail, exploring the lotions, deodorants, undergarments, spells and beauty aids which have seduced users over the centuries. And it is also inclusive, exploring expressions of gender identity, and showing how a history of perceptions of beauty is inseparable from ideas about race and the history of colonialism. Read on!

Visit Margarette Lincoln's website.

The Page 99 Test: London and the Seventeenth Century: The Making of the World's Greatest City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erik Kenyon's "Philosophy at the Gymnasium"

Erik Kenyon received his PhD from Cornell University in classics. He is a philosopher, musician, and weightlifter, who teaches Latin and humanities at Friends Academy, Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He is the author of Augustine and the Dialogue and a coauthor of Ethics for the Very Young.

Kenyon applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Philosophy at the Gymnasium, and reported the following:

Page 99 starts, “and queens. Unlike most rulers, they will approach ruling as a burden in comparison to the delights of philosophy, yet one that they must shoulder for the sake of the city that raised them. While the masses will be left to chase shadows, people with a sense of how the world actually works will keep them in line as best they can. Having an army at their disposal will help. The goal is for the city as a whole to flourish.” This conclusion to a section ties together main ideas from Plato’s Republic: class distinctions between rulers, army and masses; educational requirements for rulers; real-world knowledge vs. “shadows” on the wall of Plato’s Cave. How this fits with the chapter title, “Women at the Gym,” is unclear.

A new section, “The Method of Hypothesis in Republic 1-7,” reminds readers of a philosophical method, explained in chapters on Plato’s Symposium, which “proceeds as investigators keep identifying the question behind the question until they arrive at a most basic question,” after which they try out hypothetical answers to all these questions. Using this methodology as a lens, the remainder of the page lays out core questions that drive Republic’s first seven books. This proceeds from “Is justice profitable?” to “What is justice?” and “What is good?” at breakneck speed.

Philosophy at the Gymnasium uses Greek philosophers as coaches for ‘wrestling with’ questions that are still timely today. Page 99’s emphasis on methodology captures this, as do its connections between education, politics and life. That said, this page concludes a discussion spanning four chapters and takes ideas, which are laid out more carefully above, ‘at a sprint.’ This missing puzzle piece, what any of this has to do with women at the gym, is that ancient gyms were both venues for nude athletics and schools for future citizens. The present chapter stresses that Republic’s forays into the nature of knowledge are introduced by the suggestion that women, as future rulers, “must strip naked and wear virtue instead of clothes.” This collision of body and soul, quirky and profound, captures the flavor of the book well.

Visit Erik Kenyon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Kornfield's "Invoking the Fathers"

Sarah Kornfield analyzes the public persuasion of sexism. A feminist rhetorical critic, Kornfield’s research explores the politics of gender within U.S. television, religion, and governance. She is an Associate Professor of Communication and Women's & Gender Studies at Hope College.

Kornfield applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Invoking the Fathers: Dangerous Metaphors and Founding Myths in Congressional Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Invoking the Fathers opens with two substantive quotes from U.S. senators, followed by my analysis of these speeches along with other senators’ speeches from the prior pages.

Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) celebrated Constitution Day by stating,

Two hundred thirty-two years ago, our Founding Fathers gathered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and signed a document that remains the supreme law of the land today. In those two hundred thirty-two years, the United States has become the most powerful, the most prosperous Nation in the history of the world, and that success has come as a result of the framework set by our Constitution. The genius of the Framers was their determination to maximize the freedom of the individual while recognizing the need for a central government limited in size by our Constitution.

Likewise, Senator James Lankford (R-OK) stated,

On September 17, 1787, this great experiment was finalized to try to form what they considered a more perfect Union, and the birth of our Constitution happened. This was a radical experiment in self-government, and most of the rest of the world at the time stared at those whom we now call our Founding Fathers and thought, that will never work.

These speeches focus on the past, on a specific moment of origin: September 17, 1787. Senator Daines (R-MT) calls attention to this origin moment by situating it in space—Independence Hall, Philadelphia—and situating it in time by repeating the phrase “two hundred thirty-two years.” Senator Ernst (R-IA) focuses on this origin moment by framing the Constitution as a material item, a “gift” bestowed on us by the “Founding Fathers.” This activates the inheritance framework so frequently used in congressional discourse. Senator Lankford (R-OK) personifies this sense of inheritance and lineage by describing the Constitution as birthed—by the fathers—on September 17, 1787.

These celebrations of Constitution Day engage in the typical veneration of the “Founding Fathers,” positioning them as exceptionally wise. Senator Ernst (R-IA) states that the founders had “incredible foresight”; Senator Daines (R-MT) applies the word “genius” to the founders; and Senator Lankford (R-OK) suggests they were so brilliant the rest of the world could not even conceive of how their plan might work.

How well does this page represent my book? Page 99 does a good job of showing readers what they can expect from Invoking the Fathers in terms of topic, evidence, and method! This book is an analysis of how contemporary congresspeople talk about the “Founding Fathers” and that comes across very well on page 99.

Page 99, however, does not give readers a clear sense of Invoking the Fathers’ overarching argument. It shows readers what I am analyzing and how I approach the topic, but does not zoom out to the book’s larger interpretive argument. Namely, it does not show how, by revering the founders as fathers, contemporary political discourse (1) constructs us-other binaries between real America and everyone else, (2) frames this real America as exceptional, (3) imagines a possessive relationship, in which the “Founding Fathers” belong to “us,” and “we” to them, (4) uses material appeals to frame this exceptional America as real, and (5) assumes that this real America is inherited by real Americans—the “us.” At every turn, the “realness” of the United States is defined by its lineage to the “Founding Fathers,” normalizing a sense of lineage in which some people—the founders’ supposed heirs—have greater claims to the country and its governance. Ultimately, this shapes what it means to govern in the name of “the people” and who can be “the people.”

Page 99 does, however, provide evidence for this argument by specifically pointing to the sense of lineage and inheritance in Senators Daines’ and Lankford’s speeches, and it speaks more broadly to the myth of American exceptionalism.

Page 99 is part of my favorite chapter in Invoking the Fathers. Reading through years of congressional speeches, I was shocked to find that congresspeople spend a lot of time on ceremonial speeches—for Constitution Day, National Bald Eagle Day, National Bible Week, and so on. I enjoyed writing this chapter so much, in part, because I was so surprised to find these ceremonial speeches in the Congressional Record. These speeches venerate the “Founding Fathers” and the founding era, drawing on and playing into the myth of American exceptionalism.

Learn more about Invoking the Fathers at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan A. Brewer's "The Best Land"

Susan A. Brewer was born in Oneida, New York, and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she taught the history of American foreign relations. She is the author of To Win the Peace and Why America Fights.

Brewer applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Best Land introduces two men, both in their twenties, who played a significant role in the early development of what would become my hometown, the city of Oneida in Madison County, New York. The first is Sidney Breese of New Jersey, a Yale graduate, lawyer, and employee of the Holland Land Company. The second is Angel Deferrier, the son of a poor French nobleman and the daughter of a colonial official who had made a fortune in Canada, was imprisoned in the Bastille for defrauding the state, and pardoned by Louis XV. Angel, who served Louis XVI as a royal bodyguard, fled during the French Revolution, contacted the Holland Land Company, and traveled from New York City to the frontier with Sidney in the 1790s.

At first, I thought that page 99 failed the test of revealing the whole book, but upon consideration I rather think that in some way it does. As was often the case in the local histories I have read, Natives are missing from this page. The only mention of Indigenous people concerns the image of two “savages” on the ancient coat of arms of Angel’s family. This symbolic, rather than actual, presence of Native people was a familiar one in my childhood. I had grown up in Oneida without realizing that Oneida Indians still lived on their ancestral lands. At school where we cheered on our team called “Oneida Indians,” the Oneidas, along with the rest of the Haudenosaunee or People of the Longhouse, had disappeared from our textbooks after the American Revolution.

As illustrated by Angel’s story, however, that was not true. When he came to Oneida territory, he followed in the footsteps of his forefathers by marrying a woman from a family of property and influence. In Angel’s case, he married Polly Denny, a Mohawk/Oneida woman. In contrast to Page 99, much of the rest of the book is about generations of Polly’s family. For over a century, Polly’s family lived on what would become my family’s farm, called “the best land” by my grandfather whose parents had bought it from Angel and Polly’s grandchildren.

Angel Deferrier and Sidney Breese, along with a multitude of land speculators, turnpike, canal, and railroad developers, settlers, and squatters, had come to Oneida territory in search of wealth, opportunity, a home. The Oneidas, including members of Polly’s family, tried strategy after strategy to hold on to land guaranteed by the United States that New York State acquired using deceit, corruption, and illegally made treaties. They initially secured help from Sidney and Angel, but both men eventually took an active part in the dispossession of the Oneidas. Remembered as gentlemen with elegant manners and gracious homes, Sidney and Angel built their prosperity on broken promises. Page 99 introduces these key characters in The Best Land, a history of settler colonialism and Indigenous perseverance filled with love and betrayal.

Learn more about The Best Land at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Why America Fights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brycchan Carey's "The Unnatural Trade"

Brycchan Carey is professor of literature, culture, and history at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published numerous books and articles on the cultural history of slavery and abolition.

Carey applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807, and reported the following:

The Unnatural Trade asks how late eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as a “dread perversion” of nature, charting that process across a century and a half of writing about African and Caribbean environments and people by British colonists and, later, abolitionists. In a book of around 220 pages, it should come as no surprise that page 99 describes an author and a moment around halfway through that process. The page is one of ten discussing the notorious historian and racial theorist Edward Long (1734–1813) and his infamous History of Jamaica, which was published in three volumes in 1774 and which compares Black people with orangutans. I go on to discuss those disturbing passages, for which Long has been dubbed “the father of English racism,” but on page 99 I show how in the History of Jamaica he moves from a highly aestheticized account of the Jamaican environment and its natural wonders to a more pragmatic call for its exploitation. Long’s parish tours, I argue, “reveal him an author with a keen eye for detail, a genuine appreciation of wildlife, landforms, and meteorology.” He is eager to emphasize the economic benefit of properly conducted natural history and he calls for more funding for top-quality scientific research into the Jamaican environment—while slamming amateur naturalists who he condemns as “the despicable tribe of insect-hunters, and collectors of gimcracks” who have brought the science of natural history into “contempt and ridicule.” Proper naturalists, he argues, understand that God has created Jamaica for the benefit of colonists and may “instruct us in the means by which our health may be preserved, our life prolonged, our agriculture improved, manufactures enlarged and multiplied, commerce and trade extended, and the public enriched.” For Long, I conclude, “the Caribbean environment is a resource supplied by God for the benefit of the British people and economy and natural history a tool in its exploitation.”

Reading page 99 in isolation would certainly give a reader an insight into some of the key themes of the book. It offers a reading of an important piece of environmental literature that was written in the service of the Caribbean plantocracy and it shows how one writer could use his Christian faith, his belief in European supremacy, and his desire for economic expansion to justify colonial expansion and exploitation. It also shows how natural history and agricultural writing are deeply entwined with colonial discourses in this period. But unlike much of the rest of the book, page 99 has little to say about enslaved people and nothing about the slave trade. It also discusses the writing of one who was an unambiguous advocate for plantation slavery and a notorious racist. Many of the earlier 98 pages of the book assess the writing of naturalists who were instead ambivalent about enslavement, or who at least questioned its humanity. Many of the following 123 pages discuss those like Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, and Thomas Clarkson who worked actively to abolish the slave trade, and implicitly enslavement itself. In this case, the Page 99 Test is partially successful in that it foregrounds the role of natural history in the history of colonial resource exploitation, but it is less successful in showing the part played by naturalists in recording the brutal realities of the slave trade and plantation slavery, and not at all successful in showing how abolitionists seized upon and deployed that literature.

I hope someone who read page 99 of The Unnatural Trade would be intrigued enough by its glimpse into this complex literature to go back to page 1 and read the book through. The book as a whole tells the story of the part played by environmental writing in the development of British attitudes toward the slave trade and colonial slavery in which colonists increasingly presented slavery as an unalterable part of the natural order, but abolitionists, and increasingly the British public, saw it instead as a “dread perversion” of nature that needed to end. The book guides the reader through the writings of colonists and slave traders, explorers and scientists, enslaved people and abolitionists, poets and novelists, across a century and half, and concludes by showing the influence this writing would have on the next century of resource imperialism in the nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa.” Page 99 is a good entry point, but The Unnatural Trade has a great deal more to offer.

Learn more about the book and author at Brycchan Carey's website.

The Page 99 Test: From Peace to Freedom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher R. Pearl's "Declarations of Independence"

Christopher R. Pearl is Associate Professor of History at Lycoming College and the author of Conceived in Crisis: The Revolutionary Creation of an American State.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Declarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution, and reported the following:

For Declarations of Independence, the Page 99 Test captures the essence of the book's central themes. On this page, colonial Pennsylvania and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) work intently to keep Lenape (Delaware) leader Teedyuscung from leaving the Northern Susquehanna River Valley for the Ohio region. Both Pennsylvania’s colonial government and the Haudenosaunee recognize Teedyuscung’s strategic importance as the leader of the Susquehanna Nations—a coalition of Indigenous nations whose presence stabilizes the Northern Susquehanna River Valley against Connecticut settlers’ encroachments—his influence could either uphold or fracture the region’s tenuous balance of power. The ambitions of these settlers challenge both the Haudenosaunee’s claims to the territory and the “unpurchased lands” that Pennsylvania’s Penn family considers within their purview. Meanwhile, Teedyuscung and the Susquehanna Nations also pursue their own independence, aiming to secure autonomy in the region from both the Haudenosaunee and encroaching British colonies.

On page 99, Teedyuscung ultimately agrees to stay in the Susquehanna Valley, but this does little to ease the fierce colonial rivalries that continually destabilize the frontier. The escalating tensions foreshadow a larger conflict that could endanger both local Indigenous autonomy and British colonial control.

This page exemplifies several key elements of Declarations of Independence: the relentless Indigenous efforts to defend their lands amidst rival colonial ambitions, and how these struggles create a volatile frontier that could dramatically shift power dynamics throughout the colonies and the British Empire. More importantly, page 99 underscores that the struggle for independence was far more complex than American colonists versus the British Empire. It was a layered fight, involving Indigenous nations and colonial players alike, all striving for sovereignty and survival.

Teedyuscung’s skillful negotiations and his unwavering defense of Indigenous sovereignty are also emblematic of the “declarations of independence” made by diverse peoples throughout the revolutionary era. His pursuit of autonomy for the Susquehanna Nations highlights a broader, multifaceted struggle for land and freedom that shaped this critical period—and, as the book argues, laid essential groundwork for what would become the United States. Page 99 is not just a snapshot of colonial rivalry but a pivotal moment that resonates throughout the broader narrative of America’s paths to independence.

Learn more about Declarations of Independence at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Messer-Kruse's "Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution"

Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University and author of The Patriots' Dilemma: White Abolition and Black Banishment in the Founding of the United States of America (2024).

Messer-Kruse applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution, and reported the following:

From page 99:

...several states, pointing to the British “carrying away” of people they had agreed to surrender, flouted their disregard of the treaty that held the peace by seizing loyalists’ properties and passing laws shielding their citizens from English debt collection…these problems plagued the “Critical Period” leading to the nation’s constitutional reorganization.

For more than a century historians have offered competing explanations for why the young American republic radically reordered its federal government. Many have attributed this extraordinary change to financial concerns: the federal government’s lack of an independent taxing authority or the state’s increasing bickering over tolls, tariffs, and international trade. Some have found novel causes. Charles Beard pointed out that many of the key delegates to the drafting convention were speculators in western lands that stood to be better protected under a stronger central government.

Many scholars have attempted to link the Constitution to a project of protecting slavery. Staughton Lynd in the 1960s pointed out the many disguised ways that the Constitution defended slavery and more recently Nicole Hannah-Jones in the New York Times’ 1619 Project implied the Constitution was written just for this purpose. However, while successfully showing that in the end the Constitution advanced the interests of enslavers, these accounts did not provide a compelling account of how slavery played a role in the movement to overthrow the Articles of Confederation and construct a new model of government in the first place.

Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution uncovers the missing link in the historical chain of events that connects slave interests to the Constitutional Convention. The road to Philadelphia begins with the mass escape of enslaved people during the revolutionary war and the British decision (similar to Lincoln’s) to provide sanctuary to them so as to recruit African American soldiers into their army and deny the patriots the enslaved labor their war effort depended on.

After the war, the Americans insisted that the British return these thousands of fugitives, most of whom had been evacuated to Nova Scotia or the Caribbean, in the treaty that recognized American independence. However, this agreement broke down as the English dragged their feet and American states responded by seizing Loyalist property and canceling debts owed to British merchants. Page 99 reprises the importance of this stand-off in a chapter that goes on to note that the failure of the states to uphold a treaty negotiated by the central government was one of the few issues that could not be compromised within the terms of the original confederation. Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution goes on to trace the direct connections between several of the key organizers of the Constitutional Convention and the controversy over the people the patriots’ euphemistically referred to as the “carried off.”

Learn more about Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph A. Seeley's "Border of Water and Ice"

Joseph A. Seeley is Assistant Professor in the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia. He specializes in the histories of Korea, the Japanese Empire, and East Asian environments and borderlands.

Seeley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria, and reported the following:

“By nature a Korean takes to smuggling like a duck to water.”

These harsh, discriminatory words and their historical context is examined in page 99 of my book, Border of Water and Ice. K-pop is undoubtedly more famous today than K-smuggling, but as my book shows, the fluid Yalu River between China and northern Korea has long seen a thriving underground trade. After Japanese imperialists colonized Korea in 1910, they encouraged Koreans to smuggle goods across the river in order to further expand Japan’s influence into China.

The quote at the beginning of this post is from Roy Maxwell Talbot, an American official working for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Talbot unfairly saw Korean participation in smuggling as a racial flaw. But as page 99 of my book states, “Blaming smuggling on Koreans’ ethnicity was easier than dealing with the systemic factors that fueled Korean participation in this illicit trade.” With few other economic options under Japanese rule, thousands of poor, marginalized Koreans along the border were drawn into the underground economy as a way to survive. Japanese merchants profited from their activities, and Japanese border police were very much complicit. As I note on the very bottom of page 99: “widespread Korean involvement in smuggling would have been unimaginable without the protection offered by Japanese police authorities.”

This page gives a taste of what my book is about: how Japanese colonialists tried to control and exploit border-crossers, like Korean smugglers, to further their goals. One key aspect of the book not covered in this specific page is how the Yalu River itself—with its seasonal floods, freezes, and thaws—shaped these underground economies and other aspects of border life. Smugglers knew that their success or failure depended on an intimate understanding of this protean border of water and ice.

Learn more about Border of Water and Ice at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Wright's "Unruly Labor"

Andrea Wright is the Class of 1952 Distinguished Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at William & Mary. She is the author of Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (2021).

Wright applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea, and reported the following:

Unruly Labor is a history of the oil industry in the Arabian Sea that centers the workers who built and maintained the industry. Looking at the 1930s through 1960s, each chapter of the book begins with strikes by both mobile and local workers and considers what factors influenced worker strikes and solidarities. Unruly Labor also examines how oil companies and governments responded to these strikes. This examination demonstrates how oil became increasingly connected to national security and how this connection between oil and national security negatively impacted workers’ ability to unionize and go on strike.

Page 99 of Unruly Labor is located in the middle of Chapter 4: “Shaping Nationalism Outside of the Nation-State.” This chapter examines a hunger strike that Indian workers who were building an oil refinery in Aden went on in the early 1950s. The page describes workers complaints of religious discrimination against Hindus by oil company managers, including allegations that Hindus were not hired to work at this project due to their religion. This page also discusses both oil companies’ and the Indian government’s response to these claims. The page begins:

Accusations of religious discrimination were effective in mobilizing action by the Indian government, and the government halted the recruitment of Indians for the Aden construction project based on these allegations. As government officials investigated claims of religious discrimination, Indian bureaucrats considered citizens not as a homogenous category, but within the specificity of India’s demography. Religion was a critical category for both oil companies and the Indian government, and government responses were informed by two seemingly competing views of India as a secular state and as a Hindu nation.

Regarding the Page 99 Test, this page provides a good introduction to the book, but it only partially conveys the book’s main ideas. It reflects the book’s focus on the interactions among oil companies, workers, and governments. In addition, this page highlights that citizenship is critical concept in the book, and the reader is introduced to the importance of citizenship in determining the efficacy of worker action. However, page 99 does not present some of the other key concepts in the book, and it does not reflect the book’s focus on how the racialized labor hierarchies of the Arabian Peninsula came into being.

Learn more about Unruly Labor at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jean-Philippe Belleau's "Killing the Elites"

Jean-Philippe Belleau is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Killing the Elites: Haiti, 1964, and reported the following:

Page 99 recounts one of the worst massacres in Caribbean history, which occurred on April 26, 1963 in Port-au-Prince.

From inception, there are modes of killings. Some victims are taken from their homes or arrested at road- blocks by soldiers or VSN, and then brought to Fort Dimanche (…) where they are executed the same day. Other victims are randomly killed right on the street or in their homes in broad daylight, in the Pacot and Turgeau areas, by roaming VSNs and Presidential Guard officers. Victims include lawyers, businessmen, engineers, a museum curator, lawyers—mostly men. Members of the same families are killed together; one example is a branch of the Tippenhauer family in which the father (a businessman) is killed with his two sons. Some of the murdered retired officers were known public figures. Col. Edouard Roy had been Chief of the Presidential House. Col. Roger Villedrouin is also executed. Jean Bouchereau, a retired army engineer arrested in a bookstore, pleaded for his life (“I have ten children!”) before being taken to the execution site at Fort Dimanche. Of the 120 active duty officers who were killed under Duvalier, almost half were killed on that day. (…)

The massacre convinced many of Haiti’s intellectual elites, irrespective of their racial identity, to flee the country. Leslie Manigat, a promising Haitian scholar, fled the country with his entire family. The flight of elites was hardly new in Haitian history, as Matthew Smith shows, but up to that point those who had gone into exile had been predominantly men. On April 26, “state terrorism applied to entire families,” and it caused a massive exodus on a scale not yet seen before in Haiti.

Page 99 partly passes the test. Uncannily, page 99 recounts the most under-researched massacres in Caribbean 20th century history, and for that matter one that targeted almost exclusively the elites. It also exemplifies the gratuitousness of state violence under Duvalier: people who were not known opponents were executed because of their social identity. The book recounts many episodes of anti-elite massacres, in Haiti and in other countries, in the 20th century and earlier. Page 99 also points at one of the most tragic consequences of anti-elite violence in Haiti: elite flight. Page 99 therefore gives an accurate impression (but an impression only). In addition, the victims mentioned on page 99 are represented on the book’s front cover (Col. Edouard Roy, Jean Bouchereau, the Tippenhauer, Col. Villedrouin). However, given that Killing the Elites compares anti-elite violence across space and time, and develops several theoretical arguments about mass violence, the book cannot be summarized in one page only.

Learn more about Killing the Elites at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue