Ronald Angelo Johnson's "Entangled Alliances"

Ronald Angelo Johnson holds the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History at Baylor University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution, and shared the following:

When opening to page 99, the reader enters the book mid-sentence, encountering a discussion of the petition from Felix. “…the cruelties of enslavement and white supremacist attitudes. He then summarized the condition of Black life plainly: “We have no Property. We have no Wives. No Children. We have no City. No Country.” In 1773, Felix, a Black Bostonian, like White American rebels in that day, submitted his grievances in writing to Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson and the House of Representatives. Felix’s call for the end of slavery during the American Revolution represents the first public, Black-authored antislavery petition to the Massachusetts legislature—and perhaps the first in American history.

A reader opening to page 99 gets a good sense of the book. There, the reader engages themes discussed throughout the book. Some are Black and White American patriots, the importance of early newspapers, the power of citizens in an American democracy to critique government leaders, the search for justice in courts, and the US’s interconnectedness with people across the world.

One sentence captures an important theme: “The revolutionary period created a sense of optimism that Felix exhibited in his petition.” The American Revolution did not solve the problems in the United States. The revolutionary moment gave people hope that problems could be solved. The sharing of news about liberties being won across the Atlantic world encouraged prominent White American men to push for independence, White American women to advocate for greater rights, free Black people to seek enfranchisement, and enslaved Africans to demand freedom.

An important part of the book is absent on page 99. This book illuminates the strong ties between the US and the French Caribbean colony Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) during the American Revolution. It would be a shame for readers to miss narratives about the Dominguan rebel Jacques Delaunay, the justice seeker Marie-Jeanne Carenan, and the future Haitian Revolution leader Toussaint Louverture.

Another sentence is instructive: “Felix submitted his petition in the hope that enslaved people could join their white neighbors in the enjoyment of articulated rights for all humankind.” The American Revolution stoked the desire for freedom and equality that lived within the hearts of Atlantic world inhabitants. In 2026, the year the US celebrates its 250th anniversary, the desire for freedom and equality lives on. That never-ending search is the inheritance—from the Founding Generation—to all citizens and immigrants who love, labor, and sacrifice to help the United States live up to the truly revolutionary ideal “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

Learn more about Entangled Alliances at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Derby's "Bêtes Noires"

Lauren Derby is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo and coeditor of The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics.

Derby applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, and reported the following:

Page 99 showcases one of the central questions of Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands – why animals figure so prominently in the popular culture and religion of Hispaniola which I explain through the prominence of hunting and extensive cattle ranching in the island’s history. Contraband sales of cattle peaked in the late eighteenth century as Dominican cattle and oxen were sold to the neighboring colony of Saint Domingue when it became the largest sugar producer of the French Atlantic since the sugar mills were driven by oxen. Due to the vast expanse of feral herds formed over centuries of pigs and cattle originally brought by Columbus as seed animals, the Dominican Republic developed a vibrant hunting culture. Hunting has not been explored much for Caribbean history but it was an important feature of Dominican everyday life and one that enabled these peasants the luxury of remaining outside of slavery and sugar plantation labor while it continued into the late nineteenth century in neighboring Cuba and Puerto Rico. Dominican hunting skills also shaped the army since troops were not provisioned as they were in Cuba, a detail also noted on that page. Hunting and extensive ranching has left its mark on popular culture from animal nicknaming practices to horned carnival costumes and most importantly storytelling about spirit demons in animal form. The fact that the animals from the Columbian exchange have become spirit demons I argue is a material manifestation of what Dominicans call the fukú de Colón – the curse of Columbus – and represent trauma since these animals were used to dispossess the indigenous population and were terrifying since the largest animal on the island had been a hutia – a large rodent - before the massive horses and cows and the violent boars and slave catching canines arrived.

Learn more about Bêtes Noires at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek J. Thiess's "American Fantastic"

Derek J. Thiess is an associate professor of English at the University of North Georgia. He is the author of Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction; Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach; and Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography.

Thiess applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, American Fantastic: Myths of Violence and Redemption, with the following results:

This is the last page of chapter 3, which is an analysis of the John Henry legend, especially as it appears in popular culture. As such it contains some final thoughts about a short story by Balogun Ojetade from 2012 titled “Rite of Passage: Blood and Iron.” The culmination of this analysis notes how this story invests “Henry with a violent agency that both activates the spirit of the legendary forms and flies in the face of the critics of redemptive violence that would reduce that violence to futile resignation.” It then nods towards a prior chapter (and a prior book of mine) discussing violence in sport, putting Ojetade’s text in a martial and sporting context. The text notes that the “relationship between sport and violence” indicates how “denouncing redemptive violence in this case would directly mean Henry’s accepting the status quo. It would mean openly accepting the violent historical context that the historian makes central in their work on Henry.” This paragraph also notes that Ojetade’s story and the other fantastical reinterpretations considered in the chapter highlight “the importance of taking seriously the ‘recycling’ of the folktale.”

The last paragraph is transitional, looking forward to the next chapter, which takes up the legendary figure of Blackbeard, noting that at this point the book is “transition[ing] us to a more overt entanglement of colonialism, religion, and capitalism.” However, it also underscores that “there is a tendency in the work of criticism to emphasize certain violences...over the potential of resistant violences and to co-opt such legends as John Henry within existing Christian mythic traditions.” A co-opting that will be even more overt in the coming chapters.

Because this page is signposting between two (of my favorite!) chapters it actually does a good job of highlighting most of the central concerns of the book. The random browser may, however, feel a little lost as the “Myth of Redemptive Violence” is not elaborated upon on this page—it’s an idea first developed in Religious Studies by Walter Wink, but that has become popular throughout historical and social scientific work. The general idea is that violence has become a kind of mythic (as myths are stories that authorize belief) focus of our society and has supplanted traditional religious, Christian, morality. The longer arc of the book demonstrates how this notion is revisionist, overtly working against Richard Slotkin’s germinal work on regeneration through violence, in order to carefully hold Christianity apart from its historical role (whether directly or apologetically) in those very violences. The central thesis of this book, then—that attempts to erase violence from our society often betrays a continued pacification strategy, via religious myth, to obscure religion’s role in colonial violence. This thesis is expressed in this chapter both in how Henry is uncritically recorded in the historical record as a quasi-biblical figure (i.e. Samson) and in how the wholesale denial of (systemic) violence obscures the potential for violent resistance in the various versions of Henry’s story.

Noting those various versions also does a decent job of explaining the methodology of the book, which is a comparative approach between folkloristic and fictional forms (“recycling” is a nod to Frank de Caro’s Folklore Recycled). This approach is heavily theorized in the introduction, so lacking that context, the browser will intuit this method, but perhaps still wonder why. Furthermore, they may be turned off by what is clearly an etic approach to the topic (as an early reviewer was). Yet again in the framework of the book, this is addressed as rather necessary to avoid criticism’s continued contribution to Christian supremacy via insider apologetics.

Visit Derek J. Thiess's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fabricio Tocco's "Precarious Secrets"

Fabricio Tocco is an assistant professor at the School of Literature, Languages & Linguistics at the Australian National University and author of the prize winning Latin American Detectives against Power: Individualism, the State, and Failure in Crime Fiction.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford’s test works remarkably well for Precarious Secrets. A glimpse of page 99 would offer a browser a very accurate idea of what the book is about. It features a scene analysis of one of the most significant Latin American political thrillers ever made: Jorge Fons’ Rojo amanecer (Red Dawn), a Mexican film made in the late 1980s. The thriller, a unique portrayal of the Tlatelolco Massacre held in Mexico City in 1968, is a paradigmatic case study of the theories that I develop throughout the book: it serves as a central example to explore how Latin American filmmakers have used precarity in favor of storytelling. I understand “precarity” in a very broad way. From the most obvious point of view, there’s the financial constraints, as Fons operated with a very tight budget. As a result, the film was shot indoors almost in its entirety. From a less evident perspective, I examine how precarity informs political censorship, too. The polysemic nature of precarity paves the way for discussions on filmmaking choices regarding sound and offscreen techniques, but also around interiority and exteriority, fiction and archive, affect and infrapolitics, motherhood and gender, as well as the invasion of the political in the personal, all explored in page 99.

This page includes a review of what important critics such as Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Samuel Steimberg, and Jorge Majfud have previously written about Rojo amanecer. I build on their arguments to go beyond them, offering a new reading of the film. Much like in the rest of the book, I engage in this page with a central concept I coined to study political thrillers: the “grammar of secrecy,” a category defined in the introduction as “a particular way of thinking about secrets, utilizing prepositions of space, such as ‘under’ and ‘above’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘behind’ and ‘in front of.’” This concept sheds light to the understudied ties between secrecy and space: if secrets are always stored somewhere, it is through this grammar and its prepositions that political thrillers hide and eventually showcase secrets. In page 99, the secret in question has to do with state-sponsored violence, a key theme that obsessively reappears in Latin American renditions of the genre.

Learn more about Precarious Secrets at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Esther Eidinow's "Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth"

Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol; she has also taught at Newman University and Nottingham University. Her research explores ancient Greek culture, especially ancient religion, magic, ritual, and belief, drawing on theories from different disciplines, including anthropology and cognitive science, and she has published widely on these topics and their intersections with the history of emotions, gender, women's histories, and environmental humanities. Her latest project, funded by the AHRC, co-created (with teachers) is an accessible virtual reality experience of visiting the ancient Greek oracle of Zeus at Dodona in the fifth century BCE, for use in classrooms.

Eidinow applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth, and shared the following:

On page 99, the reader plunges into the chapter headed ‘Air’, that is, myths of metamorphosis that culminate in the body of a man or woman changing into a form related to this element. The three other chapters in the book cover myths that describe metamorphoses related to 'Earth', 'Fire', and 'Water'.

The page opens with reflection on different versions of the Greek myth of Prokne and Philomela: in the canonical version, they are sisters who have suffered terribly at the hands of Tereus, Prokne’s husband. Before they flee him, the sisters kill Itys, Prokne’s son by Tereus, cook him, and serve him to Tereus as a meal. At this point, the gods turn Prokne into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow, and Tereus into a hoopoe. This is just one version of the myth, but as page 99 elaborates, myth is both mutable and unchanging. Even the very different versions by other ancient writers maintain the key narrative thread of the rape of a sister and the killing and cannibalism of a son.

The discussion then turns to an overview of the other stories of transformations into birds studied in this chapter—and how they depict men and women in the most extreme of situations, removed from human society. Many of these stories portray the breakdown of family order; and one argument suggests that metamorphosis is prompted by the need to exclude from a community those who have committed dreadful crimes, lest they bring down the anger of the gods.

Alongside that perspective, page 99 offers another way of reading these myths—that is, that they relate metamorphosis to the experience of intense and unbearable emotions. This chapter highlights the emotions of grief, pride, excessive and misplaced desire, and the trauma of fear and anger provoked by sexual assault.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book: page 99 includes a number of its key themes, including the nature of myths and myth-telling and how myths of metamorphosis reinforce cultural conventions and religious beliefs. But, above all, page 99 incorporates the book’s main argument—that myths of metamorphosis evoke human experiences of extreme emotion or trauma, which we now discuss in medicalised terms as fight or flight, freeze, faint and flop.

In this book, I suggest that ancient Greek men and women also experienced these physiological responses, but since they lacked our medical knowledge, they evoked these experiences through stories about bodies literally changing. For example, in the chapter ‘Air’, rather than depicting a traumatic ‘faint’ response, or describing an experience of dissociation, these stories portray men and women falling, and/or turning into birds, being snatched by winds and/or changing into stars.

As the rest of the book argues, in the ancient Greek mind, transformations like this made a sort of sense. Ancient Greek philosophical and scientific writings suggest that the elements, air, earth, fire and water, were understood to be the building blocks of everything—including humans. In ancient stories of metamorphosis, the human body’s elements are forced into another form, in moments of extreme and violent emotion; they become part of the surrounding landscape. Both men and women undergo these changes, but it is women who are the primary protagonists, deeply vulnerable both to the violence of gods and men; and to profound emotions, especially grief.

The book’s other chapters explore the mythic relationship of emotions and elements. We have all at some point talked about being so frightened that we are rooted to the spot, or turned to stone with fear. We might now understand this as a traumatic ‘freeze’ response, but in the stories described in the chapter ‘Earth’, men and women literally turn into stone, or are rooted in the earth as plants or trees. Stories in the chapter ‘Fire’ describe the power of rage at secrets revealed. Finally, the stories explored in the chapter ‘Water’ evoke the ceaseless flow of traumatic memory, and a repeating story pattern of violent separation, change and rebirth.

These myths of metamorphosis are specific to the ancient contexts in which they were told and heard, but they can also, I argue, offer insights into embodied experiences that are shared across cultures, including our own.

Learn more about Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Burstein's "Being Thomas Jefferson"

Andrew Burstein recently retired as the Charles P. Manship Professor of History at Louisiana State University. He is the author of The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Jefferson's Secrets, and several other books on early American politics and culture. He is the coauthor (with Nancy Isenberg) of Madison and Jefferson and The Problem of Democracy. Burstein’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Salon.com He advised Ken Burns’ production “Thomas Jefferson,” and was featured on C-SPAN’s American Presidents Series and Booknotes, and numerous NPR programs. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Burstein applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, with the following results:

On page 99, as he is preparing his draft of the Declaration of Independence in June 1776, Jefferson is thinking of his text as a divorce petition, casting King George III as an abusive husband:

The divorce analogy makes sense for a number of reasons. In 1772, at the high point of his career as a practicing attorney, Jefferson took extensive notes in preparing the case of a client who wished to divorce his wife. At the time it was virtually unheard of for a husband or wife to succeed in a divorce suit as we understand it, even in cases of adultery.

The rest of page 99 details attorney Jefferson’s objective in the 1772 suit, demonstrating his familiarity with legal precedent, while at the same time protecting the reputation of his client, a recently deceased physician who left no will, and whose wife had “refused his conjugal rights,” yet demanded the bulk of his estate.

It happens that the content on page 99 is a tempting snippet of the book’s themes. As “intimate history,” it speaks to Jefferson’s willingness to acknowledge the centrality of male-female relations in all facets of life. I can say that the Page 99 Test works for my book, both because it engages directly with my interpretation of the most celebrated piece of writing in American history, and it comports nicely with the book’s humanization of a historical figure whose loves and losses shaped the kind of politician he became. The two main threads I follow in this biography are fame and vulnerability, which are at the very least hinted at on page 99.

Learn more about Being Thomas Jefferson at the Bloomsbury website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina Schwenkel's "Sonic Socialism"

Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi the reader encounters a discussion of social distancing not merely as a public health measure, but as an ethical gesture— a public expression of care that shaped how people interacted with one another within reconfigured sensory environments. Marking the beginning of Act 3, this page explores the careful calibration of the relationship between “safe” distance and proximity, particularly through heightened attention to the sonic dimensions of epidemiological risk. It outlines how listening itself changed, as people attuned more deeply to coughs and sneezes that provoked new registers of anxiety, transforming connections to both the urban environment and the bodies moving through it.

This discussion emerges at a pivotal transition in the book. The chapter shifts from the end of a three-week lockdown in Hanoi (Act 2) to a different form of pandemic governance, from enforced isolation to cautious social reintegration with an emphasis on spatial distancing, as it was called in Vietnam. This also marked a reopening of the domestic economy following containment of the virus by April 2020, while much of the world remained closed. Page 99 examines how this shift in governance materialized in daily life, transforming everyday sensory experience through both spatial and sonic interventions. For example, outside commercial establishments, material markings on the ground designated two-meter distances (“stand here”), while bullhorns provided auditory reminders to keep apart. People also created their own protective boundaries to mitigate the risk of viral transmission. Market vendors—particularly women—used tape to cordon off their stalls to ensure customers transacted from a safe distance. Though a photograph of this practice originally appeared on page 99, I removed it when the tape proved too faint to see clearly.

Page 99 thus captures a particular moment in pandemic time when anxieties about viral transmission in Hanoi ran high. A COVID poem featured here reflects concerns about cross-contamination, as well as the dread of being publicly identified through contact tracing in the press. This vigilance would soon wane, however. Later in Act 3, with no reported contagion, people began to lose their fear and test the boundaries of state control. In this way, page 99 marks a specific point in the acoustic and affective rhythms at the heart of this sensory autoethnography, as they ebbed and flowed across 2020.

Visit Christina Schwenkel's website.

The Page 99 Test: The American War in Contemporary Vietnam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeff Roche's "The Conservative Frontier"

Jeff Roche is a professor of American history at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. He is the author and editor of several books and essays on American politics and the conservative movement, including Restructured Resistance, The Conservative Sixties, and The Political Culture of the New West.

Roche applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right, and shared the following:

Page 99 is early in the book’s fifth chapter in a section that describes the conflict over prohibition in Amarillo Texas in 1907. The brutal murder of a young man in the Bowery (the city’s Red Light District) had created an uproar and a demand among citizens that the city prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol. On one side were a group of people we would now call social conservatives, who believed that eliminating liquor was not just a step in creating a more righteous community, but also a signal that the city had emerged from its rough and tumble frontier phase to become a modern and moral city. On the other side were folks who we would recognize as more libertarian, who did not believe nor support any efforts to legislate morality. It also describes the violent corruption that surrounded the election to go “dry” and begins the tale of the bloody chaos of an Amarillo that was dry in name only, a time when local police and Texas Rangers fought each other in the streets and a local deputy assassinated a Ranger at the city courthouse.

Page 99 is possibly as good an indicator of the tone and style of the book as any other random page I suppose. It demonstrates the kinds of political conflicts that serve as the foundation of the book’s narrative structure and central premise – that it was local struggles over national issues that helped mold West Texas’s cowboy conservatism. It also describes an ongoing ideological conflict between the live-and-let-live libertarianism of a cattle culture and the demands for civic conformity of a small-town elite determined to see their communities grow.

The book itself covers roughly a century of West Texas history as it explains how the region became the most conservative and the most reliably Republican section of the United States. The story unfolds across dozens of vignettes (like the conflict over prohibition in turn of the century Amarillo) organized in shortish chapters written in an accessible style. The first third of the book describes the politics, culture, and economy of what I call the Agricultural Wonderland, a modern, forward-looking society, based on commercial family farming and designed as an alternative to a rapidly changing America. A place literally advertised as a white, Christian homeland on the Texas prairies. The second part of the book traces the origins of the modern Texas right-wing as it moved from a broadly conceived pro-business and anti-labor lobby to a paranoid and conspiratorially minded movement whose members believed that communists were secretly plotting to brainwash American children through subtle messaging in schoolbooks. The last third of the book describes and explains how the far-right took control of the Texas Republican Party over the course of the 1960s and turned it into a vehicle for the expression of their ideology, a project that was all but complete when the book ends with Ronald Reagan sweeping the Texas Republican Primary in 1976.

Visit Jeff Roche's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Flannery Burke's "Back East"

Flannery Burke is associate professor of American studies at Saint Louis University. She is author of A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century and From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's.

Burke applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region, with the following results:

Page 99 appears in the center section of Back East and reveals a mainstream opinion of the eastern United States held by many westerners in the twentieth century. The page begins with a complete sentence: “As it had in ‘The Plundered Province,’ Wall Street, once again, played the role of the East.” The author of the article “The Plundered Province” was Bernard DeVoto, a writer for Harper’s Magazine, a Harvard graduate, and an ardent conservationist originally from Ogden, Utah. In “The Plundered Province” and again in later articles referenced on page 99, DeVoto excoriated eastern corporations who extracted natural resources and labor from the American West and westerners who accepted and even encouraged such economic exploitation. As a westerner who had succeeded in the East, DeVoto considered himself an expert on both regions. As I write on page 99, DeVoto identified himself in the eastern press as a man who was “informed by a western sensibility but understood eastern culture.”

A browser who opened Back East to page 99 would receive an excellent introduction to the book’s primary themes. The book addresses how westerners imagined the eastern United States in the twentieth century, and DeVoto, as one of the most prolific and authoritative writers on the American West in the American East, well encapsulates the ways in which westerners both accepted and countered eastern expectations in their presentations of their home region. That these expectations influenced the material lives of westerners as much as it did their cultural and intellectual ones – from mining to forestry, ranching, farming, and tourism – is an important finding of the book and one foreshadowed by DeVoto’s articles of the 1930s and 1940s.

Page 99 also well reflects the structure of Back East, which is divided into three parts. Parts 1 and 3 explore western views of the American East from the margins of American culture. Part 1 addresses midwestern presentations of the East that non-midwesterners frequently overlooked or overshadowed while demonstrating that Chicago appeared as both a western and an eastern city in twentieth-century American culture. Part 3 examines the outlooks of westerners marginalized by their race, their status as citizens of Native nations, their language, or their efforts to farm on the arid Plains. Although such westerners’ perceptions of the American East appeared less frequently in magazines like Harper’s and universities like Harvard, they illustrate the ways in which regional narratives opened and foreclosed opportunities for greater national understanding. Part 2, in which page 99 appears, describes popular, well-published authors like DeVoto and his dear friend Wallace Stegner, whose views of the American West and the American East were often consistent with the mythology of the frontier. Page 99 illustrates how DeVoto and Stegner furthered that mythology even as they endeavored to undo its harms.

Visit Flannery Burke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kimberley Johnson's "Dark Concrete"

Kimberley S. Johnson is a political scientist and urban studies scholar whose work examines governance, institutions, and the spatial organization of power in the United States. She is also a spatial storyteller, using history, maps, and urban form to interpret cities, suburbs, and metropolitan change.

Johnson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Dark Concrete introduces one of the central tensions of Black power urbanism (BPU): how to build a just and emancipatory city within political and institutional configurations that worked against these aspirations. Page 99 captures this tension playing out in Newark during the city’s second teacher’s strike in 1971. Black and Puerto Rican activists, parents, students and educators were struggling over the control of education, and by extension the future of the city. In this sense, page 99 serves as an illuminating snapshot of the book as a whole, as similar conflicts recur across the multiple cities and policy areas, including housing and policing.

For proponents of BPU like Amiri Baraka, control over the Newark’s education system was not simply about jobs or contracts (the traditional terrain of machine politics). Instead, it was a struggle over who should teach, what knowledge should be centered, and the kinds of spaces that a new system of education could take place. Newark’s BPU activists believed that the city’s teachers and administrators were indifferent if not hostile to the needs of a now majority-Black and Puerto Rican student body trapped in crumbling underfunded schools, even as White residents (including the family of Chris Christie a future governor) and much of the teaching force, left for the suburbs. Although Newark’s education conflicts emerged in the mid-1960s, the movement for community control of schools would be epitomized in the explosive Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teacher’s Strike of 1968 in New York City, and would find its echo in Newark during the 1971 strike.

The election of Kenneth Gibson’s in 1970 as Newark’s first Black mayor appeared to create new political opening. Gibson empowered BPU activists to demand more community control and to condemn the teacher’s strike as a power grab. Yet Gibson’s political influence proved limited in effecting transformative change on the scale desired by BPU activists. Ongoing conflict with Italian American city council members and resistance from White ethnic neighborhood groups constrained Gibson’s capacity to govern. As a result, emancipatory ambitions, as well as tensions inherent in Black Power urbanism– the struggle to create just “new forms” of governance – clashed with precariousness of formal Black electoral power. Ultimately, Gibson pursued greater centralization of the school system (and more leverage over political opponents) rather than the neighborhood-based and alternative pedagogical models advocated by BPU activists. This outcome fostered decades of distrust between parents, activists and teachers on the other, stalling reform and paving the way for the state’s takeover of Newark’s schools in 1995.

At its core, BPU sought to develop “new forms,” a concept articulated by Charles Hamilton and Kwame Ture in their book Black Power (1967). Community control of education, along with ideas around housing and policing, were the most visible of these experiments taking place across the nation’s increasingly majority-Black and Brown majority cities. Dark Concrete traces this struggle not only in Newark, but also in Oakland, East Orange, and East Palo Alto, showing how efforts to reimagine urban life unfolded through experimentation, conflict and constraints. As page 99 demonstrates, Black Power urbanism ultimately reshaped the terrain of urban governance leaving legacies that continue to shape debates over democracy, equity and the right to the city.

Visit Kimberley Johnson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue