Kenja McCray's "Essential Soldiers"

Kenja McCray is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Clayton State University and coauthor of Atlanta Metropolitan State College, a campus history.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership, and shared the following:

Page 99 highlights a central theme in Essential Soldiers, that women played fundamental, complex, and sometimes contradictory roles in Black Power cultural nationalist organizations. The section focuses on gender roles in educational programs and contains a “case study” of a single school told through the narrative of one African American woman activist. I assigned the pseudonym Imani Omotayo, because she wanted to remain anonymous. For context, Black Power activists faced ongoing threats of external state surveillance, harassment, and violence, as well as internal conflict among movement peers.

This specific page spotlights the Us Organization’s School of Afroamerican Culture, which was founded in majority-Black South Central Los Angeles in 1967. The school’s teachers and staff charged minimal tuition, offering academic lessons, cultural enrichment, meals, and a nurturing space in ways that earned community support. Rooted in Pan-African nationalist values, instructors combined the guiding Principles of Blackness (some of the Kawaida Principles) with expectations of academic excellence. While the school’s personnel fostered a sense of cultural pride and scholarly development in students, Omotayo noted that the curriculum also reinforced restrictive gender norms. Such values telegraphed a sex-based hierarchy that limited women and girls to secondary, “submissive” social roles.

The Page 99 Test might pique a browser’s interest. It will provide them with some information, but it is just an entry point. Of course, they would have to read more to get the full meaning, because the book’s premise is more complicated. Essential Soldiers examines how Pan-African cultural nationalist women who were affiliated with some of the most notoriously masculinist Black Power organizations utilized their agency to transform themselves and their environments. In doing so, I argue that they demonstrated a work-centered, people-centered, and African-centered form of service leadership. Exploring their activism in several areas, from the media to education, provides a new standpoint for considering Black Power leadership legacies. This is because scholars and popular commenters alike have tended to focus on male-chauvinistic, top-down, and authoritarian Black Power leadership models, in part because the women’s stories have been so obscured in the historical record.

If readers browsed backward in the book a bit and looked ahead just a few pages, they would find out that supplementary and independent Black educational programs (IBIs), like the School of Afroamerican Culture and others, were often developed, designed, and sustained by women, whose gender roles within the earliest days of Kawaida organizations were limited to domesticity and childrearing. As nationalist mothers, they were seen as the primary cultivators of a budding nation. As Pan-African cultural nationalist teachers, women filled roles that were essential to developing good citizens in the nation becoming. Many female cultural nationalist advocates challenged their secondary status, utilizing access to education and training to create leadership opportunities for women and developing programs like communal childcare, which helped mothers (and fathers) perform political work outside the home. IBIs and supplementary educational programs became some of the most important and longest-running endeavors that Black Power cultural nationalist organizations undertook in their communities, developing into outlets for women’s political work and incubators for their unique form of service leadership.

Visit Kenja McCray's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregory A. Daddis's "Faith and Fear"

Gregory A. Daddis is professor of history and the Melbern G. Glasscock Endowed Chair in American History at Texas A&M University.

Daddis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Faith and Fear: America’s Relationship with War since 1945, and reported the following:

What are the implications when you write a “moral tract on mass murder”? This was the question one reviewer pondered as he evaluated Herman Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War. Kahn, director of the Hudson Institute think tank in New York, had set out to challenge his readers, to force them to think about “the unthinkable” because, he surmised, nuclear war was not just possible, but statistically probable. In many ways, he succeeded. Well before the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, many Americans fearfully considered the prospect of nuclear Armageddon.

Kahn’s treatise took aim at more than just deterrence theory, the popular notion that nuclear weapons could serve as a global “stabilizing force” because the superpowers feared “retaliation in kind.” Rather, the physicist-turned-strategist was critiquing US policymakers’ deeper faith in war keeping their nation safe in an uncertain yet dangerous world.

As page 99 of Faith and Fear reveals, however, that faith in war sat in uneasy and constant tension with a fear of war and its consequences. Throughout the early Cold War years of the late 1940s and 1950s, a pattern emerged in how Americans conceived of their relationship with war. They held faith that they could adeptly manage military force to promote an ever-expanding foreign policy agenda while keeping guard against communist enemies seemingly hell-bent on world domination. Yet they also feared that war might bring chaos and destruction and, in the atomic era, the possible extinction of mankind itself.

Page 99 illustrates well the dysfunctionality of this relationship between faith and fear. Cold War “policymakers may have exuded confidence from their possession of nuclear weapons, yet their eagerness to pursue hydrogen bombs and a triad of delivery systems—intercontinental bombers, ballistic missiles, and submarines—intimated deeper fears about what the future might hold.”

These tensions between faith and fear matter because they endure. Americans continue to place faith in massive defense budgets keeping them safe from threats both real and imagined. And they fear, acutely so, that those same threats may lead to the end of the nation as they know it.

Back in 1960, Herman Kahn wanted his fellow citizens to think more seriously about their relationship with war. Sixty-five years later, his inclinations to challenge our martial assumptions about war and its value are as relevant as ever.

Learn more about Faith and Fear at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test:Westmoreland's War.

The Page 99 Test: Withdrawal.

The Page 99 Test: Pulp Vietnam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen B. Casey's "The Things She Carried"

Kathleen B. Casey is Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Professor of History at Furman University in South Carolina. She is the author of The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville.

Casey applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America, and reported the following:

If you open up The Things She Carried to page 99, you’ll likely be surprised to find a large advertisement from 1937 for Tampax tampons. The ad was published in Good Housekeeping and includes a black and white photograph showcasing a woman’s manicured fingers slipping a box of Tampax into the mouth of her purse. At the time, tampons were brand new products with which consumers were unfamiliar. Because advertisers were reluctant to show the actual product or discuss its use, they relied on more discrete images of their boxed products being placed inside women’s purses. The partial paragraph at the bottom of this page notes how terms like pocketbook and purse had become so associated with women’s bodies in the 1940s that, in some cases, they began to serve as euphemisms for women’s genitalia.

Because page 99 is almost entirely occupied by an image and it reflects one of six chapters exploring very different angles of the cultural history of the purse, it would likely intrigue and surprise readers more than represent the book as a whole. When most people think about purses, they think of fashion, but they don’t imagine how purses might be connected to women’s history and the invention of purse-sized personal hygiene products like tampons. This chapter of my book, “The Bag and the Body,” helps to explain why purses became increasingly linked to womanhood and femininity, to the point where American men now often shrink at the idea of touching a purse, nevermind carrying one of their own. The book is really about how purses are these seemingly mundane, ubiquitous objects that we have really underestimated. In reality, they were powerful toolkits strategically used by several generations of women across two centuries of American history.

In a way, the Page 99 Test works because this book is full of rather unexpected stories, connections, and images, which place the purse in surprisingly important roles in American history. Page 99 represents that quite well.

Visit Kathleen B. Casey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Baker's "Charlottesville"

Deborah Baker is the author of A Blue Hand and The Last Englishmen. Her biography In Extremis was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and her book The Convert was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in New York and Charlottesville.

Baker applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Charlottesville: An American Story, with the following results:

Page 99 describes the January 16, 2017 Charlottesville City Council vote on the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a local park. Here is a paragraph describing the mayor's thinking at that moment.

Until [vice Mayor Wes Bellamy] brought up King's definition of the white moderate from his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Mayor Mike Signer felt certain he had persuaded him to keep the Lee statue in Lee Park. This was a measure of the high value he placed on his own thinking and powers of persuasion. Signer prided himself on his results-oriented approach to the statue question. He arrived that evening prepared to expound on this at great length. In his prefatory remarks, he took pains to express his own "abhorrence of slavery" and his desire to "create bridges rather than divisions." But what was the practical effect of moving the Less statue he asked, vis-a-vis advancing the cause of racial justice? Not seeing any material benefit, he concluded it was an empty political gesture. He voted no on removal, yes on contextualizing it and renaming the park.

Page 99 comes in the final chapter of Part 1 of my book, Charlottesville: An American Story. Part I is prefaced by the 1924 ceremony that accompanied the installation of the Lee statue in Lee Park. A reader opening page 99 would get a good idea of what the book was about and my style of reporting. What would be missed is my deeper dives into Virginia and Charlottesville's history; the Lee statue's installation ceremony, for example, was presided over by a prominent Klansman, who was also a Grand Commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Even before this city council meeting, the statue had become a subject of controversy. Neo-Confederate groups had staged rallies to defend it. The council had convened a Blue Ribbon Commission to study the question. When the commission's conclusions were less than conclusive, it was left to the city council to make the final call on its fate. That evening it wasn't yet clear how individual council members would vote. Council chambers were filled with people carrying signs, there was a woman in a hoop skirt who'd driven all the way from Maryland. Four days before Donald Trump's swearing in, emotions were running high.

It was the council's 3 to 2 vote to move the statue elsewhere that put Charlottesville in the nation's crosshairs. Only then did Richard Spencer, who had been milking his notoriety during the lead up to the election of Donald Trump, decide to make this local controversy a national flashpoint for his brand of white nationalism. Eight months later he and over one thousand white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klan members, far right internet trolls, podcasters, and influencers showed up in Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally. Before the day was over a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a crowd of counter protesters, killing Heather Heyer and critically injuring dozens of others.

Visit Deborah Baker's website.

Writers Read: Deborah Baker (December 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah James's "Clawing Back"

Deborah James is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Faculty Associate in the International Inequalities Institute. She is the author of Money From Nothing (2015).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Clawing Back: Redistribution In Precarious Times, and shared the following:

“People will come in with one issue, but it usually turns out to be several”, says London-based volunteer adviser Yusuf, a few lines down on page 99. People needing help because they are in debt or have lost a job, or because a state benefit is not forthcoming or has been withdrawn, seek help from intermediaries and volunteers working in a range of charities. Page 99 discusses the interaction between these tangles of diverse issues (called “problem clusters” by those working to help UK residents in the low-wage sector), and shows how advisers like Yusuf separate them into discrete strands. The term “clusters” suggests an embroiled knot, the solution to which requires pulling apart its component parts. In the process, advisers help clients— in order not to feel overwhelmed—demarcate resources as separate from one another. What prompts a person to seek help may appear to consist of just one of these strands. Often it is not the most serious, but it is the one that causes them most fear or anxiety.

Adviser–advisee encounters involve sifting through letters from creditors or different welfare departments and agencies, often in search of a single all-important document that, if left undetected, would undermine the fine balance between constantly readjusted sets of income and outgoings. In a face-to-face encounter with a client, the adviser lists the client’s expenses and establishes what her income is. This includes ascertaining which welfare payments the client is receiving (and at what levels), suggesting others that might supplement that income, and liaising with agencies that may have failed to fulfil their obligations in providing these. If the client is in debt, she may be referred to a debt specialist. The adviser seeks to help the client compartmentalize problems, but without ignoring what caused them to “cluster” together. These intersections shape, and are shaped by, the complex interdependencies of householding, but knowing when to pull them (and keep them) apart is key to the boundary work that advisers do. And, in turn, advisers also know how and when to recombine these elements, creating a holistic picture of householders’ quandaries and recognizing them as real people with families.

This page gives a partial, but important, glimpse into the book. Clawing Back is about how householders in both the UK and South Africa make a living by patchworking together these three income sources: work, welfare and debt. Each on its own can appear as providing an important resource, but in combination they often turn into “problem clusters”. What is as important as earning a wage, getting paid a benefit, or securing a loan, is seeking to avoid having one or all of these taken away, once procured. “Clawing back” often involves sidestepping automated repayments that use high-tech financial instruments. In South Africa, people often find themselves involuntarily subjected to the settling of loans provided by private creditors, while in the UK it is often to the public welfare benefit system that they owe money, because of what are called “overpayments”. As page 99 shows, people in the UK are able to seek expert (if often unpaid) advice in dealing with one or all elements in these “problem clusters”. In South Africa, the other case study, those with similar difficulties face a more uncertain advice landscape, with unevenness between areas that are well-served by paralegals and those where people are often left to their own devices: “I advise myself” as one woman told me.

The book gives an ethnographic accounts of how this happens, illustrating how “distributive labour”, as it was called by the late lamented James Ferguson, has become increasingly important. If by “labour” we mean strenuous activity and effort in negotiating socioeconomic relations, then the endeavours undertaken by people in these low- income settings certainly qualify: they are time-consuming and relentless. In an era where the boundaries between (public) welfare and (private) debtfare are increasingly blurred, people (and women, in particular), must exercise ingenuity in seeking access to resources that support their reproduction and their future plans for greater stability and well-being.

Learn more about Clawing Back at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Vernon's "Awake!"

Mark Vernon is a London-based psychotherapist, writer and former Anglican priest. A keen podcaster and a columnist with The Idler, he speaks regularly at festivals and on the BBC. He has a PhD in Philosophy, and degrees in Theology and Physics. His previous book topics include Dante, Plato and Christianity.

Vernon applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, Awake!, is in the middle of a chapter considering one of the myths about William Blake that I hope to nuance, namely that he was into free love. There is no doubt that the poet and painter was fascinated by the erotic and, at various points in his life, wrestled with its demands, particularly in the years of his youth. But as the heat of passion morphed into a wider love of life, he realised something crucial: youthful eros can expand into an appreciation that is both less fleeting and more connecting. There is a pleasure to be had in the immediacy of all the beings that surround us – be they animal, vegetable or mineral. There can be a realisation that they are each connected to the source of life itself, as indeed we are.

For this reason, in the middle of page 99, I quote some of Blake’s best known lines: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” Beheld with love, the humble grain of sand and the simple wildflower make the boundless tangible. These things become sacred, for as Blake elsewhere puts it: “Everything that lives is holy.”

So, Awake! passes the Page 99 Test. Dipping in on that page provides an excellent touch point for what I am trying to get across about Blake.

After all, he is often appreciated as a great artist or astute social commentator. But at the heart of his vivid perception of things lies a mystical vision: everything, in its own way, shines with the radiance of the divine.

The imagination is the faculty by which we can know that immanent transcendence, not because we have imagination, but rather because the imagination has us. “Nature is imagination itself!” Blake exclaims at one point. Learning both to trust and discern our imaginations is therefore key to his message, for that is an echo, reflection and sharing in the imagination that shapes all things and gives them life.

With the imagination, we can learn to overcome the alienation many today feel – alienation from the natural world, other human beings, even themselves and the divine wellspring. That way, Blake argued, politics might be renewed and individual people find lasting fulfilment.

Incidentally, he lived in immensely turbulent times. The American War of Independence and its aftermath erupted when he was an adult, as did the French Revolution and the subsequent bloody wars that raged across Europe, alongside other parts of the world. On occasion, affairs grew so dark that they felt existential for England and for Blake as well. But he never lost trust in the love of life that, through the imagination, can renew our relationship with everything and everyone around us. That is why Blake’s poetry and imagery can powerfully speak to us today.

Visit Mark Vernon's website.

The Page 99 Test: Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Ball's "Death to Order"

Simon Ball is professor of international history and politics at the University of Leeds. He is the author of a number of acclaimed books, including Secret History, The Bitter Sea, and The Guardsmen.

Ball applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination, with the following results:

Death to Order passes the Page 99 Test with flying colours. All the key elements of the book are to be found on the page.

Page 99 is devoted to the assassination of Zhang Zuolin, the Old Marshal, who had ruled Manchuria for nearly two decades at the time of his murder in 1928. The account of this particular assassination encapsulates the central argument of Death to Order: the state is at the centre of modern assassination, indeed that centrality is the core feature of the “modern”. This does not mean that powerful states are always behind assassination but it is their actions that shapes the importance of assassination for international politics. In the particular case of the Zhang Zuolin assassination, part of the Japanese state was most certainly behind the assassination. The killing was organised by Japanese military intelligence and carried out by a regular engineer unit of the Imperial Japanese Army using their high explosive munitions to blow up a train. The state reaction was such that the assassination was one of the most consequential, if now little remembered, assassinations of the twentieth century, responsible for the destabilisation of both Japan and China.

Page 99 also neatly illustrates Death to Order’s method of untangling assassinations. Death to Order argues that the analyst should pay attention to four aspects: the procurer, the assassins, the tools of the trade and the cover up. The cover up for the Zhang assassination was particularly rich, as it moved from Japanese military deception to a whole state effort, ‘an amalgam,’ as page 99 puts it, ‘of nearly every cock-and-bull story told: the assassination was a Japanese–Chinese conspiracy (false); the actual assassins were Chinese (false); the Japanese behind the assassination were the Secret Service Organisation (false); the chief Chinese conspirator was the Old Marshal’s chief of staff (false), subsequently murdered by the Young Marshal (true).’

Learn more about Death to Order at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine E. Rohrer's "Daughters of Divinity"

Katherine E. Rohrer is associate professor of history at the University of North Georgia.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Daughters of Divinity: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Making of a New Southern Woman, 1830-1930, and shared the following:

From page 99:

These southern evangelical women demonstrated particular concern for poor whites, Blacks, and immigrants in a number of urban locations throughout the South, including New Orleans, Nashville, Charleston, and Atlanta…. In such missions, southern women typically exuded an attitude of concern that, although often mixed with enforced deference and condescension, conveyed their interest in education, health care, and improved living and social conditions among the South’s poor and underserved.

I believe that page 99 does illuminate a key argument from this book. More than anything, Daughters of Divinity seeks to underscore that evangelical Protestant Christianity (what we would today refer to as “mainline Protestantism”) offered southern women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one of the very few outlets to experience educational and professional fulfillment. As mission workers engaged in domestic and foreign work, such women served in a multitude of roles. They were not only proselytizers, but educators, administrators, fundraisers, and even medical doctors, honing skills in such varied areas as public speaking, financial management, persuasive writing/recruitment, public health, and logistics. Southern society at large—men in particular—did not feel threatened by women’s participation in religious work; women likewise appreciated that engagement in mission work did not preclude them from holding the covetous, unofficial title of “lady.” Quite simply, mission workers could “have their cake and eat it, too.” Page 99 complicates this idealized narrative by underscoring that such southern women engaged in mission work did exercise some agency. However, while such women sought to reshape and expand conceptions of southern femininity in their favor, they used this same agency to reinforce a conservative and rigid racial- and class-based hierarchy.

Learn more about Daughters of Divinity at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Faisal Devji's "Waning Crescent"

Faisal Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence and Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea.

Devji applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, and reported the following:

A reader chancing on page 99 of my book would get a good idea of its argument. The book tells the story of how Islam came to be understood as a protagonist in history. From the second half of the 19 th century, it steadily lost meaning as a word describing Muslim acts of devotion to become a subject in its own right. Coinciding with the diminution of Muslim sovereignty within European empires, this new understanding of Islam not only displaced the political agency of Muslims but also the theological agency they attributed to God and Muhammad. On page 99 I deal with one way in which both these forms of agency were rendered impossible.

Unlike the generality of colonised intellectuals who sought to recover their sovereignty, Islamist thinkers were deeply suspicious of its unregulated violence in colonial and other modern states. Like the anarchists from whom many Islamists took inspiration, they wanted to deprive the nation-states succeeding colonial rule of the violent potential of sovereignty. And they did so by claiming that sovereignty, seen as the authority to create as much as suspend and override the law, could only belong to God. As such it could not be exercised by men, with the state having to conform instead to the divine law as interpreted by Muslim scholars who worked outside its remit and so represented society or rather social as opposed to political power.

Pakistan, which became the world’s first Islamic Republic in 1956, has therefore been extraordinarily innovative by abjuring sovereignty in all three of its constitutions. Rather than preventing its exercise, however, the refusal to vest sovereignty in any institution or, indeed, the people, ended up making it a free-floating possibility that has continued to haunt Pakistani politics. There it is manifested most frequently in the military coup, ironically the purest or most excessive act of sovereign power outside the law. The workings of Pakistani politics, of course, are not determined by this constitutional feature alone, but are nevertheless legitimised and make thinkable by it.

The constitutional history of Pakistan shows us how a sovereignty handed into God’s keeping is not only denied its citizens but premised upon God’s own expulsion from political life. For the divine law is meant to be seen as a form of self-governance by and within society and not the state. And it represents not the people, who are as liable to usurp God’s sovereignty as any politician or general, but Islam itself as the true subject of Muslim history.

Learn more about Waning Crescent at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Impossible Indian.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Marriott's "Land, Law and Empire"

John Marriott is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford and has published extensively on the nexus between London and India.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Land, Law and Empire: The Origins of British Territorial Power in India, with the following results:

Page 99 gives a brief account of the dramatic shift in the East India Company’s geopolitics of trade in India that occurred from the 1630s.

Uncannily, I can think of no other page in the book which provides a neater summary of the underlying narrative of the company’s quest for territory. Frustrated by what they perceived as the intransigence of Mughal authorities and rival European colonial powers at the port of Surat where they had first settled, company agents were impelled to explore other trading opportunities where the authorities would prove much less resistant to the acquisition of defensible territory. The Coromandel Coast, beyond the immediate control of the Mughal Empire, did just that, and so it was that a small, seemingly unpromising fishing village called Madras became their first permanent settlement. Under the company, Madras grew dramatically as a trading centre. With renewed confidence – and some chance – the company later acquired Bombay from the Portuguese, and toward the end of the century Calcutta. By then, although the amount of territory held by the company was minute, the ideological, legal, political and economic foundations had been laid for the great land grabs of the eighteenth century.

The book, which I hope is accessible and jargon free, provides a new account of the foundations of British rule of India. While researching it I was struck in particular by how pragmatic the enterprise was. Territorial power was not secured through a carefully crafted plan but through the decisions taken for the most part by a relatively small coterie of company agents working in India.

Learn more about Land, Law and Empire at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue