Robin Bernstein's "Freeman’s Challenge"

Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights.

Bernstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, and reported the following:

The 99th page of the book is the first page of Chapter Five, the chapter that narrates the murder at the heart of Freeman’s Challenge. The murder is the challenge, because it threatens the Auburn State Prison, America’s original profit-driven prison. The chapter is called “Work” because that’s the word William Freeman later used to describe the murder. He had been forced to labor in factories inside the Auburn State Prison, and now his “work” of murder would turn the prison inside-out. The 99th page—and the chapter—opens with the full moon rising on a snowy March evening in 1846. Freeman hides his weapons in the folds of his clothes and starts walking south. He walks almost five miles from his home in Auburn toward the neighboring town of Fleming, where his “work” will begin.

This page gives you a great idea of the whole book! Freeman’s Challenge is a work of history, and every word is based on historical sources—but I wanted the book to read like a novel. I wanted to write the kind of book someone would read in one sitting because they couldn’t put it down (and the book is short, so that’s possible!). To manage that balance, I did massive research to recover William Freeman’s experience. The road from Auburn to Fleming is a great example: historical sources told me what that road was like. I knew the road was narrow and slick with mud and slush; I knew that a nearby lake pulsed against the shore. I knew that owls and wolves lived in the woods alongside the road. These truths enabled me to reconstruct Freeman’s experience.

William Freeman’s voice is very important to the book—and to this page. Freeman never wrote or dictated his own story, but people who knew him reported his words. I wove these quotes into Freeman’s Challenge for two reasons: to do justice to Freeman and to make the book enjoyable for the reader. You can hear Freeman’s distinctive voice on this page: as he’s deciding to start out toward Fleming, he regards the sky. “Just at dark,” he calls it, “edge of evening.” I love how William Freeman used language, and his eloquence shines on this page.

This page is also representative of the book because it describes the everyday racism that affected Freeman and every other Black person in New York State (and beyond). As Freeman walks southward, a white man in a cutter—a small sleigh— comes up behind him on the same road. As the man passes Freeman, he looks suspiciously at him. The truth is that Freeman did plan to commit a crime, but the white man had no access to that information. The white man was suspicious simply because a Black man was walking at night—“walking while Black,” we might call it now.

Learn more about Freeman’s Challenge at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian M. Ingrassia's "Speed Capital"

Brian M. Ingrassia is an associate professor of history at West Texas A&M University and the author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a typical page of Speed Capital, but not necessarily an exceptional one. It discusses the 300-mile sweepstakes race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1916. That was the only time, from May 1911 to the present, when the big race was shorter than 500 miles. (It was not held 1917-1918 or 1942-1945.) That page also discusses how Indianapolis became a place for testing automotive technologies, including some that never materialized: in this case, a fuel substitute called "Zoline," which was really a con-man's clever scheme!

Page 99 imparts the book's flavor, but not the full range of courses. Speed Capital uses the story of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's early years to illustrate connections between modern transportation technologies, popular culture, capitalism, and geography. The title is a double entendre: Indianapolis was the capital of speed, but its history conveys how people devised rituals to facilitate and exhibit the speedy movement of capital. The book starts with the idea of "space annihilation": automotive speedways utilized and popularized technologies that elided the tyranny of space and time. Early on, Indianapolis's speedway was a place for both automobility and aviation. But after World War I it narrowed, becoming a place mainly for motor sport. The track also became a site for traditions and nostalgia—for looking back with fondness to earlier eras of technological transformation and popular spectacle. The speedway and its museum, which opened in the 1950s, soon became a site for a different kind of space annihilation: eliminating distance between present and past.

Page 99 briefly mentions Carl Graham Fisher, the primary founder of the speedway. Fisher is a significant yet somewhat overlooked figure in American history, and his life story is a narrative thread running through Speed Capital. Other pages more successfully invoke Fisher and Indianapolis's connections to farther-off places, including Chicago, Detroit, Miami, and New York. Many people traveled from these and other places—from all over the nation and the world—to see the famous races. The book also discusses how Fisher spearheaded important transcontinental routes, namely the Lincoln and Dixie Highways, and even famously transformed a South Florida sandbar into the popular resort town of Miami Beach. Basically, I argue, Fisher taught Americans how to enjoy cars as well as how to use them to consume geographical space.

Learn more about Speed Capital at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosamund Johnston's "Red Tape"

Rosamund Johnston is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969, and reported the following:

Readers who open at page 99 of this book will be met with two young journalists, Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund, who became radio celebrities in postwar Czechoslovakia. This page explores the reasons for their fame, suggesting that it hinged upon their youth, desirability, and ultimately their appeal to socialist politicians and listeners both.

I am delighted that these two are foregrounded by the Page 99 Test: they were in fact the first journalists I wrote about for this book and, as such, set the framework for the rest of Red Tape. They helped me answer the question I posed throughout which was: why might people genuinely like and look forward to censored and propaganda-tinged socialist radio? And they form part of the answer, which I found to be on account of the relationships that listeners fostered with reporters such as Hanzelka and Zikmund through the medium of radio (hearing their voices at a regular time several times a week, writing to them with feedback about their work, and then finding their letters in some ways incorporated into the fabric of the pair’s reports). Hanzelka and Zikmund were broadcasting during Stalinism, and their example shows the responsiveness of radio to listeners’ concerns at that time. They also show that there was more to Stalinist radio than the murderous show-trials (which I write about in other chapters, but which I am delighted are not front and center here).

I was not always able to take a biographical approach to the history of radio in socialist Czechoslovakia—sometimes it made more sense to think about technologies (such as the tape in the title, for example) and how these served to reconfigure listeners’ expectations of the medium. But I always felt the most at home being led through the period by reporters such as Hanzelka and Zikmund and the fan-mail that was addressed to them. In this sense, this page represents some of my favorite lines of inquiry and sources used in this book. Here, I am specifically writing about the generation to which Hanzelka and Zikmund belonged, which, I argue throughout, shaped postwar radio and the rhetorical environment of socialism’s first two decades in Czechoslovakia. When they and their peers (all by now middle-aged) were pushed out of Czechoslovak Radio in the wake of the Soviet-led invasion in 1968—events captured in the final chapter of this book—then, I argue, radio finally ceded its “dominance” to television.

Visit Rosamund Johnston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David W. Congdon's "Who Is a True Christian?"

David W. Congdon is a Senior Editor at the University Press of Kansas, where he acquires new titles in political science, and an Instructor at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. His books include The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann's Dialectical Theology (2015, which won the Rudolf Bultmann Prize in Hermeneutics from the Philipps University of Marburg), and he is the editor of Varieties of Christian Universalism: Exploring Four Views (2023).

Congdon applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Who Is a True Christian?: Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture, and reported the following:

Here is what I found on page 99 of my book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture:

Newman provides seven tests to determine whether a development is the continuation or the corruption of the idea of Christianity, and the rest of the book applies these tests to particular points of doctrinal controversy. But as David Bentley Hart acknowledges, “these criteria amount to little more than a transparently forced ideological reconstruction of the historical narrative,” requiring both “willful narrative creativity” and “selective ignorance regarding those historical data that the preferred narrative cannot assimilate.” Reducing the complexity of history to the adaptability of an idea made it all too easy for Newman to reconstruct an account of Christian history that supported his argument, and any reconstruction under these presuppositions is “self-evidently specious,” an exercise in “saving the appearances.” Newman’s Essay is a stunning work of historical eisegesis, a retrospective reading of the past that already knows where history leads – namely, to his own position. His failure is thus an instructive one, serving as a cautionary tale for all those people, whether church leaders or Supreme Court justices, who wish to use history to prove the rightness of their beliefs.

To my surprise, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Who Is a True Christian? This page is my analysis of John Henry Newman’s effort to establish historical continuity between the origins of Christianity and Roman Catholic orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. Newman was a prominent figure at the time, but he has become especially important in the last several decades, not only as an inspiration for many converts to Rome but also as an intellectual lodestar for Protestants seeking to prove their fidelity to the ancient rule of faith (regula fidei).

The problem, as I show (with some help from David Bentley Hart), is that Newman’s reconstruction of this history is a convenient just-so story that all too easily leads directly to his own position, as if his account of Christianity were foreordained from the beginning. Newman failed to consider that he could have constructed such a narrative for any version of Christianity. It is always possible to trace how later developments emerge from earlier ones, and if you already know how history ends, the path to get there can seem inevitable.

This passage is particularly fitting as a summary of my book, since I connect Newman’s misuse of history to church leaders and Supreme Court justices—highlighting the way my book joins theological and political history. The quest for “true Christianity” has a political counterpart in the quest for the “true America.” Theologians pursue “historic Christianity” while justices and politicians pursue the “original America.” I suggest in my book that both quests are best abandoned. With respect to religion, I propose replacing the exclusionary pursuit of true Christianity with the open-ended, pluralistic search for new Christianities. Perhaps the same might apply in politics.

The Page 99 Test highlights whether a book remains focused on a clear thesis, and I made an effort to keep the material in my book tethered to my central argument. While not every page in my book would succeed as well as this one, I am pleasantly surprised with how well this page captured a central theme of my work.

Visit David W. Congdon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna S. Mueller & Seth Abrutyn's "Life under Pressure"

Anna S. Mueller is Luther Dana Waterman Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a leading expert on youth suicide and suicide prevention in schools, and her work has helped families, schools, and communities understand how social environments generate risk of suicide and why youth suicide clusters emerge and persist. Her work on youth suicide has received numerous awards for its contributions to knowledge, including the Edwin Shneidman Early Career Award from the American Association of Suicidology. In 2020, she was named one of Science News's "Top 10 Early Career Scientists to Watch."

Seth Abrutyn is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Abrutyn specializes in youth suicide and is also a general sociologist whose research rests at the intersection of mental health, emotions, social psychology, and culture, and which has won several national awards. His overarching goals as a social scientist are to merge sociological theory with the public imagination in hopes of making accessible sociological tools in the service of solving social problems.

Mueller and Abrutyn applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Life under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them, and reported the following:

Page 99:

level, so I must be doing terribly with my life.’ So, I think that’s something that happened a lot.”

That must have been hard to hear for kids who were struggling to get by, more so because so many of the youth who died by suicide had been among those high achievers— the kids who embodied Poplar Grove’s ideals. Krista said her friend Michelle had been “trying to find worth in things that she felt, like, she could never do perfectly.” Poignantly, she concluded, “I guess she felt like there was no reason to keep living, because nothing was giving her the worth that she wanted.” Perfectionism in a tight- knit community where everybody knows your business, the ideal youth is visible and known, and yet the standards of perfection are a moving target, is a dangerous cultural directive: anything short of an always- out- of- reach “perfect” may feel like a shameful failure.

3.4 THE PAIN OF FAILURE
Thus far, we have looked at the stories of young women who struggled with the painful mismatch between who they thought they were and who they thought they should be. We also found, more prevalent among the young men we got to know through interviews with families and friends, that youth suicides coincided with instances in which youth had more concrete evidence of their “failure,” such as tangles with the law. Young men, however, were not immune to the agony of measuring themselves against perfection and believing they came up short. Meet Brian. Brian was dreamy. Handsome. Artistic. Smart. Sociable. “He was really cool,” shared his friend Chloe. “Kind of introverted. Super- hot, you know? Blond hair, blue eyes, really artsy. . . . And he was a really nice sensitive sweet guy.” Brian’s father Bruce made less of the young man’s looks, perhaps, but said much the same: “He always had girlfriends and he was pretty sensitive with those relationships . . . he took things to heart and— but he was also happy- go- lucky, damn the torpedoes, did stuff he shouldn’t do, [tried to] get away with it.” Bruce laughed, maybe remembering some

The Page 99 Test works well for introducing our book to a reader.

This passage is a small window into one of the central reasons we found for youth suicide clusters and their perpetuation. As the preceding section concludes, the pressure youth were under – in short, to achieve academically, athletically, and socially – stands out in the story of Michelle, one of the more popular suicide victims in Poplar Grove. The nuance also stands out: perfection is not something that is actually achieved, but an on going project whose standards are perceived to be always moving. Not hitting those standards, not just for Michelle, robs youth of a sense of value despite the rich, rewarding (from the outside) lives they live. The dilemma youth face, then, is that perfection in achievement is not a black or white attribute. Rather, it requires one to be in perpetual motion, but, as other research in sociology has demonstrated, this motion must appear—on the outside at least—as easy and routine. Kids in Poplar Grove, both the ideal youth and those who fell outside of the cream of the crop, all felt the endless push of an achievement hamster wheel.

Consequently, as the second half of the passage illuminates: youth feared failure more than anything else. They lived in a heightened state of awareness most of the time, irrationally (from the outside) sensing failure was imminent; and that one B would ruin their lives. That many youth were struggling with mental health issues made things worse, because showing any signs of imperfection would violate the goal of achievement and represent failure. So, the truth was many kids felt like they were failing even when their school record, parent’s social media accounts, and standing among their peers reflected a successful youth. In the end, shame, or the emotional response to the belief that one is not meeting others’ expectations and that they are a contemptuous person as a result, was a pervasive response that only amplified the challenges of adolescence, leading to greater emotional distress.

Ultimately, youth suicide clusters because kids get trapped in these perfection-failure-shame cycles. They see a friend or classmate die by suicide, and they explain it through this lens of “pressure-to-be-perfect can cause suicide.” They can identify with that person’s pain, even if their own pain or situation isn’t identical. Suicide becomes a cultural script for expressing emotional distress instead of the sort of help-seeking behaviors that might alleviate this distress.

Visit Anna S. Mueller's website and Seth Abrutyn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Carruthers's "Human Motives"

Peter Carruthers is Distinguished University Professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, where he has worked since 2001. He previously held appointments at a number of universities in the UK. He has published widely across many areas of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, including work on cognitive architecture, the role of language in thought, self-knowledge, consciousness, the mentality of animals, and meta-cognition. His most recent books are The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us About the Nature of Human Thought (2015) and Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest (2019).

Carruthers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect, and reported the following:

Page 99 advances a particular theory of what pleasure and displeasure really are. Rather than being intrinsic felt qualities of experience, or a sort of “hedonic gloss” that attaches to experience (as many philosophers and others assume), they are better understood as perception-like representations of value. Pleasure attaching to the taste of a ripe strawberry, for example, represents it in a fine-grained perception-like way as good (to some degree), and in consequence makes continued eating seem choice-worthy. But what are these values and disvalues that are represented by degrees of pleasure and displeasure? Page 99 suggests that they are best understood in evolutionary terms, as adaptive values and disvalues (to be cashed out in terms of inclusive fitness). This answers a problem that had been raised previously in the chapter, that since values don’t really exist as part of the natural world, they can’t be represented correctly or incorrectly. Page 99 points out this problem evaporates if the values in question are cashed out in terms of biological inclusive fitness.

A reader who opens the book to read just page 99 won’t get a good idea of what the book as a whole is about, I’m afraid. But he or she will have landed on a crucial node in the overall argument. The book aims to refute a new and powerful, scientifically grounded, form of motivational hedonism. (This is the view that all human actions are really taken to secure pleasure and avoid displeasure.) The new hedonism argues on very good grounds that pleasure and displeasure are the common-currency of all human and animal decision making, enabling seemingly incommensurable things to be traded off against one another. (Is it worth getting stung by the bees to extract the honey from the hive? Here pain is pitted against pleasure.) As a result, it seems that genuine altruism is impossible. When I act to save someone’s life, I am really acting because I anticipate that saving the life will make me feel good, or because not acting will make me feel bad, or both. While accepting the common-currency idea, I argue that because pleasure and displeasure are really representations of value, altruism is possible after all (and frequently actual). When acting to save the life, I act because doing so strikes me as an intrinsically valuable thing to do (this is what the anticipated pleasure really is), not because I think it will make me feel good. The goal of the book is to flesh out this account in detail, to defend it against alternatives, and to show how it provides the best interpretation of the underlying affective science.

Learn more about Human Motives at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colleen Taylor's "Irish Materialisms"

Colleen Taylor is Assistant Professor of English and Irish Studeis at Boston College in Massachusetts, USA. She has been the recipient of research fellowships from the Keough-Naughton Institute at the University of Notre Dame, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Irish Research Council. Taylor has taught English and Irish Studies at Notre Dame, University College Cork, and Boston College and has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eire-Ireland, Tulsa Studies, Persuasions, and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Her research specializes in eighteenth-century studies, Ireland, new materialism, and the environmental humanities.

Taylor applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830, and reported the following:

Page 99 is part of the chapter on Flax, which details the steps in the eighteenth-century Irish linen manufacture, Ireland's sole and most important industry in the century. It takes part in my wider analysis that the introduction of linen as a proto-industry in Ireland contributed to Britain's paternalist model of Irish colonialism: namely that British influence could improve and civilize Irish character. The discussion on page 99 focuses on industry improvements to make the linen bleaching process more efficient, specifically the addition of alkaline chemicals like sulfuric acid. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the whiteness of Irish linen became an increasingly important selling point, as the addition of alkaline solutions streamlined the industry's final step of bleaching flax. Although sulfuric acid ostensibly improved the bleaching process in comparison to older, more time-consuming processes involving buttermilk, the acid ultimately altered and damaged flax's naturally brown fibers at the molecular level. As I write on page 99: "When flax is bleached, when it sheds its brown oils in response to an oxidizing agent, it loses some of its matter and is permanently, irrevocably altered--a fact that implicitly extends to ideas about white fabric's correlative cultural ideal: purity" (99).

Yes, the Page 99 Test does work for my book. The example displayed on page 99 (bleaching flax in the linen manufacture) effectively demonstrates one of my central arguments: that material details metaphorically correlate to wider socio-cultural processes in Britain's colonial wheelhouse (in this instance, bleaching flax and cultural cleanliness). This page marks an important step in the book's wider story, which moves between coins, linen, mud, and pigs. Page 99's discussion exemplifies that the way materiality was treated in Ireland speaks to the ways the Irish character was colonized under a British government. Readers jumping to page 99 might be surprised, but they would get a sense of the book's new materialist methodology--of reading the metaphoric resonance of real, material details--and this new methodology's relevance for Irish studies.

Irish Materialisms argues that small material details mobilized big ideas in colonial Ireland. On page 99 the two extremes of this paradigm come together: the smallest material object discussed in the book (a molecule) and perhaps the biggest or most controversial idea in the argument (race). In the pages that follow, I move from discussing to the whiteness of flax linen to the deemed necessity of "cleansing" or "whitening" the Irish character, as expressed in British ideology, from its lazy, slovenly, "piggish" nature to the civil, white, and implicitly more "human" ideals of English society. That Irish flax could be treated with outside forces and bleached into whiteness implicitly said the same of Irish character: that it could be whitened, Anglicized, and improved through sometimes violent processes. Thus, the way objects were discussed in colonial Ireland mattered in powerful ways, as something as small as a flax molecule can articulate. As I argue throughout the rest of the book, reading matter deeply not only helps us better understand the functionality of colonial stereotypes, but it also guides us to retroactively read Irish colonial resistance with and through those same materials: coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs.

Learn more about Irish Materialisms at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kristalyn Marie Shefveland "Selling Vero Beach"

Kristalyn Marie Shefveland is associate professor of American history at the University of Southern Indiana. She is the author of Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1646–1722.

Shefveland applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Selling Vero Beach: Settler Myths in the Land of the Aís and Seminole, and reported the following:

Page 99 picks up on a story of a Swedish émigré to the lower Indian River Lagoon in SE Florida and his successful attempts, after much hardship, to grow pineapples along the Atlantic Ridge. Excerpt from page:

Abundance came in time but an examination of the letters from the Hallstrom homestead tell quite the story of the realities of farming in the region and what settlers faced in Oslo and along the Atlantic Ridge, from heartbreak to success in the bright sun laden fields of South Florida. To this one can add the intrigue of family scandals, in this the Hallstrom’s are uncharacteristically open in their letters about their concerns and feelings, providing a unique window into their experiences. Axel Hallstrom was one of ten children from Skane in southernmost Sweden, thusly his correspondence involved many of his extended kin and family across the world.

Missing from this page, but would be found on surrounding pages, is that Axel Hallstrom found success on lands maintained by the Seminole, particularly the relatives of Tom Tiger, and that many settlers to the region chose to farm in the Tiger Hammock in part because it was already cultivated and filled with rich soil. Transformed entirely, the Tiger Hammock became Hallstrom space, a testament to settler memory, but this is also a form of Native erasure and further research is necessary to understand the longer history of the landscape, the story of the Seminole peoples whose original cultivation of the land likely made success for the Viking settlement possible.

While the Page 99 Test doesn’t necessarily work, per se, it reveals an interesting element to the story, a window into one settler family and their efforts in the Atlantic Ridge. The top of the page includes references to success from booster literature, but the lead to the next page hints at family discord and the strain of a transatlantic endeavor on the Hallstrom family.

Learn more about Selling Vero Beach at the University Press of Florida website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Regina Kunzel's "In the Shadow of Diagnosis"

Regina Kunzel, Larned Professor of History and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is an historian of the modern United States with interests in histories of gender and sexuality, queer history, the history of psychiatry, and the history of incarceration. She is the author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality and Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945.

Kunzel applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life, and reported the following:

Page 99 of In the Shadow of Diagnosis considers queer people’s resistance to psychiatric authority and treatment in the mid-20th-century U.S., and to psychiatrists’ insistence that homosexuality was a treatable mental illness in particular. It features evidence from the archival collection that inspired and enabled the book: a rich and remarkable set of previously unexamined case files from Saint Elizabeths Hospital, the federal hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C., in which psychiatrist Benjamin Karpman asked his patients to write autobiographies, journals, responses to questionnaires, and reviews of psychiatric texts. Page 99 includes one of my favorite lines drawn from one of those files. Frustrated by a lesbian who expressed “her profound skepticism with respect to all psychoanalytic findings and her intense resistance to all forms of psychic therapy,” Karpman acknowledged that “actually she does not want therapy. What she wants is either a social revolution which will permit her neurosis to be accepted, or a secret means of securing sexual gratification.”

Page 99 highlights gratifying stories of queer resilience and resistance. But to focus on resistance alone would require that we read the historical record very selectively and ignore evidence of the deep effects of stigma on queer and gender-nonconforming people that I explore beyond this page. The history of the encounter of queer people with psychiatry offers up resistance, to be sure. But it should not surprise us that for many, psychiatric thinking and treatment instilled, compounded, and consolidated a sense of stigma and shame. Others engaged psychiatry in more ambivalent and complex ways. One of the book’s challenging claims is that while psychiatry’s capture of queerness was far from complete, it is impossible to conceive of modern queer life sealed off from the influence of psychiatric thinking or stripped entirely clean of its assumptions.

Page 99 doesn’t shed light on another big claim of the book: that psychiatrists’ claim to expertise over homosexuality and gender variance underwrote the expansion of their power and authority at mid-century, used to broker some of their most important and strategic collaborations with the state. And so a story often told within the confines of the history of medicine or the history of the oppression of gay men and lesbians is also a story about American state and carceral power. In this history, (putatively) therapeutic and carceral spaces, practices, and logics blend and blur.

Learn more about In the Shadow of Diagnosis at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Criminal Intimacy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Trueheart's "Diplomats at War"

Charles Trueheart is a former foreign correspondent of the Washington Post, a former Associate Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, and a former Director of the American Library in Paris.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict, a third of the way into the book, happens to introduce one of the themes of this history/memoir of Vietnam during the Kennedy administration: the outsized role of US news correspondents in shaping the gloomy narrative of an alliance that was not working.

The most famous of these correspondents was David Halberstam, whose book The Best and the Brightest, published nearly a dozen years later, charted the series of hubristic misjudgments that led the United States into a ten-year war. My page 99 introduces Homer Bigart, Halberstam’s predecessor as the New York Times correspondent in Saigon, and a model of the skeptical reporting that would undermine the optimistic progress reports the US government was producing for public consumption. Bigart famously coined a phrase describing the American reliance on the flawed governance of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, pronounced Ziem: “Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.”

To quote a salient passage about the US reporters from page 99, “The presidents of the United States and South Vietnam, and their entourages, were being driven crazy by their reporting. They thought it was inaccurate. They thought it was tendentious. They thought it was simplistic. But at least some Americans knew it was accurate.”

Although the focus of Diplomats at War is on the ranking US Foreign Service officers in Saigon at the time – US ambassador Frederick Nolting and deputy chief of mission William Trueheart, my godfather and father, respectively – their stormy relationship to the press corps is an important element in the narrative, and not a bad glimpse of the forces shaping historic outcomes in Vietnam more than sixty years ago.

Visit Charles Trueheart's website.

--Marshal Zeringue