Larry Tye's "The Jazzmen"

Larry Tye is the New York Times bestselling author of Bobby Kennedy and Satchel, as well as Demagogue, Superman, The Father of Spin, Home Lands, and Rising from the Rails, and coauthor, with Kitty Dukakis, of Shock. Previously an award-winning reporter at the Boston Globe and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, he now runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship. He lives on Cape Cod.

Tye applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America and reported the following:

Here’s a slightly abridged version of what is on page 99:

With most jazz kingpins, it was difficult to be sure when they were swinging at full throttle. With Bill Basie, the tell was his ten toes.

Those calloused and curled digits, planted squarely under his piano seat, foretold whether a song had the vital elixir, the rhythmic perfection, the sheer it. His bandmates watched for a hopeful nod of his close-cropped head, a flicker of his bushy brows, or perhaps a doubling of his fists. But they knew the true proof lay in any movement of his toes. Would it be enough to lift both feet? Would they thump or just flutter? Some musicians actually suspected he had radar hidden in his shoes...

Now that he was on center stage, the Count’s weren’t the only toes that counted. Everyone listening – dresses and pants, moldy figs and beboppers – had to be bobbing theirs. Then moving to the dance floor. Once they got there, the rest was a gut reaction – stomping, swaying, and swiveling with the Jump King of Swing.

“If you have a Count Basie record playing and your left foot isn’t tapping,” said jazz radio host and scholar Dick Golden, “you better go see your doctor because something must be wrong with your circulation.” Critic Gary Giddins concurred, saying, “Basie knew if he had your foot, your heart and mind would follow.”

That selection gives a flavor of my three-in-one biography, and of why Basie – like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington – warrants his place on the Mount Rushmore of jazz greats. But it misses the bigger point: that this book is mainly about these maestros’ lives off their bandstands, and the hidden history of their writing the soundtrack for the civil rights revolution.

Duke, Satchmo, and the Count set the table for racial insurrection by opening white America’s ears and souls to the grace of their music and their personalities, demonstrating the virtues of Black artistry and Black humanity. They toppled color barriers on radio and TV; in jukeboxes, films, newspapers, and newsmagazines; and in the White House, concert halls, and living rooms from the Midwest and both coasts to the Heart of Dixie. But they did it carefully, knowing that to do otherwise in their Jim Crow era would have been suicidal. The sound of their evolving jazz dialect formed a cultural fulcrum that no outraged protestor or government-issued desegregation order could begin to achieve.

Visit Larry Tye's website.

The Page 99 Test: Demagogue.

My Book, The Movie: Demagogue.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Soluri's "Creatures of Fashion"

John Soluri is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia and reported the following:

Given the crowd with whom Ford Madox Ford reputedly ran, I suspect that neither he nor most run of the mill readers would be deeply moved by reading page 99 of Creatures of Fashion. Given that I am an academic historian not Hemingway, I felt compelled to hook readers on page 1; so, dear (potential) readers, please begin my book at the beginning!

That said, page 99 invokes some of the book’s major themes:

The people who worked on estancias were overwhelmingly men, but men did not form a majority of the workforce. Horses and dogs usually outnumbered people and they played critical roles in ensuring the reproduction of sheep. Men formed close bonds with dogs and horses, often bestowing them an individuality, including names, denied to sheep.

These sentences describing the “multispecies” workforce typical of sheep ranches in early twentieth-century Patagonia, address the quotidian entanglements of the lives of people and animals. These kinds of entanglements are examined throughout Creatures of Fashion whose narrative arc traces the consequential transformations of diverse and divided people due to the commodification of wild and domesticated animals whose furs, fibers, and feathers became commodities. The trade in animal furs and fibers helped to bankroll the settler colonial projects of central governments in Argentina and Chile, while integrating Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego into sprawling networks of investors, workers, animals, and goods.

Page 99 conveys a glimpse of the story more or less at its midpoint, when the wool industry’s importance supplanted that of nineteenth-century trades in furs and feathers—principally from fur seals, guanacos (a camelid related to llamas) and rheas. Sheep ranching in Patagonia, as in many other parts of the world, involved the violent removal of Indigenous foragers and hunters who maintained different kinds of relationships with animals those that existed between settlers and animals. One critical difference that I alluded to on page 99 is the taken-for-granted need to control the reproduction of animals in order for them to become—and remain—livestock.

Two important aspects of Creatures of Fashion that are absent from page 99 include the role of fashion markets in driving demand for the furs and fibers from animals in Patagonia, and the concomitant rise of wildlife conservation and tourism in Patagonia during the second half of the twentieth century. Calling attention to the transboundary forces that transformed Patagonia is one of the book’s main innovations that is best appreciated by taking a deeper dive.

Learn more about Creatures of Fashion at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yolanda Ariadne Collins's "Forests of Refuge"

Yolanda Ariadne Collins is Lecturer in the School of International Relations at University of St Andrews. She studies the intersection between climate change governance, environmental policy, and international development. Her work examines processes of racialization and histories of colonialism and the ways in which they challenge the successful enactment of forest governance policies in the Global South.

Collins applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield (2024) and reported the following:

From page 99:

The firm is widely used in climate change and environmental matters to provide economic analyses and to attribute financial values to environmental services. This value estimation acted as the foundation of Guyana’s REDD+ effort, which builds on McKinsey’s estimates to estimate Guyana’s forests’ value to the world at US$40 billion per year.

The Guyana Government explained: Our work suggests that baseline assumptions should be driven by analysis that assumes rational behaviour by countries seeking to maximize economic opportunities for their citizens (an “economically rational” rate of deforestation). Such baselines can be developed using economic models of expected profits from activities that motivate deforestation (vs. in-country benefits of maintaining the standing forest), and timing and costs required to harvest and convert lands to alternative uses.

The estimated value of those in-country benefits was estimated at a more conservative US$580 million per year. The economically rational path that Guyana should take was depicted by a wide array of statistical graphs based on economic valuations attached to activities that have traditionally taken place in the country, or that are likely to take place to generate income. For example, the estimation of the carbon abatement costs for predicted avoided deforestation in Guyana amounted to an annual payment of US$430 million to Guyana for the services of its forests. It is worth pointing out that these values are estimates based not on historical trends, but on possible future pressure on the forests. Development here is used to justify the need for these policy shifts, and for REDD+, since a “rational” development path is predicted as necessitating the destruction of forests. Therefore, the pursuance of REDD+ through the LCDS draws on these economic rationalities rooted in neoliberal logic and points out that a rational development path would result in the destruction of the forests, making room for REDD+ to alter that equation. Thus far, only forests conserved and managed by the state have been allocated for REDD+ activities. Indigenous groups who have some tenure over the forests within which they reside (in the case of Guyana but not in Suriname) should eventually have the option of opting into the REDD+ mechanism and being remunerated for the services of their forests.

This page refers to several ideas that form the core of my book, although this core can only be accessed if the reader had already been exposed to the acronyms used. Page 99 highlights the economically rational method of valuing forests that dominates the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. It points to some of the key international and national actors and ideas behind REDD+. It also highlights (albeit insufficiently compared to the rest of the book) the tension between the state claim on land and that of indigenous people. This page, naturally, also misses a lot. It misses the book’s connection of colonialism to the evolution across time of these ‘rational’ ways of relating to nature in the Amazonian Guiana Shield.

In the rest of the book, I explore the contestation that emerges when REDD+ encounters the colonial histories of forest use at the local and regional levels. I move past questions of whether market-based, international environmental policies should be seen as successes or as failures, and towards an understanding of the associated effects of their pursuit. In essence, the book presents a regional, two-country case study of environmental governance in the largely neglected Guiana Shield eco-region that demonstrates how REDD+ builds upon existing, colonially-rooted land claims. Forests of Refuge, thus, offers a unique exploration of REDD+ through the lens of postcolonial and decolonial thinking, highlighting interrelationships between ethics of extraction, state formation, race, and conservation in the transition from formal colonialism to post-colonial status.

Visit Yolanda Ariadne Collins's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski's "The Price of Empire"

Miles M. Evers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. Eric Grynaviski is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire and reported the following:

Opening The Price of Empire to page 99 gives the reader an excellent summary of the book. We were surprised. Our central argument is that American entrepreneurs were responsible for early American imperialism in the Pacific. This page is at a turning point in the book and captures this argument well.

Page 99 briefly summarizes the previous chapters about how the search for guano and copra led to imperial projects. The page then compares these to American imperialism in Hawaii. It begins by discussing the conventional wisdom of U.S. annexation of Hawaii, which is often credited to American strategic and trade interests. We describe this position (which we disagree with): “Pearl Harbor, since the 1940s, has been central to the U.S. Navy’s strategies for defending the American west coast. It is also economically important as a harbor and, of course, later became a destination for American tourists. Theories that emphasize strategic or trade interests should therefore be well-placed to discuss Hawaii.”

It then turns to a summary of our argument about Hawaii: “Rising sugar prices led Americans to invest in the Hawaiian Islands. These entrepreneurs entered the economic and political life of the islands with vim and vigor, reshaping the domestic political environment of Hawaii to suit their interests. When threats arose – primarily tariffs and falling prices – they turned from entrepreneurs into lobbyists, using their positional advantages to secure favorable trade terms that initiated a pattern of imperialism in Hawaii decades before annexation.”

There are two aspects of the argument not well represented. The first is the idea of “positional advantages.” A significant part of the book explains why the U.S. government turned to entrepreneurs in crafting policies concerning overseas expansion, where we argue that their position in-between societies created special opportunities for political lobbying. The second is the long legacy of entrepreneurs with respect to indigenous rights. The introduction and conclusion highlight the long legs of imperialism and why they continue to persist today.

In sum, we give ourselves a passing grade on the Page 99 Test. Most of the argument is present, along with a summary of the historical chapters of the book, but the discussion about why it matters for contemporary readers – the nexus between economics and security, and its racist legacy – is missing.

Visit Miles M. Evers's website and Eric Grynaviski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness's "The Influencer Factory"

Grant Bollmer is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, and Katherine Guinness is Lecturer in Art History, at the University of Queensland.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Influencer Factory we see a screenshot from MrBeast’s popular video “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!” We describe how this video cost more, minute-to-minute, than the actual Netflix show it recreates. MrBeast’s videos, and their ever-increasing scale and cost, we argue, “almost seem to enact a contemporary form of potlatch,” a competitive system of giving and waste described by the Anthropologist Marcel Mauss. Potlatch, for Mauss, was a kind of mutual squandering of resources between equals. What differentiates MrBeast’s spectacular giving is that he mostly seems to be competing with himself. MrBeast’s stunts grow larger and larger while the cash squandered must perpetually increase—pressure that comes from his need to attract and maintain his massive global audience.

Page 99 gives the reader a good sense of The Influencer Factory as a whole. The theme of waste and excess is central to many of our arguments about the “elite” influencers we discuss in the book—not only MrBeast, who is mentioned throughout, but people like Jeffree Star and Emma Chamberlain, both of whom regularly engage in feats of wasteful spending and other excessive stunts. This page also provides a good sense of the approach we take in our book. We look closely at the content of specific videos made by these influencers, branching out into an analysis of their backgrounds, their production, their broader historical and conceptual contexts. In doing so, The Influencer Factory reframes how we understand YouTube, capital, and the class politics of influencer culture. The specific image on page 99 is captioned “I could remake this.” This is also a theme that follows many of the other image captions in the book, many of which also begin “I could,” examining some of the aspirational forms of wastage that can be seen in many influencer videos. Waste gets attention, and foregrounding waste reveals a different way of understanding luxury and excess, in which the literal production of trash can be understood as a performance of class mobility.

MrBeast’s excessive spending, we argue elsewhere in The Influencer Factory, points towards a context in which individual human beings and vertically integrated conglomerations converge. Each MrBeast video is also an advertisement for some other industry into which MrBeast has some ownership stake—chocolate bars, apps, a burger chain. The individual person that is MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is indistinguishable from the corporate enterprise that is MrBeast. We term this moment the Corpocene, a moment in which individual body and corporate body converge, in which individuals like MrBeast become images of “success” to be emulated by countless others who are seeking to make it as an influencer or content creator. Influencer culture, we ultimately conclude, represents a point in time in which one desires to become capital personified—a kind of individual represented by MrBeast—and how class mobility on YouTube should be understood as motivated by a desire to literally become capital, to transform oneself into a vertically integrated corporation.

Visit Grant Bollmer's website and Katherine Guinness's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua O. Reno's "Home Signs"

Joshua O. Reno is professor and graduate director of anthropology at Binghamton University. He is the author of several books, including Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness and, with Britt Halvorson, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest.

Reno applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Home Signs: An Ethnography of Life beyond and beside Language and reported the following:

My latest book is about the subtle ways that we all communicate with those closest to us using facial expressions, gestures, bodily movement and contact, that is, without words. The passage that concerns me here is from the third chapter, which is the only one in the book that appeared previously, twelve years ago in fact, as a standalone article.

Like that article and like all the other chapters of this book, page 99 focuses a lot on my non-verbal son, Charlie. Charlie was diagnosed on the autism spectrum years ago and non-verbal communication is all that he has, so he offers a useful case study of how much we can do without language. Nearly one hundred pages in, and I am explaining how attempts to get him to use language have failed over the years (twelve years ago and in the present day). I describe one method in particular, known as PECS, which is a method specifically designed by speech and language therapists to get people like him to learn to exchange words (in the form of symbols) for things they want. But from another point of view this is not just an example about how incapable Charlie is of using words. Rather, it shows how well he can assert and express himself:

Sometimes Charlie would push the PECS folder away, a home sign for “I don’t want to do this now.” Sometimes he would decide not to eat at all when he would see it near his food, a sign that he was defying the exercise even if it meant starving himself for that moment. But Charlie’s most common way of defying the exercise, then and now, is to look away while grabbing symbols or tapping icons on a screen. If he did this over and over again, even if I moved the symbols around, eventually he’d get food out of it.... From our perspective, he was too good even then at home signing, at expressing his intentions and modifying interactions without symbols, to the extent that he could work around them if need be.

In that sense, at least, on page 99 readers will encounter something that they have witnessed already for several chapters -- a purportedly “disabled” communicator capably controlling situations and making his intentions known to those around him. Charlie may not do what his teachers and parents want, may refuse to communicate in socially prescribed ways, but in so doing he shows us all that he is neither hapless nor helpless simply because he lives now, and likely will live for his whole life, beyond and beside language.

Learn more about Home Signs at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Waste Away.

The Page 99 Test: Military Waste.

--Marshal Zeringue

Núria Silleras-Fernández's "The Politics of Emotion"

Núria Silleras-Fernández is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and affiliated faculty in the Humanities Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her research focuses on cultural and intellectual history, gender, and literature in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia and the Mediterranean. She is the author of Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship. Maria de Luna (2008) and Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2015).

Silleras-Fernandez applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Politics of Emotion. Love,Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2024) and reported the following:

This excerpt refers to Isabel of Portugal (r. 1447–1454), one of the case studies I analyze in detail in The Politics of Emotion. It represents the book such that it explores how medieval society understood the dangers of love and desire, which, are explored in my book in conjunction with grief (which at times, turned to “madness”) and are intertwined with the public and the private: government and emotions. Excerpt from page 99:

In fact, we can see Isabel of Portugal and Álvaro de Luna as they are presented in the chronicles as two sides of the same coin. Accounts hostile to the queen accused her of being an object of excessive desire on the part of Juan and lamented her ability to “manipulate” her weak husband. For his part, Álvaro de Luna is presented in exactly the same terms, which were even more worrisome in his case because of the moral implications that same-sex love carried in that era. The accusation of sodomy became a powerful tool to discredit someone and could be deployed for political gain.

Isabel was the queen-consort of Juan II of Castile, and both were the parents of one of the most famous queens of all times, Isabel I of Castile “The Catholic” (r. 1474–1504). The chronicles portrayed Juan II as a weak hedonist, easily manipulated, and always at the mercy of others: first, his royal favorite, friend (and lover?) Álvaro de Luna who was later displaced by the king’s young second wife, Isabel of Portugal. In the Middle Ages, whoever controlled the king (or queen) held great indirect power and thus awakened the envy and criticism of those who coveted this position of influence. Hence, mirrors of princes and princesses were consistent in admonishing the ruler against malicious counselors and conduct literature (which was often misogynistic) warned against the domination a wife could exercise over her husband – particularly a wife like Isabel who not only enjoyed the status of a queen but was the object of the king’s love and lust. Poetry, sentimental fiction, and medical and religious discourse all made the dangers of love clear.

In the end, politics and “social property” ruined this peculiar triangle. Juan II loved his crown more than Álvaro and, to avoid further turmoil, was obliged to condemn him to death in 1453, accused of treason. Within a year the monarch had also died, because as Gonzalo Chacón, a contemporary chronicler, put it, “the burrowing worm of his conscience was what killed him.” For her part, Isabel of Portugal is said to have been overwhelmed by grief after the death of her husband and lived in relative isolation for her remaining forty-two years. Thus, Isabel and Álvaro are two sides of the same coin and comprise an excellent example of the emotional dynamics examined in my study.

Learn more about The Politics of Emotion at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sten Rynning's "NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance"

Sten Rynning has researched and written on NATO for twenty-five years. He is a professor and director of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, University of Southern Denmark, and the author of NATO in Afghanistan and NATO Renewed.

Rynning applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works moderately well for NATO. It captures a key event in the history of the alliance still of great relevance today. But it comes out of a discussion of the fine grains of 1960s alliance politics that for the browser of the book may come across as a bit of ‘inside baseball.’

The fine grains are important, though, because for the reader of the book—as opposed to the browser—they tell the story of why the political seams of the alliance were coming undone. The allies lacked trust, and they were pursuing incompatible national approaches to East-West relations. France had decided to kick NATO headquarters off its territory, and NATO was in addition approaching its twentieth anniversary (in 1969), which by its treaty allowed individual allies to leave the alliance at a one-year notice. Might France be tempted to leave? Might West Germany leave to pursue German unification? The one sure thing was the Soviet desire to stoke trouble.

Into all this—and on page 99 of the book—stepped Pierre Harmel, Belgium’s foreign minister, and undertook a study of NATO’s “future tasks.” This proved a crucial moment for the alliance. Pierre Harmel succeeded in establishing principles that brought allies together and which resonate to this day—that NATO must be able to do both collective defense and East-West diplomacy, and, critically, that defense must come first.

“Defense first” was NATO’s Cold War recipe for countering the threat of political fragmentation. NATO leaders have since invoked this recipe multiple times, also in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. However, NATO allies diverge in their level of support to Ukraine and in their willingness to stand up to Russia. In essence, allies disagree on what “defense first” today means. Page 99 of NATO will help the browser—and especially the reader—understand why this present-day rerun of the Harmel debate is so momentous for the alliance.

Learn more about NATO at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: NATO in Afghanistan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum's "Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists"

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is an award-winning author whose research explores how individuals navigated the traumas of the twentieth century. Her books include Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (2000); The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995 (2006); and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War (2015).

Kirschenbaum applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip, and reported the following:

If you opened Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists to page 99, you would find the first page of the chapter on what I call “complex hybrids.” In 1935, these “hybrids,” mostly Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire, helped the Soviet satirists Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov pull off an epic 10,000-mile road trip across America. The chapter begins with the observation that the writers’ “dream of seeing and understanding America faced two daunting obstacles: Neither spoke much English and neither knew how to drive.” To overcome these difficulties, they relied on “immigrants from the Russian empire to show them around.” However, the authors omitted most of these mediators from their published travelogue, One-Story America (Odnoetazhnaia Amerika). Page 99 emphasizes that the chapter recovers the stories of the individuals who facilitated Ilf and Petrov’s discovery of America and “reveals a central and incompletely suppressed paradox of their quest: their impressions of ‘real’ America came filtered through the eyes and mouths of outsiders or immigrants.”

The Page 99 Test works well to give readers a sense of the book’s methods and arguments. My interest in retracing Ilf and Petrov’s road trip grew out of a desire to locate the people who worked to construct friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Page 99 introduces a critical, but publicly unacknowledged subset of these individuals – immigrants from the Russian empire, who served as the writers’ guides and translators. Citing Ilf’s notebook, page 99 suggests that clues in the pair’s unpublished writing allowed me to track down many of their contacts. The page also hints at the importance of highways in Ilf and Petrov’s account of America; their early adventures convinced them that to really understand the country, they had to travel by car, not train.

Focused on Ilf and Petrov’s omissions, page 99 sheds little light on how I learned the stories of the pair’s American interlocutors. In the case of the complex hybrids, I relied on personal papers and FBI files. The most challenging problem I faced was finding the more ordinary people with whom Ilf and Petrov interacted. In these cases, I had to generate creative sourcing solutions such as the remarkable series of life history interviews collected in 1935-1936 as part of a survey of San Francisco’s foreign-born population.

Finally, this single page may give readers the mistaken impression that I retraced Ilf and Petrov’s journey primarily as a means of judging their accuracy. While page 99 highlights the writers’ dependence on immigrants, it has little to say about why immigrants wanted to help. Nor does it address the book’s larger goal of understanding the process of cross-cultural understanding and misunderstanding. By reading Ilf and Petrov’s notes and narratives against the American sources, the book aims to illuminate the shared concerns as well as the preconceptions and misconceptions that guided and sometimes limited efforts to bridge cultural, linguistic, and political divides.

Learn more about Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Alff's "The Northeast Corridor"

David Alff is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo, where he researches the eighteenth-century Anglophone world.

Alff applied the Page 99 Test to his new book The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region, and reported the following:

My book is a cultural history of the northeast corridor: both the railroad that runs between Boston and Washington, and the seaboard metropolitan region it helped build. This history begins several hundred million years ago, in the Ordovician period, when the microcontinent of Avalonia smashed against proto North America. It ends on New Year’s morning 2021 when Moynihan Train Hall first opened to the public.

Page 99 picks up at a crucial moment in the corridor’s development. It describes Thomas Edison’s construction of an experimental electrical railway in what is today Metropark, New Jersey. I show how Edison’s track drew direct current from his laboratory’s steam generators, and how tourists flocked to Menlo Park for the chance to snag a ride on one of his trains. One journalist recounted how the silent train “shot off like a bullet,” in sharp contrast to the slow percussive build of steam locomotives.

Of my book’s two-hundred-and-eighty-odd pages, 99 is a great place to land. It features one of many passages that describe technological change through story. Drawing on archival research and secondary reading, I try to immerse readers in the details of the past: the crackle of current coursing through iron rails; Edison’s comical indifference to his railway’s frequent wrecks; and the incongruity of the fact that the line terminated beside what is now the fifteenth hole of the Metuchen Golf and Country Club. Such minutiae, I hope, can help us share the wonder that a nation of train passengers felt at dawn of electric railroading.

Beyond my own narrative strategies, page 99 happens to depict a momentous turning point in the history of transportation engineering, as people realized that steam traction was bumping up against physical limits, and faster trains would require remote power generation. Though Edison’s railway was long ago abandoned, reclaimed by forest, and finally buried under suburban tract housing, the technology it tested continues to propel the world’s rapid transit systems and all high-speed passenger trains. The northeast corridor is the busiest and fast inter-city passenger line in North America because its trains receive current from overhead wires (instead of generating it themselves from igniting diesel fuel).

While no single historical anecdote could encompass an infrastructure as wide-ranging and diversely-experienced as the northeast corridor, page 99 offers an unusually representative glimpse into innovations that made the rail line and region what they are today.

Learn more about The Northeast Corridor at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue