Maggie Downs's "Braver Than You Think"

Maggie Downs is an award-winning writer based in Palm Springs, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Palm Springs Life, and McSweeney’s, and has been anthologized in Lonely Planet’s True Stories From the World’s Best Writers and Best Women’s Travel Writing.

Downs applied the “Page 99 Test” to Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother's) Lifetime, her first book, and reported the following:

Page 99 brings the reader along with me to explore an Argentinian building inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. The Palacio Barolo is a marvel — once the tallest building in South America — and the design elements create distinct layers of hell, purgatory, and paradise. And it happened to be across the street from my $8 a night hostel.

The building is one hundred meters high, one for each of the poem's cantos, and the twenty-two floors represent twenty-two stanzas. On a clear day, they say you can see all the way to Uruguay from one of the tiny cupola windows, though when I climb to the top, I can't see beyond the wide, sparkling expanse of the city. I don't want to anyway.

I take the English-language tour of Palacio Barolo twice. Then I return a few more times, just to sit in hell, which is lined with attorney offices, and read books. It's quieter than my hostel, and I am comfortable among the Latin inscriptions, a smattering of dragon sculptures, and the fire-patterned floor.

My initial thought was that page 99 isn't a good representation of my book. But then I reconsidered.

The scenes on this page take place in Buenos Aires, a city that first intimidated me, then won me over. It is stately, elegant, sophisticated. It's a place that could easily overwhelm if it weren't for all the charm.

Most of all, it's a city that reminded me of my mom. It didn't take long for BA to feel as comfortable as home.

And that's the essence of my book, after all. Braver Than You Think is about the backpacking trip I took to honor and grieve my mother as she was dying. So the story is both a love letter to travel and a love letter to the woman who raised me, but it's also about discovering the nature of family and learning what it means to make a home.

The Palacio Barolo page is actually a decent reflection of that. It shows what I learned through this journey: The agitation of fear and grief can push you to the brink, but it can also lead you to the most spectacular places.

Visit Maggie Downs's website and follow her on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Frances Turek's "To Bring the Good News to All Nations"

Lauren Frances Turek is an assistant professor of history at Trinity University. A diplomatic historian by training, she has research interests in the history of U.S. foreign relations, religion, and the international human rights movement. At Trinity, she teaches courses on modern United States history, U.S. diplomatic history, and public history. She is also the director of the Museum Studies Minor.

Turek applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations, and reported the following:

I was quite interested to see what might happen when I applied the “Page 99 Test” to my book, and ended up feeling pleased and relieved with the results. My book argues that global political and economic changes in the 1960s and 1970s, such as decolonization, globalization, and Cold War competition, coupled with a renewed concern about overseas missionary work, shaped the foreign policy opinions of politically conservative U.S. evangelical Christians and led them to engage in foreign policy lobbying. A range of factors made their lobbying more effective by time Ronald Reagan came into office.

From page 99:

In speeches and public statements, Reagan often merged this biblical notion of human dignity with “eternal” U.S. values, including the freedom of conscience. He reviled Soviet communism for its atheism as well as its statist repression. Throughout his career as a public speaker and politician, Reagan counterposed the United States as the “shining city upon a hill” against the bleak, totalitarian Soviet Union. He saw the United States as the world’s beacon of freedom and expressed confidence in the broad appeal of U.S. democratic values.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan drew on these core religious and ideological beliefs to mount an attack on President Carter’s approach to international relations and human rights. He railed against détente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, advocating for a more muscular foreign policy that would bolster U.S. strength and negotiating power vis-à-vis its major adversary. On human rights , Reagan alleged that Carter had applied foreign policy pressure inconsistently, targeting authoritarian
regimes for their violations yet ignoring abuses in the Soviet Union. In his campaign speeches, he called for a reappraisal of how human rights issues fit into U.S. policymaking—though not for their wholesale removal from the decision-making process.

During his first term as president, Reagan and his advisers advanced a human rights vision that distinguished between and emphasized human rights violations in totalitarian as opposed to authoritarian regimes, and sought change through quiet diplomacy rather than congressional pressure. In an interview with Walter Cronkite on CBS News in March 1981, Reagan explained his position: “I think human rights is very much a part of our American idealism.... My criticism of them, in the last few years, was that we were selective with regard to human rights. We took countries that were pro-Western, that were maybe authoritarian in government, but not totalitarian ... and we punished them at the same time that we were claiming détente with countries where there are no human rights. The Soviet Union is the greatest violator today of human rights in all the world.” In downplaying the abuses of authoritarian regimes, this distinction troubled many liberal human rights activists. For evangelical groups such as CREED, however, Reagan’s statements aligned with their policy objectives and seemed to indicate that he planned to champion religious liberty abroad while in office.

Eager to protect their brethren behind the Iron Curtain, evangelicals rallied during the first months of Reagan’s presidency to defend his administration’s stated plan to prioritize human rights abuses in totalitarian rather than authoritarian regimes.

Page 99 captures the themes and argument of the book well. The book explores how conservative evangelicals grappled with issues related to human rights and human rights abuses. I found that the groups I wrote about often used human rights language when writing about foreign policy issues such as trade or military aid. They tended to define human rights narrowly, emphasizing the freedom of religion or freedom of conscience as a primary human right from which all others would stem. I make the case that their definition of human rights reflected their missionary agenda: they believed that it was their spiritual duty to spread the Christian gospel, and thus they wanted a foreign policy that would protect their freedom to evangelize (and the freedom of the “unreached” to hear that gospel). For evangelicals, no earthly privation compared to the loss of the potential for salvation through Jesus Christ, and as such they advocated primarily for religious liberty rather than for the more expansive human rights that secular and politically-liberal organizations such as Amnesty International promoted.

U.S. evangelicals expressed considerable concern about Christian suffering in communist nations, and lobbied policymakers to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on those countries that persecuted Christians, such as the Soviet Union. Similarly, when evangelicals identified anti-communist or pro-evangelical leaders in other parts of the world, they pushed the United States to implement policies that would benefit those regimes—even when they were extremely authoritarian and repressive, such as in Guatemala.

Page 99 shows the intersection of these evangelical ideas about human rights and foreign relations with Reagan administration foreign policy priorities. I think readers that turned to this page would find it provided a good hint as to the historical argument I build over the course of the book.

Visit Lauren Frances Turek's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Willemien Otten's "Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking"

Willemien Otten is Professor of the History of Christianity and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where she serves as the Director of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.

Otten applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson, and reported the following:

Page 99 takes the reader to my chapter on Augustine. More than anyone else in Christianity Augustine stands accused of devaluing nature, seeing it as corrupt, a fall from paradise to which we can never return. I illustrate this common view through my critical analysis of a book on Augustine by Andrea Nightingale called Once out of Nature. Here is a passage from page 99:

As sketched above, Nightingale’s is a harsh indictment of Augustine’s take on natural life as a constrictive negative spiral of time, body, distended mind, and mortality. For Nightingale, God as acting, as presented in Genesis, may be the deeper source of Augustine’s thought, but this makes Augustine no less culpable for subjugating Western civilization to the yoke of this essentially negative Christian paradigm for earthly life…."

The next paragraph continues: “The question is whether Nightingale’s analysis is correct.”

The reader gets an indirect view of the book when opening it at page 99. The page criticizes the view that Augustine devalues nature before launching into my correction. But the correction is visible in my criticism, as I disagree that Augustine divorces nature from paradise or that paradise represents a state of transhumanism. As the chapter develops, I lay out paradise as a view of temporal nature that sees it with maximum clarity in all its beauty. That clarity is the privilege of God who created nature but it can also be grasped, in flashes rather than as a constant awareness, in our natural lives outside paradise.

I find in Augustine a respect for the independence of nature that accords with his wider respect for earthly life and human nature. Yet Augustine writes on nature only through biblical commentaries on Genesis, which marks a break with the speculative Eastern tradition of early Christianity. Building on that observation, I conclude that Eriugena —my medieval protagonist in the book alongside Emerson as my modern one— gives us the natural theology that Augustine never wrote, since he pushes his analysis beyond biblical interpretation. This assessment captures Eriugena’s practice of “thinking nature” much better than the traditional label pantheism does. In a similar move I analyze Emerson’s practice of "thinking nature" through comparisons with Schleiermacher and William James.

Learn more about Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward A. Purcell, Jr.'s "Antonin Scalia and American Constitutionalism"

Edward A. Purcell, Jr. is the Joseph Solomon Distinguished Professor at New York Law School and one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the history of the United States Supreme Court and the federal judicial system.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Antonin Scalia and American Constitutionalism: The Historical Significance of a Judicial Icon, and reported the following:

Page 99 provides only a limited idea of the book’s content and argument. The page comes in the middle of a long chapter surveying Justice Antonin Scalia’s jurisprudence on a wide range of constitutional issues. Specifically, it is part of a four-page discussion arguing that Scalia’s treatment of the Fourth Amendment was inconsistent and contradictory, and page 99 contributes to this argument by detailing an inconsistency in Scalia’s opinions involving the role of property rights in determining the amendment’s reach. The section shows that his opinions had little to do with any truly “originalist” analysis, and that they actually exemplified a non-originalist version of “living” constitutionalism. Indeed this short section concludes by pointing out that Scalia did not even attempt to use originalist reasoning in more than 80 percent of his Fourth Amendment opinions. The discussion on page 99 is representative only insofar as it exemplifies one of the book’s principal theses about Scalia’s constitutional jurisprudence. His opinions frequently ignored, twisted, contradicted, or flatly rejected the originalist and textualist methodologies that he promoted so vigorously and tirelessly.

The page is not representative insofar as it does not directly contribute to any of the books’ other principle theses. Page 99 does not develop the book’s general argument that Scalia’s jurisprudence was shaped not by his theoretical proclamations but by his personal political and ideological goals. He sought to defend corporate power, private property, gun rights, the death penalty, and the institutional interests of the Republican Party, and he worked methodically to defeat affirmative action and other civil rights claims, abolish rights to abortion and gay marriage, deny the equal protection claims of women, and defeat the claims of consumers, employees, environmentalists, minorities, and tort victims. The consistency and coherence of his jurisprudence lay in the ways he used constitutional reasoning to advance those partisan goals, not in any consistent or disciplined application of originalist or textualist methodologies. Scalia was important primarily because he was, in fact, a leader–and the primary judicial spokesperson--for a distinctive and time-bound late twentieth-century political and ideological movement.

Most important, page 99 does not relate directly to any of the three general conclusions the book draws about Scalia’s overall significance in the history of American constitutionalism. First, the page does not advance the book’s argument that his originalist jurisprudence not only failed but that it also demonstrates that originalist methodologies are intrinsically incapable to producing the kind of “objective” conclusions he claimed. Second, it does not bear on the book’s argument that his jurisprudence illustrates–to an unusual and extreme extent–a fundamental characteristic of American constitutionalism, the fact that political and ideological values have necessarily shaped its course. Third, page 99 does not contribute to the book’s argument that, contrary to Scalia’s claim that originalism has largely and properly controlled constitutional law, the nation’s history shows that American constitutionalism has been intrinsically dynamic and that constitutional law has evolved over the centuries to adapt itself to new conditions and challenges. Scalia’s most important historical significance, the book concludes, is one of irony. His career and jurisprudence demonstrate–despite his impassioned insistence to the contrary–that American constitutionalism is a truly “living” enterprise.

Learn more about Antonin Scalia and American Constitutionalism at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathryn Harkup's "Death by Shakespeare"

Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. She completed a doctorate on her favorite chemicals, phosphines, and went on to further postdoctoral research before realizing that talking, writing and demonstrating science appealed a bit more than hours slaving over a hot fume-hood. She writes and gives regular public talks on the disgusting and dangerous side of science.

Harkup’s first book was the international best-seller A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, which was shortlisted for a Mystery Readers International Macavity Award and a BMA Book Award. She has also written Making the Monster: The Science of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Harkup applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Death by Shakespeare discusses the deaths of two Shakespearean characters - Falstaff and Henry IV - one fictional and one who existed in real-life. The first half of the page looks at Mistress Quickly’s description of Falstaff’s death. It examines how the words Shakespeare wrote four hundred years ago can be interpreted or translated into modern understanding of diseases such as malaria and the sweating sickness. The second half of the page is the start of the discussion about the death of Henry IV and how Shakespeare had real-life events he could draw on to portray the death of the king, as opposed to the possibilities of pure invention he could use for the fictional Falstaff.

Page 99 is fairly typical of the book as a whole, in that it looks at putting the deaths of Shakespearean characters in some kind of context for the time it was written. The page illustrates pretty well my approach to looking at the deaths in Shakespeare, for example, why and how he portrayed them on stage and his possible sources. The page also shows how I looked for clues in the text as to what Shakespeare understood about death and disease and how his audience might have understood things differently to modern audiences. It also looks at the accuracy of the deaths in terms of historical record as well as the underlying science of the disease.

Some deaths, like that of Falstaff dying in a domestic setting surrounded by friends but without any medical professional attendants, are very different to what we might expect to happen today. Most deaths today occur in hospitals, but dying at home would have been the norm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The very detailed description of the knight’s death contains some very specific medical diagnosis though the language used is no longer in common use. It might also seem surprising to hear such in-depth medical knowledge coming from a pub landlady like Mistress Quickly.

When it comes to the death of Henry IV, my discussion begins with what we know of the real-life events and how faithful Shakespeare was to the historical record. In other parts of the book it becomes clear that Shakespeare could play very fast and lose with historical facts when it suited him.

In the context of the book as a whole, I found it interesting how often death featured in Shakespeare’s work and how it is an integral part of the plays he wrote. I was curious as to how detailed and realistic Shakespeare chose to show his characters’ deaths. Whether a death took place on or off stage, how much information and explanation did his audience need, want or understand? What were probably obvious occurrences for a Shakespearean audience need considerably more explanation and interpretation for modern audiences and this is what the book tries to offer.

Visit Kathryn Harkup's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael E. Woods's "Arguing until Doomsday"

Michael E. Woods is associate professor of history at Marshall University and author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy, and reported the following:

Since there happens to be a section break on page 99, this page features two distinct topics, both from the year 1849. First is an account of Illinois senator Stephen Douglas’s success in getting Congress to create the Minnesota Territory, followed by a brief discussion of Douglas’s continued interest in, and close political ties to, residents of that territory. After the section break, the focus shifts southward to Mississippi, where many politicians—including Senator Jefferson Davis—and voters combined in a swelling outcry against the possible prohibition of slavery in the southwestern lands recently ceded by Mexico to the United States.

I’ll admit to having been skeptical of The Page 99 Test, but it works moderately well for my book. Readers who perused page 99 would meet its two main figures—Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis—and a few other important individuals, including Henry M. Rice, one of Minnesota’s first senators (and Douglas’s neighbor in Washington, DC), and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. They would also be introduced to several key themes, including westward expansion, the intense antebellum conflict over the extension of slavery, and connections between local and national politics. They would get a taste of how Davis and Douglas envisioned the West, with Douglas imagining a booming northwest stretching from Illinois to Puget Sound, while Davis saw the southwest as a vital source of strength for the South.

What’s missing from this page is a clear indication of how repeated collisions between Davis and Douglas, dating back to their earliest encounters in Congress in the mid-1840s, ratcheted up tensions within their Democratic Party and ultimately produced a dramatic rupture in 1860. These conflicts, born of the imperative to show their respective constituencies that the national Democratic Party could advance state and regional interests, propel the book’s narrative. I suspect that this demonstration of change over time, which is so central to the work of the historian, might often be difficult to capture in a single page.

Learn more about Arguing until Doomsday at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessi Streib's "Privilege Lost"

Jessi Streib is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke University. Her research uncovers mechanisms and builds theories about how social class inequality is experienced, reproduced, and alleviated. She is the author of The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages.

Streib applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall, and reported the following:

Page 99 concludes the story of a young woman I call “Vana.” She had a college-educated professional parent – the definition of upper-middle-class membership – but she grew up with few resources associated with it. Her mother’s income as a teacher was relatively low for the upper-middle-class, and her mother’s mental illness meant that she did not regularly talk with Vana about school or work. Her father had also moved away when Vana was young, and he offered Vana little advice. Technically, Vana grew up in the upper-middle-class, but she did not receive many resources associated with it.

Privilege Lost answers the questions of which youth born into the upper-middle-class become downwardly mobile and how they fall. Vana’s story, showcased on page 99, is an exception to the rule. Most youth whose parents earned relatively little money and who rarely spoke with them about school and work entered downwardly mobile trajectories. This occurred not only because they received relatively few resources from their parents, but, as the book reveals, because of what youth did with them as well. In this regard that Vana was exceptional. She, unlike many of her peers raised with similar resource profiles, learned how to acquire enough resources to excel in school and work – and therefore to avoid downward mobility by becoming a college-educated professional herself.

Visit Jessi Streib's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matt Fitzgerald's "Running the Dream"

Matt Fitzgerald is an acclaimed endurance sports and nutrition writer and certified sports nutritionist. His best-known books include Racing Weight, Brain Training for Runners, and Triathlete Magazine’s Essential Week-by-Week Training Guide. He has contributed to Bicycling, Maxim, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Triathlete, Stuff, Men’s Journal, Outside, Runner’s World, Shape, Women’s Health, and other national publications.

Fitzgerald applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Running the Dream: One Summer Living, Training, and Racing with a Team of World-Class Runners Half My Age, and reported the following:

I will confess that I felt some anxiety as I flipped to page 99 of my book to see what was there. My worry was that the material would be, in my own judgment, less likely than the material on many other pages to make people want to read the whole thing. I won’t share the conclusion I came to. I just wanted to let you know what it’s like for an author to go through this exercise. I doubt I’m alone in having approached it with a degree of trepidation.

Running the Dream documents my experience as a “fake pro runner”—a summer I spent as a forty-six-year-old tagalong with a Flagstaff-based team of twenty-something genetic lottery winners striving for the Olympics. This passage describes an encounter I had with one member of the team, Aaron “Brauny” Braun, at an early point in my recovery from a groin injury I suffered midway through the experiment.

An almost queasy expression came over his face when he got out and noticed me waiting for him, as though I were some wayward second cousin of his who hit him up for money whenever our paths crossed. I took no offense, knowing how awkward it is sometimes to be around an injured teammate. You feel both grateful for and guilty about your own good health, and your instinct is to hide both emotions, an effort that inevitably results in stilted communication. Taking mercy on him, I spoke first as we entered the building together.

“Good workout for you yesterday, eh?”

Aaron posted a mildly self-deprecating tweet after yesterday’s 20 x 1K session at Mountain Shadows (another workout I would have done “with” him if not for my injury), evidence to anyone who knows his modest nature that he was well pleased with it.

“It was,” he said, trying not to sound too happy. “I felt pretty good aerobically the whole way. My legs just got tired toward the end—kind of like in a marathon, come to think of it, which I guess was the point.”

It’s a long walk from the front entrance of Hypo2 to the weight room, and there came a point in our journey down the main hallway where Brauny had no choice but to ask about my groin despite my obvious determination to steer the conversation in a different direction.

“I think I’m entering the anger stage of my recovery,” I told him glibly, “which is probably a good sign. It means I’m impatient to start running hard again, and I’m impatient because I’m feeling better.”

“Been there,” Aaron said. “You’ll feel a lot better once you get to do that first real workout and you see you haven’t lost as much fitness as you thought. And then you’ll start to see the bright side of taking time off: ‘Hey, at least my other aches and pains got a chance to quiet down. And I’m not worried anymore about overcooking myself before the race.’”

Aaron knows whereof he speaks. Imagine being twenty-nine years old, the main breadwinner for a family of four, and realizing your career—the only occupation you’ve ever known or loved—is probably over. That’s where Brauny found himself last year, a mysterious hip injury that defied every treatment known to man, including prolonged rest, having wiped out his 2015 season and threatening to do the same to 2016, an all-important Olympic year.

As with any memoir, whether Running the Dream succeeds or fails depends largely on the quality of the writing and storytelling, and I’m confident, at least, that page 99 is no worse than any other page in these areas. It strikes me too that the content is representative of the book as a whole in certain ways. There are many other pages I might have been asked to share that also would have shown my deep emotional investment in the fantasy I was living out and portrayed the odd dynamic of an athlete almost young enough to be my child mentoring and counseling me.

This is a fun little exercise for an author. Kind of scary, but fun.

Visit Matt Fitzgerald's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Booth's "Three Tigers, One Mountain"

Michael Booth is the author of multiple works of non-fiction, including The Almost Nearly Perfect People and Super Sushi Ramen Express. His writing appears regularly in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Telegraph, and Condé Nast Traveler magazine, among many other publications globally. He is the Copenhagen correspondent for Monocle magazine and Monocle 24 radio, and travels regularly to give talks and lectures on the Nordic lands and their peculiar, nearly perfect people.

Booth applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Three Tigers, One Mountain: A Journey Through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea, and Japan, and reported the following:

Page 99 features one of the more unusual, and grisly, stories from my journey through Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan. It was a physical journey, by car, train, boat and bus, but I went in search of the shared history and culture of these countries, and to get to the bottom of the reasons for their troubled present day relations. In a way, the page 99 story is pretty representative of all this.

The story is this: In the late 16th century, the Japanese forces of Toyotomi Hideyoshi twice invaded the Korean peninsula, killing many thousands of people. To provide evidence of the death toll, the army sent back the severed noses of their victims to Japan, packed in salt. The noses were buried in special mounds, most of which have been lost to time. However, back in the 1990s, a Korean monk campaigned to repatriate the noses and was given permission by the Japanese authorities to excavate one tomb. The noses had disappeared, but some symbolic soil was taken from Japan to south western Korea. On page 99 I tell of my attempts to track down the temple where the soil was interred, with the help of a friendly park ranger, Mr Kang.

Most of my books are kind of humorous, at least that’s usually my intention. I have a kind of ironic style, I suppose. It’s a fault, common to lots of English travel writers. Self-deprecation. Irony. Sarcasm. That kind of thing. When I decided to write this book, I realised that style was going to be wholly unsuitable to many of the topics I would need to explore, not least Japan’s war crimes. It was a big problem.

In a way, my page 99 tale typifies the challenge. It’s a deeply horrid tale, and I tell it with what many will probably find to be a deeply inappropriate tone. But, as they say, tragedy + time = comedy. In this case, I judged that five hundred years was enough time to get away with it. In terms of the 20th century history I cover in the book, it was all absolutely too recent. So I steered well clear of anything remotely funny when discussing that, obviously.

Visit Michael Booth's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Valerie Hansen's "The Year 1000"

Valerie Hansen teaches Chinese and world history at Yale, where she is professor of history. In the course of writing The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World-and Globalization Began, she traveled to some twenty different countries and was a visiting scholar at Xiamen University in China, University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and the Collège de France in Paris.

Having lived in China for six plus years, Hansen has visited at least 300 temples, climbed the Great Wall multiple times (once during a lightning storm), and posed next to the Terracotta Warriors eleven times. (All this in the company of her husband and three children.)

Her books include The Silk Road: A New History, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1279, and Voyages in World History (co-authored with Kenneth R. Curtis).

Hansen applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Year 1000 and reported the following:

Multiple rulers in Europe, Africa, and Asia converted to world religions around the year 1000, and page 99 focuses on Vladimir of Rus, who weighed the pros and cons of Judaism, Islam, Roman Christianity, and Byzantine Orthodoxy. Vladimir rejected the Roman Christianity of the Ottonian kings of Germany, and this page explains possible problems with this source and why we should accept its version of events:

But even if the entire account is an invented story written to explain what happened—whose religion could Vladimir accept if not that of his immediate neighbor, the Byzantines?—it still shows the types of information about religion circulating soon after 1000, when the Primary Chronicle took shape. And we do have outside confirmation—from an Islamic account—that a Rus ruler named “Vladimir” sent four kinsmen to the ruler of Khwarazm asking for information about Islam. This external source shows that Vladimir actively sought information about the various belief systems of his neighbors as he wrestled with the decision of which one to convert to. [This passage is directly from p. 99]

One of the book’s major themes—the spread of religions—shapes page 99. Vladimir’s choice of Byzantine Orthodoxy is one of the best-documented instances of conversion around the year 1000. As rulers forged new alliances, many gave up their local deities and made the decision to convert to the belief system of a more powerful neighbor. Northern and Eastern Europe became Christian, the realm of Islam expanded east into Central Asia and west into West Africa, and Buddhism and Hinduism spread into Southeast Asia. Some ninety-two percent of the world's believers today subscribe to the teachings of these four religions, all of which gained ascendance in 1000.

Religious teachings were able to move around the world because of the pathways that opened up around 1000. Viking, Polynesian, and Chinese mariners crossed the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans at the same time as new land routes connected the different regions in the Americas and Africa. For the first time, many of the world’s occupants realized that they had neighbors.

Along with religious teachings, merchants and objects traveled along these routes. In the Americas, for example, the Maya, based in the Yucatan Peninsula, traded chocolate and brightly colored macaw and parrot feathers (and the occasional live caged bird) for the turquoise of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, some two thousand miles away.

The ongoing demand for slaves in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), Baghdad, Cairo, and other cities resulted in the forced movement of over ten million people from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia—hundreds of years before the trans-Atlantic slave trade began.

Globalization really began in 1000. The changes of 1000 affected both those who went to new places (traders, explorers, slaves) as well as those who stayed home (religious change, riots, onerous labor conditions to produce goods for overseas markets).

Europeans didn’t invent globalization. They changed and augmented what had been there since 1000. If globalization hadn’t yet begun in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, Europeans wouldn’t have been able to penetrate the markets in so many places as quickly as they did after 1492.

Visit Valerie Hansen's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Silk Road.

--Marshal Zeringue