Trishula Rachna Patel's "Becoming Zimbabwean"

Trishula Rachna Patel is Assistant Professor of African History and Asian Studies at the University of Denver.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Becoming Zimbabwean: A History of Indians in Rhodesia, and shared the following:

Page 99 page focuses on immigration laws in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in the 1950s, and how they intersected with marriage law in Southern Rhodesia as it applied to Indians. Because most Indian couples were married according to Hindu or Muslim law, often in India before wives joined their husbands resident in the colony, Rhodesian immigration authorities argued that their marriages were inherently polygamous (even if the couple were monogamous). Therefore, they interpreted these relationships as invalid according to local marriage legislation for the purposes of immigration of the wife from India, or for her inheritance upon her husband’s death. The page focuses on one case involving a Muslim man whose will was contested after his death because of his second marriage. It also introduces the case of a Hindu family, where the husband remarried his one and only wife in order to register the marriage according to Rhodesian law after their first wedding in India. However, when he died, court authorities argued that the second marriage invalidated his will, which had been made between both weddings. This section of the book considers the intersection of immigration and marriage law, as well as whether Indians fit into civil laws established for white citizens or customary laws set up for Black African subjects.

Would readers opening the book to page 99 get a good or a poor idea of the whole work?

This is a tough question! The Page 99 Test works really well in the sense that it shows how Indians were treated as second-class citizens during British settler colonial rule in Southern Rhodesia, and how legislation discriminated against their rights of mobility. It also demonstrates how colonial laws and racism interfered in their domestic lives, affecting families in huge ways. The two stories featured on this page are great illustrations of the intersection of different legal systems of Indian law, African customary law, and Roman Dutch law. It’s a good test as it applies to this chapter in particular, which is about how Indians contested government intervention in their lives in the court system, revealing how the state treated them as transient immigrant populations – but when it challenged the structure of their families according to gender and generation, the children of migrants made a case for their rights as permanent residents and citizens. This gels with the book’s argument that Indians transitioned from being a diaspora over generations to becoming an African community and population, with their cultural traditions transformed in fundamental ways to make sense in local contexts.

What page 99 doesn’t show as much as I’d like about the book is the centrality of the Indian shop, or the dukkan in Gujarati, to Indian families in their transition to becoming Zimbabwean. Their general trading shops were economic spaces between white industrialists and Black customers, but also social spaces which allowed the growth of Indian families and kinship networks as well as political spaces which enabled their resistance to the white minority state. The shop is hinted at in this chapter as a cultural space, where the structures of family and gender were challenged by legal restrictions against both immigration, which allowed the business to continue to grow with the migration of relatives as a source of labor, as well as determined who would inherit the business and the wealth acquired from it upon the death of the head of the household. But as a physical space and a lens into Indian identity, it’s not as prominent here as I would like as a way to get a good idea of the entirety of the book and its focus on the centrality of the shop to daily life.

Learn more about Becoming Zimbabwean at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

George Lewis's "Un-Americanism"

George Lewis, professor of American history at the University of Leicester, is the author of The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945–1965.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Un-Americanism: A History of the Battle to Control an Idea, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book immediately situates readers in the midst of both the overarching, grand debates over un-Americanism and the dirtier political squabbles that have surrounded its meanings and the uses to which it has been put. The book itself traces the idea of un-Americanism from its origins at the dawn of the Republic to its continued salience in the era of Trump, and shows that, despite its longevity, it has never had an objectively agreed definition. As a direct result, a central theme of its history has been ongoing arguments both over what un-Americanism means and over who has the right to control that meaning.

Page 99 lands readers right in the middle of one of those episodic debates, which here is over the creation of a formal congressional committee tasked with investigating un-American activities in the late 1930s. Many Americans had hoped that a government-led un-American activities committee would at least clarify what un-Americanism was, or how best it might be defined. It did neither. What it did do, though, was clarify that contemporaries believed it to be more important to have an un-American investigating committee than it was to know what the un-Americanism that was to be investigated might entail.

This particular debate was over New York Representative Samuel Dickstein’s 1937 resolution to alter what had been a temporary committee to investigate Nazi propaganda into a standing committee with a wider remit covering un-American activities. Page 99 details the concerns that many congressmen had with the idea, which ranged from the putative power of such a committee to a sense that the nebulous, ill-defined idea of un-Americanism was open to misuse for nefarious goals. They were to be proven correct on both counts.

Learn more about Un-Americanism at the University Press of Florida website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel K. Williams's "The Search for a Rational Faith"

Daniel K. Williams is a historian of American religion and politics who is currently an associate professor of history at Ashland University. Before moving to Ashland, he was a professor of history at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of several books on religion and politics in the United States, including God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right and Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro—Life Movement before Roe v. Wade. His articles on American Christianity and conservatism have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Christianity Today, and the Washington Post.

Williams applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity, with the following results:

If you flip The Search for a Rational Faith open to page 99, you will land in the middle of a chapter on Christian responses to eighteenth-century deists. One-third of the way down the page is the bold-print subheading “Charles Leslie’s Use of Historical Evidence.”

Leslie was an Anglican priest who wrote one of the most widely read refutations of deistic arguments against orthodox Christianity during the Enlightenment, but he is even more significant as a pioneer of the use of empirically based historical evidence to defend the trustworthiness of the biblical record. This became the foundation for an evidence-based Christian apologetic that is still popular in some circles today.

A reader encountering this material would get an accurate idea of my book, because The Search for a Rational Faith focuses on Christian apologists like Leslie – that is, people whose intellectual defenses of Christian faith were influential, but whose life stories and achievements have been largely forgotten.

Many people today have heard of the skeptical attacks on Christianity that came out of the Enlightenment – such as Spinoza’s historical criticism of the Bible, David Hume’s arguments against miracles, or Voltaire’s questions about God’s justice in a world of suffering – but they’re much less familiar with the responses from Enlightenment-influenced Christian intellectuals. My book analyzes those responses and demonstrates that on the whole, Enlightenment thinkers were actually more supportive of Christian faith than many have assumed. It makes this argument by examining a large number of thinkers like Leslie – that is, theologically orthodox Christians who used empirically based reason and historical or scientific examination to defend Christianity.

The Search for a Rational Faith provides a 400-year history of Christians’ intellectual defenses of the faith, first during the Enlightenment and then in the era of nineteenth-century Darwinism and twentieth-century philosophical challenges. While page 99 of the book cannot possibly cover the entire sweep of that history, it gives readers a clear idea of this theme. Leslie’s work “demonstrated the growing belief of many educated Anglicans that Christianity should be rational and provable, in the same way that any scientific principle was,” I say on page 99.

One of the central questions of this book is why so many Christians thought for so long that “Christianity should be rational and provable.” Page 99 doesn’t answer that question – but it might give readers enough of a hint to make them curious about the rest of the book.

Visit Daniel K. Williams's website.

The Page 99 Test: God's Own Party.

The Page 99 Test: Defenders of the Unborn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kent Lehnhof's "Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays"

Kent Lehnhof is Professor of English at Chapman University, where he has received the university's highest award for scholarship and its highest award for teaching. He has co-edited two essay collections, Of Levinas and Shakespeare (2018) and Shakespeare's Virtuous Theatre (2023), and has published two dozen articles and essays.

Lehnhof applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays, I discuss the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero in the context of Shakespeare's Pericles. This is highly representative, for my book aims to use these two philosophers to enhance our understanding of the ethical stakes of the Shakespearean drama. Why this pair of philosophers? Well, because they open exciting pathways by predicating their ethics on difference, rather than sameness.

Many ethical programs do the opposite. These other programs emphasize sameness, urging us to see the other as similar to ourselves and to treat them accordingly. This is the essence of precepts like "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995), however, felt that supposing the other to be same-as-the-self is not an ethical response but a reductive one. For him, ethics can only arise from a recognition that the other cannot be reduced to your mental constructs or categories. The other exceeds every thought you can think of them--and it is this radical otherness that commands your attention and makes you ethically responsible.

Adriana Cavarero (b.1947) agrees with Levinas and proposes, further, that the fundamental manifestation of the alterity of the other is the sound of their voice. Due to variations in pitch, timbre, cadence, tempo, intonation, and accent, each voice is distinctive. As a result, each voice communicates what Cavarero calls "the true, vital, and perceptible uniqueness of the one who emits it." And this expression of uniqueness, Cavarero insists, is independent of any linguistic meaning it might convey. According to Cavarero, the mere sound of the voice is sufficient. Every "vibrating throat of flesh" sounds an ethical summons prior to and apart from its verbal messaging.

I suggest that Shakespeare conceives of ethics, otherness, and voices in similar terms. Especially in his late plays, Shakespeare invests the sound of the voice with an intense ethical charge. My book, then, explores the power of speech in Shakespeare. Yet it differs from other studies of speech in Shakespeare by attending more to the sensuous and sonorous sound of the voice than to its semantic meaning and linguistic content. At the core of every chapter is the vibrating throat of flesh, communicating the alterity and uniqueness of its speaker. By attending to the ethical efficacy of the voice in Shakespeare's late plays, Voice and Ethics contends that Shakespeare concords with Cavarero that "the voice is always, irremediably relational … the voice is for the ear."

Learn more about Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michelle Pace's "Un-welcome to Denmark"

Michelle Pace is Professor in Global Studies based in Roskilde, Denmark.

Her new book is Un-welcome to Denmark: The paradigm shift and refugee integration.

Pace applied the “Page 99 Test” to Un-welcome to Denmark and reported the following:

Page 99 is the start of chapter 5 entitled "Tracing legislative intent in the Danish Aliens Act from 1983 to 2019."

Here is the text in whole:

5

Tracing legislative intent in the

Danish Aliens Act from 1983 to 2019

Introduction

[F]rom now on it must be clear that Denmark only accepts foreigners who adopt and respect Danish values, norms, and traditions, while all the others may well stay away. My approach is that when people choose to come to Denmark, and want to become citizens, it is of course because they want to become Danish, not because they want to change Denmark. In my view it is the multicultural that makes it all crack. Contrary to opposition parties, I do not see the great value in the multicultural society.

(Søren Pind, minister for refugees, immigrants, and integration, 2011)
(as quoted in Adamo, 2012: 2)

Throughout Denmark's recent history, immigration debates have changed quite drastically. From discussions on how best to ensure equal rights for guest workers during the 1960s and 1970s, to the anti-multiculturalism narratives outlined in the above quote from 2011 (see also Kivisto and Wahlbeck, 2013; Lægaard, 2013), immigration has undoubtedly contributed to various challenges for Danish policy-makers and society at large.

While political opinions may differ, to an extent, across the political spectrum and across various Danish communities, more recent debates have raised pertinent questions:

How many immigrants can the country absorb? Which kind of refugee is Denmark obliged to receive according to UN declarations? Should immigrants and refugees have access to education, health care, and the labor market, and if so, how soon? Is it better to 'assist' refugees and immigrants in distant 'safe zones' (so that they do not appear at the Danish border)? How about placing the unwanted immigrants on an isolated island to incentivize them to go back home? (Villadsen, 2021: 137)

Danish political parties all admit to the well-known fact that Denmark has one of the strictest immigration laws in Europe (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Scott Ford, 2022; Khalid and Mortensen, 2019; Kreichauf, 2020;

Page 99 will enable readers to get a strong sense of the core argument and conceptual framing of this book, but not a balanced sense of the whole work.

What page 99 communicates well, starting at Chapter 5, with the above Søren Pind quotation, immediately signals several central features of the book, namely that: Danish immigration and asylum policy is imbued with the language of 'values', 'identity', and 'cultural conformity'. This in and of itself aligns very well with my book’s title and core argument. Moreover, by framing this chapter as “Tracing legislative intent,” this page highlights the analytical approach of the book: the Aliens Act has been critically read and analysed in light of political ideology, discursive practices, and stated goals. Readers can therefore immediately understand that this book interrogates state power, integration rhetoric, and the challenges with/rejection of multiculturalism. The Danish case is also situated within a longer historical trajectory (1983– 2019), giving the book's analysis depth, continuity, and longitudinal weight. Browsers reading this page will thereby be able to conclude and appreciate that this is a serious, critical study of how Danish asylum and refugee law evolved into an exclusionary, assimilationist regime. This I believe is a fair description of the book’s intellectual project.

However, opening the book on page 99 would miss several important dimensions of the whole work, including its rich background, contextual and empirical groundwork. This contains a nuanced historical-social-policy-integration-methodological and conceptual analysis, none of which is visible here. A browser might therefore underestimate how evidence-driven the book is as well as its analytical scaffolding. Core concepts, definitions, and methodological choices developed earlier (e.g. how I define “integration,” “paradigm shift,” or “welcome/unwelcome”) are assumed rather than introduced. Browsers may also miss important nuances and/or inherent tensions. Beginning with a ministerial quote foregrounds ideology. Browsers may not appreciate how carefully I distinguish between rhetoric, law, implementation, and lived experiences of those targeted by state policies as well as those tasked with assisting and supporting them.

In conclusion, as a snapshot of the book’s core argument and stakes, page 99 does a very good job. As a representation of the book’s full scope, method, and evidence: it gives browsers a partial appreciation of the often-overlooked debate on racism and xenophobia in Denmark's immigration and integration policies, in particular in relation to the forensic investigation of the tensions, illogicalities and injustices in Denmark's racist, illiberal, exclusionary and assimilationist policies towards asylum-seekers and refugees.

Learn more about Un-welcome to Denmark at the Manchester University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Lieb's "Road to Nowhere"

Emily Lieb is an historian of U.S. cities, schools, and segregation. She has a PhD from Columbia and an AB from Brown, and she taught history and urban studies at Seattle University for more than 10 years. She is also a writer at Derfner & Sons.

Lieb applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, with the following results:

Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore is, as the subtitle says, a book about the power of a mid-20th–century highway map—not necessarily the highway itself—to wreck a city, and in particular a Black homeowners’ neighborhood in West Baltimore called Rosemont. So, it’s lucky that page 99 of the book is itself a map. It’s a page from a 1968 report from a group of city planners and engineers that shows just how much harm a proposed expressway route through Rosemont was set to cause: “bisection of residential area,” “isolation of housing by traffic,” the loss of nearly 1,000 homes and businesses.

(You can find the image, which comes from the Urban Design Concept Team’s Rosemont Area Studies(February 1968), at the University of Baltimore’s Baltimore Studies Archives here; the pages aren’t numbered but it’s page 11 of the PDF.)

It would be easy for any reader who flipped to this page of the book to see the damage the proposed expressway would do to Rosemont if policymakers ever built it. But they wouldn’t understand what led up to it, nor why the neighborhood’s story matters so much.

The story Road to Nowhere tells goes like this: Very deliberately, the people who had the power in Baltimore created a Black neighborhood in the early 1950s, robbed that Black neighborhood, labeled that Black neighborhood “blighted,” and then drew an expressway map to destroy it in the name of “renewing” it. That’s where the Urban Design Concept Team came in. By the late 1960s, people who did not live in Rosemont were starting to see the harm the highway would cause to the neighborhood and to the whole city. In the end, officials never built the road they wanted through Rosemont.

It's important to say that this was a good thing. But just not building the highway was not the answer, because the map itself had already caused so much harm. And then, instead of making amends, powerful people in Baltimore compounded the problem, targeting the neighborhood for exploitation once again.

So, as I write on page 11 of the book:

When officials in the 1970s looked around Rosemont, they saw what they called “deteriorated, neglected properties” and “a lack of interest or pride in the home and community.” In other words, they saw the “blight” they’d always expected to see. What they did not see were the consequences of their own actions. In the official version of events, policymakers had tried their best to “renew” Rosemont, but Rosemont would not be renewed. Thus [they wrote]: “We have spent a lot of money on a lot of blocks that have turned out to be unsalvageable.”

But as I say in the book, that’s a lie. “Turned out to be” is exactly the wrong way to explain what happened here. If Rosemont was unsalvageable, Baltimore had made it so.

Visit Emily Lieb's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lydia Murdoch's "What We Mourn"

Lydia Murdoch is Professor of History at Vassar College and the author of Daily Life of Victorian Women.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and shared the following:

From page 99:

The political context of the Indian Rebellion shaped how Britons grieved child death, and grief, in turn, ultimately served to strengthen British imperialism. Without access to communal British mourning rituals, including the witnessing of a child’s death and salvation, the preparation of the body, the funeral and burial service, and the marking of the grave for future visitation, survivors initially struggled to articulate and perform their grief. They pointed to their inability to mourn for children who died during war as a means to highlight the incongruity between an idealized childhood in safe, “British” domestic spaces and extreme wartime violence. These accounts suggested, in fact, that children should never have been present in such circumstances. The initial reports from Lucknow marked a “cultural trauma,” and like many mid-Victorian literary and historical representations of “the Mutiny,” they contained what Christopher Herbert identifies as a “sometimes dizzying rhetorical instability” and “incurable self-contradiction” about such fundamental questions as the excessiveness of British force, the law, race, and religion—contradictions ultimately overshadowed by repeated cries for vengeance and rising imperialist propaganda following the 1865 Jamaican Rebellion and late Victorian colonization of Africa. The swift reclamation of British grieving rituals beginning with the distribution of mourning attire as survivors made their way from Lucknow to Calcutta and the retelling of child wartime casualties as beautiful deaths surely allowed many survivors to express their sorrow more openly, providing them with comfort and solace. However, such nationalistic expressions of grief also left much unspoken and unremembered: the anguish of violent child death, the struggle for resources divided unequally among the besieged population, the awareness that Indian as well as British children were dying and that Britons were dependent on Indians for survival, and the utter loss of oneself that can come with grief for another (Bartrum’s sense that she was “stripped of all,” “empty & desolate”). . . The forms of national mourning and memory that eventually dominated public accounts reaffirmed the ties that bound all Britons along with the distinct subject positions that had been eroded during the conflict: military men and domestic women, British colonizers and Indian subjects, nurturing adults and innocent, protected children.

Page 99 is the conclusion to my third chapter, “‘Suppressed Grief’: Mourning the Death of British Children and the Memory of the 1857 Indian Rebellion.” The Page 99 Test works remarkably well as a reflection of my book’s argument and method. The chapter details British accounts of child death from shell fire, disease, and starvation at Lucknow, where civilians and troops remained under siege for several months during the colonial uprising against the British East India Company. Page 99 speaks to the underlying idea of the book that grieving enables us to rethink our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to others. Here, in the chapter conclusion, I summarize how British adults struggled to mourn the often violent deaths of children during the siege, and how, for some, the defamiliarization of mourning patterns corresponded with a questioning of self and nation. Ultimately, however, after the siege ended and Britain reclaimed violent military control of India, these unsettling deaths of children tended to be forgotten or rewritten as “beautiful deaths” and replaced with imperialist testimonies of British power.

While this chapter focuses on forms of forgotten or “suppressed” grief during the Indian Rebellion, the book’s other chapters take this argument in reverse to explore how a broad group of nineteenth-century reformers politicized their grief over child death. In response to child deaths that they increasingly understood as “premature” rather than divinely ordained, they expressed their grief in public to demand from the state a future with new political rights: freedom, citizenship, and suffrage, as well as the rights to leisure, housing, and medical care.

Learn more about What We Mourn at the the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuele Collu's "Into the Loop"

Samuele Collu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition, and reported the following:

I was kind of hoping the test would work when I went to page 99 of Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition. And… Yes! This page definitely captures something crucial about the book’s spirit, rhythm, and conceptual ambitions. Page 99 is more or less two thirds of the way into “Compulsive Repetitions,” which is the third and my favourite chapter of the book. The chapter explores, in a playfully obsessive tone, how repeated refrains, returns, and circular rituals sustain our affective attachments (in particular, compulsive attachments to romantic others but also to all sorts of dispositifs). The chapter is built around my own compulsive return to the final minutes of a filmed therapy session I observed, in which the couple in therapy decides to separate. The central idea of the chapter is to describe repetition in its (paradoxical) double affordance of thwarting psychic transformation as well as becoming the very medium through which psychic change becomes possible. In the chapter, I turn to anthropological theories of ritual as well as psychoanalysis to make this point.

At the very center of page 99 there is a short section that I loved writing and always makes me smile when I re-read it:

Some repetitions keep you exactly where you are; others could untether you from your own self. Compare binge-scrolling on TikTok for one hour to doing deep, intense, circular breathing for one hour. Both repetitions can get you high, but the kite will fly across different skies.

The idea here is, to put it simply, that repetition is the pulsing beat of psychic rituals, and that it can have radically different impacts on our lives depending on the types of cosmologies you get “wired into.” Repetition has the capacity to promote affective states of openness or to reinforce the boundaries of our own psychic patterns. Page 99 also explains this process, moving into quick conversations about ego dissolution, the subjectifying role of dispositifs, as well as my own reading of the Freudian death drive, which I provisionally describe here as a force that pushes against psychic transformation—and the infinite motions of becoming. This chapter captures the type of book I was trying to write, at least aspirationally. Sometimes it lands; sometimes, a little bit less.

Learn more about Into the Loop at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Carney's "My Father's List"

A writer and magazine copy editor in New York, Laura Carney has been published by the Washington Post, the Associated Press, The Hill, Runner’s World, Good Housekeeping, The Fix, Upworthy, Maria Shriver’s The Sunday Paper, and other places. She has worked as a copy editor in national magazines—primarily women’s—for twenty years, including Vanity Fair, GQ, People, and Good Housekeeping.

Carney applied the "Page 99 Test" to My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free, her first book, with the following results:

As much as I hoped to be the exception to the rule, I was shocked to open my book, My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free, to page 99 and find that it meets the criteria:

"What?" I wrote back. He sent me a GIF from Point Break of Keanu Reeves saying this to Patrick Swayze, just before he rides a wave likely to kill him. "I thought you watched it?" Dave said.

I looked up the phrase.

It means "go with God."

This scene took place in my first year of checking off my late father's bucket list. I had just successfully checked off "surf in the Pacific Ocean," and had plopped on Venice Beach, exhausted. I texted my brother the good news. On page 98, I shared the phrase he responded with in his text back "Vaya con dias."

Why I think this sums up my entire book:

My brother was the one to find my dad's list. He intuited that he should give it to me. He'd had it in a box for 13 years, since our dad was killed by a distracted driver. We were both young when this happened. A central conflict for me as I checked off my dad's list was whether I was doing the right thing. These were his dreams, not mine. Was it wrong that I was receiving lessons meant for him? What if I ended up unstable financially or in my career as my father often seemed to be to my teenage eyes? As I watched my status change—one I'd been attached to previously, as my job at a national women's magazine struck me as important—I often found myself studying my peers, my friends, cousins, stepbrothers and brother. I worried that I was falling behind. That they were acting like typical 40-somethings while I had regressed to age 25.

Earlier in this chapter, I describe meeting President Jimmy Carter (another list item) and listening to his Sunday school lesson, which encompassed the principles of Phillippians 2:13: "...for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." I don't give the actual Bible verse in the book, but it's an odd coincidence that just two days before hearing that Sunday school lesson, I climbed Stone Mountain with my husband, reciting my favorite Bible verse towards the top (Phillippians 3:14): "I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." Both passages emphasize the very thing my brother says at the end of that chapter: "go with God."

He was saying it somewhat facetiously, because he's funny. When Keanu Reeves says that to Patrick Swayze in Point Break, he's saying goodbye, because there is no way Patrick Swayze will survive the wave he's about to surf. But at the same time, Reeves's character respects Swayze's chutzpah. Is life worth living if you're not doing what you love? That's a question Swayze often asks in the movie.

The word 'goodbye' itself stems from the phrase "God be with you." And what is My Father's List if not a book about how to say goodbye? It's by recognizing that our loved ones continue to travel with us. Jimmy Carter said so. Keanu Reeves, too. And in that moment on page 99, so did my brother. The main blessing I needed to continue on.

Visit Laura Carney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eran Shalev's "The Star-Spangled Republic"

Eran Shalev is Professor of History at Haifa University and the author of Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic, and American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation, and shared the following:

Page 99 describes a common but now largely forgotten way in which early Americans represented the American Union: America and its republican governmental structures as a political sun. The page demonstrates how, from the founding of the United States through the Civil War, Americans across the country repeatedly employed astronomical language to conceptualize the federal system in solar terms. Drawing on metaphors that had developed within a European monarchical culture of “sun kings,” this imagery was reborn and refitted in the United States to serve a democratic and republican political culture. Page 99 offers several examples of how early Americans described the federal government as a sun sustaining “a whole planetary system” of states, or as occupying “the same relation towards the States that the sun does towards the solar system—that is, the centre of gravitation.”

The page provides a vivid illustration of the solar image as a mode of explaining the federal system, one of the central forms of imagery that the book uncovers and unpacks. At the same time, it necessarily offers only a partial view of what the book terms political astronomy. Other major components of this conceptual language are not present on this page, including, for example, the constellational mode of understanding relations among the states. Page 99 thus does not capture the full argument, but it does serve as an effective entry point and a useful test case for grasping how astronomical metaphors structured early American political thought.

While page 99 conveys one of the most prominent manifestations of political astronomy, the notion of the Union, the Constitution, or the federal government as suns that hold the political nation together, it does not present the full range of the rich astronomical language in circulation. An alternative and sometimes overlapping and even competing vision was constellational rather than solar: an understanding of the United States as composed not of a single dominant sun but of many stars, equal and harmoniously arranged. This imagery was particularly well suited to expressing the federal nature of the Union and the equality of the states. It also informed the choice of stars to spangle the American flag, a decision that cannot be fully understood without reference to political astronomy. The book further recovers the meaning of other culturally prevalent but little- examined practices, such as calling celebrities “stars” or describing them as “meteors.” To grasp the full richness of this language, one must recover the experience of the dark, star-filled skies of pre-industrial societies, in which astronomical metaphors carried an immediacy and explanatory power that has since faded.

Learn more about The Star-Spangled Republic at the University of Virginia Press website.

The Page 99 Test: American Zion.

--Marshal Zeringue