(1997) and Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762-1855 (2013).
Martin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars: One Family's Odyssey, 1768-1870, and reported the following:
Page 99 of From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars drops us into the middle of a family drama. In 1798, in the German town of Kassel, Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch's marriage suddenly collapse. Why did Rosenstrauch's wife walk out on him? Page 99 explores what the fatal dispute could have been about: Money? Religion? His position as an outsider in Kassel? The low esteem in which his profession--he was a theater actor--was held by society?Learn more about From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 gives you an excellent sense of the book as a whole. This is a microhistory, that is, it uses something small as a lens for examining something big. The big thing is the Age of Revolution, from the late 18th to the mid-19th century, when the modern world came into being. The small thing is the colorful life of Rosenstrauch (1768-1835), an obscure but fascinating figure no one has ever heard of before.
Rosenstrauch was a lifelong migrant and seeker, and this makes him a microcosm of the Age of Revolution. He believed in the Enlightenment, then turned to religion. He was caught up in the Napoleonic Wars. Originally a Catholic barber-surgeon apprentice from Prussia, he ran away from home as a boy, eloped with a young woman, became an actor in Germany, a Freemason in Holland, a merchant in Russia, and finally a Lutheran pastor in Ukraine. Page 99 comes at a pivotal moment, because the breakdown of his marriage set in motion the series of events that led him to abandon Germany, Catholicism, and the theater, and make a new life for himself in Russia.
The point of the book is what one life can reveal about an era. The book has three leitmotifs. First, what was the world in which Rosenstrauch lived? To answer that question, I explore, for example, how German theater operated, how Enlightenment Europeans thought about love, or what it meant to take a carriage through the Ukrainian steppe.
Second, how did this world look to people at the time? Take, for instance, the moment when he moved to Russia: What might he have heard or read about the country? What challenges did such a trip entail? How did his own past memories affect his ideas about the future? In a word, what do we learn if we set aside our retrospective omniscience and put ourselves in Rosenstrauch’s shoes?
Finally, what can we actually know about a long-dead figure like Rosenstrauch? A lot of evidence survives for some aspects of his life, but for others—Who murdered his son? Why does his name appear in a letter from the Russian tsar? Was Rosenstrauch in fact his real name?—we can only speculate. A history like this, as the discussion of his marriage on page 99 shows, has much in common with the work of a detective.
--Marshal Zeringue
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