Shannon applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Mission Manifest: American Evangelicals and Iran in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:
Mission Manifest offers a critical history of American evangelicals in Iran during the mid- twentieth century. These evangelicals, primarily associated with the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), lived and worked in pre-revolutionary Iran, especially Tehran, alongside other Americans and their Iranian friends and colleagues. The book contains seven chapters, most of which cover the period from the 1940s to the 1960s. Each chapter focuses on a particular manifestation of the American mission in Iran.Learn more about Mission Manifest at the Cornell University Press website.
Page 99 is in the middle of chapter 4 and is about the educational manifestation of mission. The page begins with a discussion of how the United Nations inspired the Presbyterian conception of international education at the Community School of Tehran. This was a coeducational, English- language, K-12 school in downtown Tehran that existed from 1935 to 1980. Page 99 provides a biographical portrait of Richard Irvine, the lead administrator of the school from 1951 to 1967, and it unpacks his model of international education, which he actualized at Community School. These Americans were never alone, as the page ends with a discussion of the international faculty, which continues in more detail on the following page.
Page 99 is, in many ways, a microcosm of the book because it demonstrates the ways in which Presbyterian evangelicals engaged with the modern world at brick-and-mortar institutions alongside their American and Iranian colleagues in downtown Tehran. Indeed, Community School occupied an important place in the educational landscape of Pahlavi Iran. For anyone interested in more, please check out the Community School Tehran collection on the Presbyterian Historical Society’s Pearl Digital Archive. Yet there are some missing pieces from page 99. The church is underplayed and the Iranian context could be more pronounced. Moreover, there is no discussion of U.S. foreign relations or the American colony in Iran that was, by the late 1970s, nearly 50,000-strong. These subjects are covered elsewhere in the book.
On the whole, if a reader of Mission Manifest applied the Hafez test – the practice of opening a book of Hafez’s poetry to a random page for insight into one’s future – and found themselves on page 99, they could hardly do better!
--Marshal Zeringue
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