and several other books on early American politics and culture. He is the coauthor (with Nancy Isenberg) of Madison and Jefferson and The Problem of Democracy. Burstein’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Salon.com He advised Ken Burns’ production “Thomas Jefferson,” and was featured on C-SPAN’s American Presidents Series and Booknotes, and numerous NPR programs. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Burstein applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, with the following results:
On page 99, as he is preparing his draft of the Declaration of Independence in June 1776, Jefferson is thinking of his text as a divorce petition, casting King George III as an abusive husband:Learn more about Being Thomas Jefferson at the Bloomsbury website.The divorce analogy makes sense for a number of reasons. In 1772, at the high point of his career as a practicing attorney, Jefferson took extensive notes in preparing the case of a client who wished to divorce his wife. At the time it was virtually unheard of for a husband or wife to succeed in a divorce suit as we understand it, even in cases of adultery.The rest of page 99 details attorney Jefferson’s objective in the 1772 suit, demonstrating his familiarity with legal precedent, while at the same time protecting the reputation of his client, a recently deceased physician who left no will, and whose wife had “refused his conjugal rights,” yet demanded the bulk of his estate.
It happens that the content on page 99 is a tempting snippet of the book’s themes. As “intimate history,” it speaks to Jefferson’s willingness to acknowledge the centrality of male-female relations in all facets of life. I can say that the Page 99 Test works for my book, both because it engages directly with my interpretation of the most celebrated piece of writing in American history, and it comports nicely with the book’s humanization of a historical figure whose loves and losses shaped the kind of politician he became. The two main threads I follow in this biography are fame and vulnerability, which are at the very least hinted at on page 99.
--Marshal Zeringue
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