He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Between Worlds: John A. Broadus, the Southern Baptist Seminary, and the Prospects of the New South, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Between Worlds is also the opening page of chapter 6, the critical transition in the life of my subject. The Civil War has ended and Reconstruction has begun in John A. Broadus’s South Carolina. He has plummeted from his antebellum success and prosperity into poverty and humiliation. The southern institutions he labored to build—most notably the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—now teeter on the brink of collapse. This page features one of, if not the single most important moment of his life. As his fellow faculty members at the seminary consider shutting school down for good in the wake of Confederate defeat, Broadus makes a famous and well-documented vow: “Let us all quietly agree that the seminary may die, but we’ll die first.” He spends the rest of his life struggling to keep that commitment.Learn more about Between Worlds at the LSU Press website.
In fact, the Page 99 Test applies remarkably well to Between Worlds, because it falls exactly at the pivotal moment of John A. Broadus’s life and career. it is difficult for me to imagine another single page in the volume that so succinctly captures the crux of this story. Remarkable!
My book is the first critical biography of John A. Broadus, a highly influential Southern Baptist preacher, educator, and cultural influencer in the late nineteenth century. The book focuses on his unique ability to navigate “between worlds,” in order to keep alive the southern institutions, religious and otherwise, in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the pivotal moment documented on page 99, the rest of the book chronicles Broadus’s herculean efforts to recover his personal position and to re-establish the seminary and other southern institutions he loved in what to him in the strange new world of Reconstruction and Gilded Age America.
--Marshal Zeringue
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