Oscar Winberg's "Archie Bunker for President"

Oscar Winberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and the John Morton Center for North American Studies at the University of Turku.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics, and shared the following:

From page 99:

In the minds of many television viewers Carroll O’Connor was Archie Bunker, and so the campaign leaned into the conservative angle – intentionally blending the two personas. Media interest in celebrity and entertainment helped. “Archie Bunker,” the press reported, “is casting his vote for McGovern.” An Associated Press headline read “Archie Bunker Backs McGovern.” Associated Press political reporter Walter Mears, one of the most respected journalists on the campaign beat, even highlighted the support of Archie Bunker before that of the former vice president (and McGovern rival in the primaries) Hubert Humphrey. The coverage made it clear that the strategy of presenting O’Connor as a representative of working-class Queens, rather than another embodiment of Hollywood, was working.

In television advertisements for McGovern, O’Connor went even further than he had in Lindsay’s ads to present himself in character. Thus, he presented himself as a conservative man for McGovern, not as the lifelong liberal that he actually was. Outtakes from the recording reveal the importance of having the conservative Archie Bunker back McGovern. “Never mind,” O’Connor exclaimed in frustration in the middle of one of the takes when he forgot the most important line. “I got to get the conservative in.” Indeed, in one of the sixty-second ads he recorded, O’Connor described himself as conservative no less than three times, while repeatedly describing the Nixon administration as an example of radicalism.

This Page 99 Test sounded like such a fun and quirky experiment when I first heard about it, and I turned to page 99 in my own book with excitement. Turns out that page 99, part of a chapter titled “Archie Bunker on the Campaign Trail,” is, indeed, a rather good representation of the book.

First, it makes clear that Archie Bunker for President is a work of both media and political history. Second, it references one of my favorite archival finds – the television ads Carroll O’Connor recorded for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election (I spent over a year looking for these ads and in a leap of faith paid to digitize old reels in an archive without knowing what was actually on them – it paid off!). Third – and best of all – the page engages and argues a key point of my book: that entertainment television became a part of political life because politicians and the political press believed it mattered. On page 99 we see both politicians turning to the stars of the television show All in the Family and the media focusing on the star power of the character of Archie Bunker. This is a story driven by political interests.

Of course, one page alone cannot capture all aspects of Archie Bunker for President and the reader would not, based only on page 99, expect to find chapters on civil rights organizations, the women’s movement, or congressional censorship campaigns. Still, with references to other chapters and sections dealing with the campaigns of President Nixon and John Lindsay, I hope it leaves readers eager to find out more about the role of entertainment television in political life and, as the subtitle of my book suggests, how one television show remade American politics.

Visit Oscar Winberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua B. Freeman's "Garden Apartments"

Joshua B. Freeman is distinguished professor of history emeritus at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000; Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World; and Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II.

Freeman applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia, with the following results:

Page 99 of Garden Apartments describes two residential complexes built by the United States government during World War II. During the war, all civilian housing production was suspended, except for projects for war workers. For some of these, the government hired inventive, modernist architects, who during the postwar years would become architectural stars. Discussed on this page are Aluminum City Terrace, in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, for workers at a nearby aluminum plant (with a photograph of it), and the Centerline Defense Housing Project, outside of Detroit, designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen and their partner Robert Swanson, for workers at a nearby tank plant and naval armory (with photographs on the next page).

Page 99 does, and does not, give a good sense of this book as a whole. It examines what were in effect exceptions that illuminate the norm. Garden Apartments traces the origins of the two- and three-story apartment complexes, set on large landscaped sites, that are common across the United States, to early twentieth-century efforts to provide affordable housing to European workers and their families. In shows how, when brought to the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, such residential complexes generally were stripped of their most radical and innovative social and design features. During World War II, however, there was a moment when a convergence of progressive New Deal officials, left-leaning labor unions, and modernist architects led to a short burst of construction of brilliantly-designed, affordable, pathbreaking projects for ordinary working people, like the two described on page 99. The moment was short-lived. When, after the war, garden apartment construction resumed, with government assistance, on a mass scale, much more conventional, even banal, designs became near-universal. Garden Apartments recounts how these buildings nonetheless served their residents well. Many still do (as do the page 99 projects). Page 99 thus suggests mostly unrealized possibilities for a form of housing which, even when dumbed-down, represented a significant social achievement.

Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia is the first history of a widespread form of housing almost completely ignored by scholars and policymakers. It is simultaneously a political, architectural, and social history, with the text complimented by extensive illustrations. Written at a time of an intense crisis of housing affordability, it argues that we might learn something about how to address it by looking at our past.

Learn more about Garden Apartments at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Gorup's "The Counterrevolutionary Shadow"

Michael Gorup is assistant professor of politics at Ithaca College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Counterrevolutionary Shadow begins with a section break. The heading atop the page reads: “Abolition, Reparation, and the Politics of People-making.” What follows is the final substantive section of the book’s third chapter.

Chapter three traces a distinctive current of abolitionist political thought that emerged in the 19th century U.S., which I call “abolition as people-making.” Here is how I explain the political content of this current on page 99:

Abolition was not a negative demand that aimed only to eliminate the old world of slavery. It also expressed a desire to create a new world: one in which those who had been historically oppressed could be made a free and politically empowered people. This would necessarily entail social transformation at significant scale. The system of slavery could not be uprooted simply by granting legal independence to the formerly enslaved. The United States would remain, in its basic relations, a slave society, wherein one portion of the population (Blacks) continued to live at the mercy of another (whites).

The preceding parts of the chapter focus on the origins of this political vision in the life and work of the antebellum Black abolitionists David Walker and Hosea Easton. On page 99, readers find me arguing for two propositions: 1. Walker and Easton were early proponents of the demand for reparations for slavery, and 2. Their conception of reparations aspired to more than just repair. For them, reparations was just as much a project that aimed to create the conditions for a collective freedom to come as it was a response to freedoms long denied. On subsequent pages I will argue that this positive conception of reparations later resurfaced among abolitionists and Radical Republicans in the Reconstruction era who called for the confiscation of plantation lands and their redistribution to formerly enslaved people.

The central claim of my book is that racism is a distinctively democratic technology of counterrevolutionary politics. Unlike other traditions of counterrevolutionary politics, racism doesn’t reject the idea of popular rule. Instead, it sutures the contradiction between democracy and despotism by enclosing who can be said to belong to “the people.” Page 99 offers a succinct representation of one of the political visions that has emerged to challenge the politics of racialized enclosure. It thus offers readers a glimpse of a revolutionary, rather than counterrevolutionary, politics of peoplehood.

Learn more about The Counterrevolutionary Shadow at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ralph Pite's "Edward Thomas's Prose"

Ralph Pite is Professor of English at the University of Bristol.

Before moving to Bristol in 2007, he held a chair at Cardiff University. He completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge where he was Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College and Teaching Fellow at Corpus Christi. Pite was Director of Bristol's Institute for Advanced Study (2013-17). His research focusses on literature's contribution to addressing the environmental emergency, both contemporary poetry in the European languages and writing from the past. His new book, Edward Thomas's Prose: Truth, Mystery, and the Natural World, and his study of Frost are part of that inquiry. He is now developing a reading of Romantic period literature and water-based industrial development.

Pite applied the “Page 99 Test” to Edward Thomas's Prose and shared the following:

On page 99 you find the conclusion to my book’s discussion of Beautiful Wales, written by Thomas in 1905, followed by just the first few sentences introducing his next publication, The Heart of England.

My analysis of Beautiful Wales ends by looking at the book’s closing passage – a landscape set at night in a graveyard beside a river, which runs beside an unnamed Welsh town. (The setting is evidently based on Pontarddulais, which stands on the coast of South Wales between Swansea and Carmarthen). Thomas was making his living at the time through journalism, and he'd written about this graveyard in a review two years before. So, as elsewhere in the study, I compare Thomas’s writing in a book with an earlier newspaper article.

According to Beautiful Wales, the past does endure in the country’s landscapes – Welsh identity has not been erased by English power (whether industrial, cultural, or linguistic). Its presence is muted, however — and much more so than it appears to be in the review. Hence, the Welsh Revival, taking place when Thomas was writing, cannot straightforwardly bring the past back to life. The past is definitely there but it's not necessarily recoverable. In a sense, it resists appropriation. This perception and the perspective it leads to are, I suggest, the distinctive achievements of Beautiful Wales.

The Heart of England (I then go on to say) seeks the same discovery of the mysterious and elusive but genuine past that lies within the English countryside. England, though, is for Thomas a different proposition from Wales because the past you will find there, if you search truthfully, will be at odds with the image of stability and order which you are probably looking for – which the ‘Englishness’ of the time and its highly patriotic 'nature writing' were seeking to affirm.

Does page 99 give a reader a good sense of the book as a whole?

I’m not sure it’s the page I would choose when introducing a reader to the book because it builds on a run of examples from the preceding few pages. What I’m trying to say about Beautiful Wales might be hard to be sure of, in isolation and out of context. The page does, on the other hand, give a good flavour of the study : it shows that I’m interested in Thomas’s prose work (which is, to most readers, only marginal to his poetry) and that I’m making claims for its sophistication and subtlety. The page indicates too the chronological structure of the work – that I’m looking for continuity and development across Thomas’s career as a prose writer (which lasted very nearly twenty years, whereas he wrote poems for little more than twenty months). And, thirdly (most helpfully I think), the page brings to the fore Thomas’s loyalty to Wales.

Thomas was born in London, lived in southern England all his life, and he did not speak any Welsh. His reputation is very much as a writer of England and Englishness. Both Thomas’s parents were Welsh, however, and Thomas visited cousins in Pontarddulais many times. His tutor in Oxford was a significant figure in the Welsh Revival. Beautiful Wales is, to my mind, such a considerable achievement because Thomas may bring to the project both his knowledge and his love of the country. Furthermore, he looks to establish through his prose in the book a balance – and a relationship – between knowledge and love, between objective fact and subjective experience. Discriminating between good and bad versions of that relationship formed a central aim of his work as a literary critic; finding the best version of it became the task he set himself as a creative writer.

So, in these ways, page 99 does open the door to key interests and concerns in my book. And, as often with concluding paragraphs, the writing is more ambitious than elsewhere – something like a peroration. I would rather someone came across that first, rather than a passage of bread-and-butter, expository academic writing. More than anything, since this is the underlying aim of the whole enterprise, I hope readers who know of Thomas as a poet might come away from the page encouraged to look again at his prose. His writing in this mode is full of riches and interest — and especially now. Our relationship to the natural world, which needs to be based on both love and knowledge combined, is in danger of breaking down. Thomas's prose, focussed as it is on the natural world and humanity's place in it, can help us find ways to restore that connection.

Learn more about Edward Thomas's Prose at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen J. Ramos's "Folk Engineering"

Stephen J. Ramos is a professor of urbanism at the University of Georgia. His first book, Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography (2010) received wide acclaim for its contribution to infrastructure studies, and it continues to be an important reference for Gulf urban research.

Ramos applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism, with the following results:

Fortunately, page 99 of my book Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism provides a rich representative sample of its broader claims and concerns. The Southern regionalists were a group of social scientists at the University of North Carolina, who during the interwar years developed the concept of regionalism for the South, and regional planning as its operational practice, to navigate pressures for progress and recalcitrance. Page 99 finds us in the center of the action, beginning, “Myth in the South was nothing new.” The mythos of folk was central to regionalism going back to nineteenth-century European movements, and in the South the regionalists combined myth with social sciences and literature as construct for traditionalism. Page 99 continues: "The 'progressive evolutionism' of turn-of-the-century social sciences, with their faith in those sciences to improve society, was met in the New South with the countervailing force of traditionalism. All regionalists called for balance, but in the South, this balance between progressive and traditional culture and ways of thinking was the one the white elite needed to maintain. The contradiction between these two epistemological approaches is glaring: If the claims of modernity were based on progressive evolutionary assumptions about culture and thought, how best to balance them with Victorian and even earlier modes of traditionalism? How could a balance be struck between Old South and New South? Like William Faulker, Odum believed that the South needed time for its white society to 'go slow' in evolving toward the modern egalitarian cultural demands often viewed as imposed from the North. Against his training in the ameliorative organic social sciences of the early twentieth century, Odum struggled 'to articulate a kind of planning at cross-purposes to time.'”

Against this apologist, organic view of history at an evolutionary pace, I then quote James Baldwin’s 1956 response, after a lifetime of hearing this position, countering “this pleasant 'go slow' mythology with acerbic skepticism. In response to Faulkner’s assertion that 'emotional' white Southerners would move gradually away from segregation if left on their own time, Baldwin pointed out, 'The question left begging is what, in their history to date, affords any evidence that they have any desire, or capacity to do this. And it is, I suppose, impertinent to ask just what Negroes are supposed to do while the South works out what, in Faulkner’s rhetoric, becomes something very closely resembling a high and noble tragedy.'”

Learn more about Folk Engineering at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Aiello's "Return of the King"

Thomas Aiello is a professor of history and Africana studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey and Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947–1979.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Return of the King describes the racial state of play in Atlanta in January 1970, wherein a new administration was sworn into city government with more Black representation than ever before, but with court-mandated teacher desegregation mandates causing a furor among white students and parents, protests eagerly celebrated by Georgia’s governor, Lester Maddox. It was a city in transition, as white flight to suburban areas created Black majorities in the city, but the majority of money and power in Atlanta still remained with white leaders, many of whom were antagonistic to Black social and political gains.

The book itself is about Muhammad Ali’s return to boxing after a three-year forced exile for refusing his draft notice for the Vietnam conflict, and Muhammad Ali does not appear on page 99. Nor does boxing. Or sports more broadly. But the book is also a story of race in Atlanta and the conditions that created the possibility of Ali’s return to the ring in a Deep South city beset by racial contradictions. Page 99 goes a long way to demonstrating those contradictions at the beginning of a year that would see, by its conclusion, the revival of Ali’s boxing career. The racial contradictions depicted on page 99 weren’t new in January 1970. Atlanta had long cultivated an image of itself that stressed business-friendly racial moderation. It was, in the words of mayor William Hartsfield, “The City Too Busy to Hate.” When the civil rights movement began, it did not experience the kinds of televised violence that beset Birmingham, New Orleans, Selma, and other southern cities. But under the surface of that moderation was a seething mass of Black frustration at the limits placed on Black economic development, the continued segregation, and the social neglect of city officials. Ali’s return to boxing in Atlanta, facilitated by Black state senator Leroy Johnson, representing a district in the city, would be one of the first and most effective uses of Black power, a channeling of that anger into a legitimately successful venture that would have an outsized and indelible influence on the city and its national and international reputation. And the efforts of Black Atlanta to make the fight happen would come despite attempts to thwart them by segregationist governor Lester Maddox, who was, back in January 1970, celebrating white students for protesting against teacher integration in public schools.

In that sense, even without an appearance by Ali himself, page 99 of Return of the King does demonstrate much of what the book is about—racial transition in the Deep South’s most important city at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s.

Visit Thomas Aiello's website.

The Page 99 Test: Jim Crow's Last Stand.

The Page 99 Test: Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration.

--Marshal Zeringue

Antwain K. Hunter's "A Precarious Balance"

Antwain K. Hunter is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865, and shared the following:

Page ninety-nine of A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865 features an image and consequently, has limited text. The image, courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, is Alfred Waud’s 1871 sketch of “A Snipe Shooter.” This image, which is also used on the book’s cover, depicts a Black man hunting in a marsh, gun at the ready. The text on that page reads:

The food that Major acquired for his fellow laborers was also important to him for a more personal reason. It allowed him to assume the “patriarchal mantle of provider,v and it thereby affirmed his manhood, which both his enslaver and the broader institution of slavery had otherwise deeply circumscribed. The Woods’s enslaver had sold Major’s first wife away from the plantation. It is not clear where she was sold to, but she seems to have been removed from the area, perhaps making Major part of one of the over 300,000 interstate sales…

Readers who opened straight to page ninety-nine would get a glimpse of what my book is about. While there is a limited amount of text, readers would see some important themes around firearms, manhood, and race. This short section is part of my third chapter, “Armed Labor,” which highlights how free and enslaved Black people in the antebellum era used firearms in a number of labor applications. The image which dominates this page shows the quotidian nature of Black Southerners’ gun use. While rebellion and resistance are an important part of this story, free and enslaved Black people labored with their weapons, both with or without their enslavers’ or the state’s permission. This chapter explores how some enslaved men were able to provide food for their communities via hunting, which thereby bolstered their masculinity. While tangential to my book, page ninety-nine also references the interstate slave trade, which wrought havoc on enslaved Black families.

The Page 99 Test works... sort of. While it illuminates an interesting aspect of the book, my larger arguments are about how free and enslaved Black people used firearms for labor—feeding themselves and their families, protecting crops and livestock, and defending their communities from threats. Still, many white people saw firearms as yet another tool through which they could exploit Black labor. As a result, the state legislature’s laws permitted enslavers to arm their laborers from the colonial era through to Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, though some white people ignored the law or used their armed slaves for illegal purposes. Unsurprisingly, many white people were frightened at the prospect of gun-totting enslaved people. Some of their concerns were real but others were merely the anxieties of white people living in a racialized slave society. Enslaved Black folks acquired their weapons from a number of sources, ranging from their enslavers to an illegal arms trade, and were able to push back against enslavement’s constricting grasp and make better lives for themselves and their families. Firearms hold an incredibly complicated place on our current sociopolitical landscape, but our nation’s relationship with them across time is often misunderstood or intentionally mischaracterized. We should all learn more about it!

Learn more about A Precarious Balance at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick J. Doyle's "Carolinian Crucible"

Patrick J. Doyle teaches US History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research has been published in the Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of Social History, and Civil War History.

Doyle applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Carolinian Crucible: Reforging Class, Family, and Nation in Confederate South Carolina, with the following results:

If one were to open up Carolinian Crucible: Reforging Class, Family, and Nation in Confederate South Carolina on page 99, they would find themselves on the final page of Chapter 3, which deals with conscription and its consequences. Although only half a page of text, I think it would give the reader a good idea of the book and its wider claims. The page picks up my point that conscription and its operation in South Carolina reveal much about the state’s society and its responses to the demands of the Confederate war effort; in particular, it demonstrates how certain class-based privileges linked to conscription generated frustration among lower-class whites but did not foster a fundamental rejection of the Confederate cause. As I write,

Tensions of course existed, and one can find gripes about “big men” during the war. The critical point, though, is that conscription was not popularly interpreted as the rich shirking their duty while callously forcing the poor into the military. The many sons of wealthy enslavers in the armies of the South, the efforts of the Confederate government to correct defects or areas of abuse within its conscription legislation, and the identification of most South Carolinian whites with key tenets of Confederate nationalism all helped ensure that momentary frustrations never coalesced into a more tangible and sustained opposition to the central government.

While page 99 of the book would give a browser a good sense of my wider takes on class, nationalism, and Confederate loyalty in the Palmetto State, the experiment would be less effective in other respects. Seeing as it brings you to the concluding paragraph of a chapter, it doesn’t meaningfully introduce the reader to the rich material the book has regarding the lived experiences of lower-class whites in the Civil War South. Where possible, I strive to foreground the perspectives and lives of this class in South Carolina, often through close consideration of their correspondence, but page 99 only reveals the outcomes of this analysis rather than the more quotidian insights and intimate stories pertaining to common white folk that can be found throughout the book. Put another way, jumping to page 99 of Carolinian Crucible is rather like looking over the final calculations of a math student but not their intricate workings. Nonetheless, the Page 99 Test certainly seems like a useful shortcut for glimpsing a book’s core claims.

Learn more about Carolinian Crucible at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Pooley's "Discovering the Okapi"

Simon Pooley is the Lambert Reader in Human-Wildlife Coexistence at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the coeditor of Histories of Bioinvasions in the Mediterranean and the author of Burning Table Mountain: An Environmental History of Fire on the Cape Peninsula.

Pooley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Discovering the Okapi: Western Science, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Search for a Rainforest Enigma, and reported the following:

On page 99, I explain how in 1902, the German Egyptologist Alfred Wiedemann created the myth that Ancient Egyptians depicted the okapi (discovered in 1901), identifying it with the god Set (the identity of this god’s sacred animal was disputed). Wiedemann claimed okapi had once inhabited the Nile valley. This was perhaps an unsurprising claim considering that Egyptology was in vogue in Europe at this time. In the previous page I note that both Bible scholars and eugenicists sought evidence for their stories and theories in the evidence being unearthed by Egyptologists in this period.

On page 99, I also discuss the earliest of several rebuttals of this idea that the okapi is depicted in Ancient Egyptian art. One rebuttal is based on habitat: the okapi is a rainforest species (never found in the Nile Valley) and Set was associated with the desert. Another argument notes that the depicted okapi are missing key anatomical features (no horns; Set is male). This seems surprising given the Ancient Egyptians’ incredibly lifelike depictions of the region’s fauna.

Ford Madox Ford’s test doesn’t reveal the contents or intentions of my book particularly well. The chapter it comes from, “Okapis in African Art, Ancient and Modern”, is somewhat of an outlier in a book focused more on Western scientific and popular representations (and misrepresentations) of the okapi, and the peoples who first taught them about this mysterious rainforest giraffid – as well as the current state of okapi knowledge, keeping and conservation.

The chapter touches on cryptozoology, the international society of which adopted the okapi as its emblem. Supposedly, the discovery of the okapi was a vindication of the cryptozoologists’ method: the discovery of myths about fantastical animals which lead to the discovery of an actual undiscovered species. Harry Johnston, in this interpretation, discovered the okapi based on ‘parataxa’ (fragmentary evidence, physical or verbal), including travellers’ tales of a rainforest unicorn, Mbuti peoples’ report of a rainforest equid, and bandoliers of stripy okapi skin. Harry however sought more evidence, leading to the identification and description of the okapi, dispensing with unicorn myths. The okapi is of course wondrous and strange enough in real life, without association with unicorns, or Ancient Egyptian gods (regrettably, this latter story persists).

This episode chimes with my larger theme on the entanglement of various kinds of knowledge in the discovery of species for Western science, notably African indigenous knowledge about okapi.

Learn more about Discovering the Okapi at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Larsen's "The Fires of Moloch"

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College and an Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity at Edinburgh University. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls College, Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford. Larsen's books include The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (2014) and John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life (2018), and he has edited 14 volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Christmas (2020). He is also the president of the American Society of Church History.

Larsen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One, and shared the following:

Page 99 is in a chapter titled, “The Moral Theologian,” which is a biographical study of Kenneth Kirk, who, after serving as a military chaplain in World War One, went on to become a professor of Moral Theology at Oxford University, and then bishop of Oxford. This page is presenting his Anglo-Catholicism, that is, his desire for the Church of England not to be thought of as Protestant, but rather to be closer to Roman Catholicism in its beliefs and practices. The first half of the page focuses on Kirk’s enthusiasm for orders of Anglican nuns and monks. The second half of the page opens a new section. It presents Kirk’s opposition to theological liberals in the Church, and his unyielding, zero-tolerance stance on divorce.

I don’t think this page either strongly supports or contradicts the Page 99 Test. It is less lively than a lot of the book, and so not the page I would have chosen. Still, it does reveal what much of the book is doing, which is giving the life stories of priests who served as military chaplains in the First World War. One sentence, which passes the test well because it keeps war and the military in view (as the book hopes to do throughout) is: “The bishop of Oxford observed that he thought of the Religious communities as the ‘commandos’ of the Church.” It is certainly a revealing choice to tell a group of cloistered, contemplative, elderly nuns that they should think of themselves as a crack military unit. The connection of the issue of divorce to war is explained elsewhere, “Both world wars tempted people into ill-advised marriages and created strains which led to divorce.” The theme of divorce continues in the next chapter which, in a playful interaction with the previous chapter, is titled, “The Immoral Dean.” It is about a prominent Anglican priest whose marriage broke down because of his serial adultery.

Learn more about The Fires of Moloch at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life.

--Marshal Zeringue