Rivka Weinberg's "The Meaning of It All"

Rivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of The Risk of A Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible. Weinberg specializes in ethical and metaphysical issues regarding procreation, birth, death, and meaning.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time, and reported the following:

In a book as ambitious as The Meaning of it All, which is a book that explains what Ultimate Meaning is (it's the point of leading a life at all), what Everyday Meaning is (it's the meaning in our everyday lives), what Cosmic Meaning is (it's the meaning of our role in the cosmos) and how death and time relate to meaning (death much less than has been claimed, time much more than has been noted), page 99 turns out to be a page on which a narrow point is made. It is therefore not the best sample page if you are looking for a page that gives you a good idea of the book, since this book addresses big, broad, deep, and important matters. But page 99 will suffice to demonstrate that the claims made in the book are well argued, with specific premises that lead to their conclusions, and that even the narrower points are of interest.

Page 99 of The Meaning of It All addresses the view that significance – how much something matters – is only relative to other things. On this view, our cosmic significance would be greater if we were the only intelligent beings in the universe and lesser if we weren't since significance is relative: "the broken knuckle on your finger is insignificant when you've also been shot in the face" (that's from page 98). So we should hope that we are the only intelligent beings in the cosmos because that would make us more cosmically significant.

I dispute this on page 99:

This perspective neglects intrinsic significance, which does not depend on how many things there are that can be considered similar to you. Although there are billions of people in the world, Kahane is wrong to conclude that we are each, therefore, “terrestrially insignificant” because significance— how much something matters— has both an intrinsic and a relative component. There’s no shortage of people in the world, “plenty of fish in the sea,” yet each person matters. Each person, like Walt Whitman, “contain[s] multitudes”; each person, a world, because each person has unique, untransferable, unfungible, and intrinsic value. You can’t kill a person and claim you did something insignificant because there are billions of other people. There is an intrinsic kind of significance, just as there is an intrinsic kind of value because how much something matters cannot be divorced from its value. Generally, the more valuable something is, the more significant it is: the more it matters if you lose it, destroy it, ignore it, create it, nurture it, etc. Intrinsic significance doesn’t disappear no matter how widely you pan out— even as far out as the entire cosmos—because it is inherent in the thing itself. Therefore, since we are intrinsically significant, we are significant wherever you find us. In this way, we have cosmic significance because we are significant in and of ourselves, and therefore significant anywhere, including the cosmos within which we reside. Does this make our lives more Cosmically Meaningful? I don’t think so because it doesn’t change how significant we are. It just reflects a fact about where that significance is located: in the cosmos.
[footnotes omitted]

This discussion tells us that even though we are intrinsically cosmically significant, that doesn't add a lot of meaning to our lives because it doesn't seem very different from our earthly significance, so what does it add, really?

And this challenge runs throughout the book's chapter on Cosmic Meaning. If we assume all the miracles in the world, what kind of meaning would that give us? How meaningful would it be to commune with god in the afterlife or enjoy heavenly bliss? Probably not very meaningful because, think about it: heavenly bliss sounds more like a drug trip than a meaningful experience, and communing with god probably gets old too. Why? How? Well, for that, you'll have to read the other 176 pages.

Visit Rivka Weinberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacques Berlinerblau's "Can We Laugh at That?"

Jacques Berlinerblau, Rabbi Harold White Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, is author of The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography and How to Be Secular. His writing appears in The Washington Post, MSNBC, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.

Berlinerblau applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Can We Laugh at That?: Comedy in a Conflicted Age, with the following results:

If you opened to page 99–first of all, thank you, I really appreciate your interest–you’d be in the thick of a discussion about the French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala. What a fascinating and unsettling character he is! For more than two decades running he has been making jokes about Jews and the Holocaust. Page 99 reviews some of that material.

Page 99 would give you some indication of what this book is about, namely jokes that set the world on fire. But it would not really give you a sense of the scope, depth, and dare I say, majesty, of the arguments contained within We Can’t Laugh at That: Comedy in Conflicted Age. Sorry Ford Madox Ford (OMG is that really his name?) but your test just kinda sux. What my 99th page doesn’t reveal is the word-and-thought-defying complexity of the free speech tensions that comedy ignites in the digital age. FMF, my thesis is that some tectonic shift is taking place in the domain of free speech and for whatever reasons comedy calls attention to that shift (and exacerbates all of its attendant tensions).

This is a book about how jokes lead to outrage, cancellation, deportation, mass violence and even geopolitical conflict. Whether it’s Dave Chappelle lighting up the trans community, Vir Das denouncing India’s ruling BJP party, or Zimbabwean comedian Samantha Kureya mocking the brutality of her government, the responses to such quips are fast, digital and furious. They also raise some really difficult questions about free speech and how much of it we can allow in a digitally interconnected world where some people don’t “get” the joke

Visit Jacques Berlinerblau's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Kate Nelson's "The Westerners"

Born and raised in Colorado, Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian now based in Boston, Massachusetts. She has written about US western history, the Civil War, and American culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, Time, and Smithsonian Magazine. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Saving Yellowstone; The Three-Cornered War, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Ruin Nation; and Trembling Earth.

Nelson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier puts readers on the ground in Santa Fe in the chaotic winter of 1846-47. The U.S. Army had arrived in this trading center in northern Mexico a few months before, and General Stephen Watts Kearny had issued a proclamation annexing the territory of Nuevo México on behalf of the U.S. government. Kearny’s Army of the West was a component in the American invasion of Mexico, and the events I describe on page 99 reveal that Nuevomexicanos did not passively accept the U.S. Army’s occupation.

On page 99, in December 1846, one of The Westerners’ protagonists—a Mexican citizen named María Gertrudis Barceló—hears rumors that an uprising against the U.S. Army will take place on Christmas night. The revolt will begin in the town of Taos, seventy miles north of Santa Fe. Barceló, who is the wealthiest woman in Nuevo México, had already made her choice in the conflict with the United States. A keen observer of geopolitics, she had welcomed General Kearny and his officers to her home and her gambling saloon when they arrived. In mid-December, Barceló passes along the information about the uprising to the Army’s officials, and they make arrests.

New Mexico’s newly appointed American governor, the fur trader and entrepreneur Charles Bent, believes that these arrests mean that the revolt is over before it even started. Despite warnings that Taos residents resent Bent’s presumptive authority over them, Bent travels there to see his wife and children early in the new year. On January 19, 1847, rebels surround his house, and Bent goes out on the porch to try to talk them down while Ignacia and the children seek safety next door.

Browsers will have to turn the page to find out what happens next.

***
Anyone who opens The Westerners to page 99 and starts reading there would likely be confused. Because the book is a narrative history, they will be immersed in these scenes immediately, without much context or argumentative signposting to guide them. Sort of like dropping into a novel mid-chapter.

However, this page does exemplify my approach to U.S. western history throughout the entire book. I put readers on the ground with the book’s protagonists and give them a way to see and understand events they thought they knew well (like the Mexican-American War) from a vantage point that is likely new to them.

Just by reading page 99 of The Westerners, they will understand that this American war of conquest was contested, despite the U.S. Army reports that suggest the contrary.

They will understand this moment as a struggle for control over Santa Fe, a city whose position at the intersection of the Santa Fe Trail to the east and the Chihuahua Trail to the south made it a vital center of economic and political power in the American West in the 1840s.

And given that this page is part of a larger chapter that focuses on Gertrudis Barceló’s experience of the invasion and occupation of her city, they will get a sense of the important role she played as a cultural broker during a volatile and violent time in Santa Fe’s history.

This is one of the themes of the book: Westerners in the nineteenth century tended to be adaptable, and they used their extensive community networks to survive and often thrive during a volatile time in American history.

Visit Megan Kate Nelson's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Three-Cornered War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charlotte Brooks's "The Moys of New York and Shanghai"

Charlotte Brooks is a historian and author who has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American and Chinese diaspora history. Originally from California, she graduated from Yale and worked in mainland China and Hong Kong before earning a PhD from Northwestern University. She is a professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a proud New Yorker.

Brooks applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution describes the lives of the two New York-based Moy siblings, Kay and Helen, during the mid-Depression years. Kay was married to Ming Tai Chin, whose Jazz Age restaurant empire had collapsed in 1932, so the Chins were suddenly struggling to support their seven children. Helen, her husband George, and their young daughter were more fortunate, yet the stress of George’s job as the only Chinese American civil engineer at a white firm was beginning to show.

The Page 99 Test does not really offer a full sense of the book. The Moys of New York and Shanghai is a biography of the six Moy siblings and their spouses, but I center three of the couples—Kay and Ming Tai, Ernest Moy and his wife Ruth Koesun Moy, and Alice Moy Lee and her husband Alfred Lee—and tell most of the story through them. So looking at page 99 gives a reader perhaps a one-third view, mainly of the domestic lives and career struggles of the New York-based siblings. The war and revolution of the title more directly shaped the lives of the other two featured couples, who spent much of this period in China.

What I hope readers see on every page are people who are familiar and relatable. Of course, the Moys’ lives in many ways were extraordinary—family members included a revolutionary, an Axis broadcaster, a wartime Rosie the Riveter, an engineer who helped put the first man on the moon, and two Medal of Freedom winners—yet all of the siblings and their spouses were complex, flawed, and deeply human.

Follow Charlotte Brooks on Instagram.

The Page 99 Test: Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eli Hirsch's "Selves in Doubt"

Eli Hirsch is Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University. He has published widely on metaphysics and epistemology. His books include Quantifier Variance and Realism, Radical Skepticism and the Shadow of Doubt, and Talmudic Philosophies.

Hirsch applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Selves in Doubt, with the following results:

On page 99 of my book, I argue that intuitively strange languages that are often criticized on pragmatic or theoretical grounds as being in some sense “bad,” ought rather to be criticized as “impossible,” that is, impossible as a primary language in terms of which people think. An example is a language containing the words “cubond” and “rindical” that refer, respectively, to anything that is either cubical or round and anything that is either round or cylindrical. I say on page 99:

It seems to me that insofar as I can get myself to accept the possibility of people actually thinking in terms of [such a language], I have no definite intuitive feeling that there is anything bad about this. If they are cognitively disposed to think, ‘A cubound object must have twelve edges if it is not rindical,” which is a true statement about cubes, what is bad about that?

I’m afraid the Page 99 Test does not work for my book. That page is in a chapter that is largely ancillary to the main topics in the book. The book is primarily about selves, first, about first-person (“de se”) attitudes towards oneself and then, about knowledge of other selves. A main conclusion of the first part is that a language suitable for rational beings must contain the first-person pronoun. Chapter 4, containing page 99, is essentially a kind of postscript to that main conclusion, arguing against more familiar claims in the literature about rational constraints on languages that have nothing to do with the first-person pronoun.

As I just noted, the first part of the book is about first-person attitudes, and the later part is about knowledge of other selves. In the later part, chapter 6 has been found by readers to be especially provocative. I argue in this chapter that it is a priori metaphysically impossible to be “sane” – to be a “genuine self” – if one is not certain of the existence of other selves. This claim becomes even more provocative and perplexing when I argue in the following chapter in favor of traditional skeptical arguments that raise doubts about the existence of other selves. How all of this can coherently work together is something I try to explain in the final chapter.

Learn more about Selves in Doubt at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Atilla Hallsby's "Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie"

Atilla Hallsby is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of Reading Rhetorical Theory: Speech, Representation, and Power.

Hallsby applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie, readers will find a discussion of the secret scandal focused on the case of Valerie Plame Wilson, whose secret identity was exposed during (and by) the George W. Bush administration. The case is broken up chronologically and organized according to three rhetorical tropes: repetition, caesura, and synecdoche. Page 99 is the end of the section on caesura and the start of the section on synecdoche.

Caesura is a trope of missingness, hiddenness, or absence. Valerie Plame Wilson, a former CIA agent whose identity was leaked by members of the Bush administration, embodies the caesura because, in her congressional testimony before a 2007 House Oversight and Reform Committee, she describes herself “as a lost node in a life-giving, life-taking network of spies and technicians.” The significance of her status as caesura is that she signaled an emerging “absence of separation between America's national security state and its private, political interests.”

Synecdoche is a trope of substitution, specifically, the substitution of one ‘whole’ of reality for another. The focus of this section is George W. Bush’s folksy, but also error-riddled, speech. “During the 2000 election, Bush’s campaign marketed him as a likable, trustworthy, and down-to-earth candidate: a straight shooter who couldn’t mislead the public, because he tripped over his words and couldn’t help but say what he meant. Following several years of the war on terror, perceptions of Bush began to change, even among Republican loyalists.” Speech was the part around which perceptions of Bush's whole presidency were rearranged, substituting his folksy image with that of deliberately opaque war monger.

Like synecdoche, page 99 is a part that frames the book’s whole in a partial -- albeit useful -- way. It is partial because the Plame scandal is only one example among many that illustrate how political rhetoric in the United States has become supersaturated with the secret’s routine, recurring forms. It is useful because it clearly centers rhetoric through the language of trope and because the page resonates with events that are fresh in U.S. public memory as of February-March 2026. Readers may find “the absence of separation between America's national security state and its private, political interests” timely, to say nothing of the refashioning of the president’s image around signifiers that have been twisted and reconfigured by the prurient ambitions of American imperialists and the incumbent U.S. president.

Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie tells two stories. The first, told in chapters 1-2, concerns the epistemic, historical, and rhetorical precedents for the secret’s prolonged crises. The second story, told in chapters 3-6, features the scandal, dog whistle, leaker, and detective. Beyond the reference to John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, these chapters lend the title a performative twist: The scandal is associated with sovereign power, the settler with popular detective fiction, the leaker with the sexualization of national security state vulnerabilities, and the lie with the racist dogwhistle. Beginning with George W. Bush and ending with Joseph R. Biden, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie is prelude to a political present in which ‘the people’ are constantly reminded of what they do not – or cannot – know.

Visit Atilla Hallsby's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Engel's "American Kindergarten"

Susan Engel is the Class of 1959 Director of the Program in Teaching and a senior lecturer in psychology at Williams College. She is the author of The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (Not Money) Would Transform Our Schools, The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood, and The Intellectual Lives of Children.

Engel applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, American Kindergarten: Dispatches from the First Year of School, and reported the following:

Page 99 plants you right in the middle of one particular classroom in Tennessee. A little girl named Destiny is struggling to figure out what she is supposed to do, and she is struggling to follow the rules. She is a haunting little girl, in a somewhat haunting situation. By the end of the page, there’s a glimmer of hope for her.

More broadly I think page 99 offers a feel for what it’s like to read the whole book, which tells the story of specific students and their teachers, figuring things out together in their classrooms.The passage about Destiny gives you a good sense of how the book is put together, and what the book is about: stories about five year olds, their teachers, and the schools in which they all spend their days. However, that particular description is heart wrenching. Many other parts of the book are uplifting, funny, or simply offer you a close-up look at the world of kindergarten. Some sections of the book describe developmental research that challenges what teachers are doing.

I embarked on this project with what felt to me like an urgent question: after 45 years of developmental research, teaching children, working with teachers, writing about schools, and as a mother and grandmother, what would I think if I travelled around the country and took stock of our schools? What would I find that was the same everywhere, and what kinds of differences would I see? I had a hunch that the popular narratives about how terrible our education system were wrong, and was equally dissatisfied with the too-granular view of schools one gets from reading education research. I needed to see for myself. I’m so glad I stuck with it. I learned more from this project than almost any other research I’ve undertaken. I discovered what really seems to make the difference between classrooms where children flourish and classrooms where kids and teachers seem to be dragging their way through the day, and it wasn’t what I expected. The visits gave me a chance to see where developmental science shines a light on what is happening, and where we have allowed the research and our school practices to rumble along on totally separate tracks. Page 99 hints at all of that, so I guess the test is pretty good.

Learn more about American Kindergarten at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Japonica Brown-Saracino's "The Death and Life of Gentrification"

Japonica Brown-Saracino is a regular commentator for major news organizations such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, and is the award-winning author of A Neighborhood that Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity and How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities. She is professor of sociology and women’s, gender, and sexualities studies at Boston University, where she serves as faculty fellow at the Initiative on Cities.

Brown-Saracino applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea, with the following results:

Talk of gentrification abounds. References to gentrification appear in television series, social media posts, novels, and art. But the word doesn’t just evoke brick-and-mortar gentrification anymore. People reference the “gentrification” of donuts, collard greens, and even our own selves. Gentrification is a tool many rely on to signal transformations far afield from urban redevelopment, particularly those associated with appropriation and diminishing community and “authenticity.” Above all else, gentrification communicates loss.

But even as gentrification works to mark and mourn certain transformations, it doesn’t always help us speak directly about them. Sometimes, relying on gentrification as a shorthand prevents us from directly addressing precisely that which we hope the term gestures to, serving as a faulty metonym for what really troubles us. This can be true even when one hopes that engagement with gentrification will generate resistance to urban upscaling. This dissonance emerges, in part, from the fact that gentrification evokes such general feelings of loss that it can gesture to issues well beyond brick-and-mortar gentrification.

Like much of The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea, page 99 explores what gentrification means and how it works for what the sociologist Wendy Griswold calls “cultural producers.” While much of the book examines novels, newspaper articles, academic texts, and activists’ narratives, page 99 departs from that trend by featuring the work of an artist. In addition, page 99 is distinctive in its attention to a work that aims to evoke brick-and-mortar gentrification, while also using the process a metonym for a broader set of losses. This stands in contrast to those who rely on gentrification purely as a metaphor, such as when we quip about the gentrification of tattoos or beer.

Specifically, page 99 engages an incredibly evocative sculpture, made by the artist Pat Falco, which the artist displayed in Boston’s upscale Seaport neighborhood in 2019. The sculpture, entitled Mock, was presented as a mockup of Boston’s most iconic housing form: the triple decker. Throughout the 20th century, the triple decker provided affordable housing for many working-class Bostonians; the form is particularly associated with White immigrant and ethnic populations. In the triple decker that Mock presents, colorful wallpaper dominates the walls, with frames around statements such as, “here lies the body of democratic architecture,” “a nod to our colonial future,” and “the illusion of a single family home.” Another image depicts a photo of clothes on the line behind a triple decker. Mock’s warm and cozy interior stands in stark contrast to neaby steel and glass towers.

Via Mock, Falco meant to contrast the humble triple decker with the Seaport’s luxury housing. Mock asks why recent development so often serves the wealthy, and why we’ve let working class housing disappear. Mock is meant to offer criticaon brick-and-mortar gentrification.

However, I ask readers to consider the messages we unintentionally communicate when we evoke gentrification. Mock is no exception. It communicates feeling, including connection to home, place, and family – and the fragility of that connection. More than anything, it communicates loss. However, by situating Mock in a triple-decker that harkens to the first part of the 20th century, before gentrification ascended, it conjures nostalgia for neighborhood groups that dispersed in the mid-20th century, before brick-and-mortar gentrification took root. Many of those who once assembled in the rooms Mock presents left Boston due to suburbanization, White flight, and upward mobility. While Falco aims to underline the consequences of gentrification for today’s working-class Bostonians, most of whom are demographically distinct from those who populated triple-deckers in the period Mock commemorates, by gesturing to the distant past, he evokes nostalgia for a Boston that changed before literal gentrification. In this sense, Mock gestures to the loss of community, but the sculpture references a time when many experienced losses because of mobility, rather than gentrification.

Page 99 instructs that sometimes, even when we aim to talk about brick-and-mortagentrification, we end up gesturing to other issues. This is, in part, because gentrification has come to evoke more feeling than action. Today, gentrification is so evocative of loss that it conjures a general loss, rather than loss specific to gentrification. My book calls for critical reflection on what we really evoke when we call on gentrification as a symbol.

Learn more about The Death and Life of Gentrification at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Neighborhood That Never Changes.

The Page 99 Test: How Places Make Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Igler' "All Species of Knowledge"

David Igler is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His books include The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (2013), which won the Sally and Ken Owens Award of the Western History Association and the John Lyman Book Award for U.S. Maritime History of the North American Society for Oceanic History, and Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920.

Igler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, All Species of Knowledge: A Voyage of Discovery, Failure, and Natural History in the Pacific Ocean, and shared the following:

The Page 99 Test works exceedingly well for my new book All Species of Knowledge. The page examines a lithograph by the voyage artist Ludwig Choris and also the way the expedition’s personnel served a strong critique of the Russian imperial project in the North Pacific. The Rurik expedition sought to find a Northwest Passage in the years 1815-1818, but it failed in this mission in the same manner as every previous attempt to locate a passage. The voyage naturalists and the artist turned failure into great success with their own production of natural history and visual ethnography once they returned to Europe. Much of the scientific knowledge they gather derived from their interactions and communications with Indigenous people.

The artist Choris was central to this success, and his volume of lithographs Voyage Pittoresque (1822) created an entirely new genre of visual expeditionary accounts. Page 99 delves into one of these lithographs: an image of a richly decorated visor used by an Aleut sea otter hunter. These decorations show how Aleut hunters encircled their prey on the water, and used spears to attack an individual otter. Surrounding this image of the hunt are depictions of whales and other sea life. Therefore, the Aleut visor itself tells a story of the hunt, and Choris’s lithograph translates this story for his European audience.

Page 99 connects this ethnographic interpretation of the visor to a larger goal of the Rurik’s naturalists. They sought to acquire knowledge from Indigenous groups because they found this knowledge valuable. At the same time, they were largely repulsed by the Russian colonial project in the North Pacific, which had severely destabilized Aleut and other Indigenous communities in the previous decades. Their private diaries and published accounts document their critique of the Russians, despite the fact they sailed on a Russian ship. Page 99 oddly, even eerily, reflects the book in that it showcases the most important archival material (a telling lithograph by the artist) and one of the key arguments regarding discovery, failure, and the ongoing work of colonialism in the Pacific world.

Learn more about All Species of Knowledge at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Great Ocean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Avery Sutton's "Chosen Land"

Matthew Avery Sutton is the Claudius O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor and department chair in history at Washington State University. He is the author of several books on the history of American Christianity, including Double Crossed and American Apocalypse, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Pullman, Washington.

Sutton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test poses a fun and unique challenge for assessing a 650-page book. It might make more sense to look at pages 99, and also 199, and 299, but the rules are the rules!

Page 99 focuses on the life and work of Franciscan priest Junípero Serra and the creation of the California mission system. Convinced he would fulfill prophecies of mass Indigenous conversion, Serra turned north after failures in Baja and helped plan a new network of missions in Alta California, home to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people already exposed to European disease. He stripped resources from southern missions to supply the new effort and celebrated early baptisms—often of sick children—as signs of divine promise, even as missionaries used aid to draw Native communities into the system. The passage also captures Serra’s extreme penitenial piety. During a sermon, he scourged himself so violently that a man imitated him and died in front of the crowd.

The larger purpose of the book is to explain why the United States looks so different from its peer nations when it comes to religion. Christianity has profoundly shaped American education, politics, economics, popular culture, and foreign policy. I argue that a godless Constitution and a First Amendment that guaranteed religious freedom did not weaken religion but supercharged it. Disestablisent encouraged religious leaders to become entrepreneurs, master new communicatin technologies, and compete aggressively for influence and authority.

The book traces 500 years of competing Christian visions and efforts to apply those visions to everyday life. I also highlight those caught in the middle, such as the Indigenous peoples Serra encountered, and the enslaved, religious minorities, and many others. Some rejected the faith that various Christians tried to impose on them; others embraced it and reshaped it into a tool of resistance, drawing on the God of Exodus to challenge the religious power structures.

This passage on page 99 matters because it shows that the effort to turn North America into God’s chosen land was not confined to the Atlantic seaboard. It stretched all the way to the Pacific. In fact, I open the book with earlier Catholic efforts in the Southwest to remind readers that the Puritans are not the beginning or source of Americans’ sense of divine mission.

Finally, I’m hoping that readers of my book will recognize that the current debates over American politics, polarization, and the culture wars are not new but have been baked into the nation from its very origins. I don’t think we can understand what’s happening in American culture today without understanding the role of religion in our past and the many ways it has been and is being used by competing groups of Americans.

Visit Matthew Avery Sutton's website.

The Page 99 Test: American Apocalypse.

--Marshal Zeringue