Patrick H. Breen's "The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood"

Patrick H. Breen is Associate Professor of History at Providence College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt, and reported the following:

Could Ford Madox Ford be wrong about Page 99? The thought crossed my mind as I read my discussion of number of blacks who were killed without trials as the revolt was suppressed.

How many of the 178 uncounted [by 1832 tax collectors] slaves were among the dead after the revolt? Nat Turner and twenty-nine others were found guilty by the white courts for their involvement in the revolt. They were all sentenced to die. Although some had their sentences reduced to transportation, all thirty convicted slaves were absent from the 1832 tax survey. As a result, it is likely that fewer than 148 Southampton slaves lost their lives during the period of panic and uncertainty that followed the revolt.

Primary sources, including The Confessions of Nat Turner, newspaper articles, letters from Southampton, trial notes, and petitions to the Virginia General Assembly mention between thirty-seven and thirty-nine slaves who were involved in the revolt. Of these, at least twenty-one survived long enough to be tried. Among the rebels never tried, nine men had their deaths documented: their owners and executors for their owners’ estates sought compensation for the property they lost when their slaves were killed without trial. (Since slave owners in Virginia were compensated for slaves who were executed or transported by the state, these owners argued that the owners of slaves who had been killed as the revolt was being suppressed also should have received compensation from the state.) Two other rebels were mentioned as prisoners, but their serious injuries—one newspaper described Tom as “desperately wounded and about to die”—meant that they did not survive long enough to stand trial. Add to the list three prominent rebels—Henry, Will “the executioner,” and Austin (who killed Hartwell Peebles)—whose disappearance from the record following the revolt is most readily explained by their deaths, and one can identify fourteen rebels who almost certainly died as the revolt was put down. Two more slaves—the unnamed slave who died at Samuel Blunt’s plantation and Nathaniel Francis’s Charlotte—were also killed after the revolt, bringing the minimum number of slaves who died without trial to sixteen.

The range discussed here is less important than the conclusion on the next page where I show it most likely that the number of blacks killed without trials was between thirty and forty. This is lower than most historians have thought and leads to an important question: how did it happen that whites did not kill more blacks after the revolt? My answer to this question—that the slaveholders intentionally prevented a massacre—is at a key to the second half of the book.

But the problem with Ford’s test is not that he chose page 99 instead of 100. Instead, the problem is that I am making a formal argument about the number of people killed in the aftermath of the revolt. But numbers—as important as they are—are not people, and my book is about the people and the terrible position that they found themselves in during the revolt. On page 99, names are mentioned, but I do not tell the stories of these people. Just to take one example, the unnamed slave who died at Samuel Blunt’s had been seen with a gun just as the alarm had sounded. It seems that the white man who killed him did not realize that the man had been armed to defend Blunt’s plantation. Irony is, of course, a stock technique of so many careful historians, but the irony is just one level of the story of the unnamed man’s death. This story raises the uncomfortable issue of slave loyalty: why did the unnamed man fight for the slaveholders? Was he trying to suppress the revolt? Or was he worried about what would happen if Blunt’s plantation, where his family lived, were captured by the rebels? It also raises the question of white confidence. Did the slaveholders really believe that their slaves would remain faithful to them? If so, it was a bit odd that they only distributed the guns at the moment when they heard that a rebel attack was imminent and then collected the guns from their slaves as soon as the alarm passed. These are the stories at the heart of The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, but you can’t find them on page 99.

Learn more about The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nina Milton's "In the Moors"

Nina Milton is most well known for her crime fiction series The Shaman Mysteries Series, published by Midnight Ink Books.

In the Moors was published in 2013 and followed by Unraveled Visions (2014). Beneath the Tor, set in the magical English town of Glastonbury was published at the end of 2015. Milton is a prize-winning short story writer and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. She works in the UK for the Open College of the Arts and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Milton applied the “Page 99 Test” to In the Moors and reported the following:

I think all writers are curious about what happens when someone walks into a bookshop and opens their book at a random page. Will it stand up to incidental scrutiny? This is what I found on Page 99:

“Sabbie,” Cliff began. “Last time…you said something about…my soul?”

“Yes. I think you still feel bad because while you were in the cottage, the essence we think of as ‘soul’ broke into pieces. A massive ordeal can shatter a soul and bits of it get lost, or hidden in different places.”

“You’re saying I left my soul in that place?”

“No – it’s inside you somewhere. Just fractured, floating all apart in your spirit world. It needs healing, that’s all.”

“Something needs healing, that’s for sure.” Cliff took a shuddering breath. “When I get out of here, I want it all back. Can we do that?”

“It will take a long time. But if you feel that you could see it through…”

“I want to try.”

We were speaking quietly now, leaning towards each other, so I hardly registered that someone had come in, but Cliff’s face suddenly became the colour of my uncooked bread dough. I spun round. Rey and his sidekick Abbott were standing with their arms folded. A quip sprang to my lips – that he made a habit of bursting into rooms without knocking – but it died prematurely. Like Cliff, I took in their sombre expressions.

“We’re here to interview the prisoner,” said Rey to the policewoman at the door.

Six years ago, a new character walked into my head. Like a few of my shamanic friends, she had set up a small business. Modern day shamans usually offer therapy to people who can find help no where else. Doctors, herbalists, psychotherapists, have tried and failed to help with these people’s problems and now they are desperate. People who visit a shaman for help are often on the edge; on the edge of society, on the edge of a breakdown, or even on the edge of something darker.

The first book in the Shaman Mystery series, In the Moors opens when a child’s body is found buried in the eerie depths of the Somerset Moors. Sabbie Dare’s client, Cliff Houghton, is arrested for wandering at night over the shallow grave, now empty. Sabbie starts to work with him, and uncovers repressed memories from his childhood, but, as another small boy disappears, and fresh, damming evidence turns up at his flat, Cliff is charged with both murder and kidnap.

In the excerpt from page 99, Cliff has been brought up from police cells and Sabbie has been able to visit him alongside his solicitor, Linnet Smith. They are not discussing Cliff’s innocence – Sabbie already believes that implicitly – but the state of Cliff’s soul. Shaman understand souls; they work with them all the time. They believe that the soul is the first port of call when severe trauma hits a person. This theory does explain why childhood traumas affect us for so long – the rest of our lives, in some cases – and why we feel so badly shaken after horrid events, even if we were not touched physically. Often, the clients Sabbie sees have had their souls splintered or lost from past trauma, and it’s her job to retrieve those soul parts and help that person rebuild their life.

But the first thing Sabbie wants to do is to prove Cliff’s innocence and – if she possibly can – find the missing child. Ancient shamans were reputed to be able to find lost things…can Sabbie locate little Aidan Rodderick? Her attempts place her into deeper and deeper danger, but also throw her together with Detective Reynard Buckley, a fizzing relationship which will continue throughout the trilogy.

Visit Nina Milton's website.

Writers Read: Nina Milton.

--Marshal Zeringue

Phaedra Daipha's "Masters of Uncertainty"

Phaedra Daipha is assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth, and reported the following:

Masters of Uncertainty passed the test and the test passed Masters of Uncertainty. I was delighted (and somewhat relieved) to discover that page 99 can well serve as a benchmark of sorts for the book, in the sense that it nicely encapsulates how forecasters at the National Weather Service (NWS) endeavor to tackle meteorological ambiguity and uncertainty.

Right at the top of the page, I was greeted by the following passage:

It is precisely this visceral need to achieve an optimal gestalt, or “maximum grip” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, Dreyfus 1992), on the atmosphere that in practice compels NWS forecasters to oscillate between different ways of viewing the weather. Cast in this light, their habit of leaving their workstations to study the weather outside becomes central to understanding how they impose order out of the disparate and ambiguous fragments of information at their disposal.

The text next launches into a series of thickly described episodes from the field, so as to illustrate the “countless, indeed daily, instances where a forecaster would leave his workstation with the express purpose of checking on the weather outside, fully aware that a colleague had just been outside for the very same reason.”

The weather outside is forecasters’ passion and it is their nemesis. It remains forever elusive—too complex to be reconstituted and studied under controlled conditions inside, too dynamic to be perfectly predicted. To prevail over meteorological uncertainty and produce accurate and actionable weather predictions, NWS forecasters cannot afford to simply rely on the standard set of highly sophisticated information delivered to them on their computer screens. In practice, they harness a widely disparate assortment of meteorological cues to fashion a provisionally coherent representation of the future. Masters of Uncertainty takes the reader through firsthand accounts of several forecasting episodes to flesh out the dilemmas and challenges of creating weather predictions come rain or come shine. In the process, it advances a theory of decision making that foregrounds the practical and situated nature of expert cognition and casts new light on how we make decisions in the digital age.

Learn more about Masters of Uncertainty and read an excerpt from the book at The University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kyle Smith's "Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia"

Kyle Smith is Assistant Professor of Historical Studies and Religion at the University of Toronto and the translator of The Martyrdom and History of Blessed Simeon bar Sabba'e.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia: Martyrdom and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity, and reported the following:

Every reader of this blog knows one thing about Constantine: he was the first Christian Roman emperor.

His decision to embrace Christianity certainly had a profound effect on the history of western Europe. But how did it affect Christians living outside of the Roman Empire?

Many believe that Constantine’s conversion in the early fourth century politicized religious allegiances, that it divided the newly Christian Roman Empire from the Zoroastrian Persian Empire. Some think that it even led to the persecution of Christians in what is now Iraq and Iran and that this, in turn, sparked a war between Rome and Persia.

On page 99, I explain that although we do indeed have a lot of stories about the persecution of Persian Christians we need to radically revise how we read these texts and, with it, how we understand fourth-century history.

There was no religious war between Rome and Persia. There was no persecution either.

Upon closer inspection, the many ancient texts that claim otherwise present an evocative and evolving portrait of the first Christian emperor. The literary memory of Constantine was undoubtedly very useful for shaping the political and religious identities of ancient Christian communities, but these texts have wrongly cast how we have understood the waning years of Constantine’s reign and, indeed, the emperor’s subsequent legacy.

Learn more about Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rebecca Mitchell's "Nietzsche’s Orphans"

Rebecca Mitchell is assistant professor of history at Middlebury College.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Nietzsche's Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire, and reported the following:

As a cultural-intellectual historian, I am fascinated by the meanings that people have historically ascribed to artistic works and cultural production. One of my primary goals in Nietzsche’s Orphans was to examine the multiple meanings given to music in a particularly tumultuous moment in Russian history: the years between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The book explores how, following in the footsteps of 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, members of Russian educated society conceived of music as the “Dionysian unity” underpinning phenomenal existence and a basis through which to offer a new understanding of “Russianness” amid the upheavals of modernity.

Although individual composers (Aleksandr Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nikolai Medtner) play an important role, Nietzsche’s Orphans does not circumscribe its focus to the meaning(s) specific artists ascribed to their music; rather it looks at multiple interpretations of music in society more generally to glean new insights into contemporary concerns. The Page 99 Test effectively highlights this aspect of the book. It drops us into the heart of Chapter Two, which examines the interpretation and reinterpretation of composer Aleksandr Scriabin by his Russian admirers, and introduces us to a minor historical figure who encapsulates this process: Aleksandr Brianchaninov.

A nobleman with an estate in the Perm region, a strong admiration for Napoleon, and a love for political dalliance, Brianchaninov introduced Pan-Slavic politics and Anglophile views into Scriabin’s inner circle. Together with his wife Mariia Brianchaninova (neé Gorchakova), Brianchaninov encouraged Scriabin’s interest in India as the location for his Mystery, finding in the work not the end of the phenomenal world but a future vision of the dominance of Slavic culture through Russian political and military victory, which he believed would come to pass through political affiliation with England. Brianchaninov offered to introduce the composer to British officials and assist in the practical matter of purchasing land in India for the performance of the Mystery (which, he logically concluded, would need the official approval of the British government). At the same time, he vehemently proclaimed a Pan-Slavic interpretation of the modern age, in which it was the messianic task of Russia to serve as the guiding light for the other Slavic peoples and ultimately for all humanity.

Scriabin believed that he would bring about the end of the world through his music (an idea shaped in part by his involvement in theosophy). Nietzsche’s Orphans adds to the literature on this composer and his philosophical views by exploring how the composer’s contemporaries interacted with and reinterpreted the composer and his music according to their own hopes. Brianchaninov actively encouraged the composer in his wild fantasy of building a performance temple in India, but his own understanding of Scriabin’s Mystery was heavily influenced by the Pan-Slavic ideals of the day. For Brianchaninov, the Mystery was about Russia’s call to free the Slavic peoples from the “German yoke” (both political and cultural) under which they suffered, an idea that dovetailed with the increased militarism surrounding the First World War.

Music and art are never separate from the larger political and social contexts in which they arise; Nietzsche’s Orphans shows how contemporary concerns (not always palatable ones) are central to artistic reception, and how audiences tend to hear what they want to hear in the music they admire: an observation certainly as true for contemporary as for late imperial Russian audiences.

Learn more about Nietzsche's Orphans at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexandra Shepard's "Accounting for Oneself"

Alexandra Shepard is Professor of Gender History at the University of Glasgow. She has published widely on gender and social relations in early modern England (1550-1750), including Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (2003), and she is currently leading an International Network, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, on gender and work in early modern Europe.

Shepard applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, & the Social Order in Early Modern England, and reported the following:

Page 99 falls roughly in the middle of the first of the book’s three sections—on ‘Wealth and Poverty’—and contextualises the value of 40 shillings (£2) established through a series of equivalents:

In real as well as symbolic terms 40s. was not an insignificant sum. Forty shillings was a not untypical annual wage for a domestic servant in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Forty shillings comprised one-fifth of the amount required to rebuild a simple peasant or suburban dwelling after the mid-seventeenth century destruction of civil war. A variety of items amounting to the value of 40s. were regularly grouped together as lots in probate inventories, presumably to make the accounting process easier, but also suggesting that this provided a routine means of quantification through keeping the unit of value constant rather like the changing size (rather than price) of a penny loaf. Forty shillings was the fourth most frequent value assigned to goods itemized in a sample of inventories from Kent between 1600 and 1650, after 10s., 20s., and £5. In a selection of inventories from Thame (Oxfordshire) dating from between 1598 and 1699, 40s. was the second most frequent value (after 10s.), whereas 41s. occurred only once in the entire dataset. As is evidence from the Thame sample, in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries 40s. was the value frequently assigned to bedsteads and associated bedding—components of a household’s good requiring relatively high outlay. In a shoemaker’s inventory from 1604, for example, one truckle bed, one featherbed, one flock bed, two joined bedsteads, one straw bed, and a collection of bolsters, blankets, and ‘old coveringes’ were grouped as one item valued at 40s. Forty shillings also amounted to quite large quantities of furniture. In 1618, a table and frame, eight joined stools, eight cushions, two chairs, one cupboard, and two iron dogs formed one item in a yeoman’s inventory from select contents of his hall, valued collectively at 40s. In 1637, just four pairs of blankets and two coverlets that had been in a husbandman’s possession were appraised at 40s., comparable to the value of his “wearing clothes”, but 40s. worth of goods could still comprise a significant asset to a household in the later seventeenth-century, such as the range of brewing equipment itemized in the inventory of a blacksmith in 1682, which included at least thirteen barrels, vats, and tubs.

This extract forms part of a larger discussion of the complex culture of appraisal in the early modern period, and the ways in which certain values (in this case 40 shillings) held wider social and political associations beyond merely signifying quantity. Besides functioning as a very common unit of account, the possession of moveable property worth 40s. was the threshold for political participation of various kinds and it also functioned as a critical benchmark in processes of social estimation, increasingly used to demarcate a dividing line between those with at least a modicum of credit and self-sufficiency and those identified as poor and worryingly dependent on account of having nothing more than their labour on which to live.

The book is based on a sample of over 13,500 statements provided by witnesses in court between 1550 and 1728 in response to questions designed to establish their creditworthiness. It is designed as a ‘bottom up’ or grassroots account of the social order and social change—fully inclusive of the voices of women as well as men—on the basis of the language of self-description that witnesses deployed when asserting their credibility. Disappointingly, p. 99 does not include any direct reference to the myriad shards of self-positioning on which the overall analysis is centred. The book charts the dramatic widening of wealth inequality between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries and its consequences for the ways that people assessed their own and each other’s social position. A central argument is that the chasm that opened up between rich and poor involved not only the redistribution of wealth but also its redefinition. In addition, a shift of emphasis towards what people did for a living as opposed to what they had to live on (which became increasingly private), was part of the realignment of the calculus of esteem from the later seventeenth-century.

The book attempts to combine painstaking recovery of the details of the material lives and social perceptions of a broad social range of men and women with sustained engagement with larger debates about the character of economic and social change, and the place of class, credit and consumption in the development of modernity. Whether ‘the quality of the whole’ is revealed in this extract depends on an evaluation of the rest of it, but I’ll leave that to the reviewers!

Learn more about Accounting for Oneself at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Stevens's "Written In Stone"

Christopher Stevens is a writer and journalist. His runaway bestselling mnemonics book Thirty Days Has September hit the number-one reference book spot on Amazon. Stevens worked at the Observer for fifteen years before moving to the Daily Mail. He lives in London.

Stevens applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Written in Stone: A Journey Through the Stone Age and the Origins of Modern Language, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The Romans referred to both coal and charcoal as carbo, from [the proto Indo-European word] kar [meaning hard or strong]. Carbunculus meant a small lump of coal, and that brings us to diamonds and all other gemstones: a carbuncle stone is any gem with a fiery colour. Hard red spots or pimples in the face, often caused by excessive boozing, are also called carbuncles.

There, on page 99 of Written In Stone, is one of the typical sets of connections between words which sound similar yet seem at first to have quite different meanings – the carbuncle that is a gemstone (like the one in the Sherlock Holmes story of the goose that swallowed a sapphire, "The Blue Carbuncle") and the carbuncle that is a hard, almost luminous boil on the face or the bottom.

Carbuncle sounds like carbon, because it comes from the same root – kar, in a language at least 6,000 years old, developed by the earliest farmers who lived on the steppes of what is now Ukraine and southern Russia.

Their language of evocative, often onomatopoeic syllables, single sounds that fitted together like Lego building blocks, was so effective and adaptable that it evolved into dozens of modern-day tongues, right across Europe and south as far as India and Vietnam.

My book examines about 100 of those syllables, and explores how they bind today's English words into families. The word for 'no' was ne – which is why all our negative words begin with an N, like none, no-one, nobody, nothing, not, never and so on.

Kar, as found on page 99, split into several families. For instance, because it could signify strong as well as hard, it formed the English suffix '-cracy' – as in democracy, bureaucracy and autocracy, meaning literally strength through the people, through officialdom and through dictatorship.

But in northern Europe, the 'k' sound was softened to an aspirate, and kar became har – giving us hard, harsh and hearth... where the Romans burned their carbunculi.

Visit Christopher Stevens's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lori A. Flores's "Grounds for Dreaming"

Lori Flores is assistant professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Grounds for Dreaming begins with a picture, actually, of a group of Mexican agricultural guestworkers—known as braceros—lining up in front of a movie theater in Salinas, California in 1956. After their backbreaking workweeks harvesting fruits, nuts, grains, or vegetables, braceros all over the United States often used weekends for leisure activities such as watching movies, eating at restaurants, shopping for “American” things such as cowboy boots and radios, dancing at nightclubs, or going to church. The Plaza Theater in Salinas, which was established by a Mexican immigrant to California named Jose Enrique Friedrich, sought to provide braceros with Spanish-language entertainment that would make them feel more at home amidst their harsh work schedules and often lonely living conditions in segregated labor camps.

Unlike Friedrich, many California residents were loathe to embrace braceros’ presence, and this included some U.S.-born Mexican Americans who sought to distance themselves from braceros for fear of losing their own tenuous social status and respectability. One of the major points of Grounds for Dreaming is that the lives of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals have always been intertwined. Circuits of labor and migration brought Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers together—either in cooperation or in conflict—in the fields, while social interactions between Mexican men and Mexican American women produced romantic relationships and families that transcended the borders of nationality. Popular songs of the 1940s and 1950s like “El Bracero y La Pachuca” described these controversial yet very common romances.

Ironically, in the very male-dominated world of agriculture, it was Mexican American women who served as important bridges between U.S.-born and immigrant Mexican communities. By the same token, they tended to suffer the most when these connections were shattered. For instance, when the INS ramped up its deportation efforts with “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s and apprehended countless undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Southwest, many Mexican American women experienced the sudden loss of their romantic partners and fathers of their children.

Page 99 captures some of the main characters and communities in the book’s story, but there are many more. From prominent agribusinessmen to the FBI to Cesar Chavez to the Catholic Church, several people and institutions had a part to play in the long drama of the U.S. farmworker rights movement—and it’s a drama that continues to unfold today.

Learn more about the book and author at Lori A. Flores's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Pugh's "America Dancing"

Megan Pugh is a critic and poet living in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches at Lewis and Clark College. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, The Oxford American, and many other magazines.

Pugh applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk, and reported the following:

If you open America Dancing to page 99, you won't get a sense of my prose. Instead, you'll find a photograph—a man and a woman, dancing. Here's the caption: "Vernon and Irene Castle, ca. 1914 (Library of Congress)." The Castles' movements look simultaneously intimate and large. They hold hands, their bodies just a few inches apart, yet each kicks a leg—Vernon's goes forward, Irene's back—and their arms stretch out to the sides.

In the years before World War I, the Castles helped spread and popularize ragtime dance across the nation. They presided over an empire of clubs, cabarets, and consumer goods: you could watch them dance at Castles in the Air, the Castle Club, Castles by the Sea, and the Castle House, where you could also sign up for lessons. You could buy Castle corsets, Castle hats, or Castle bands to keep your Castle-style bobbed hair in place while dancing. The Castles' success came not just because of their skill, but also their savvy: ragtime dance was associated with the black and working-class dancers who'd pioneered it, but the Castles sanitized it—just enough—to appease middle- and upper-class white anxieties.

The Castles don't have starring roles in America Dancing—those go to the chief subjects of each chapter: Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Agnes de Mille, Paul Taylor, and Michael Jackson. Yet each chapter includes a large supporting cast: the Castles, for example, were models for Astaire and Rogers. And their career helps us see a recurring pattern in American dance history, and one that's central to my book: though people don't always want to acknowledge it, dance moves are forever crossing lines of race and class.

In the architecture of the Castle House, the Castles seemed to provide their white patrons a choice between recognizing black artistry or ignoring it: the building had two long staircases, each leading to a separate realm. Here's how I describe it, just a little after page 99: "Up one set of stairs was the masterful band of James Reese Europe, who, a few years later, accompanied the 369th Regiment to France, helped buoy the spirits of World War I soldiers with music, and became a hero for black America. Up the other set of stairs reigned white pianist Henry Lodge, composer of turkey trot spin-off "Oh! You Turkey."

Learn more about the book and author at Megan Pugh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel K. Williams's "Defenders of the Unborn"

Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.

Williams applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade, and reported the following:

For my first book, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, the Page 99 Test worked perfectly. A reader opening God’s Own Party up to page 99 would encounter a discussion about Billy Graham’s political relationship with Richard Nixon and would immediately be confronted with the central theme of the book: the tension-filled alliance between the Republican Party and conservative evangelicals.

But a reader opening up Defenders of the Unborn to page 99 would likely be puzzled, especially if she had read the introductory chapter beforehand. As the introduction makes clear, Defenders of the Unborn challenges conventional assumptions by demonstrating that in the early 1970s, before Roe v. Wade, there was a vibrant pro-life movement that won political victories in dozens of states. In fact, the movement succeeded precisely because it was a liberal movement that employed human rights ideology to forge an ecumenical, bipartisan coalition that gained endorsements from Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson. Its leaders included self-identified feminists, antiwar activists, and a Boston Methodist physician who was the first African American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

But page 99 presents an apparent contrast to this revisionist narrative. The entire page is devoted to an analysis of pro-life Catholics’ failure to gain support from Protestants in the late 1960s – a phenomenon that seems to belie the picture presented in the introduction. What is going on here?

In reality, page 99 depicts a pivotal moment of crisis in the movement that eventually led to a strategic recalibration. Catholic opponents of abortion won critical victories in the early 1960s, and they would have even greater success in the early 1970s, but the late 1960s were “wilderness years” for the movement – a time of political defeats that led to soul-searching moments. A reader who read only page 99 of Defenders of the Unborn would not have much idea of the book’s central argument, but she would nevertheless get a sense of the challenges that the pro-life movement faced in the late 1960s. Maybe she would be intrigued enough to want to read the rest of the book to find out how the movement surmounted those challenges and found a way to appeal to Protestants, thus producing the pro-life coalition that continues to shape American politics today.

Learn more about Defenders of the Unborn at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: God's Own Party.

--Marshal Zeringue