Dominic Janes's "Oscar Wilde Prefigured"

Dominic Janes is professor of modern history at Keele University, United Kingdom. He has most recently published Picturing the Closet (Oxford University Press), Visions of Queer Martyrdom and Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900 (both from University of Chicago Press).

Janes applied the “Page 99 Test” to Oscar Wilde Prefigured and reported the following:

Oscar Wilde Prefigured discusses the ways in which the appearance of men was regularly scrutinized for evidence of deviant sexual desires in the decades leading up to the trials of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency on the grounds that he regularly posed as a sodomite. This sometimes meant looking out for obvious effeminacy, but that was not always the case. Page 99 of the book is exemplary of this in that it argues that the fine figures of young military men were often examined with a peculiar mixture of suspicion and desire at the time of the Napoleonic wars. As it says on the page:

Suggestions surface that soldiers were sometimes picked and promoted because of their attractive appearance and they were sometimes depicted as imbecilic dollies as a result. These practices and caricature of them continued into the Victorian period, as can be seen from John Doyle’s The New Regulation Infantry Hat; Prince Albert's Own (c. 1843). The alleged sexual implications of wearing Albert’s design for a shako (a high military hat) are not made obvious as they were to be a century later when Men Only published Oh Sir, Spare a Copper (1936), in which a man wearing make-up addresses a red-faced sergeant and his baby-faced troop of constables. Yet the implication was very much present at the earlier time that young men who were dressed up in uniform by their superiors dangerously undermined their male autonomy because this rendered them objects of aesthetic spectacle.

In other words what made a man a real man was not necessarily his apparently butch army uniform. This is not to say that Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria at the time when the British Empire was at its height, was homosexual. But the fact that his name has been applied to a modern item of genital jewelry flags up that understanding the history of sexual desire involves thinking in ways that engage on an ongoing and critical basis with our contemporary expectations of sex lives in the past.

Learn more about Oscar Wilde Prefigured at the University of Chicago Press.

Writers Read: Dominic Janes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ruth Franklin's "Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life"

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. She has written for many publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Salmagundi, to which she contributes a regular film column. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Franklin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, and reported the following:

Much of page 99 is occupied by a large photograph of Stanley Edgar Hyman, Shirley Jackson’s future husband, taken during his college years and inscribed to her, “Love, look with favor…” Jackson first caught Hyman’s attention when he read her short story “Janice” in a college literary magazine—he decided on the spot that he wanted to marry her. Despite their intellectual affinities, in many ways Jackson and Hyman were perfect opposites. The daughter of a socialite and a businessman, Jackson was raised as a Christian Scientist in the tony suburb of Burlingame, California, and knew as a child that she wanted to become a fiction writer. Hyman, on the other hand, had a traditional Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn (though he was an atheist and a Communist by the time Jackson met him) and found his calling as a critic almost as early. He saw Jackson as his ideal subject, and saw himself as the cool-headed intellectual who would help her realize her full creative powers and then explain her genius to the world.

The relationship was tumultuous from the start. The differences in their backgrounds couldn’t have helped, but the real problem was Hyman’s infidelity, which would persist throughout their nearly twenty-five-year marriage. Why Jackson stayed with Hyman—and there is considerable evidence that she may have considered divorce—is one of the enduring questions of her life story. In addition to being unfaithful, he belittled her and put pressure on her to constantly produce the women’s magazine stories that supported their family. (Jackson was the breadwinner during most of their marriage.) Yet he also was her greatest champion and cheerleader, writing copious notes on all her drafts and constantly exhorting her to improve.

After Jackson’s sudden death from a heart attack at age forty-eight, just a few days before their twenty-fifth anniversary, a grief-stricken (and perhaps guilt-stricken) Hyman devoted himself to promoting her reputation. “I think that the future will find her powerful visions of suffering and inhumanity increasingly significant and meaningful, and that Shirley Jackson’s work is among that small body of literature produced in our time that seems apt to survive,” he wrote in the introduction to The Magic of Shirley Jackson, an anthology of her work that he compiled. By now, it seems safe to say that he was correct.

Visit Ruth Franklin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenneth Stow's "Anna and Tranquillo"

Kenneth Stow is the author of Theater of Acculturation and Alienated Minority and founding editor of the journal Jewish History. He is currently a research associate in the Department of History, Smith College, and emeritus professor, University of Haifa, Israel.

Stow applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions, and reported the following:

The story of Anna del Monte, kidnapped and held in the Roman House of Converts for thirteen days in 1749—to no avail, for she refused to convert and returned to the Roman Ghetto a Jew—is one link in the long chain of attempts to erase Jewish existence. The essence of that chain is the topic of page 99, the first mass attempt at conversion through violence that took place during the first Crusade of 1096. However, that violence, largely unorganized and orchestrated from (near) the bottom up, was also unapproved. The Church wanted order, which is what Anna’s story illustrates. There had to be rules and regulations, perverse by current standards, but still rules and regulations punctiliously observed. Anna knew these rules, somehow. Her brother Tranquillo, who perfected Anna’s original memories that she set down in writing, knew them even better, and one sees in Anna’s so-called diary, the core of my book, as a kind of manual. How does one avoid falling into the conversionist trap? But the diary is also a protest. Jews in Rome were, in civil terms, full citizens; every lawyer and jurist, non-Jewish ones, that is, said so. But Jews were also restrained by the ghetto, for reasons of religion. The absurdity of this contradiction, citizenship, yet discrimination founded on religion, is also the diary’s implicit message. Anna’s story, in the context of the reality of Jewish life in the Roman Ghetto, illustrates the pitfalls of the confessional state, one with a formal religion that also privileges religion in law. That kind of state would go out of existence only when the American Constitution intentionally ignored religion as a criterion for citizenship; George Washington told the Jews of Newport, R.I., that a good citizen is one who obeys the law; hence, obedience to law creates the citizen. Till then, the criterion was “rebirth,” “regeneration,” through baptism. The French Revolution followed suit. It was, however, only with Napoleon’s Code Civil of 1804 that modern secular state in Europe was fully born. Only then could Jewish Emancipation, the diametrical opposite of Roman Ghetto life, become a true reality. In Anna’s Rome, that event occurred only in 1870, with the fall of the Papal State and the founding of the Italian Monarchy.

Learn more about Anna and Tranquillo at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Reef's "Florence Nightingale"

Catherine Reef is the author of more than 40 nonfiction books, including Noah Webster: Man of Many Words, Frida & Diego: Art, Love, Life, and other highly acclaimed biographies for young people. She lives in College Park, Maryland.

Reef applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Florence Nightingale: The Courageous Life of the Legendary Nurse, and reported the following:

A painting in warm tones dominates page 99 of Florence Nightingale: The Courageous Life of the Legendary Nurse. It depicts a scene at Scutari (the Üsküdar district of Istanbul) between 1854 and 1856, during the Crimean War. Sick and wounded British soldiers have arrived at the army’s Barrack Hospital. Most are ambulatory, although this often was not the case, and one reclines on the stone floor. The men likely waited days for transport from the camps and battlefields where they were stricken. Florence Nightingale is at the door, receiving them.

Most images of Nightingale created at this time were fanciful, romanticized presentations of a selfless, dedicated lady bearing an oil lamp and bringing kindness and comfort to ailing men far from home. The painting on page 99 [inset,left; click to enlarge] is different because the artist, Jerry Barrett, journeyed to Scutari and sketched from life. His is the real Nightingale, businesslike and plainly attired in a brown dress and white cap. She is flanked by Charles and Selina Bracebridge, her married chaperones. As important as she was—keep in mind that she was in charge of nursing in the British military hospitals in Turkey—Nightingale was still a Victorian lady, and it was improper for her to travel alone.

The scene at the Barrack Hospital is at the heart of Nightingale’s story. She spent her first thirty-four years preparing for it by studying hospital reports and tackling subjects that made up a man’s curriculum, such as algebra and chemistry; by resisting pressure from her family and society to marry and live a conventional life; and by answering what she believed was a call from God to pursue nursing, then a lowly line of work. As a result, when Britain was at war and her government appealed to her for help, she was ready.

Ignorance and mismanagement had allowed the nation’s military hospitals to become places of suffering and filth, where thousands of soldiers were dying needlessly of infection, disease, and neglect. There was “but one person in England” capable of assembling a skilled nursing team and turning such a horrific situation around, Secretary of War Sidney Herbert knew, and he reached out to her. He warned Nightingale that the task would be “after all full of horror, & requiring besides knowledge & goodwill, great energy, & great courage.…” Nightingale was undaunted.

By page 99 Nightingale has won over the doctors who initially rejected help from her female nurses. She and her staff have cleaned and dressed many wounds, replaced foul bedding, and scrubbed the wards. Morale is improving, and the death rate is falling. But shortages persist, and providing palatable food remains a problem.

Twenty pages later, with the coming of peace, Nightingale will return to England. For the remainder of her long life—and the book—she will work for the public good, improving health for all Britons and elevating nursing to a respectable profession for women. As she professed, “Constant progress is the law of life.”

Visit Catherine Reef's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Catherine Reef & Nandi.

The Page 69 Test: Frida & Diego.

My Book, The Movie: Noah Webster.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Beam's "The Feud"

Alex Beam has been a columnist for The Boston Globe since 1987. He previously served as the Moscow bureau chief for Business Week. His books include three works of nonfiction: American Crucifixion, Gracefully Insane, and A Great Idea at the Time; the latter two were New York Times Notable Books.

Beam applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book opens Chapter Seven, the very beginning of what newspapermen might call the "tick-tock" of the actual feud between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. It explains how Nabokov savaged the respected scholar Walter Arndt, who ended his career at Dartmouth College, when Arndt politely asked for comments on his translation of the famous Alexander Pushkin poem, "Eugene Onegin."

Nabokov, who had been working for years on his own translation of "Onegin," which he immodestly considered to be a masterpiece (it wasn't), anathematized Arndt, first in correspondence and soon after in a vitriolic attack in the New York Review of Books. That appeared in 1963. Two years later, Edmund Wilson chose the Review to unleash his famous, 6600-word attack on Nabokov's "Onegin" translation, the event that precipitously ended the men's quarter-century long friendship.

Visit Alex Beam's website and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: Gracefully Insane.

The Page 69 Test: Gracefully Insane.

The Page 99 Test: Great Idea at the Time.

The Page 99 Test: American Crucifixion.

My Book, The Movie: The Feud.

Writers Read: Alex Beam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Winston's "Lawyers at Play"

Jessica Winston is Professor of English and Chair of History at Idaho State University. She is the author of numerous articles on the English laws schools and legal societies, Inns of Court and, with James Ker, she is editor of Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies (2012).

Winston applied the “Page 99 Test”“Page 99 Test” to her new book, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581, and reported the following:

In 1567, the poet George Turberville (c. 1540–1597) published a translation of the ancient Roman poet Ovid. Near the close of the work, he claimed, “It is a work of praise to cause | A Roman born to speak with English jaws.” In the 1560s, the word “cause” connoted force. What is praiseworthy about forcing an ancient Roman to speak in English? Page 99 of Lawyers at Play discusses the almost jingoistic fervor for classical translation in London in 1560s and 1570s, particularly among members of the early English law schools and legal societies, the Inns of Court. Page 99 asks, why was classical translation so popular among innsmen at this time?

The answer to this question lies in the central background and major claims of Lawyers at Play. In Renaissance England, sons of nobles, aristocrats, and well-to-do commoners often attended an inn of court to learn law and make social connections that would serve them later at court and in other prestigious social circles. While at the Inns, many of these men, such as the poet and future Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, John Donne (1572–1631), also wrote poetry, translated classics, and performed plays. And this made the Inns important literary centers too. At the Inns, legal study was not required and, for young men with time on their hands, writing and sharing verse, performing plays, and publishing translations of classical and continental texts were important social pastimes—ones that sharpened linguistic skills, promoted social connections, and facilitated professional networking.

The Inns originated sometime in the fourteenth century, but the literary culture only emerged strongly in the sixteenth century. The Inns were always legal and social centers. So why did literature become a prominent part of this world only in the 1500s? Lawyers at Play proposes that the literary dynamism of the Inns was part and product of the legal culture the period: The Inns’ literary culture of the Inns intensified in decades of profound transformation in the legal profession. To illustrate this point, Lawyers at Play focuses on the 1560s, the period when the Inns first became an important literary hub. The book’s central claim is that the artistic surge of this time grew out of and responded to a period of rising litigation and attendant expansion in the legal profession. In this context, writing and performance carried a cultural cachet that elevated the status of law students and legal men. At the same time, it defined the members of an emerging profession as centrally important to the culture and prestige of the nation.

So how does this relate to page 99? In the 1560s and 1570s, translations of the classics were especially popular, particular works by Seneca, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Caesar, even Euclid, and Ovid too. Lawyers at Play shows that translations were important since they assisted members of the Inns in the move from educational to professional life, allowing them to demonstrate linguistic ability and more: for civic-minded innsmen, translation was itself a form of national service. They imagined translation as a form of translatio imperii and translatio studii—that is, as a way of transferring the political and intellectual dominance of Greece and Rome to England. By importing the might and learning of ancient empires, translation helped to catalyze men looking for positions in the state into contributing members to the commonweal, at just the time when the local and national government was looking to hire more legally trained me into bureaucratic and administrative roles. Thus when Turberville describes his translation as a laudatory form of physical transmogrification, he suggests that his work is a salutary force for another kind of change: the transformation of the professional personas of translators themselves and the vitalization of the intellectual and cultural world of England, a point that other chapters develop with respect to lyric poetry and drama too.

Learn more about Lawyers at Play at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Alice Watt's "The Paradox of Preservation"

Laura Alice Watt is Professor of Environmental History and Policy at Sonoma State University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The Paradox of Preservation is the first in Chapter 4, titled “Landscapes as (Potential) Wilderness.” Because of the title page formatting, it contains minimal text—only a paragraph or so, describing how inhabited, managed, and modified the southern end of the Point Reyes peninsula, located about an hour north of San Francisco, had been since Anglo settlement in the 1850s (not to mention impacts from Spanish/Mexican and Native American residents in prior decades and centuries, respectively). Yet in 1976, most of this area was formally declared to be federally designated wilderness.

Despite its brevity, this page highlights a theme throughout the book of shifting definitions—of what “counts” as historic, what “counts” as wild—and how our expectations for parks shape what we see, and how we interpret what we see, in those landscapes. Once a place that for over 150 years supported numerous working dairies and beef ranches, as well as other crops, military outposts, and paved roads, is identified as wilderness, our perception and understanding of it changes; suddenly historic ranches no longer seem to “belong” here, and traces of human uses (other than tourism) become problems to remove or fix, rather than indications of residents’ relationship with the places they live and work. Once it is managed as wilderness, it gradually becomes one.

Page 99 further reflects the larger reality of the book’s title: that preservation paradoxically changes that which is preserved, just as pickling fresh cucumbers changes them into something very different. Yet these changes often remain invisible to visitors, taking for granted that what they see in a preserved landscape is “how it has always been.” They also frequently remain invisible to park staff, whose management decisions further reshape the place to meet our expectations of what a park “should be.” And if the object of preservation is a working agricultural landscape, this process can gradually disconnect the residents from their own homes, bringing their presence into question and sacrificing their needs to the illusion of untouched nature and pristine wilderness. By making this process more visible, this book aims to help make conservation efforts more inclusive of people in protected landscapes—arguing there is no need for a zero-sum game of sustainable agriculture versus wilderness in parks; there is room, and an essential role, for both.

Learn more about The Paradox of Preservation at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Avery Kolers's "A Moral Theory of Solidarity"

Avery Kolers is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Social Change minor at the University of Louisville. Since completing his PhD at the University of Arizona, he has published widely in the areas of social and political philosophy and applied ethics. His first book, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (2009) was awarded the Canadian Philosophical Association's Biennial Book Prize.

Kolers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Moral Theory of Solidarity, and reported the following:

Suppose we want to be in solidarity with others in a shared struggle. Should we join with those we already agree with? Or should we join with others before knowing whether or how far we agree with them?

A major theme of A Moral Theory of Solidarity is that taking sides is prior to agreement, and this for at least two reasons. First, as a sociological matter of fact, we tend to side with people on the basis of mutual recognition, sympathy, or prior relationship, and only afterwards come to understand the issues at stake in the struggle. Second, what is distinctive about solidarity as opposed to coalition or alliance is precisely that solidarity involves sticking with others through thick and thin. Whereas coalitions fracture over ideological or strategic disagreements, solidarity involves deferring to the group even when we disagree.

But just for that reason, solidarity can be a perilous idea. How can we know whether we are “on the side of the angels,” and not “on the wrong side of history”?

Page 99 of the book is considering the hypothesis that we should defer to others when we are in a certain kind of relationship with them. I call this relationship deference.

In relationship deference, then, our ends are chosen in dialogue with others…. We decide upon ends together. Hence the group is prior to any particular aims, and the justice of the ends … cannot be taken for granted…. [Person] B might disagree with the action—might think it ill-advised or immoral or otherwise inapt. But that does not automatically count as a reason for B not to do it. Rather, provided B is interested in maintaining the relationship, such doubts serve to initiate a critical dialogue the purpose of which is as much to maintain the relationship as it is to accomplish any particular action.

I argue that, although relationships “are an indispensable part of the process of deference when we are engaged with the same group over time,” nonetheless “relationship deference is not self-sufficient; it requires appeal to social structures.” This is because we should actively seek to enter into such relationships with those who are oppressed, and within such relationships we should defer to them. For this reason, relationship deference must be supplemented or superseded by what I call structural deference to the least well-off.

The book goes on to defend solidarity with the oppressed on the basis of equity or fundamental equal treatment. To be in solidarity is to treat people equitably, and, since equitable treatment is intrinsically valuable, solidarity-as-equity is intrinsically valuable—even, or especially, if we fight a losing battle.

Learn more about A Moral Theory of Solidarity at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heath Brown's "Immigrants and Electoral Politics"

Heath Brown is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Pay-to-Play Politics: How Money Defines the American Democracy.

Brown applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Immigrants and Electoral Politics: Nonprofit Organizing in a Time of Demographic Change, and reported the following:

On Page 99 of Immigrants and Electoral Politics, I describe the work of the MinKwon Center for Community Action, an immigrant-serving 501c3 nonprofit in New York City. When the MinKwon Center in Queens NY developed a more rigorous approach to mobilizing its primarily Korean-American constituents, they developed a plan. Their 3-step process begins with registering voters. In 2012, MinKwon mobilized over 10,000 new voters, and in 2016 they continued registering new voters, always in a non-partisan fashion.

Next, they educated voters. They did this, in part, because many in the community are limited English proficient and thus struggle to read educational material from political parties and other sources. MinKwon develops bi-lingual voter guides and holds community forums on the election. In many cases, they invite candidates for office to speak about the issues that the community cares most about.

Third, they mobilize voters. For MinKwon, this ranges from traditional door-knocking and phone-calling to remind registered voters to vote, but also now relies on technology as well. The organizations relies on sophisticated voter databases to target mobilization at the exact voters with whom they want to communicate.

This comprehensive plan is unique. My book finds that most immigrant-serving nonprofits -- 60% -- never take even one of these steps. Limited resources, concerns about losing their protected 501c3 IRS status, and worries about the implications of taking too bold a political stand explain this low percentage.

Others, like MinKwon, adopt much more ambitious plans to energize immigrants about voting, in particular, and politics, more generally. The findings of the book, drawn from qualitative and quantitative research, explore in detail the past, present, and future of this issue and the position of immigrants in US politics.

Learn more about Immigrants and Electoral Politics at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Lane's "Surge of Piety"

Christopher Lane, a winner of the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, teaches at Northwestern University. A former Guggenheim fellow and a Victorianist by training, he has a secondary interest and specialization in 19th- and 20th-century psychology, psychiatry, and intellectual history, and has held Northwestern’s Pearce Miller Research Professorship.

He is the author of six books, most recently Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life. His other books include The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.

Lane applied the “Page 99 Test” to Surge of Piety and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book appears near the end of a chapter on “The Peale-Hoover-Eisenhower Empire.” Its focus is the way religious conservatives in the 1950s set about turning Dwight D. Eisenhower into the nation’s “spiritual leader.” The Republicans fought a bitter, divisive primary in the 1952 presidential. Despite attending church only sporadically, Eisenhower decided to run on a faith ticket, with billboards proclaiming: “Faith in God and country; that’s Eisenhower—how about you?” He ended up securing the nomination and then a landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson, carrying 39 states. Once the election was over, Republicans looked to heal the party and bring the nation together by making religiosity the unifying issue. They promised “government under God,” recast the U.S. as “one nation under God,” and encouraged prominent ministers such as Norman Vincent Peale to baptize the newly elected Ike “God’s chosen leader for this time of crisis.”

Surge of Piety focuses on the role that Peale played in promoting the massive wave of religious sentiment that swept the nation in the 1950s, much of it orchestrated by his ministry and allies, and concentrated in the Congress, Pentagon, FBI, and White House. Opening in the Great Depression, the book draws on far-reaching but neglected archival evidence of Peale’s role as a hardline conservative activist when, politicizing his ministry, he repeatedly attacked FDR’s New Deal as “un-American” and Roosevelt himself as “indifferent to religion,” though the four-term president was in fact anything but.

After Peale was appointed minister to New York City’s Marble Collegiate Church, one of the oldest in the nation, he threw high-profile support behind Senator Joseph McCarthy in the latter’s crusade against “subversives” in the federal government. The book also brings to light Peale’s shared efforts with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to make “the godless tyranny of atheistic communism” appear the nation’s greatest existential threat. Through its rejection of communism and embrace of evangelical Protestantism, Peale preached weekly from his pulpit and opined in his phenomenal bestsellers, the nation would find both success and salvation. He also warned Americans, “The man who shows no interest in Christianity and fails to support it is the real enemy of our social institutions.”

One of Peale’s most lasting and least discussed legacies, the book brings to light, was his well-funded campaign to align religiosity with mental health, to make religious belief a prerequisite for individual and national prosperity. Though the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, Inc., an evangelical organization he co-founded in 1953, Peale succeeded in making American medicine issue a “proclamation of faith,” turned what he called “religio-psychiatry” into a national movement, and persuaded millions of Americans that the solution to their and the nation’s problems were religious in character.

It will doubtless surprise a few that the man we often associate today with positive thinking and can-do optimism had such a dark history of public and behind-the-scenes activism. In the late 1920s and through the next decade, Peale even joined forces with hardline Christian nationalists, voicing as his explicit goal the ability to “generate [the] enthusiasm and vitality necessary for Christian world conquest.”

In the immediate aftermath to our own recent presidential election, when the political and cultural landscape seems yet more divided, we can only hope the nation will unify around policies and platforms that don’t repeat the turbulent, bruising history documented in Surge of Piety. As but one way forward, my Coda, “Faith as an Ongoing Force,” looks at strategies for reining in religious extremism while also acknowledging the complex ways that religious beliefs continue to shape our politics and society.

Learn more about the book and author at Christopher Lane's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Age of Doubt.

--Marshal Zeringue