Shelton Woods's "Governor of the Cordillera"

Shelton Woods is the author of seven books and numerous articles. He earned his MA in Modern Chinese History from California State University, Northridge, and his PhD in Southeast Asian History from UCLA. Born and raised in the Philippines, Woods spent his first eighteen years in Baguio City, an urban center within Luzon’s highlands. He has served as a dean and associate dean at Boise State University since 2000, while also winning numerous awards including the university’s highest teaching honor the Foundation Teaching Award.

Woods applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Governor of the Cordillera: John C. Early among the Philippine Highlanders, and reported the following:

The 99th page of The Governor of the Cordillera: John C. Early Among the Philippine Highlanders reads:

alliance because, as he later wrote, “A school of thought had arisen in the Philippines which based its creed upon the postulate that you must first use force to the uttermost, then when the opponent is crushed extend him gradual leniency. Here we found people coming in contact with government for the first time, eager and willing to conform because personal safety and ordered government appealed to them. This dissipated all arguments of the advocates of flattening punishment as a matter of policy.” Early’s conviction did not align with Hale’s ideas. The Apo of Kalinga was on the move from Lubuagan, and nothing and no one was going to stop him from destroying Bacarri. A showdown between the two lieutenant governors was now just two days away.

Page 99 of The Governor of the Cordillera slightly passes the Page 99 Test. The text only takes up one-third of the page because it is the end of chapter thirteen, “The Bacarri Problem.” Most of the text is a quote from the book’s main character, John Early. But that quote encapsulates his unpopular position that the Philippine indigenous, head-hunting, highland peoples (Igorots) were neither the noble savage romanticized in Western novels nor representatives of the inferior Darwinian evolutionary species. Early fought against the prevailing racism that characterized American colonial officials in their newly-acquired Southeast Asia colony.

For more than three centuries Spain attempted to control the fiercely independent Igorots. Living in the Cordillera range in northern Luzon—the Philippine’s main island—the Igorots’ seven tribes successfully repelled hundreds of attempts by Spanish soldiers and priests to integrate them into the colonial paradigm that lowland Filipinos accepted.

When America purchased the Philippines from Spain in 1898, it succeeded in the highlands where Spain had failed. But some of its methods were illegal and ignored human rights. While many accepted these depredations as the price for “civilizing the wild tribes,” John Early—an obscure American teacher with a checkered background—rose to defend the Igorots against colonial exploitation and carnage. He was fired for doing this and banished from Luzon. But just a decade later, the Igorots demanded that Early be returned—not as their teacher—but as the governor of the entire Cordillera. Three years into his governance, the US press declared that Early was the best governor in the Philippines. But cancer cut Early’s redemptive career short and his story was lost to history, until now.

Page 99 is the showdown between Early ‘s conviction in the equality of all humans, and the impending destruction of entire villages by American-led forces.

Visit Shelton Woods's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Alexander Cook's "Neither Believer nor Infidel"

Jonathan A. Cook is a literary scholar, educator, and musician born in Washington, DC, raised in the Hudson Valley of New York, and currently living in Northern Virginia. He has a B.A. from Harvard College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has taught literature and writing over the span of three decades at various institutions. His major field of concentration as a literary scholar is nineteenth-century American literature, and he is a specialist in the writings of Herman Melville. He has published an extensive roster of books, articles, and reviews, and has recorded numerous one-hour podcasts on selected works of American and English literature, available on YouTube and SoundCloud.

Cook applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Neither Believer nor Infidel: Skepticism and Faith in Melville's Shorter Fiction and Poetry, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Neither Believer nor Infidel: Skepticism and Faith in Melville’s Shorter Fiction and Poetry I argue that the character of Hunilla in the eighth sketch of Melville’s “The Encantadas,” set on one of the Galapagos Islands, plays the role of a modern female version of the Old Testament Job while also being inspired by the real-life history of Agatha Robinson, another comparable Job figure in Melville’s imagination. Melville had heard about the latter figure on a trip to Cape Cod and Nantucket in July 1852 during which he became acquainted with the long-suffering wives of the region, and more particularly, in Agatha’s case, the suffering she uncomplainingly endured because of her morally remiss bigamous husband. In this chapter I trace a genealogical line of literary descent from the character of the Job-like “patient Griselda” of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, to the abandoned wife in Hawthorne’s story “Wakefield,” to the contemporary Cape Cod abandoned wife Agatha, to the abandoned Chola widow Hunilla, who loses her husband and brother to drowning in the ocean while they are harvesting turtle oil on one of the uninhabited Galapagos Islands. All these figures represented a type of passive female suffering that appealed to Melville’s imagination in the wake of his creation of the heroic male rebels of his two most recent novels, Moby-Dick and Pierre, whose moral and metaphysical rebellions led to their suicidal (Pierre) or quasi-suicidal (Ahab) deaths. As the longest sketch of “The Encantadas,” “Norfolk Island and the Chola Widow” conveys the aura of unjust divine punishment that seems to overhang the desolate history of the Galapagos Islands in Melville’s imagination.

The contents of page 99 of my book provide a small hint of my larger argument regarding Melville’s religious skepticism and his use of biblical themes and motifs to critique the injustice of the Judeo-Christian god, but the page is largely devoted to evoking the contents of the eighth sketch of “The Encantadas” and so does not suggest the full range of my argument. My larger aim in this book is to examine the nature of Melville’s religious skepticism in the wake of the two outspoken tragic narratives, Moby-Dick and Pierre, that nearly ended his career as a novelist. Like other Victorian-age writers, Melville exemplifies the division of head and heart in his loss of religious faith, but Melville critics are often baffled to explain the seemingly paradoxical nature of his attitude toward religion as an author whose fiction regularly attacked the injustices of the Judeo-Christian god and critiqued the failings of Christian dogma while relying on the Bible to frame many of his themes and narrative structures. An explanation of this paradox can be found in his religious skepticism which renounced any personal commitment to Christianity even as many of his literary works explored the ineffectual or oppressive influence of evangelical Christianity within the mid-nineteenth-century world.

Recognizing that he had to disguise his ongoing critique of Christianity in his writings following the critical and commercial disaster of Pierre, Melville produced a series of shorter works in the 1850s that reflected his idea of the obsolescence of Christian dogmas such as Pauline ideas of charity (in “Bartleby, the Scrivner”) and the doctrine of the Resurrection (in “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!”). Relying on the skepticism implicit in the Old Testament books of Job and Ecclesiastes, Melville also produced in the sketches of “The Encantadas” and in his Revolutionary War novella Israel Potter similar challenges to the providential history of the nation’s Protestant heritage. Examining his mid-career shift to poetry, I similarly demonstrate that in the poems memorializing the Union dead of the Civil War, Melville used a modified form of forensic Christianity along with motifs derived from literary and cultural forms of memorialization from ancient Greece and Rome. In his penultimate book of poetry Timoleon etc., Melville again mixed Christian and classical motifs in a collection of poems exemplifying the increasingly pluralistic religious universe of the late nineteenth-century. Finally, in an examination of the Christian paradigm of the Fall in Billy Budd, I trace the impact of Melville’s literary models in Genesis and Paradise Lost while demonstrating the appropriateness of Melville’s reading of the works of Schopenhauer as he worked on the novella left unfinished at his death. Eschewing academic jargon, Neither Believer nor Infidel is a work of literary criticism that will appeal to both the educated general reader and the Melville scholar interested in a key aspect of the author’s literary creativity.

Visit Jonathan Alexander Cook's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacob Eisler's "The Law of Freedom"

Jacob Eisler is James Edmund and Margaret Elizabeth Hennessey Corry Professor at the Florida State University College of Law.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Law of Freedom: The Supreme Court and Democracy, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a moment where The Law of Freedom ties together the two main themes of the book: the beautiful principle of democratic self-rule as reflective of a people’s moral freedom, and the paradox of how legitimate (that is to say, non-political) judicial review can intervene to shape it. Page 99 captures the soul of this paradox of elite judges dictating to a people the terms of their own self-rule:

If a “right” configuration of democratic rules can be legitimately externally determined and imposed on a polity…one of two conditions must apply. The first is that democratic rules do not need to conform to requirements of constituent self-determination and democratic justice. But if this is the case… then presumably electoral procedures do not have any normative weight, and are morally and politically insignificant. The second condition is that electoral rules are significant, but that the right answer can be reached through technocratic moral philosophy rather than constituent self-determination. But if this is the case, the basic premise of democracy – constituent self-rule – does not apply. If the terms of democratic procedure can be externally imposed rather than self-determined by constituents, either the animating value of democracy (constituent self-determination) is irrelevant and the entire debate devoid of significance, or the rules do not matter because they do not affect democratic determination. If democratic procedure is morally relevant as a fulcrum of constituent self-determination, constituents must exert control over it with the same (indeed, arguably even more) urgency that they do over first-order political decisions.

This is passage, really, the foundation of the book. Either judicial review of democratic process is special and matters, or not. If it does matter (and its special characteristic of judicial review is rule of law neutrality, that is to say independence from politics), we need to explain why it doesn’t contravene democratic autonomy.

The rest of The Law of Freedom offers an answer. In very brief, judicial review of election law must consist of ongoing struggle over electoral process to avoid contravening popular autonomy. This is precisely what has happened on the Supreme Court, with a battle between libertarians (who think politics is a matter of private power and thus inequality is ok) and egalitarians (who think that politics is a matter of civic community and thus that inequality should be eliminated from democratic process).

Learn more about The Law of Freedom at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Cook Miller's "The Enthusiast"

William Cook Miller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rochester. His work has appeared in the journals New Literary History and Studies in Philology.

Miller applied the “Page 99 Test” to his first book, The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Enthusiast, we see Henry More, the most famous English philosopher of his era, investigating the “enthusiasm,” that is, the false prophetic emotionality, of Henry Nicholis, the founder of the sixteenth-century mystical movement known as the Family of Love. (More refers to Nicholis, for complicated reasons, by his initials, H. N.) More describes H. N.’s enthusiasm as consisting in his (false) revelation that Christ is not an external but an internal figure—a sort of allegory of personal rebirth. More registers his disgust at this position in his literary style. He describes H. N. “riveting” and “thwacking” Christ’s hands and feet onto his own—replaying the Crucifixion, now with H. N.’s body as the cross. On the basis of H. N.’s example, More launches into a more general condemnation of “blind Enthusiasm,” which he calls “the Triumphal Chariot of the Devil.” Finally, More repeats a point he often makes in his writings: that he has discovered the “condition” of H. N.’s “Spirit” because he has explored this spirit in his “own heart.” He has experienced something like H. N.’s enthusiasm and survived to tell of it—hence he is trustworthy as a prophetic vehicle, an author capable of understanding, comprehending, and transcending the limitations of false prophets, thus of subjecting their errors to his own higher reality.

So—is this most representative page in The Enthusiast? Not really. But it opens a window in certain ways. For one thing, it concerns Henry More—probably the protagonist of The Enthusiast. More’s importance is easy to miss, because almost nothing he wrote, aside from his correspondence with Descartes, holds much interest for scholars. But he was someone who deeply influenced Locke, Shaftesbury, and Swift, to choose a few names, and was particularly important for the project at the heart of my book: how to distinguish true from false prophets without relying on heresy courts or episcopal proclamations. On this page, he is battling the final boss of false prophecy: “H. N.,” the “Homo Novus” (new man), who declares Jesus Christ relevant only insofar as he sets up a pattern for personal and private illumination. One sees in this encounter an eerie foreshadowing of currents we still cannot escape: for instance, the dialectical relationship of enlightenment secularity and reactionary fundamentalism, which are often seen as stark opposites but which we might more clearly see as codependent twins born from the same early modern matrix.

This page also reflects how false prophecy was internalized and ironized in the course of the seventeenth century, which is the main argument of the book as a whole. During stabler times, false prophets were reliably cast as demonic idolators. With the Protestant Reformation, another sort of fear creeps in as well: that one’s neighbor, one’s mother or father, or even an earlier, more immature version of oneself might be a false prophet. A surprising twist followed: those who confessed and explored their false prophetic humors, their “enthusiasm,” tended to find thereby an ironic prophetic authority. Those who insisted they weren’t enthusiastic, on the contrary, were increasingly suspicious. This paradox helped to give a peculiar ironic flavor to later writers of the period—that hint of a new sort of prophet of Enlightenment who denied prophecy. The Enthusiast tries to catch this maneuver in the moment of its execution. One feels it, for sure, on page 99.

Visit William Cook Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gillian Brock's "Corruption and Global Justice"

Gillian Brock is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She has published widely on issues in political and social philosophy, ethics, and applied ethics. Her books include Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (2009), Debating Brain Drain (with Michael Blake, 2015), Cosmopolitanism versus Non-Cosmopolitanism (2013), Justice for People on the Move (2020), and Migration and Political Theory (2021). She has received several prestigious awards including a Fulbright Award in 2005 and she was joint winner of the 2014 Amartya Sen Prize.

Brock applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Corruption and Global Justice, and reported the following:

In this book I argue that those concerned with global justice matters should also be concerned with corruption, a major obstacle to achieving peaceful, inclusive and just communities across the world. I offer a normatively justified account of how to allocate responsibilities for addressing corruption across the many agents who can and should play a role. In order to know who should take responsibility and how they should do so, we need to understand multiple forms of corruption, the corruption risks associated with various activities, the interventions that tackle corruption effectively, and current policy and legal frameworks in place for addressing corruption.

An important part of the book is offering an account of how to assign responsibilities for addressing corruption fairly. So we need a deep understanding of how to address corruption effectively. What we ought to do concerning addressing corruption must track evidence about the kinds of interventions that are likely to be effective. Such understanding is also crucial to assigning responsibilities to particular agents fairly. Throughout the book I introduce different case studies to illustrate the multiplicity of corruption risks we face and how they manifest to thwart global justice efforts. As we come to appreciate, corruption takes many forms and many tools are needed to address it. These examples illustrate the complexities involved and the details of what needs to change in particular sectors to tackle particular corruption problems while also illustrating some dominant commonalities.

After canvassing some of the impressive insights on how to address corruption in Chapter 4, in Chapter 5 I begin to consider how well they have been brought to bear on real world initiatives, treaties, policies and other measures, so we can assess the effectiveness of various corruption-reducing mechanisms. On page 99 I discuss evidence of effectiveness for a particular initiative operating in some countries to curb corruption in extractive industries (such as mining for oil). I show that this initiative, which aims to promote transparency and accountability around revenue related to extraction, has an impressive track record of success so far. It serves as one example of the kind of measure that particular agents should support. Together with the many other cases of specific measures that assist in addressing corruption discussed throughout the book, readers gain an understanding of how to tackle this global scourge and how to fulfill important obligations to build relevant collaborations to form corruption-resisting communities.

Learn more about Corruption and Global Justice at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Bowman's "The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill"

Matthew Bowman received his PhD. in history from Georgetown University. In 2019, he was appointed associate professor of history and religion and Howard W. Hunter Chair in Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, where he teaches courses in American history, new religious movements, religions of North America, and Mormonism.

Bowman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill does not, unfortunately, mention Betty and Barney Hill. Nor does it mention their story of alien abduction, which is the broader narrative the book explores. Rather, this page is part of a brief exploration of the career of Morey Bernstein, a salesman who took up hypnosis as a hobby. In the early 1950s, he began hypnotizing a housewife named Virginia Tighe, and was astonished when the woman began speaking in an Irish brogue and describing her life as Bridey Murphy, the wife of an Irish lawyer who died in Belfast in 1864. Bernstein was nothing if not a shrewd capitalist, and this page describes his transformation of Tighe's story into a bestselling book, followed quickly by a movie adaptation.

The story made Bernstein rich. A hypnosis craze swept the nation in the 1950s. It became a popular party trick and a common subject for popular films and novels. But Bernstein also drew critics. A slew of professional psychiatrists and other counselors who used hypnosis warned that neither hypnosis nor memory worked the way Bernstein alleged - human memories are not like gems to be unearthed from the soil of our minds; rather they are constructed in the process of recall. Hypnosis, then, is not simply a shovel for the unearthing, but can actually influence the memories constructed.

Despite not mentioning Betty and Barney, this section is critical both to the way I imagined the book and the sort of argument I wanted the book to make. Betty and Barney Hill saw a strange light in the sky while driving to their New Hampshire home one September night in 1961. In 1964, under hypnosis, they experienced memories of being abducted by creatures from that light and subjected to medical tests before being returned to their car having forgotten it all.

While on the face of it this seems an incredible story, my purpose in the book is to embed it in the culture of the American mid-century, to show how the HIlls's story reflected and was absorbed by other cultural trends. Like, for instance, the growing fascination with psychiatry and hypnosis, the explosion of therapy as a profession and a practice, and the awe with which many Americans approached science.

Betty and Barney Hill's recovered memory led them into many other mid-century cultural conflicts. It became fodder in the struggle for civil rights, as the Hills were an interracial couple deeply involved in the Black freedom movement. It led them out of the conventional liberal politics they shared with many other Americans and toward the New Age and conspiracy theory. But they were able to travel such paths because others, like Morey Bernstein, paved the way.

Visit Matthew Bowman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ruby Blondell's "Helen of Troy in Hollywood"

Ruby Blondell is professor emerita of classics and adjunct professor emerita of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Their books include Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation and Ancient Sex: New Essays.

Blondell applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Helen of Troy in Hollywood, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses the scene in Robert Wise's 1956 epic Helen of Troy where the Wooden Horse is welcomed into Troy. After besieging the city for ten years, the Greek army has left the Horse as a deceptive "gift" which the Trojans are foolish enough to accept. They welcome it with a wild party evoking the decadent entertainments of Roman Emperors and other tyrants in historical epic films of the period, like Quo Vadis and The Ten Commandments. On this page, I argue that this generic parallel gives the scene ominous overtones. When the drunken Trojans fall asleep, the Greeks emerge from the horse and slaughter the Trojans, whose "fatal lapse in vigilance, good judgment, and sobriety results in Troy's total destruction." In its historical and cultural context, the scene has resonances of the Cold War politics of the 1950s, in keeping with the epic genre of the period, where tyrannical Romans and Egyptians often represent the threat of communism. In the words of the science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which came out the same year), "falling asleep is dangerous."

The Page 99 Test is effective in that it provides a good example of the book's overall methodology: the interpretation of ancient world movies and television shows in their specific cultural and political context. It is less effective in that there is no mention of Helen of Troy, the ancient mythological figure around whom the book is built. Nor does this page deal with the broader issues surrounding female beauty and desire of which Helen is emblematic in both ancient Greek myth and in cinema (as I argue in the book's introduction). A further limitation is that, in its focus on one specific moment in Hollywood history, this page gives no indication of the book's broader scope. Helen of Troy in Hollywood ranges over multiple genres in film and television from the silent period to the early twenty-first century. It discusses not just epic films like Helen of Troy (1956) and Troy (2004), but a silent movie (The Private Life of Helen of Troy), episodes of Star Trek and Xena: Warrior Princess, and a TV miniseries (Helen of Troy) from 2003, showing in each case how the figure of Helen reflects concerns about gender and femininity that are specific to the period and genre.

Learn more about Helen of Troy in Hollywood at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Blake's "Edible Arrangements"

Elizabeth Blake is Assistant Professor of English at Clark University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Edible Arrangements: Modernism's Queer Forms, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a very short page of my book. It’s the final few sentences of the final paragraph of the book’s second chapter, on queer obscenity and narratives of hunger:

Indirection both helps elude the censor and enables an especially queer version of obscenity, as it invites the reader to turn back to their own hungers, and see what it is they desire. Indirect obscenity contains a queerness that is not identical to homosexuality but encompasses it; it is queer in that it is not governed by the logic of heteronormativity. More broadly, it is not governed at all. In these texts, desire is a destabilizing force. This is not because it is inappropriately directed but because of its intensity, excessiveness, and insatiability. By writing desire as hunger, even “straight” writers like Joyce and Tagore strip sex of the trappings of sexuality, revealing its power to both ravish and ravage. While the staged obscenity of burlesque mirrors back to the audience what it thinks they want to see (and thereby teaches them what they ought to want to see), these textual obscenities interrogate desire itself, inviting us to imagine what exactly happened inside a walled palace, to attend to the ways our own minds and eyes might stray and where they linger as we move through a text or the world, and finally, to confront the ways our desires construct us.

Even though it only addresses one part of the book’s argument—each chapter pairs a specific literary form with a distinct relationship to food or eating—page 99 provides a good sense of how my thinking about queerness emerges from possibilities illuminated by modernist texts, rather than a fixed understanding of sex and sexuality. While the page only mentions two of the thirteen writers whose work I discuss, the fact that one is Irish and the other Bengali does hint at the breadth of the book’s transnational archive. What’s less obvious is that most of the writers whose work I discuss were not straight (even in quotation marks), and that the book thinks across a range of genres, including poetry, plays, essays, and fiction.

Most pages of the book involve more specific engagement with the literary texts themselves, including a lot of close reading, but this page offers a distilled moment of argument that doesn’t require readers to be familiar with the texts or writers than I’m referencing (though I of course hope that it incites readers’ desire to track them down!). I’m also particularly delighted that this page is all about desire and pleasure, which are central concepts of the book: I argue that modernist writing about eating has the capacity to unsettle ideas about what feels good in both corporeal and textual bodies.

Learn more about Edible Arrangements at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wayne E. Lee's "The Cutting-Off Way"

Wayne E. Lee is Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Cutting-Off Way sits at the very beginning of Chapter five, which is a detailed recounting of how first the Tuscaroras and then the Cherokees confronted the problem of home defense against European attacks in the 18th century. Those two Nations chose different combinations of using fortifications and attacking European logistics as they learned about European capabilities and weaknesses over time. This page explains why these particular case studies are effective and revealing, noting that among other things, that analyzing the "most fundamental of military problems—home defense" helps "narrow the evidentiary complexity of decoding the Indians' motives and ideologies of war." This page also emphasizes change and adaptation within Native American methods of warfare. There were key continuities—indeed the book title itself refers to the operational method that retained its value for the entire period—but there were crucial shifts over time as Native American Nations reassessed changes in the threats they faced.

Page 99 represents a reasonably good introduction to the problems the book is trying to solve! How did Native Americans fight? How did they adapt their mode of fighting to European technologies and capabilities? And even more crucially, how did those adaptations themselves change over time. There was no one change from method A to method B. There was constant adaptation.

Learn more about The Cutting-Off Way at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Barbarians and Brothers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samuel Moyn's "Liberalism against Itself"

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and author of many books on the history of ideas and politics in the twentieth century.

Moyn applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Liberalism against Itself falls within the book’s fourth chapter, which is about Gertrude Himmelfarb, the American historian of Victorian England who died in 2019.

The chapter is framed around appropriations in the 1940s of the great nineteenth century Anglo-German Catholic liberal Lord Acton — when Himmelfarb wrote her dissertation and first book on him. And page 99 explores some differences and parallels between her interest in Acton and that of Herbert Butterfield, the then famous don at the University of Cambridge who hosted Himmelfarb during her visit there in 1946-7 to do archival work.

Himmelfarb later became a neoconservative. But she got there from Cold War liberalism, which is the larger topic of my new book. Page 99 is just another example of the strategy I pursue across Liberalism against Itself. The book is a set of character studies, which I pursue on the grounds that individual Cold War liberals can help generalize about Cold War liberalism. But I look carefully at each character to capture their particularity.

Something unique to the chapter on Himmelfarb is at stake on page 99 too. It is common to observe that Cold War liberals were secular Jews, and Himmelfarb was one too. But it is essential that the ambiance and spirit of the movement made much room for Christian thought and theology.

Himmelfarb revived Christianity in order to reject secular theories of progress — which had supposedly led to the Soviet Union and its crimes. The comparison with Butterfield on page 99 was worthwhile to me because he stressed more forthrightly than she did that Christians believe in providence (Acton certainly did), which is just a cousin of the idea of progress.

As I show, Himmelfarb took Acton’s significance to be his insistence on the relevance of moral norms outside history, ones that allowed potentially severe judgment. Butterfield loved Acton (his predecessor as the Regius Professor of History at the university) too. Butterfield, however, found that worship compatible with a less judgmental and more relativistic stance. He had been friendlier to National Socialism than some might like — indeed, decades later Himmelfarb angrily disowned her one-time mentor for that reason. Where Himmelfarb wanted to contest the Soviet Union’s claims to be the vanguard of progress in history, Butterfield couldn’t conceal that those rejecting a rational theory of progress might do so in order to insist that God is working for humanity’s benefit in more mysterious ways. Is that better—or worse?

Visit Samuel Moyn's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.

The Page 99 Test: Christian Human Rights.

The Page 99 Test: Humane.

--Marshal Zeringue