The Age of Questions: Or, a First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions Over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond, by Holly Case, 2018.

Abstract

Holly Case’s most adventurous work as of yet seeks to juxtapose patterns common to nineteenth century publicists’ questions in order to reveal the contradictions of the age. Case devotes each chapter to a particular theme or ideological quality of the querists, which are in dispute with one another, and yet feature common idioms of progress and geopolitical reconfiguration. Internal to each chapter are the oxymoronic imbrications between conceptual polarities such as nationalism and the international public sphere, war through peace, gravitas with farce, and more. Case explains the prevalence of high-stakes public policy, prospects of war and the convulsive realignment of empires and nations through the persistent bundling of many of these questions. She addresses the ebb and flow of popularity of many era-spanning questions, which strengthens her attempt to provide a genealogy for the crises and ‘questions’ of our current era, and her accounting for how queristic contradictions were perceived to be transcended. It is reasonable to suggest that Case has provided a foundational step for an emergent niche of epistemological inquiry in the historical discipline, not unlike Benedict Anderson’s contribution to the study of nationalism through his magnum opus Imagined Communities.