A groundbreaking history of the Big Questions that dominated the nineteenth century

In the early nineteenth century, a new age began: the age of questions. In the Eastern and Belgian questions, as much as in the slavery, worker, social, woman, and Jewish questions, contemporaries saw not interrogatives to be answered but problems to be solved. Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adolf Hitler were among the many who put their pens to the task. The Age of Questions asks how the question form arose, what trajectory it followed, and why it provoked such feverish excitement for over a century. Was there a family resemblance between questions? Have they disappeared, or are they on the rise again in our time?

In this pioneering book, Holly Case undertakes a stunningly original analysis, presenting, chapter by chapter, seven distinct arguments and frameworks for understanding the age. She considers whether it was marked by a progressive quest for emancipation (of women, slaves, Jews, laborers, and others); a steady, inexorable march toward genocide and the "Final Solution"; or a movement toward federation and the dissolution of boundaries. Or was it simply a farce, a false frenzy dreamed up by publicists eager to sell subscriptions? As the arguments clash, patterns emerge and sharpen until the age reveals its full and peculiar nature.

Turning convention on its head with meticulous and astonishingly broad scholarship, The Age of Questions illuminates how patterns of thinking move history.

About the Author
Holly Case is associate professor of history at Brown University.

Reviews
"Winner of the Istvan Hont Book Prize, Institute of Intellectual History"
"An imaginative and intriguing book. . . . [Case's] book is a dazzling display of erudition, with a little over 200 pages of elegant, witty text supported by a hundred pages of densely packed endnotes."---Jonathan Sperber, Times Literary Supplement
"Joining erudition with a poetic if occasionally enigmatic style, this book shivers with the restless spirit of the age it describes."---Ian P Beacock, Los Angeles Review of Books
"By systemizing her material into diverse arguments, and letting them contend with each other, Case convincingly shows how each carries a historiographic truth that is as plausible as all the others." * Connections *
"This book is a brilliant interrogation of the code in which the nineteenth century tells its contradictory story."---Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Journal of Modern History



Book Information
ISBN 9780691210377
Author Professor Holly Case
Format Paperback
Page Count 360
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press