| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States. By Oz Frankel. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xii, 370 pp. $48.00, ISBN 0-8018-8340-7.)

In States of Inquiry, Oz Frankel's approach to the terra incognita of nineteenth-century governmental investigatory print culture in the United States and Britain resembles that of his protagonists, namely, the intrepid explorers of geographies and societies mapping, even interpellating, in the Althusserian sense, new subjects. Any systematic historian of the Victorian book will immediately recognize the challenge confronting Frankel: an archive hulking like an iceberg in the ocean of print that scholars have occasionally encountered and routinely avoided. The tomes of governmental social investigation are usually deemed to be as lifeless and cold as icebergs, too—the mere effluvium of intensifying states that had broken away and floated into public consciousness, usually with little consequence.

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