States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (review)

States of Inquiry is an analysis of the roles of authorized state investigations and print culture during the growth period of two nations with representative forms of government. Frankel's effort examines the official social inquiries and scientific explorations financed by the British and American governments of that time. He discusses the forces that drove the investigations; the processes of collecting, publishing, and distributing this information; and how the information, once in the public sphere, engaged positive and negative political discourse between the government and its citizens or subjects. Frankel coins the term "print statism" to describe "this field of communication between the state and its constituencies" (2).

Although the British investigations into child labor, poverty, and factory and mining work seem slightly disparate from the American reports of the explorer John Fremont, the investigations of southern slavery and freedmen, and two early ethnological studies of the Iroquois Indians, Frankel blends each example into an insightful narrative. He analyzes how and why the inquiries were authorized by their respective governments to bring to light hidden or unknown aspects of society, science, or geography through the publication of their findings. These official reports were published, sometimes in huge quantities, and re- published in the private sector to be distributed widely among legislators, colleges, libraries, and the electorate.

Frankel writes a keen analysis of the many facets of print statism. The work is divided into three parts. Part I studies the role of print culture in the government, the enormous expense and time utilized to create the reports generated by the inquiries, the politics of favoritism, the reporting authors' internal conflicts with government and competing authors, and the state's role as a publisher of large, sometimes elegant, volumes. Part II looks at social investigations (several British investigations and the American Freedmen's Inquiry), revealing why they were initiated, how they were structured, and the reactions from both the government and the subjects of the inquiry. Frankel notes that these investigations expanded the electorate of both nations beyond the mere right to vote by giving voice to the dis-enfranchised—women, children, the poor, and minorities. Part III is an interesting study of Henry Schoolcraft's and Lewis Henry Morgan's different approaches to compiling ethnographic material about American Indians, focusing primarily on their research about the Iroquois. It examines the government's role in supporting the projects; how the information was accumulated, presented, and validated; the degree of Indian complicity in the gathering of information; and the role of these inquiries in the government's removal policy.

States of Inquiry is based on the meticulous examination of many official reports from both nations, archival research of private and official correspondence, and government documents. Frankel also draws upon the current debates about knowledge, print culture, and the state, referencing those studies frequently. He briefly refers to similar investigations in other Western countries, but a more thorough discussion of these examples would have been useful. Nonetheless, Frankel's work is a significant contribution to the understanding of the evolution of two representative governments and their societies during the nineteenth century.