Holly Case is a historian at Brown University specializing in modern European history. Her first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII, was published in May 2009. She also recently completed 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, published in June 2018. Email: Holly_Case [at] brown.edu
by Holly A. Case (Interviewer) and Tom J. W. Case (Hermit) The following is the continuation of an interview with Tom, a pilot who has largely withdrawn to a small piece of land in rural South Dakota. Parts I and II can be found here and here. Interviewer: I’d like to ask how you would…
by Holly A. Case (Interviewer) and Tom J. W. Case (Hermit) The following is the continuation of an interview with Tom, a pilot who has largely withdrawn to a small piece of land in rural South Dakota. Interviewer: Have you ever experienced something annoying that got transformed by hermitude into something at least harmless if…
by Holly A. Case (Interviewer) and Tom J. W. Case (Hermit) The following is part of a written interview with Tom, a pilot who has largely withdrawn to a small piece of land in rural South Dakota. Interviewer: So first of all, thanks for agreeing to this interview. I know a lot of readers are interested…
by Holly A. Case On Sunday, May 17, 2015, there was a Lutheran church service in Delmont, South Dakota. Just one. A week earlier—on Mother’s Day—there had been two, one at Hope Lutheran, another at Zion Lutheran. At around 10:45 that morning, during Sunday school at Zion Lutheran, a tornado had ripped through the town,…
by Holly Case About 1,500 years ago, the Chinese literary critic Liu Hsieh wrote The Literary Mind. It includes a section on metaphor—hsing—which he describes as “response to a stimulus.” [W]hen we respond to stimuli, we formulate our ideas according to the subtle influences we receive…. the hsing is an admonition expressed through an array of parables.…
by Holly A. Case There is a nice neighborhood in Istanbul called Kadıköy, which means “village of the kadı,” or “judge.” One might as well call it Kediköy, however: “village of the cat.” There are a lot of stray cats there, as there are throughout the city. Once I saw a poster with a photo…
by Holly Case A few years ago I found among my effects fourteen typewritten pages of prose fastened together by a rusty staple. A relic from the summer of 1996, the text was a guide to reading poetry. “It is impossible for me to write anything about the explication of poetry without pontificating a bit,”…
by Holly Case and Lexi Lerner What follows is part of a collaborative project between a historian and a student of medicine called “The Temperature of Our Time.” In forming diagnoses, historians and doctors gather what Carlo Ginzburg has called “small insights”—clues drawn from “concrete experience”—to expose the invisible: a forensic assessment of condition, the origins…
by Holly Case and Lexi Lerner What follows is part of a collaborative project between a historian and a student of medicine called “The Temperature of Our Time.” In forming diagnoses, historians and doctors gather what Carlo Ginzburg has called “small insights”—clues drawn from “concrete experience”—to expose the invisible: a forensic assessment of condition, the…
by Holly A. Case Szeged is a Hungarian university town near the border with Serbia where I spent my third year of college abroad in 1995-1996. When I arrived for the first time with a year's worth of luggage, the traffic in and out of the train station included a rail-bus that carried people in…
by Holly A. Case Wilhelm Kotarbiński, Camel Cavalry (1848-1921) "People who were not born then will find it difficult to believe, but the fact is that even then time was moving faster than a cavalry camel….But in those days, no one knew what it was moving towards. Nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was…
by Holly A. Case Peter Viereck (background, right) and student, 1958 About this time last year, the idea came to me that it was time to write a conservative manifesto. Conservatism had shown itself to be hollowed out and practically free for the taking. Fiscal conservatism, "family values," and sincere deference to Christian morality had…
by Holly A. Case Centrál Kávéház, Budapest, c. 1910 I was sitting with my friend Robi at the Café Central in Budapest when the subject turned to religion and the Enlightenment, namely about the separation of God from moral systems. The topic was a poor choice. We had discussed it before in various forms and…
by Holly A. Case National Library, Sarajevo, 1994 Last November in Vienna, a number of us met to discuss what the outcome of the US election could mean. Because it was too early to tell, much of the conversation focused on parts of the world where leaders who had honed rhetoric and positions like Trump's…
by Holly A. Case The remnants of Andrei Kurkov's cactus collection Cacti don't exactly grow on trees in Ukraine. They need a great deal of light or they become deformed. In winter the air temperature has to be maintained at ten degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit), which is neither easy nor fun to manage in…
by Holly A. Case Demonstration in Budapest in support of CEU, April 9, 2017 On Tuesday of last week, the Hungarian parliament passed a law that seeks to drive the Central European University, founded in 1991, out of the Hungary. Many articles and op-eds have been written condemning the law, and declarations of support have…
by Holly A. Case Suzi Dada. Budapest, 2014 “plus or minus 8 years” A few years ago someone took a photograph in Budapest of a slight young woman blowing on a street sign that appears to bend under the superhuman force. From a passing car an astonished driver looks on. The woman is Suzi Dada.…
by Holly A. Case Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) The first and last time I saw Zygmunt Bauman was in October 2011. The Polish sociologist had come to Jena where he was one of the star participants, along with the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller, at a workshop on "Approaches to Postmodernity from the East." As the organizers…
by Holly A. Case An early version of Little Red Riding Hood comes to us from the Frenchman Perrault. In 1697, he published the story in a collection of others. It ends with a moral: “Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may…
by Holly A. Case Alen R. (left) and Arkan (right) Is there a relationship between politics and madness? The history of the legal strategy known as the insanity defense offers some clues. One thinker, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, was so haunted by the moral confusion of the insanity defense as to wonder whether there…