Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule

Capa
University of Chicago Press, 12 de jun. de 2019 - 384 páginas
Time capsules offer unexpected insights into how people view their own time, place, and culture, as well as their duties to future generations. Remembrance of Things Present traces the birth of this device to the Gilded Age, when growing urban volatility prompted doubts about how the period would be remembered—or if it would be remembered at all. Yablon details how diverse Americans – from presidents and mayors to advocates for the rights of women, blacks, and workers – constructed prospective memories of their present. They did so by contributing not just written testimony to time capsules but also sources that historians and archivists considered illegitimate, such as photographs, phonograph records, films, and everyday artifacts.

By offering a direct line to posterity, time capsules stimulated various hopes for the future. Remembrance of Things Present delves into these treasure chests to unearth those forgotten futures.
 

Conteúdo

Memory History Posterity
1
Photographic Offerings to the Bicentennial 18761889
21
Temperance Insurgence and Memory in San Francisco 1879
69
The Centurial Time Vessels as Heterodox History 19001901
98
Posteritism and the Political Uses of the Future 19001901
145
The Modern Historic Records Association 19111914
191
TechnoCorporate Appropriations of the Time Vessel 19251940
235
The Vicissitudes of Transtemporal Communication
287
The Time Capsules Futures
297
Acknowledgments
311
List of Abbreviations
315
Notes
317
Index
395
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Sobre o autor (2019)

Nick Yablon is associate professor of history and American studies at the University of Iowa and the author of Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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