Remembrance of Things Present : The Invention of the Time Capsule / Nick Yablon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Yablon, Nick, Author.

Series:

Chicago scholarship online.

Chicago scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Time capsules--United States--History.

Time capsules.

Time capsules--Social aspects--United States.

History--Sources--Social aspects--United States.

History.

United States--Civilization--1865-1918.

United States.

United States--Civilization--1918-1945.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (415 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction: Memory, History, Posterity

1. Safeguarding the Nation: Photographic Offerings to the Bicentennial, 1876- 1889

2. "P.O. Box to the Future": Temperance, Insurgence, and Memory in San Francisco, 1879

3. Annals of the Present, the Local, and the Everyday: The Centurial Time Vessels as Heterodox History, 1900- 1901

4. Seeds of Hope: "Posteritism" and the Political Uses of the Future, 1900- 1901

5. "A Living History of the Times": The Modern Historic Records Association, 1911- 1914

6. Mausoleums of Civilization: Techno- Corporate Appropriations of the Time Vessel, 1925- 1940

7. Breaking the Seal: The Vicissitudes of Transtemporal Communication

Epilogue: The Time Capsule's Futures

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2019.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226574271

022657427X

OCLC:

1104849588