A century of tomorrows How imagining the future shapes the present

This behemoth undertaking from curator and craft historian Adamson (Craft: An American History, 2021) narrates a cultural history of twentieth-century America told through visions of its future. Organized chronologically, each chapter takes up a unique guiding theme that centered future forecasting during the overlapping eras in question: heaven and hell (1890s--1920s), machine (1920s--30s), garden (1930s--40s), lab (1940s--60s), party (1960s70s), and flood (1970s--80s). Each theme is elaborated through a meandering stream of readable, anecdotal assessments of individuals, cultural objects, and corporations, including familiar cultural touchstones, such as Sun Ra, the Whole Earth Catalog, and the RAND corporation, and lesser-known ones like Anna Julia Cooper, an advocate for Black education in America who laid important groundwork for the Pan-African movement. Adamson builds his history like a patchwork quilt, sourcing examples from different intellectual and political traditions (including some from Europe) to create a breathtaking assemblage that showcases how today's ideas about the future, be they hopeful or fatalistic, have precedent in the themes, visions, and feelings that inspired those of the past.

A history of the future--or better, the many futures that seers and scholars have painted in the past couple of centuries. "The act of probing into the future need not be predictive to be useful," writes historian Adamson. Instead, considering what the future might look like can focus attention on the good and bad of the present. Adamson opens with a fascinating, albeit brief, account of weather forecasting, which became more reliable with the advent of the telegraph: as he notes, "a lot of tomorrow's weather is already here today; it's just somewhere else, usually a little farther west." Just so, a string of futurologists of varying stripes, from techno-guru Buckminster Fuller to the fire-and-brimstone evangelist Billy Sunday, turns up here, attempting to gauge the cultural weather to come. Adamson's narrative is dizzying in its range of reference, taking in the Ghost Dance of the late 19th century and its sad culmination in Wounded Knee; the Afro-futurist jazz of Sun Ra, who inarguably lived at least part time on another planet; the influence of Edward Bellamy's wooden but nonetheless popular novelLooking Backward and its reverberations in hundreds of other books (including, Adamson suggests, Mark Twain'sConnecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court); and the role of futurist predictions in totalitarian movements ranging from Italian fascism to Soviet Bolshevism, to say nothing of the mathematical soullessness of Robert McNamara, which lends credence to Albert Einstein's maxim, "Anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror." Futurists remain with us, from the clueless (by Adamson's measure) Faith Popcorn to the forecasts of singers such as David Byrne and Laurie Anderson: Looking ahead, after all, is "part of what it is to be human," and Adamson is refreshingly optimistic on that score. An illuminating look at past and present efforts to gaze into the crystal ball. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.