Looking Forward

A conceptually and historiographically ambitious book. . .The book's ultimate contribution is not in the author's efforts to synthesize or historiographically contextualize. It is in reinserting people in all their complexity, incomplete knowledge, and mixed motives, back into our understanding of the social, economic, and epistemological shifts that accompanied the probabilistic revolution. The nuanced, insightful, and engaging portraits of the various prophets who people its pages make clear that contingency and social construction are at work even when scientists and other experts might claim otherwise. --Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Jamie L. Pietruska is among the first historians to ask how ordinary people participated in the 'probabilistic revolution, ' modern science's reckoning with the unpredictable nature of the physical universe. Looking Forward paints a lively picture of the introduction of probabilistic reasoning into everyday life circa 1900. It reveals a culture of prediction that arose in the interstices where personal choices met the marketing of expert knowledge. Pietruska argues that scientists' quests to look into the future were shaped by popular demand. Concluding with a tour-de-force commentary on the predictive debacle of the 2016 presidential election, Looking Forward examines how and why Americans have come to rely on forecasts that regularly fail them. --Deborah Coen, author of The Earthquake Observers Nobody could have predicted the past two decades, even as market gurus, climatologists, and political pundits have been ignored or made some historically bad calls. Coming at a time of widespread despair over America's future, Jamie Pietruska's smart, concise, and fun book prompts valuable reconsiderations of how our national cravings for certainty have more often been a part of the problem than a path to solutions. --Scott A. Sandage, author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America Looking Forward is an original and brilliant history of the culture of prediction in the rise of modern America. In a book deeply researched, beautifully written, and brimming with insight, Pietruska shows how Americans of all kinds first learned to forecast the future, but also to live with the inescapable condition of uncertainty in modern life. I know of no other book that integrates the cultural histories of capitalism, science, technology, and everyday life so well. --Jon Levy, University of Chicago