Remembrance of Things Present

In this brilliant book, Yablon unearths many buried treasures. Like the very best in the business, he is a three-tool historian: he can dig, he can think, and he can write. The packages left by his colorful cast of characters contain every major issue in American history after 1865. Time vessels--part tomb and part womb--also show us something deep about media that strive to bridge the gaps of time, space, and meaning. --John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds Yablon has produced a fascinating and learned account of how earlier generations of Americans thought about time. His survey of the practice of packaging objects and texts in order to project them into the future and rescue the present from oblivion manages to provide both a coherent narrative of cultural change from the Gilded Age through the Great Depression and a moving meditation on such subjects as historical self-consciousness, technological utopianism, mortality, and the number 100. Remembrance of Things Present is one of the most gratifying scholarly studies of US cultural history I've read in years. And at a moment when technological acceleration and climate change undermine confident imaginings of the future, this book will strike even nonspecialists as, well, timely. --David M. Henkin, author of The Postal Age Remembrance of Things Present is a landmark work of cultural history that brings sophisticated theoretical insights about modernity, temporality, and politics to bear upon the history of a unique timekeeping innovation: the time capsule. Yablon brilliantly identifies 'a crisis of posterity' that left Americans moored in the islands of the present but longing for bridges to the future. In clear and compelling prose, he insightfully explores how time capsules emerged in response to temporal displacement, democratizing politics, and what we today call information overload. This is a book of many dimensions, artfully executed, original, and rewarding, especially for scholars of modernity, temporality, and memory. --Alexis McCrossen, author of Marking Modern Times Remembrance of Things Present explains how anxieties about nation-building, prophecies, historic preservation, and a certain 'duty to posterity' led to the making, and sealing, of dozens of time capsules intended to tell the future about the past. This book is a fascinating study of the faith placed in physical objects as a pledge to tomorrow. --Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania