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Indlæser... Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Futureaf Joseph J. Corn
   Ingen Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. 2   RobertDay | Dec 4, 2017 |  ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
Enormous skyscrapers will house residents and workers who happily go "for weeks" without setting foot on the ground. Streamlined, "hurricane-proof" houses will pivot on their foundations like weather vanes. The family car will turn into an airplane so easily that "a woman can do it in five minutes." Our wars will be fought by robots. And our living room furniture--waterproof, of course--will clean up with a squirt from the garden hose. In Yesterday's Tomorrows Joseph J. Corn and Brian Horrigan explore the future as Americans earlier in the last century expected it to happen. Filled with vivid color images and lively text, the book is eloquent testimony to the confidence--and, at times, the naive faith--Americans have had in science and technology. The future that emerges here, the authors conclude, is one in which technology changes, but society and politics usually do not. The authors draw on a wide variety of sources--popular-science magazines, science fiction, world fair exhibits, films, advertisements, and plans for things only dreamed of. From Jules Verne to the Jetsons, from a 500-passenger flying wing to an anti-aircraft flying buzz-saw, the vision of the future as seen through the eyes of the past demonstrates the play of the American imagination on the canvas of the future. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Indlæser...GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)306.0973Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Biography And History North America United StatesLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit: (4.21)
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However, I found the text dense and difficult to read, even for me. It wasn't the writing style alone, although I have no problem normally with academic discourse. I think it was the landscape format and the internal layout which did not help readability on top of the fairly dry style. Once I got beyond that, I found a surprisingly small-'l' leftist perspective on the development of the vision of the future from a capitalist viewpoint. At the same time, it was highly America-centric, even when it referenced influences from the rest of the world, such as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Le Corbusier, E.M. Forster and Karel Capek amongst others. It does reference the Whirlpool 'Kitchen of the Future' and its role in the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, which became the scene of a noted debate - or some would say, slanging match - between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. This exhibition is referenced in Francis Spufford's 'Red Plenty' as an example of the wildly divergent attitudes to personal wealth and aspiration in those two countries at a time when the Soviet Union was, briefly, out-performing the USA economically.
Overall, though, this book promotes America's vision of itself as reflected in its idea of the future, even if that future was constructed from cloth from many lands. But the writers do not hesitate to point out the gaps in that vision and the implications of where that might lead. A 1950 proposal for underground bunkers to preserve business records so that commerce could continue despite nuclear armageddon is particularly unsettling. Like so much of the American Dream, it's sometimes best not to pick away too much from the facade. (