Book chapter
Annals of the Present, the Local, and the Everyday: The Centurial Time Vessels as Heterodox History, 1900–1901
Remembrance of Things Present
University of Chicago Press
06/12/2019
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226574271.003.0004
Abstract
This chapter examines the “centurial” time capsules sealed in Detroit, Kansas City, Colorado Springs, and at Harvard and Mount Holyoke colleges, to welcome the twentieth century, along with those imagined by utopian and dystopian novelists, including Edward Bellamy and Mark Twain. Along with pioneering amateur and female historians, these collaborative vessels defied the orthodoxies of the ascendant professional historian—that solitary, objective, implicitly masculine expert concerned with affairs of state and written documents heroically retrieved from dusty archives. Whereas the earliest vessels were content to memorialize politicians and businessmen, these sought to enable historians to write a history of 1900/1 that would be social and cultural as well as political, local as well as national (albeit still focused on the white middle class). They thus included unorthodox evidence: vernacular artifacts, commissioned essays and journals detailing everyday activities, phonograph records, and photographic surveys of the built environment. Centurial vessels also reveal how contemporaries conceived of the future not in abstract terms (as scholarship on temporality has claimed), but in embodied, affective ways. Through this communication device, and in particular the sealed envelope, they fantasized about physically touching their future recipients—an intimacy that generated a sense of ethical duty to posterity.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Annals of the Present, the Local, and the Everyday: The Centurial Time Vessels as Heterodox History, 1900–1901
- Creators
- Nick Yablon
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- Remembrance of Things Present
- DOI
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226574271.003.0004
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 06/12/2019
- Academic Unit
- History; American Studies
- Record Identifier
- 9984025517902771
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