Book chapter
Safeguarding the Nation: Photographic Offerings to the Bicentennial, 1876–1889
Remembrance of Things Present
University of Chicago Press
06/12/2019
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226574271.003.0002
Abstract
This chapter investigates what prompted photographer Charles Mosher and publisher Anna Deihm to co-invent the time capsule. It begins by examining the US centennial and its attendant exposition, which stimulated not only compendia of the present but also anticipations of a glorious bicentennial by which time the crises of the immediate future would be resolved. It then considers the time capsule as a product of the communications revolution, promising to span time as the telegraph, telephone, and postal service did space; a culture of photography oriented around portrait galleries and the collecting of albums; a crisis of posterity stemming from concerns about the inadequacy of paper-based records, archives, monuments, and the built environment; and a larger democratization of fame. The chapter concludes by recovering the vessels’ political subtext. They embodied a conservative faith in the continued dominance of the capitalist elite, the Republican Party, and the republic itself, and were intended to serve as ritual objects inculcating a sense of national belonging. Yet by the time they were sealed after the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, they assumed a more ambivalent stance and even expressed social democratic hopes for a future characterized by gender, racial, and class equality.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Safeguarding the Nation: Photographic Offerings to the Bicentennial, 1876–1889
- Creators
- Nick Yablon
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- Remembrance of Things Present
- DOI
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226574271.003.0002
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 06/12/2019
- Academic Unit
- History; American Studies
- Record Identifier
- 9984025655702771
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