Looking Forward

Looking Forward
Author: Jamie L. Pietruska
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2017-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 022650915X

In the decades after the Civil War, the world experienced monumental changes in industry, trade, and governance. As Americans faced this uncertain future, public debate sprang up over the accuracy and value of predictions, asking whether it was possible to look into the future with any degree of certainty. In Looking Forward, Jamie L. Pietruska uncovers a culture of prediction in the modern era, where forecasts became commonplace as crop forecasters, “weather prophets,” business forecasters, utopian novelists, and fortune-tellers produced and sold their visions of the future. Private and government forecasters competed for authority—as well as for an audience—and a single prediction could make or break a forecaster’s reputation. Pietruska argues that this late nineteenth-century quest for future certainty had an especially ironic consequence: it led Americans to accept uncertainty as an inescapable part of both forecasting and twentieth-century economic and cultural life. Drawing together histories of science, technology, capitalism, environment, and culture, Looking Forward explores how forecasts functioned as new forms of knowledge and risk management tools that sometimes mitigated, but at other times exacerbated, the very uncertainties they were designed to conquer. Ultimately Pietruska shows how Americans came to understand the future itself as predictable, yet still uncertain.

Weather Matters

Weather Matters
Author: Bernard Mergen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN:

A kaleidoscopic book that illuminates our obsession with weather--as both physical reality and evocative metaphor--focusing on the ways in which it is perceived, feared, embraced, managed, and even marketed.

Bibliography of Arizona

Bibliography of Arizona
Author: Southwest Museum (Los Angeles, Calif.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 460
Release: 1914
Genre: Arizona
ISBN:

"This constitutes the third edition of the original catalogue issued by Dr. Munk in 1900 and 1908. The first contained a few hundred volumes, the second about 1000; the present includes several thousand items, and is accompanied by a subject index"--Foreword, page 11.