Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America

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 theaccuracyandvalueof predictions, asking whether it was possible to look into the future with any degree of certainty.In Looking Forward, Jamie L. Pietruskauncovers a culture of predictionin the modern era, where forecastsbecame commonplaceas 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 arguesthatthis late nineteenth-centuryquest forfuturecertaintyhad an especially ironicconsequence: it led Americans to accept uncertainty as an inescapable part of both forecasting and twentieth-centuryeconomic and culturallife.Drawing togetherhistories ofscience, technology, capitalism, environment, and culture, Looking Forward explores howforecastsfunctioned 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.UltimatelyPietruska showshow Americans came to understand the future itself as predictable, yetstilluncertain.