When I was growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, I was fascinated by two very different visions of the future. On the one hand, I was transfixed by the powerful language and vivid imagery of the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. At the same time I was entranced by the promises of a world of flying cars, trips to the moon, and universal prosperity that appeared regularly in the magazine sections of the Sunday newspaper. As time passed new futures appeared in the culture around me -- the horror of a future devastated by nuclear war, the hope for a world of racial and cultural tolerance, to mention but two of them. When years later, I encountered the work of historians who sought to trace the development of different visions of the future as a means of determining the ideas and values of past eras, my old fascination with such futures returned, and I eventually decided to use the "history of the future" as an organizing concept around which to build a course.

Here are some of the topics that we will be studying in the course. You can see for yourself whether they seem worth spending a semester exploring.

• The impact of Jewish and Christian notions of the Apocalypse on Western culture
• The secularization of Western notions of the future under the influence of the Scientific Revolution
• The development of the notion that human society would progress towards utopia
• Trust in technological solutions to human problems
• The use of the future as an element in popular culture forms such as science fiction
• The use of the future in advertising and other aspects of consumer culture
• Wealth and poverty in visions of the future
• The exclusion of different parts of humanity from visions of the future
• Race and gender in speculations about the future
• The expectations for future wars and fear of nuclear annihlation
• 1960s counter culture visions of the future
• The role of the environment in shaping recent visions of the future