Much has been written about how social groups construct, exploit, or erase memories of their past, but little about how they compete to shape future memories of their present. This book investigates a pervasive yet understudied manifestation of this impulse: the time capsule. Although objects have been ritually deposited since antiquity, the idea of specifying an opening date surfaced during the US centennial of 1876. It was a product, the book claims, of expanded horizons of communication in the telegraphic and telephonic age, but also of growing doubts about traditional vehicles of memory su ... More

Much has been written about how social groups construct, exploit, or erase memories of their past, but little about how they compete to shape future memories of their present. This book investigates a pervasive yet understudied manifestation of this impulse: the time capsule. Although objects have been ritually deposited since antiquity, the idea of specifying an opening date surfaced during the US centennial of 1876. It was a product, the book claims, of expanded horizons of communication in the telegraphic and telephonic age, but also of growing doubts about traditional vehicles of memory such as paper-based records, libraries, monuments, and the built environment. Over the ensuing half-century, at least thirty communities—from colleges and congregations to cities—bequeathed some kind of safe or chest to their successors. In their (moderately) inclusive, collaborative approach, their attempt to evoke everyday life, and their embrace of artifacts, photographs, phonograph records, and films, they constitute an early form of public and multimedia history. The book further examines how time capsules engendered visions of the future. Diverse campaigners—from eugenicists and teetotalers to suffragettes, socialists, and anti-imperialists—imagined the utopia their belief would realize by the container’s target date. Utopian fantasies are often criticized as abstract and compensatory. Yet this book shows how encapsulation could render them concrete. Contributors addressed prospective individuals and imagined reaching out to touch or embrace them. Such an embodied and intimate relationship, the book concludes, is crucial to any attempt to promote a sense of duty to posterity.