The History of The Future

What does it mean to think about Dallas in relationship to Dallas? In The History of the Future, McPherson reexamines American places and the space between history, experience, and myth. Private streets, racism, and the St. Louis World’s Fair; fracking for oil and digging for dinosaurs in North Dakota boomtowns—Americana slides into apocalypse in these essays, revealing us to ourselves.

Phill Jupitus looks at how we thought the car of the future was going to turn out and finds out why it didn't happen that way, focusing on the classic era of the 50s and 60s, a time when they hadn't quite yet worked out how to make cars fly and instead just made them look like they could. In his quest to trace the dream car of his childhood, Phill visits the places where the future of motoring seemed to have arrived and learns about the visionaries who let their imaginations rove in the heroic days before marketing and 'sustainability' domesticated the car into the homogenous transports we see today.

Phill Jupitus looks at how we thought the car of the future was going to turn out and finds out why it didn't happen that way, focusing on the classic era of the 50s and 60s, a time when they hadn't quite yet worked out how to make cars fly and instead just made them look like they could. In his quest to trace the dream car of his childhood, Phill visits the places where the future of motoring seemed to have arrived and learns about the visionaries who let their imaginations rove in the heroic days before marketing and 'sustainability' domesticated the car into the homogenous transports we see today.

We love to imagine the future. But why are groundbreaking future technologies always just around the corner, and never a reality?

We love to imagine the future. But why are groundbreaking future technologies always just around the corner, and never a reality?