The History of the Future: How Visions of the Future Have Shaped History Around the World

6 credits · Undergraduate

Climate change, among other prospects, clouds our future. But visions of the future have bewitched, enchanted, and troubled human dreams for millennia. This class explores diverse moments of doubt, desire and dread across global history when oracles, artists, believers and popular leaders projected hopes and fears into near and distant futures. It explores how prophecies of the world's end reordered the world instead, how promises of impending perfection sometimes generated quite opposite results. This class asks how the future is used to shape the present. EXCLUSIONS: HIST 1510.06 FORMATS: Lecture