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Introduction Written to the Future [I]t is the present’s responsibility for its own self-definition of its own mission that makes it into a historical period in its own right and that requires the relationship to the future fully as much as it involves the taking of a position on the past. —Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity Nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective. Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future. —Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia In the winter of 1829, a handful of young women and men on the island of Nantucket began gathering the first Thursday of every month to write the history of the future. Before their meetings, each member of the group composed a short piece of writing. Upon arrival, they deposited their anonymous contributions in a small bag, or ‘‘budget,’’ that gave the group its name: the Budget Society. One by one, each piece was drawn from the bag; one by one, each piece was subjected to friendly critique. The Budget Society wrote on many topics and in several genres. Their compositions included lyric accounts of baked beans, a caustic satire in dialect of an imagined inauguration speech by Andrew Jackson, and at least one barbed poem criticizing a member unable to endure even the mildest criticism of her writing. The Budget Society’s most telling artifact is a fictional epistle with the heading ‘‘Mouth of the Columbia River, NW Coast, February 3 AD 2000.’’ This composition is an exercise in proleptic historiography. Its author adopts the persona of a letter writer in the future corresponding with a contemporary about the customs of nineteenth-century Nantucketers. From the imagined vantage point of the year 2000, this fictional descendant of the  Introduction island and amateur historian recounts the peculiar mores of his nineteenthcentury ancestors. In a dizzying and illuminating moment of self-reference, he also explains how his knowledge of his ancestors’ ways derives from some ‘‘old manuscripts’’ of the Budget Society.1 Detailing the conduct of the society’s meetings and its goals, he impugns the women’s taste for novels and applauds the ancient writings of the ‘‘chaste’’ Benjamin Franklin and William Ellery Channing. This dispatch notes as well the predictive savvy of the members of the society, who anticipate(d) the ability of twentyfirst -century Americans to fly from one end to the other of America’s transcontinental geography in steam-powered vessels. This 1829 letter typifies the way many American writers came to manage their self-representation in anticipation of the future during the first half of the nineteenth century. That period’s amateur and professional writers alike staged dialogues with the future undertaken less for reasons of vanity than out of a desire to influence how their descendants would understand their relationship to the past and in turn come to know themselves. As Anthony Giddens has written of utopian discourse, such letters to the future constitute ‘‘prescriptions or anticipations’’ that ‘‘set a baseline for future states of affairs.’’2 In the early national and antebellum United States, these letters to the future were encoded as familiar literary genres, and they were organized around shaping how later generations would think of their descent from their ancestors, thus influencing how ensuing generations would conceptualize their own present tense. Like the Budget Society epistolarian ’s correspondence, such writing effectively set the parameters of ‘‘life to come’’ by passing down teleological and eschatological narrative structures designed to realize the nation’s future history. Its authors occupied the future—our present—by captioning their own and earlier periods as the origin of an inevitable national fate and by bequeathing to us certain familiar narrative genres organized around imagining that fate. Over the past two centuries, their resilient narrative structures have often led those who study early and nineteenth-century American writing to imagine that the future these authors predicted actually came to pass—that to live on U.S. soil during this time has inevitably been to experience oneself as an ‘‘American’’ or one kin to Americans. Generations of literary critics and historians have argued that their own moment was finally fulfilling—for better or for worse—the future first figured in such writing. In important ways we live even now in the house these writers built. In this book, I attempt to push back against these early efforts to populate the horizon with...

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