Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 23

1. Using predictions to study the past: Why might historians be interested in the visions of the futures held by the peoples they study?
2. Evaluating predictions: How accurate were the predictions made in 1900, in the 1940s, and in the early 1960s? What twentieth-century developments did these predictions miss altogether? And why?
3. Comparing perspectives: Most of these sources reflect the perspectives of people in the Western world. How might predictions about the future from the vantage point of 1900, the 1940s, and 2014 be different if they reflected the concerns of Chinese, Middle Eastern, African, Latin American, Indian, or other peoples of the Global South?
4. Considering technology: How do understandings of technology in Sources 23.1 and 23.2 differ from those of 23.5 and 23.6? How might you account for these differences?
5. Imagining the future: How do you imagine the shape of things to come over the next century? Without trying to predict precisely what might happen, can you identify the most important variables that will affect the future? To what extent will conscious human actions contribute to that future?