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Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future retired on December 31, 2005. During its successful four-year tour, 133 communities in 19 states hosted the exhibition.
 Summary
Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions
of the American Future offers a unique history of popular expectations
and beliefs about the shape of things to come. Curators Joseph Corn
of Stanford University and Brian Horrigan of the Minnesota Historical
Society use manifestations of popular culture such as toys, books,
movie stills, World ’s Fair memorabilia, car designs, advertisements,
and architectural designs to examine ways that Americans of yesteryear
have envisioned our collective future. Adapted from an exhibition
originally produced in cooperation with the Smithsonian’s National
Museum of American History, Yesterday’s Tomorrows is
designed especially to meet the needs of small museums. The exhibition
concentrates on the past one hundred years in America, when visions
of the future have fluctuated between secular utopias characterized
by breathtaking leaps of science and technology and urban chaos
fraught with danger and disintegration. Though many of the predicted
futures never came to pass and seem naïve from our 21st-century
perspective, other visions still challenge our concept of the future
— like personal flying machines that strap to one’s back
or cars that can be transformed into airplanes in just a few minutes.
 Community museums that hosted Yesterday’s Tomorrows developed,
with support from their state humanities council, community events
and activities that augmented the SITES exhibition.
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