ABSTRACT
Historians do not make very good futurists. The so-called futurists of the European avant-garde before World War I imagined a coming world of racing cars more beautiful than ancient Greek sculpture. (Maybe they were right, given the popularity of NASCAR.) They disdained everyone over age thirty. Many of them died violently in the mud and trenches of the Great War. Historians failed to predict the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s or the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. But history is not a craft of prediction, like meteorology. So we cannot predict for certain that the future of history itself holds promise. Historians disagree in that regard.
