“Elegantly written and crisply paced, A Dream of the Future reminds us of the thin line that separates utopias and dystopias. The world’s fairs staged in the American South offered the world a glimpse of the future that Southerners envisioned. Tragically it looked altogether too familiar for many blacks and women. Cardon’s book joins the very best works on America’s participation in world’s fairs.” - W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William B. Umstead Professor and Chair of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“A Dream of the Future powerfully demonstrates why the American South must be placed at the center of any histories of modern America going forward. Cardon’s deft prose brings to life the oddities and amusements at world’s fairs to showcase how the ‘New South’ was never a peculiar outlier but in fact the model for an innovative brand of global empire building at the turn of the twentieth-century. His enticing notion of ‘Jim Crow modernity’ capture the volatile dance between racial segregation and industrial capitalism as Southerners, on both sides of the color line, tried to exhibit a post-slavery South ready for the future and open for business.” - Davarian L. Baldwin, author of Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life

“A Dream of the Future is an uncompromisingly intelligent book. In it, Nathan Cardon brilliantly tugs at an old knot: how and why did postbellum Southern elites marry tradition and modernity? His answers are compelling and persuasive. This book is important.” - Mark Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History, University of South Carolina

A Dream of the Future is available from Oxford University Press.