Abstract
IN SPITE OF KARL MANNHEIM'S WARNING about the difficulties of reckoning with future events, a small but growing number of brave historians have been exploring the place of the future in twentieth-century history. Drawing especially on the vocabulary of the Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck, they have sought to analyze aspects of past “horizons of expectation” rather than limiting themselves to “spaces of experience.” Studies of experience seem more susceptible to historical analysis; they are, in Koselleck's apt phrase, “drenched with reality.” Yet this flood of “reality” is deceptive, he suggests. It is impossible to analyze experience without incorporating expectation; how historical subjects imagined their futures is crucial to understanding their pasts.2 Thus the contributors to this AHR Forum seek to link experience and expectation, the past and the future, in order to illuminate key moments of possibility in the twentieth century and to offer insights into the methods of historical scholarship.