Caesar's Column (1890)

[Dave Monroe]

A sensational best-seller envisions the destruction of New York City.

Published in 1890, Caesar's Column is an account of a trip to New York
City in 1988 by a visitor from the Swiss colony of Uganda. The great
metropolis dazzles with its futuristic technology, but its
ostentatious wealth and luxury mask the brutal repression of the
laboring classes by their rich bosses. The workers, aided by
international terrorists, stage a violent revolt and the narrator
flees the devastated city by airship to found an agrarian utopia in
Africa.

Fueled by outrage at social conditions, Caesar's Column was the first
major dystopian novel in the English language. Its author, Ignatius
Donnelly, was the most famous—and controversial—American populist
politician of the day, and his book became a huge bestseller and was
often compared to such utopian works as Edward Bellamy's Looking
Backward (1888) and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890).

http://www.upne.com/0819566659.html

Ignatius L. Donnely

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_L._Donnelly