How to Celebrate a Bridge

From Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader. ETC Press.

This short presentation examines a selection of architecture of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, including buildings from the White City and two national pavilions, as the material expressions of values, ideals and social issues, and as the cusp between old and new at a moment of profound change in American society. It shows through architecture not only that not all values were shared, but also that those adhering to shared values could be unexpected in their identifications and that standard assumptions are not always accurate.

This paper explores the visual culture of recreated temple structures in the entertainment settings of international exhibitions and Disneyland. It examines the material and conceptual construction of temple mythology in world's fairs and amusement parks through the reproduction -or rather, simulation -of Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec, Cambodian and Hindu structures. Disneyland in southern California has been interpreted as the hybrid descendent of the world's fairs and colonial expositions, the result of continuities and ruptures within the exhibitionary and entertainment traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the architecture in the Adventureland section of the park can be likened to the pavilions of the colonies in French and British expositions, especially those from the late nineteenth century through to 1939. The creators of the Temple of the Forbidden Eye in Disneyland's Indiana Jones Adventure ride from 1995 have claimed they were directly inspired by images of temples published in National Geographic magazines of the 1930s. A skim through these attributed sources of information turns up period photographs from world's fair temple-pavilions.

The Public Historian, 2003

Following on the heels of Chicago's Columbian Exposition, San Francisco's Midwinter Fair generated representations of identities, histories, and memories that promoted a vision of social order that spoke to the hopes and fears of both the city and the nation. The version of history articulated at the Fair's '49 Mining Camp exhibit looked back to the past with nostalgia to construct meaningful identities for the present. Through that gauzy lens, it fashioned masculine historical identities that sought to assuage race, class, and gender-based anxieties in the present by emphasizing white male dominance and downplaying the economic dislocations associated with the expansion of industrial capitalism.

New York, a celebrated capital of contemporary culture, also hosted two remarkable World’s Fairs during the 20th century, in 1939-40 and in 1964-65, which especially outside of the United States are not well known yet. In 1939-40, on the eve of World War II, Fascist Italy took part in that event dominated by the celebration of the American Way.

Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, 2009

The Journal of Transport History, 2017

Railroads played a key role in developing resorts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, few North American transportation museums emphasize this. This exhibition chronicles how rail links led to the development of amusement parks at an urban beach resort in New York.

A Companion to the Reconstruction Presidents 1865-1881, 2014

Of the many important political, economic, and social changes that literally remade the United States during Reconstruction, the celebrations that focused on the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 can seem relatively trivial but those commemorations were integral parts of re- envisioning the nation. The celebrations as a whole held the possibility of finding a new American nationality less than eleven years after the end of the Civil War. The first “histories” of the Centennial Exposition were produced by the same journalists and engineers who had written guidebooks to the Philadelphia exhibition and by visitors to the fair and the nation. In 1876 two complementary trends could be found in the celebration of the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. The centennial year is credited with reviving the celebration of the Fourth of July. Both the centennial year and the Centennial exhibition offer numerous opportunities for future scholarship.

Paper given at the Manchester American Studies Seminar (MASS) Postgraduate Conference. This paper attempts to answer the question of why we should study World's Fairs when they seem to be mass of contradictions and have spawned so much seemingly incompatible scholarship. The contention of this paper is that World's Fairs should absolutely be studied in all their messy glory, and a Benjaminian methodology may help.