A New Look at The World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893

2002

A nation can portray itself in many ways. Some of these self portraits are accidental – the processes of everyday life create images and things that help define a nation – while at times these reflections are deliberate: the construction of national monuments or displays at a world’s fair. The Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was a rich combination of images and things: accidental and deliberate, solid and ephemeral, patriotic and self-serving. Not only did the fair define an era for subsequent generations of scholars – the “brown decades” for Lewis Mumford and Victorian America for Thomas Schlereth and me – but it serves nicely as the symbol for America’s entry into the modern industrial world. My paper will examine both the images and material culture of the Centennial to discover some of the many self-portraits – both intended and accidental – of America – and the host city – at the fair. It will also consider whose America – and whose Philadelphia – was exhibited in 1876 and whose was not. This paper is a part of my next book on spectacles of modernity at the fair. Particularly when compared with the voluminous literature on Chicago’s Columbian exhibition, Philadelphia’s Centennial has been largely ignored by scholars despite an abundance of surviving sources – from structures to written records to images – and I believe this slight has affected adversely our understanding of both late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century culture and politics.

Historical Archaeology, 2018

This article focuses on the “gilding” in the Gilded Age: the imitative finishes and faux façades that made the artifice of the Gilded Age possible. By drawing from the history of international world’s fairs and results from the 2008 archaeological excavation of Chicago’s 1893World’s Columbian Exposition, these imitative forms can be seen to have provided an authentically transformative experience to those who consumed them by virtue of their cheap and temporary materials. Finally, looking at the twenty-first century “McMansions” of the Second Gilded Age shows a similar drive to sustain illusions of affluence and status through imitative material forms.

The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia is a wonderful window through which to view the transformation of the United States from the rural, agricultural republic of the late-eighteenth century to the urban, industrial empire of the early twentieth. This shift, however, did not just take place in America and large parts of the world industrialized in the nineteenth century. The Centennial, as America's first world's fair, is the ideal location to develop this transnational setting as the creators of the fair placed it explicitly in this context, visitors to the fair commented upon it and scholars have viewed world's fairs as liminal spaces that connect the local with the global. My examination of the Centennial's presentation of industrial modernity is done through the lenses of social and cultural history. My search began by reading the diaries, memoirs and other accounts of visitors to the fair; these sources allow me to follow them as they went about the grounds. These thirty-two people (and their families and friends) effectively became my tour guides to the fair. To this base of information, I added details from newspapers, published guides and histories, illustrations and maps to flesh out the living guides' (at times) basic stories. In addition, these sources allowed me to see the grounds, buildings and artifacts that the historical actors visited. These visual images also served as texts for my analysis in the same manner as the diaries and other written sources. Finally, trips to Fairmount Park and other surviving artifacts-large and small-allowed me to understand better the physicality of the Centennial

EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste eBooks, 2014

L’Orientalisme architectural entre imaginaires et savoirs, 2009

L'Orientalisme architectural entre imaginaires et savoirs The Cairo Street at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 L'Orientalisme architectural entre imaginaires et savoirs 24. The display of a guillotine in a Moorish palace can only be explained by the entrepreneur's desire to use the most outlandish objects possible to make a large profit. 25. See Hubert Howe BANCROFT, The Book of the Fair..., op. cit. (note 4), p. 975-992, esp. p. 990 for Cairo Street.

2002

One measure of a nation is how the country chooses to portray itself: both internally and to the world at large. Many of these self portraits are accidental – the processes of everyday life create images and things that help define a nation – while at times these reflections are deliberate: the construction of national monuments or celebrations. The Centennial in Philadelphia was a rich combination of images and things: accidental and deliberate, solid and ephemeral, patriotic and self-serving. Not only did the fair define an era for subsequent generations of scholars – the “brown decades” for Lewis Mumford and Victorian America for Thomas Schlereth and me – but it serves nicely as the symbol for America’s entry into the modern industrial world. My paper will examine both the images and material culture of the Centennial to discover some of the many self-portraits – both intended and accidental – of America at the fair. It will also consider whose America was exhibited in 1876 and whose was not. This paper is a part of my next book on spectacles of modernity at the fair. Particularly when compared with the voluminous literature on Chicago’s Columbian exhibition, the Centennial has been largely ignored by scholars despite an abundance of surviving sources – from structures to written records to images – and I believe this slight has affected adversely our understanding of both late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century culture and politics.

Chicago’s Jackson Park witnessed intense and sustained tourism during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Recent archaeological survey and excavation produced information about the tourist experience of the Fair in a somewhat familiar artifactural form. The dig drew local tourists whose appetites for the Exposition were whetted by a bestselling book. At the heart of these multiple touristic consumptions in, and of, Jackson Park lies the central issue—the way that tourists create themselves as modern subjects through the practice of tourism and how this process can be both helped and hindered by the presence of familiar objects.

The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2012

The Gaze Across the Aisle: Architecture, Merchandising, and Social Roles at Marshall Field and Company, 1892 to 1911Neil Harris (l990) observed that in the two decades before World War I the knowledge most Americans had about art and style came from three places where artifacts were displayed: museums, worlds' fairs, and department stores. In Chicago, commercial magnets and city officials in the Chicago Commercial Club (CCC) built commercial and cultural institutions like banks, museums, libraries, theaters, and concert halls, located in the urban center, known as "The Loop." The museums, department stores, and even the street were places where mostly elite and middle-class individuals came to browse and learn by looking at displays of artifacts, as well as at each other, creating the drama of seeing and being seen. The department store Marshall Field and Company (Field's) was unique in that it marketed to all classes, creating a complicated drama of wishing, envy,...