HIST 110 The Chicago World Fair
THE CHICAGO WORLD FAIR
In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition honoring the 400th Anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America. The Fair was designed to showcase the achievements of the United States. The Fair was an immense popular success, but from the beginning the Fair became a flashpoint for controversy. Doubts were expressed about the terrifying new technology on display and the fake Neoclassical architecture which housed it; the display of indigenous people on the Midway; and the emergence of mass culture–symbolized by the ferris wheel–at the expense of more elite forms of cultural authority. This course will examine the Chicago World’s Fair as an inflection point and symbolic drama with a special focus on the issues it foregrounded: empire, technology, race, mass culture, urban planning and the emergence of a modernity that Americans had yet to fully reckon with or understand.
Prerequisite
None