Celebrating the New World

It was the most astonishing fair ever. "The grandest exposition this planet has ever witnessed," wrote one observer of the Columbian Exposition. A spectacular neoclassical "White City" designed by the nation's leading architects under the direction of Daniel Burnham; innumerable exhibits of science, technology, and the arts from throughout the world; a meeting place for a remarkable variety of social, intellectual, and religious groups; and a Midway of sometimes up-lifting, sometimes exotic attractions - all staged in that boisterous and fascinating city of wealth, culture, and corruption, Chicago. No fair since has so captured the imagination of the American people - indeed, people throughout the world. More than 27 million visitors (an extraordinary figure for 1893) came to see the great Chicago World's Fair, and it entertained them enormously. Its legacies - to literature, music, architecture, and city planning, among many fields - were notable.

But the Columbian Exposition was also a telling portrait of American society at the turn of the nineteenth century. No event better illustrated the American rise to world power, better reflected American tastes and values, or better presaged the American Century to come. Robert Muccigrosso explores the history, substance, and larger meaning of the fair in this lively survey.