Celebrating the New World: Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893

by Robert Muccigrosso

Book Overview

A lively survey of Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and how the Great Fair mirrored American values and tastes at the turn of the century. "Instructive of our times and an excellent brief study." -Journal of American Culture. American Ways Series.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566630142
• ISBN13: 9781566630146
• Release Date: March 1993
• Publisher: Globe Pequot Publishing Group Inc/Bloomsbury
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Literate and Lively

I consider myself an "informed amateur" (read: I collect all kinds of stuff) on the World's Columbian Exposition (WCE) a/k/a the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Sight unseen, I ordered a used paperback copy of Robert Muccigrosso's 1993 book "Celebrating the New World: Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893" and was amazed both at its literacy and at how much information he had packed into its 200 pages. Chapter 1 gives an overview of preceding 19th-century world's fairs (including the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876), Chapter 2 tells us about the squalor and splendor of 1893 Chicago (which had virtually burned to the ground in 1871) as well as its most prominent luminaries, then with Chapter 3 we're off and running with the competition between leading American architects for the honor of translating into physical form the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World. (Should we include our innovative home-town upstarts from Chicago, or should we rely on the more established firms of the Eastern seaboard?) How the principal players finally reconciled their conflicting egos and settled on the uniform style of the dazzling White City and the stately Court of Honor makes for fascinating reading. We are educated both as to the "highbrow" (the series of World's Congresses held on every major topic of the era--Religion, Public Health, Labor, etc.) and the "lowbrow" (the Midway, which bequeathed us not only its name as the generic term for an amusement area, but also the mechanics of both George Ferris' gigantic wheel and Little Egypt's sinuous "hootchy-kootchy") aspects of the WCE. The only reason I rated the book 4 instead of 5 stars is because of the now-obligatory view (in Chapter 6) of the Fair through the race/class/gender prism of the late 20th century, which (for me, at least) seems to mar so many other recent works on the subject--e.g., Robert Rydell's--yet even here the author strives to be factual in his discussion of women, blacks and Native Americans by showing some of the positive aspects of their portrayal and participation, rather than merely painting them as haplessly exploited victims who obtained no advantages at all from one of the grandest events of the century. All in all, I found this book to be one of the best I've read on the WCE and, though sparse on photographs (get Stanley Appelbaum's 1980 Dover book for those), an excellent overview which can be enjoyed by scholar and novice alike. A quick glance at the bibliography convinced me that this author had indeed done his homework well.