Spectacular Work: Labor as Entertainment at the World's Columbian Exposition Fairgrounds

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-162
Author(s):  
Meredith Conti
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Single Mother ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Construction Site ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The City

Night is falling in the city. Holiday shoppers bustle down the sidewalk, some pausing to gaze at a colorful billboard publicizing the delights of an upcoming exposition. A few crafty rats scamper along a tall wooden fence, stalked by a sinister ratcatcher of the Dickensian mold. Children frolic, fight, and tease one another in front of the fence, the familiar syncopated strains of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker overture underscoring their exuberant street play. This is not, however, the early 1800s Germany of the upper-class Stahlbaum family. It's 1892 Chicago. In the Joffrey Ballet's 2016 production of The Nutcracker, the story of Clara Stahlbaum's innocent Christmas Eve dalliances with an anthropomorphic nutcracker and their journey to the Land of Sweets becomes the story of Marie, the daughter of a Polish immigrant single mother, whose fantasyland is the future Chicago World's Fair. Marie's mother, we learn, is a hired artist working on the fair's sculptures. Marie, Fritz, and their mother inhabit a wooden shack in the heart of the construction site, surrounded by the skeletal structures that will become the White City's buildings. Drosselmeyer is now “The Great Impresario,” a character of vision and magnetism inspired by the fair's Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham, and Marie's working-class mother transforms in the second act into the embodiment of the fair's golden Statue of the Republic, a less saccharine substitute for the Sugar Plum Fairy. The mutual affection of Mother and The Great Impresario spans both acts, and though the ballet leaves unclear the outcome of their budding romance, in it young Marie sees the promise of her American dream: a contented nuclear family.

Disposing of Modernity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca S. Graff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Waste Disposal ◽  
Mineral Water ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Urban America ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition

Through archaeological and archival research from sites associated with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Disposing of Modernity explores the changing world of urban America at the turn of the twentieth century. Featuring excavations of trash deposited during the fair, Rebecca Graff’s first-of-its kind study reveals changing consumer patterns, notions of domesticity and progress, and anxieties about the modernization of society. Graff examines artifacts, architecture, and written records from the 1893 fair’s Ohio Building, which was used as a clubhouse for fairgoers in Jackson Park, and the Charnley-Persky House, an aesthetically modern city residence designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of the items she uncovers were products that first debuted at world’s fairs, and materials such as mineral water bottles, cheese containers, dentures, and dinnerware illustrate how fairs created markets for new goods and influenced consumer practices. Graff discusses how the fair’s ephemeral nature gave it transformative power in Chicago society, and she connects its accompanying “conspicuous disposal” habits to today’s waste disposal regimes. Reflecting on the planning of the Obama Presidential Center at the site of the Chicago World’s Fair, she draws attention to the ways the historical trends documented here continue in the present.

The Columbian Exposition—The Chicago World’s Fair

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean E. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
American Music ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
African American Music ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
Chicago World's Fair

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's participation in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, as representative of African American music. The exposition was designed to celebrate four centuries of progress toward building a lively industrial nation, which Chicago seemed to symbolize. It drew Americans from across the country, in company with Europeans, royals as well as commoners, to see whether the Americans might very literally be able to outshine the Paris Exposition of 1889. Despite resistance by the fair commission, there was some official representation of African Americans. This chapter examines how the World's Fair gave Burleigh, together with Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, the opportunity to address issues of representation and the ambiguous role that music and public performance could play in confronting discrimination and racist stereotyping.

Industrial urbanization, working-class lads and slang toponyms in early twentieth-century Helsinki

Urban History ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
HEIKKI PAUNONEN ◽  
JANI VUOLTEENAHO ◽  
TERHI AINIALA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:The article investigates the linkages between urban transformation and informal verbalizations of everyday spaces among male juveniles from Sörnäinen (a working-class district in Helsinki) in 1900–39. Sörkka lads' biographically and contextually varying uses of slang names mirrored their itineraries across the city in the search of earning and spare-time opportunities. As a simultaneously practical and stylistic street language, the uses of slang both eroded (in uniting bilingual male juvenile groups) and strengthened (as with providers and teachers, working-class girls, upper-class urbanites and rural newcomers) existing socio-spatial boundaries. Unlike in the late nineteenth century Stockholmska slang studied by Pred, openly irreverent toponymic expressions vis-à-vis the hegemonic conceptions of urban space were relatively few in early Helsinki slang.

scholarly journals Beautiful economic features of public landscaping in city beautiful

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 72
Author(s):  
Emilson Caputo Delfino Silva ◽  
Adriana Marasca
Keyword(s):  
Regional Economy ◽  
Quality Level ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Economic Rationale ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
City Beautiful ◽  
The City ◽  
Beautiful City

<p>City beautiful was a movement of great reach and inspiration, which apparently, was initiated in Chicago in 1893 during the World’s Columbian Exposition. The movement’s premises were artistic, architectural, social, political and economic. Among the artistic and architectural aspects of the city beautiful movement, the provision of high quality public landscaping was of paramount importance. As for the economic rationale behind the movement, we encounter the thinking that a beautiful city should increase its residents’ enjoyment of the city’s attributes and hence attachment to the city, raise real estate values as well as expand city business, with larger sales of city goods and services to local and touristic customers. This paper examines the economic rationale behind the city beautiful movement. We consider a “regional” economy consisting of two adjacent cities, which are identical in many of its attributes, such as the sizes of their populations. We build a general equilibrium model for the agents (consumers and producers) in this economy and demonstrate that the economic rationale behind the city beautiful movement is sound. Each city’s wealth and welfare are proportional to its quality level and a city’s quality level is proportional to the city’s public landscaping quality.</p>

Ethnic vs Class Voting: The Case of Winnipeg, 1945

1974 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Wiseman ◽  
K.W. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Proportional Representation ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Class Voting ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Prairie Provinces

This paper examines the relationship of social class, ethnicity, and voting in the city of Winnipeg in the 1945 provincial election. Our data sources were the 1946 census and provincial election returns. The Winnipeg provincial constituency was selected for a number of reasons. In 1945, it corresponded to the city of Winnipeg boundaries, thus permitting the correlation of the 1946 Census of the Prairie Provinces data with the October 1945 voting results. Second, it had both a large number of non-British voters and candidates, which allowed a test for the importance of ethnic voting. Third, Winnipeg had (and has) a large working-class population and pockets of upper-class areas, permitting a test for the importance of class voting. Finally, as a multi-member constituency returning 10 members, a system of proportional representation was employed. With 20 candidates in the running for 10 seats, 15 ballot transfers were necessary before all 10 candidates were declared elected. An examination of these ballot transfers permits a corroborating test for class and ethnic voting.

Temporalities as Ideologies

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-81
Author(s):  
Rebecca S. Graff
Keyword(s):  
Building Materials ◽  
Domestic Architecture ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Alarm Clock ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
Water Gas ◽  
The City

This chapter focuses on temporalities at both sites. First, it looks at the six-month lifespan and subsequent material erasure of the World’s Columbian Exposition, and how its ephemerality provided transformative potential. This is followed by discussion of the fair’s architecture and exhibits from the imagined past, present, and future, and how tourists consumed them and their ideological messages as an unproblematic totality. The archaeological research likewise centered upon Fair temporalities: monumental ephemerality (the fair’s enormous structures made of temporary building materials) and infrastructural permanence (systems of sewerage, water, gas, and electricity). The chapter then turns to the Charnley House, designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright as an aesthetically modern home, whose façade looked “out of time” with the rest of the domestic architecture of the city. Finally, an 1890s alarm clock from the Charnley midden reinforces and makes materially possible the keeping of modern, industrial time.

The Fire, the Bomb, and the Fair, 1871–1893

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Robert G. Spinney
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
The World ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Leaders ◽  
Chicago Fire Of 1871

This chapter analyzes three events that served both to define Chicago and reveal the city to the nation during the years between 1871 and 1893. It discusses the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket Bombing of 1886, and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. It also emphasizes on the enthralling stories of the three events that provided windows through which the late 1800s Chicago can be viewed by the world. The chapter talks about the fire, the bomb, and the fair that occurred within the context of late nineteenth-century apprehensions regarding Chicago. It also highlights how urban leaders managed the three events in order to combat the perception that cities were dangerous, immoral, and unnatural.

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