Eiffel Tower
The literature on the Eiffel Tower is wide-ranging and multidisciplinary, echoing the character and history of the 300-meter iron structure itself: a singular and controversial monument with both a past and a present. Not meant to last beyond a few decades, the Tower still looms over Paris. It was the tallest structure on earth when constructed on the Champ de Mars in the French capital as the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, which marked the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. Reviled at first, it is revered today. During the post-WWII decades, it became the central icon and symbol of Paris and eventually of France tout court, and is today one of the most widely recognized and visited attractions in the world. The Tower was made a Monument historique in 1964 and named part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site (“Paris, Banks of the Seine”) in 1991. The publications enumerated and glossed in what follows align with the Tower’s complexity: they are drawn from art, architectural, cultural, economic, political, social, and technology history as well as biography and semiology.