The multiple and perplexing views of this one event are emblematic of the interpretive confusion marking urban history since 1980. For urban historians, the Fair represents a metaphor for elite and plebeian values, a symbol of leisure and commercial cultures, the industrial city at its apogee, the physical embodiment of racial, ethnic, class and gender conflict, the beginning and the end of nineteenth-century planning, and the very essence of nineteenth-century American nationalism. In essence, the Columbian Exposition is an interpretive smorgasbord. A host of historians conclude that the Midway's architecture and leisure environment was constructed as imagined and commodified "representations of exotic culture." Simply put by Russell Lewis, the Fair was "the idea of the department store applied to a city scale." 3 John Kasson cast the first stone in this direction, arguing that the Midway represented a new model of democratic urban recreation shaped not by the civic beliefs of cultural elites but by the commercial values of entrepreneurs seeking to attract a mass audience. Numerous narratives now emphasize the Midway over the White City. Alan Trachtenberg and Wim de Wit underscore nationalism, viewing the Fair as a "grand illusion" by American rulers "to win hegemony over the emerging national culture." Peter Hales, by comparison, emphasizes urban culture, with an elite seeking "control over the production of the urban vision." Most critical is Robert Rydell, who sees the White City as "a cultural Frankenstein," "a coin minted in the tradition of American racism." 2 William Cronon invokes the event as a metaphor for the "shock city" of industrial America, "a fantasy landscape," and "a fairy city" symbolizing Chicago's historic climax. By contrast, Stanley Schultz characterizes the Exposition not as a beginning, but the culmination of the city planning ethos of the nineteenth century. For Christine Boyer, the Fair was part of a new discourse reflecting the emergence of modern urban planning. 1 But since 1980, the Exposition has exemplified the growing diversity of urban historiography. For decades, the considerable literature on the Fair emphasized the "White City" and issues of physical planning, moral order, and neoclassical architecture. 26 (March 1998), 175-204.įew events better illustrate the multiple paradigms in recent urban history than the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. A shorter, published version of this essay under the same title appears in Reviews in American History, vol.
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