Introduction

World's fairs in the nineteenth century were momentous events which worked largely to create a sense of a shared national identity and popular culture. The Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, which was held in 1893 to commemorate the 400 th anniversary of Columbus' voyages to the Americas, was enormously popular and attracted more than 27 million visitors during the six months it was open. The fair was a site for entertainment and commerce and it featured technological advances, educational developments and new consumer products. The exposition stressed America's progress and achievements and presented an idealized and utopian vision of the country's past, present and future. Recent scholarly works in print have focused on issues such as the role world's fairs played in legitimizing racism at home and in building an empire abroad, the linking of consumerism with entertainment and the use of public space in relation to gender roles. ¹There are several websites about the Columbian Exposition; some which address these and other cultural meanings and implications and others which serve primarily as an archive of primary and secondary sources.

Websites

World's Columbian Exposition: Idea, Experience, Aftermath was created by Julie K. Rose as a thesis for a master's degree in English with a concentration in American Studies at the University of Virginia. The three aims of this electronic essay are to provide visitors with a “virtual tour” of the fair, to examine contemporary reactions to the fair, and to discuss the social, political and cultural legacies of the fair. The tour provides a detailed description of the physical space, buildings, vendors and amusements at the exposition; however, it surprisingly does not offer many visual aids. Even though the site was created in 1996 before many of today's more sophisticated tools were available, it still could have provided more than simply one map and sixteen small photographs which cannot be enlarged. Rose states , “the first step to contextualizing [the fair's] reception is to understand the ideological landscape and physical dimensions.” While she does an admirable job in describing the landscape, Rose does nothing on the web that could not be done equally well - if not better - in print.

Rose's main focus is to examine the various meanings and legacies of the fair and in these respects she offers many thoughtful arguments. Rose discusses the goal of the fair's creators to promote a particular vision of America; one which presented the country as unified and strong and which demonstrated to the world that it had achieved cultural parity with Europe and had become a world leader in commerce and technology. Rose is interested in capturing contemporary reactions to the fair and argues that, by and large, fairgoers experienced the exposition as the creators had intended it: as a celebration of American achievements. The site offers a link to 13 quotes from fairgoers that Rose found particularly interesting, but while she notes that there are thousands of fairgoer reactions, she states that there is “not enough room” to include them on her website. Surely she means that she did not have enough time to add them to her site, as the web provides more than enough space. Rose argues that legacies of the Columbian Exposition include a culture which associates entertainment with consumption and equates technology with progress. By reaching millions of Americans and by reflecting and reinforcing existing cultural, political and social trends, the fair worked to solidify these and other movements.

This website has a simple and attractive design and it is easy to navigate. Its audience would likely include world's fair enthusiasts and students who could use it as a secondary source. As a website, it does not do anything that it could not do in print, with the notable exception of bringing an interesting and thought-provoking master's thesis to a substantially wider audience.

World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 produced by the Paul V. Galvin Library Digital History Collection at the Illinois Institute of Technology is an archive which has digitally preserved thousands of illustrations and full-text images of the fair. The four main publications in this collection (all of which were published either in 1893 or 1894) are The Dream City, The Vanishing Fair, The Book of the Fair, and Art and Architecture. The website offers a search function where one can search within one publication or all four simultaneously. Images can be viewed in three different sizes and in most cases the text has been retyped to make it easier to read. However, the otherwise easy navigation is made somewhat cumbersome by not allowing viewers to stay within one particular pixel setting. Three of the maps within Dream City have been made “interactive” by allowing visitors to click on features within the map which connect to close-up photographs and detailed descriptions. The site features additional digitized materials from Harper's, the Art Gallery of the fair, and the Official Directory of the fair. There are also links to other websites about the exposition.

Unsurprisingly, the messages about the fair in these preserved volumes are largely celebratory in tone. For example, the first page of chapter six in The Book of the Fair states “Never before had there here been witnessed a spectacle, or rather a series of spectacles, at once so dignified, brilliant, and impressive, and never had been gathered from our own and foreign lands so great an assemblage of eminent men.” The books in this collection serve as wonderful sources not only by displaying the architecture and scenes of the fair, but also by revealing the dominant message and purpose which lay behind the fair.

The website also features two recent scholarly articles; one which touches upon the fair's agenda to create a physical utopia by ignoring social problems of the day and the other which addresses the presence and participation of African Americans at the fair. These two essays seem to be directing our attention to what was not stated explicitly in the contemporary publications.

World's Columbian Exposition: Chicago World's Fair is part of larger website entitled World's Fairs & Expositions: Defining America and the World, 1876-1916. Edited by American Studies scholar Jim Zwick, this website is a directory which draws upon resources available from the University of Michigan, the Library of Congress, the Making of America project at Cornell University and over 200 local texts. By locating these various resources in one place, this website aids researchers who otherwise would have to access a variety websites to receive the same information. Zwick has indexed primary sources concerning contemporary viewpoints of the fair, attendance at the fair, art, literature, race relations, religion, social issues, technology, visiting the fair, women, and the exhibits. The site also features maps, architectural plans, photographs and cartoons. Unfortunately this website does not feature a search tool; however, it is well organized and is easy to navigate.

While offering a historical interpretation is not the primary concern of this archive, Zwick's explicit message on the homepage, which argues that fairs generally offered idealized versions of the past and present while ignoring major societal conflicts, is felt implicitly throughout the website both in the blurbs describing each article and in the selection of the articles themselves which cover a wide range of social, political and cultural issues. Furthermore, there is a link to a review that he wrote of the video Savage Acts: Wars, Fairs and Empire. Zwick commends the video for making a connection between the promotion of world trade and national identity at world's fairs and overseas expansion. The website also offers links to several books which address these and other topics which depict the conflicting messages of fairs.

The Interactive Guide to the World's Columbian Exposition is a web exhibit which lists various statistics about the fair. Produced by Bruce Schulman, a middle-school teacher in North Carolina, this website covers topics such as the total cost of the fair; admissions prices; transportation time to Chicago from various locations; the population of Chicago in 1893; a brief explanation of the legislation authorizing the exposition; a list of the countries who had exhibits at the fair; the precise location of the fair site; the cost and size of and the materials used for several buildings; and a brief description of the attractions. Little historical interpretation is given on this site. Like Julie K. Rose, Schulman is concerned with the exposition's legacy; however, his focus is on the technological inventions which were presented to the public for the first time and the lasting influence of the architecture used at the fair rather than on the larger cultural implications of the overall meaning of the event. This site is clearly aimed at world's fair enthusiasts or novices who are interested in the exposition. While the statistical information is certainly interesting and can lead to a number of worthwhile inquiries, unfortunately Schulman does state where he gets his information from and thus any scholar seeking to use the numbers he offers would have to locate them elsewhere.

Progress Made Visible: American World's Fairs and Expositions is the web component to an exhibit that the Special Collections Department of the University of Delaware Library displayed in 2000. As the title of the exhibit suggests, this site focuses on what it perceives as benefits of world's fairs such as the development of markets, the creation of buildings and parks and the exhibition of technological and educational advances. However, it also mentions negative aspects such as the overt racism that existed at the fairs. The section dealing with the Chicago fair highlights in general terms the fair's role in presenting the United States as a force in world politics, commerce and technology. The interpretation of the fair's legacy is similar to Rose's as it stresses the merging of consumerism, technology and entertainment. This website also briefly addresses issues concerning the presence and role of women and African Americans at the fair. There are a few posters and advertisements featured on the site, but the small number of images is surprising considering its purpose was to highlight an exhibit which presumably featured more objects.

This small website does nothing more than a brochure or pamphlet from the exhibit could do. It certainly is not a “virtual tour” of the exhibit and, in fact, it does not even give a good sense of what artifacts were displayed. What the website does do is bring its overall interpretation of world's fairs to an audience that is vastly larger than those who attended the actual exhibit.

Conclusion

It would appear that in terms of studying history, new media has made the most gains in offering extensive archives to scholars. For the student seeking to conduct research about the Columbian Exposition, the web is a great place to start. The digital archive produced by the Paul V. Galvin Library and the directory created by Jim Zwick are two wonderful resources for locating primary and some secondary sources. Both of these sites are examples of how new media is helping people conduct historical research easier and faster. Rose's website , and to a much lesser extent, the University of Delaware's Library exhibit website, offers a historical narrative of the impact the fair had on American society and culture. One might wonder why Rose decided to create a website for her master's thesis. What did she expect new media would allow her to do differently that she could not do in print? Or did she simply want to reach a larger audience? Could she have utilized new media in a way to enhance her narrative or are the two inherently incompatible with one another?

Janet Murray argues that literary narratives have a place on the web. She envisions a future where readers will be able to “interact” with multi-plot stories. Murray refers to interactive, narrative-based video games as precursors to such literary narratives. ²Interestingly, there is a narrative-based video game created by Peter Nepstad which is set at the Columbian Exposition. Unfortunately this game is not available on the web, but it claims to be “carefully researched and historically accurate”. According to its advertisement it offers over 500 archival photographs, dozens of interactive characters, challenging and unique puzzles and a non-linear game play. One can see how this idea could be applied to create a tour on the web based on scholarly research where visitors move through a virtual recreation of the exposition. Readers could visit the various buildings and encounter other people along the way. A project of this magnitude would be a large undertaking and is probably beyond the scope of a mater's thesis; but it can be done. ³

Perhaps the reluctance of presenting historical narratives in new ways on the web is not so much due to a lack of imagination or a lack of funds (although the latter point is a real concern) but because people prefer to read (and write) lengthy narratives in the traditional print format. In For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago, Lauren Rabinovitz discusses women's appearances in public spaces of leisure and the marketplace to examine the relationship between women's leisure and the construction of a modern female subject. Rabinovitz analyzes the way in which the Columbian Exposition was structured and advertised to draw conclusions about how women participated in the fair. In contrast to city streets, which were often viewed as dangerous and inappropriate spaces for women to roam unaccompanied by men, the exposition was arranged to provide a safe and controlled environment.⁴ The exposition is not the main focus of Rabinovitz's study, yet her book offers more detailed historical interpretation than the majority of the websites mentioned above. It would appear that while archives have found a comfortable home on the web, in-depth historical analyses, for now, largely remain in print.

1See Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exposition, 1876-1916, University of Chicago Press , 1984; Christopher Robert Reed, “All the World is Here!” The Black Presence at White City , Indiana University Press, 2000; Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago , Rutgers University Press, 1998; and Arnold Lewis, An Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop and the World's Columbian Exposition , University of Illinois Press , 1997.

2See Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace , MIT Press, 1997.

3 I am naturally inspired here by the presentation of The Lost Museum given in class.

4See Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago , Rutgers University Press, 1998

Olivia Ryan
October 2004