James Gilbert . Whose Fair? Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2009 . Pp. x, 221. $35.00.

Abstract

Since the publication of Robert W. Rydell's All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exhibitions, 1876–1916 (1984), historians have interpreted the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis as a staging ground for American ideas about race and empire. Decades before this historiographical turn, dating back at least to the Hollywood film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), popular memory especially in St. Louis itself has imagined the fair as the city's shining moment, the crest of its Victorian charm and prosperity before a protracted twentieth‐century decline. But does either of these paradigms accurately capture the experience of those who attended the exposition? In a stunning work of archival reconstruction, textual analysis, and metahistorical commentary, James Gilbert brings the people back to the fair. Ultimately, he suggests, their experience reflected neither recent historiographical consensus nor long‐enshrined local memory. Rather, the historian's tools and the insights of scholars of memory permit a richer view of what the visitors saw, heard, and imagined—and how they witnessed the fair through their own diverse lenses of identity.