Columbian Exposition Research Articles

John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner by R. Bruce Stephenson

Reviewed by: John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner by R. Bruce Stephenson Todd M. Michney John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner. By R. Bruce Stephenson. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 294. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-62534-079-5.) In this deeply researched and richly detailed biography of John Nolen (1869–1937), among the first to list his profession as “city planner,” R. Bruce Stephenson focuses attention on a figure who has been curiously understudied and who arguably deserves additional scrutiny on several topics—from his ideas about race and class to his proto-environmentalism, all key interests among Progressive reformers. Described as a “pragmatic visionary,” Nolen, in his signal contribution, translated garden city principles that originated in Great Britain for American audiences (p. 4). Nolen was previously examined in a 2011 article by Robert Freestone as a transitional figure bridging the City Beautiful and City Practical movements (“Reconciling Beauty and Utility in Early City Planning: The Contribution of John Nolen,” Journal of Urban History, 37 [March 2011], 256–77), but otherwise Nolen has mainly garnered attention in case studies of selected projects. One of the few other monographs to date is Jody Beck’s John Nolen and the Metropolitan Landscape (London, 2013), a much shorter study that Stephenson seems to have completely overlooked. Nolen left a successful first career as a promoter of adult education in 1903 to enroll in Harvard’s landscape architecture program, where he studied under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Inspiration for this move came from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and what Nolen absorbed on trips to Europe, particularly Germany, which was pioneering land-use regulation at the time. Nolen received his first commission before even completing his graduate training, and ultimately he was credited with drawing up hundreds of plans. However, his efforts to convince profit-minded developers and penny-pinching city officials to implement his elegantly organic designs typically came to naught; Stephenson’s assessment that prior to the 1920s “only about a quarter of Nolen’s city and town plans were adopted” seems overly generous (p. 158). Apart from several well-received parks and subdivisions, practically all of Nolen’s most time-consuming projects were either dramatically scaled back (Madison, Wisconsin) or ultimately rejected (San Diego; St. Petersburg, Florida). Mariemont, Ohio (a Cincinnati suburb) was Nolen’s most successful achievement, being entirely underwritten by a wealthy patron. World War I delivered new opportunities, but Florida’s land bust and the coming of the Great Depression essentially destroyed his business; thereafter, a shift toward more “scientific” planning and modernist design, not to mention his own premature death, denied Nolen the chance to fully participate in the New Deal planning revival. Despite various setbacks, Nolen was extremely well connected in the field and published prolifically, contributing to the professionalization of city planning. [End Page 961] Historians of the South will find much material of interest here, considering Nolen’s active involvement in Charlotte, North Carolina; Roanoke, Virginia; Kingsport, Tennessee; and numerous Florida cities and towns. However, Stephenson does not go nearly far enough in exploring Nolen’s views on formalized racial segregation. Throughout, the approach is to give Nolen the benefit of the doubt, emphasizing his discomfort with blatant white supremacy and highlighting his several direct encounters with African Americans—Nolen drew up a Tuskegee Institute plan, for example—while postulating that his disadvantaged childhood made him empathetic. While Stephenson does scrutinize Nolen’s occasional inclusion of segregated black settlements—most strikingly in Venice, Florida, surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of white-owned farms—he asserts these were accommodations to southern racial custom. In fact, as Jody Beck notes, on a number of occasions (and as early as 1912) Nolen personally advocated racial segregation as beneficial for African Americans. While noting race-based deed restrictions in Belleair, Florida, Stephenson neglects to mention these were also applied to Myers Park in Charlotte, as well as to Mariemont (underlining that de jure segregation was not limited to the South in this period). While representing a welcome contribution to the field, there is clearly more to be explored in John Nolen’s contributions to the field of early city...

Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women’s Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair by Miki Pfeffer

Reviewed by: Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women’s Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair by Miki Pfeffer T. J. Boisseau Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women’s Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair. By Miki Pfeffer. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. Pp. xii, 267. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-62846-134-3.) In the scholarly world of international exposition history, the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans has barely a toehold. Miki Pfeffer’s book establishes secure ground from which the significance of this ill-starred world’s fair can be better understood and appreciated. Held in New Orleans from December 16, 1884, until June 1, 1885, [End Page 192] to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the first export of southern cotton in 1784, the exposition was designed to celebrate New Orleans as an emerging industrial center of the New South. This ambition was infamously unrealized, in part due to devastating mismanagement by the exposition’s administration. Among the many near casualties of this mismanagement was the Woman’s Department. The women leading the way were determined to surpass in significance and scope the Women’s Pavilion at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. In hindsight, however, the 1876 Pavilion would not be the germane point of comparison. Given the spectacular success of the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, few scholars or gender historians have bothered to even look at what happened in New Orleans eight years before. Pfeffer’s book alone demonstrates the significance of this world’s fair for women’s history. She documents the disappointments, internal conflicts, and external obstacles that bedeviled the elite and professional women from across the nation who yoked themselves uncomfortably together to create the organizational scaffolding on which a shaky Woman’s Department was belatedly erected, months after the exposition at large had officially opened. The story Pfeffer recounts about infighting, class-inflected antagonisms, and sectional animosities could have easily become an ahistorical, misogynist bromide about women being unable to get along with one another. Instead, Pfeffer is careful to locate each seemingly interpersonal conflict within a larger historical explanation of its origins and intelligent discussions of key issues as they played out in the lives of those involved. Her analysis leaves no doubt as to the politically significant reasons for the women’s jockeying for power and intense responses to perceived slights. With virtually no other comparable venue available to them to present women’s advancements and explain their rights to inclusion in the modernist project, these women, not surprisingly, fought over every resource and opportunity for self-representation that the exposition provided. And, with the key shots being called from above—in particular the selection of Boston-based Julia Ward Howe as the presiding officer—it is clear why divisions immediately developed between local women and the northern women who formed the Woman’s Department central organizing committee and why these divisions were expressed through regionalist prejudices. Pfeffer concludes that the failures of the exposition and the disappointments experienced by its organizers were ultimately of less importance than the opportunities the exposition furnished for politicization among the professional and elite sectors of New Orleans women who participated. “[W]hat happened in New Orleans mattered,” Pfeffer tells us, because it brought southern women within reach of the chief political movements promoting women’s interests that were growing in prominence in the nation (p. 213). Pfeffer’s persuasiveness on this point carves out a new niche for this world’s fair within the critical historiography on expositions. But, of more general importance, it serves to remind historians that success—as conventionally conceived—is not, and should not be mistaken for, the measure of historical significance. [End Page 193] T. J. Boisseau Purdue University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Between Stage Décor and Reality. The Cairo Street at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 at Chicago

Between Stage Décor and Reality. The Cairo Street at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 at Chicago

The last great projects, 1890-1895

In 1890, Frederick Law Olmsted, then nearly sixty-eight years old, had risen to the pinnacle of his career. Together with his partners, stepson John Charles Olmsted and protege Henry Sargent Codman, he was involved in a number of major ongoing projects, including the Boston, Buffalo, and Rochester park systems, the campus plan for Stanford University, and numerous private estates. In July, he reported that the firm had twenty works of considerable importance underway, including nine large parks and six estates that he believed were matters of public interest. Before the summer ended, the firm's commitments would expand dramatically as Olmsted and his partners were appointed landscape architects for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As commissions for new park systems, residential communities, grounds for educational institutions, and private homes increased, Olmsted feared that their commitments would exceed the partners' ability to do their best work. Despite these fears, Olmsted's work in the final six years of his professional career would only enhance his considerable reputation, as the ninth and final volume of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted reveals. With its impressive waterways, monumental buildings, and verdant islands and shores, the Chicago fair proved to be one of the firm's crowning achievements. The early 1890s also saw the culmination of Olmsted's wide-ranging work on one of his other great projects: the design of the grounds of George W. Vanderbilt's massive estate, Biltmore, near Asheville, North Carolina. In planning the estate's thousands of acres, Olmsted outlined new approaches to landscape design, promoted the creation of the first scientific forestry operation in the United States, designed a model residential subdivision, and proposed an arboretum that would have been the most ambitious in the nation. The Last Great Projects, 1890-1895, chronicles the history of one of the world's greatest landscape design firms while offering a fascinating retrospective on Frederick Law Olmsted's productive final years. The volume also gathers together the important documents of this last triumphant era. As Olmsted neared the end of his career, he wrote some of his most reflective letters and reports, summarizing the legacy of his involvement with the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the quality of landscape design in England and France, the biographical circumstances that proved most important to his development as an artist, and his hopes and fears for the future of his profession.

Entangled Culture and Nature: Toward a Sustainable Jackson Park in the Twenty-First Century

To address Jackson Park, site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition on the shores of Lake Michigan, a talented interdisciplinary team interweaves biodiversity and cultural authenticity in this Great Lakes Fisheries and Ecosystem Restoration (GLFER) funded project. Enabled through a private-public-civic partnership, the ecological health, historic integrity, and performance of this public landscape are improved. Climate change amelioration aspects will enhance resilience. As landscape functions and scenic qualities improve, upgraded perceptions and uses will foster positive effects within adjacent urban neighborhoods.

Toward Endless Life: Population, Machinery, and Monumental Time

Both literary and historical studies have recently experienced a “temporal turn,” in which the cultural history of time has become an object of scholarly investigation. The “big history” has encouraged us to think about time on a longer scale, situating historical periods within extended arcs of centuries and human activity as a whole within millennia of natural history. But this turn to a deeper and vaster sense of historical time has, itself, a history, one that illuminates our current struggle to define the scale within which we understand human experience. At the great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century, from the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia to the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, visitors encountered representations of vast historical time in which humanity played a relatively insignificant role. The expositions seemed to tell a tale of historical change in which human beings became Malthusian populations, giving way in a quasi-evolutionary fashion before fetishized machinery and clockwork technology. The expositions and related cultural artifacts such as monumental clocks, literary narratives and sketches, and historical paintings thus presage, in their imaginings of inhuman time, not only the contemporary academic interest in “big history” and “deep time,” but also such cultural phenomena as the Clock of the Long Now, whose builders (engineers and technophiles associated with the computer industry in California) envision a clock so slow it would tell time into a future devoid of humanity. Thus, “deep time” becomes the fantasy of a world other than that made by human beings.

Types and Beauties: Evaluating and Exoticizing Women on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Columbian Exposition

ON THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE OF THE 1893 Columbian Exposition, outside parameters of White City and just a short jaunt from iconic Ferris Wheel, stood a theater patronized by old men and wicked youths who watched, in a bleary-eyed ecstasy, Oriental athletes of stage as they danced, toyed with cigarette, and by their smiles gave a Persian Parisian charm to anomalous entertainment.1 Colorful descriptions of Midway Plaisance heavily populated souvenir books commemorating Chicago Worlds Fair. Filled with photographic portrait types, landscape scenes, and ebullient commentary, souvenir books simultaneously reproduced and shaped experience of fairgoer (See Figure 1). As a cultural text constructed by and for a white, masculine American subject, souvenir book reveals objectives and weaknesses of hegemonic projects in United States during nineteenth century. In particular, representations of female bodies on Midway Plaisance illuminate intersecting discourses of race and gender.As a combination and juxtaposition of White City and foreign villages of Midway Plaisance, Columbian Exposition functioned as an expression of national identity. Hegemonic forces in Chicago and United States at end of nineteenth century shaped imagining of nation, and Exposition served as a powerful tool for their project.2 Robert Rydell asserts that Worlds fairs propagated ideas and values of country's political, financial, corporate, and intellectual leaders and offered these ideas as proper interpretation of social and political reality.3Alan Trachtenberg identifies powerful perpetuators of national as established, propertied, and wealthy elite who aimed to subsume subaltern under banner of 'peace, prosperity, progress and patriotism.'4 Indeed, Chicago business interests and financial leaders who lobbied to bring fair to city elected Exposition's board of directors. In turn, fair's administration used White City to showcase a grand vision of American and human progress.5While operating as mechanisms of hegemony, expressions of national unity like Columbian Exposition nevertheless belie internal contradictions. Lauren Berlant cautions that a national still inherits tensions that exist in national space. Although political legitimacy depends upon the cultural expression of national fantasy, narratives of national identity mask inherent conflict.6Indeed, numerous domestic tensions plagued last decade of nineteenth century. Lingering cultural and economic differences between North and South frustrated post-Reconstruction politics. Rural America engaged in widespread political mobilization as Populist movement gained ground. Meanwhile, labor skirmishes erupted in United States cities; Chicago itself would serve as site of infamous Pullman strike year following Fair. The social climate was further exacerbated by racial anxieties surrounding influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. To top it off, a severe economic depression overcame United States very year of Columbian Exposition.7 Economic instability, racial anxiety, and political uncertainty contributed to a contentious national environment.Frank Ninkovich contends that domestic issues and United States' uncertain role in international arena combined to create significant identity crisis during 1890s. The resulting anxiety took form of hyper-aggressive nationalist public opinion known as jingoism.8 Trachtenberg similarly argues that late nineteenth century elites in business, politics, and culture were working to win hegemony over dissident but divided voices of labor, farmers, immigrants, blacks and women.9 The ruling class during final years of nineteenth century, therefore, fashioned dominant narratives of national identity as a way of dealing with nation's internal tensions. …

Hegemony and Resistance at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Simon Pokagon and The Red Man’s Rebuke

SIMON POKAGON WAS THE SPECIAL INVITED GUEST of Mayor Carter Harrison to Chicago Day celebration of Worlds Columbian Exposition in October 1893. Pokagon, whose father signed 1833 treaty ceding Potawatomi lands on which Chicago was built, was scheduled to participate in a re-enactment of treaty signing and join in ringing of Columbian Bell of Liberty, in recognition of sixtieth anniversary of land cession. Later, in parade of floats depicting Chicago history, he was central figure on float depicting events of 1812, including Fort Dearborn Massacre, in which some Potawatomi participated. Addressing crowd during festivities, Pokagon delivered a call for forgiveness of past wrongs and an appeal for future of his race:1I beseech you to lay aside all bitterness of spirit [and] look up and rejoice in thankfulness in present; for out of storm cloud of darkness that is around about us we now see helping hands stretched out to aid and strengthen us We must give up pursuits of our fathers; however dear... we must teach our children to give up bow and arrow [and] take plow and live as white men do. We must teach loyalty to this nation to our children, and solemnly impress upon them that war path leads but to grave.2At time of his address, however, a very different judgment was circulating among fairgoers, authored by Pokagon, and printed on spiritually significant birch bark leaves. It was more condemning than conciliatory:In behalf of my people, American Indians, I hereby declare to you, pale faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you great Columbian Fair now being held in this Chicago city, wonder of world. No; sooner would we hold high joy-day over grave of our departed fathers, than to celebrate our own funeral, discovery of America.3The explanation for this disparity is a subtext of power, agency, and resistance, underlying celebration of Chicago Day at Worlds Columbian Exposition. Simon Pokagons engagement with non-Native community throughout his life, but specifically at Exposition in Chicago, illustrates complexities of defining an Indian identity in an era in which programs of civilization and assimilation reached their zenith, but during which memories of 'savage' Indian continued to dominate public imagination.Simon Pokagon (Figure 1) was born in 1830, in an Indian village on Pokagon Creek, about one mile from St. Joseph River in what became Berrien County, Michigan.4 He was third son of Potawatomi chief Leopold Pokagon.5 Within his tribe, elder chief was second in rank only to Potawatomi Chief Topinabe. Leopold Pokagon signed a number of important treaties with United States, including 1833 Treaty of Chicago, which sold and ceded to United States territory on which city of Chicago was built. From all appearances devoutly Catholic after years of tutelage by Jesuits (which earned them distinctive moniker, 'The Catholic Potawatomi'), Pokagons band was described as the farthest advanced in civilization of all their race in St. Joseph valley.6 In press, Pokagon were portrayed as exemplary Indians to be extolled and imitated.7 Leopold's reputation with Euro-Americans as a 'noble red man,' along with civilizing effect of their Catholicism, persuaded United States government to allow his people to remain on a small portion of their original land base, when other Indian tribes, and all other Potawatomi bands of Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, suffered trauma of removal.8 On this land in southwestern Michigan, Simon spent early years of his life.In Publisher's Notes to Simon Pokagon's autobiography, O-gimaw-kwe Mit-i-gwu-ki (Queen of Woods), C.H. Engle relates how, as a young boy, Pokagon spent many happy hours listening to his father recite history of Potawatomi, passed down through oral tradition. …

The Instrumental and Constitutive Rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass

This study of the instrumental and constitutive rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) and Frederick Douglass's “Introduction” to The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature (1893) explores both the striking similarities between the rhetorical characteristics of the texts and their contrasting receptions. Whereas King's “Letter” took advantage of the powerful zeitgeist of the Civil Rights Movement, Douglass's “Introduction” was stymied by the oppressive climate of the late-nineteenth century, including the conservative self-help movement that dominated African American's responses to discrimination and opportunity.

Frederick Law Olmsted and the World’s Columbian Exposition

This article presents the following three arguments: that Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Henry Sargent Codman played the decisive role in the selection of Jackson Park as the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition; that Olmsted and his partners largely determined the site plan for the exposition, though the planning process was fluid and ongoing; and that Olmsted made the Lagoon and Wooded Island a largely naturalistic counterpoint to the formality of the rest of the exposition grounds.

Review: Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans: Archaeology, Diplomacy, Art; Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914; and Artamonoff: Picturing Byzantine Istanbul, 1930–1947

Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans: Archaeology, Diplomacy, Art Pera Museum, Istanbul 15 October 2011–8 January 2012 Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 SALT Galata, Istanbul 22 November 2011–11 March 2012 Artamonoff: Picturing Byzantine Istanbul, 1930–1947 Koc University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul 25 June–10 November 2013 Three exhibitions that examine ways of looking at the ancient and Byzantine past from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century were recently on display in Istanbul. These exhibitions reevaluated the changing discourses and practices of archaeology as both a scholarly enterprise and a popular endeavor, particularly in relation to the late Ottoman and early Turkish contexts. They explored how contemporaries looked at, understood, and wrote about the culture, art, and architecture of the past from their various and varying perspectives. The exhibition Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 at SALT Galata was curated by Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Celik, and Edhem Eldem (Figure 1). It revolved around a double narrative of an apparently conventional historical account of the birth and development of “modern archaeology” from the founding of the British Museum in 1753 to the establishment of the Ottoman Pious Foundations Museum in 1914 alongside a contested story about some historically renowned archaeological sites that once dotted the former Ottoman lands. As its provocative title Scramble for the Past suggests, rather than presenting a celebratory narrative of archaeological practice, the exhibition put forward a critical interpretation of the history of archaeology. The seemingly neutral time line, highlighting the major dates in the long march of archaeology alongside significant historical political events, constituted a backdrop on the walls and literally encircled the main body of display, which focused on certain archaeological sites within the framework of eight different themes. True to the exploratory and interdisciplinary cultural mission of SALT, the sites were presented through their various historical representations in different media from written texts to oil paintings, from drawings to photographs and films, together with some original artifacts, among which were also dispersed commissioned installations on the nature of archaeology by artists Mark Dion …

Daniel Hudson Burnham and the American city imperial

Architecture, landscape architecture and urban design are seldom merely benign aesthetic propositions. With its victory in the Spanish-American War (1898), the United States unexpectedly found itself in possession of an empire. Within a volcanic climate of patriotic fervour, Washington’s new imperial status galvanized interest in improving the city in a manner commensurate with its enlarged role. On the strength of his work at the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), celebrated architect Daniel Hudson Burnham took the lead in Washington’s transformation (1901–2) and urban design became his medium for imperialist expression. This potent mechanism’s deployment would not be confined to the imperial hearth. The United States soon set its sights on modernizing, that is ‘Americanizing’, Manila, the antique capital of its newly-acquired Philippine colony, and similarly charged Burnham with the task (1904). Overtly emulating the British Raj in India, he was also to design a wholly new summer capital there. This essay canvasses Burnham’s work at the American and Philippine capitals, along with his vicarious hand in the design of a new model American town in the Panama Canal Zone, considering it through the lens of imperialism. The location and imperial purpose of these projects also reminds us that – at least from an antipodean perspective – in the early 20th century, Great Britain held no monopoly on empire.

Separate Spheres

Scholars of American art have frequently noted that around the time of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, two developments emerged that significantly changed the appearance and context of sculpture in the U.S. Just as large numbers of women entered the realm of sculptural production as professional artists, a taste for small-scale sculptures intended for domestic interiors began to grow. This essay argues that these two trends were linked phenomena, intimately bound up with each other as well as with Gilded Age discourses of gender, and that the early career of Bessie Potter Vonnoh (1872–1955) provides a model for understanding the convergence of these developments.

Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier by Matthew Rebhorn, and: Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway: Situating the Western Experience in Performing Arts by Richard Wattenberg (review)

Reviewed by: Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier by Matthew Rebhorn, and: Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway: Situating the Western Experience in Performing Arts by Richard Wattenberg Karl M. Kippola Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier. By Matthew Rebhorn. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2012; pp. 224. Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway: Situating the Western Experience in Performing Arts. By Richard Wattenberg. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; pp. 280. Matthew Rebhorn and Richard Wattenberg each use Frederick Jackson Turner’s landmark paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, as a framing bookend to their exploration of the American frontier and its performance. Shortly after the US Census of 1890 announced that the frontier region no longer existed, Turner argued that the juncture and tension between the civilization of society and the savagery of wilderness forged American character and democracy. In a mutually transformative, evolutionary process, settlers of the frontier tamed the wild, while the challenges of the wild created strength and individuality in its settlers. Rebhorn explores a wide spectrum of performances from the Jackson era to Turner’s announced closing of the frontier. Wattenberg more narrowly focuses on a handful of frontier-themed Broadway plays opening between 1899 and 1906. In many ways, these two works, while radically different in tone and intention, represent intriguing companion pieces grappling to define, theorize, and complicate a genre and identity that remains relevant in entertainment and the public sphere. Building his study, Pioneer Performances, around two competing genealogies of American frontier performance, Rebhorn contrasts Turner’s binary of civilization and savagery with a New Western historian’s view of the frontier stage as “an aesthetic space for performing,” and sometimes upending, “the tenets of US imperialism” and Manifest Destiny (18). Rather than confining frontier to the purely geographic, Rebhorn broadly and inclusively explores the concept of frontier as a line between the known and the not yet known, which can lead him down paths seemingly removed from his central thesis. This lens often proves a major strength in his study, leading the reader to previously unimagined layers of connection; but occasionally the theoretical shades of frontier become so omnipresent, and their link to the geographic frontier become so tenuous, that they lose their intended power. Focusing first on two popular star vehicles, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora (1829) and James Kirke Paulding’s The Lion of the West (1830), Rebhorn suggests that both works in performance prompt a feeling of “wonder [that] occurs at the horizon line of what is potentially knowable, but not yet known” (35). In Edwin Forrest’s performance of Metamora, Rebhorn persuasively argues for the actor’s performance as confronting a frontier of emotions (coinciding neatly here with the geographic frontier), which defies cultural expectations of control. Simultaneously, the power of Forrest’s performance made his Indian character sympathetic, which subverted “the deployment of the Indian play . . . as an agent of American imperial expansion” (42). In adaptations of The Lion of the West that made the disruptive, crowd-pleasing Nimrod Wildfire increasingly central, the moral ambiguity of James Hackett’s performance of the frontiersman violated melodramatic rules and expectations. By utilizing the wondrous qualities of the frontier, its wildness and fluidity, Paulding’s play “staged not just a space for the enactment of Manifest Destiny but one that also attempted to articulate a different future for the American aesthetic and national project” (70). Connecting Thomas Dartmouth Rice’s Jim Crow and The Virginia Mummy’s (1835) version of the frontiersman Nimrod Wildfire, Rebhorn attempts to conflate the frontier with racial difference and hints at “how the minstrel show used the shifting terrain of the performative frontier to envision a more flexible understanding of racial identity” (73–74). He uses this argument more effectively in analyzing Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), demonstrating the hybridity of both the stage Indian, Wahnotee, as well as the Irish author who played him: “Boucicault imagines the frontier embodied in Wahnotee as a pleasurable and nonessentialized shuttling between various overlapping and interweaving performances of the self” (111). Rebhorn also draws striking parallels of...

Daniel Burnham and Australia's Federal Capital, 1893–1912

Celebrated architect and city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham enjoyed a rise to fame in the aftermath of his widely acclaimed achievement as Director of Works for the World's Columbian Exposition, held in his adopted Chicago in 1893. Roughly in parallel with Burnham's rise, town planning movements were coalescing in Australia, and it would not be long until the Chicagoan's name was circulating in Australian professional circles. This is a pilot study broadly aimed at chronicling and interpreting Australian awareness of Daniel Burnham at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, it is concerned with the reception of Burnham's civic design ideals and why some believed them to be of antipodean relevance. Their Australian impact, however, is beyond the present study's scope. Reciprocally, this essay also surveys Burnham's knowledge of Australia. Special emphasis is given to Burnham within the context of the Australia's Federal Capital competition (1912), arguing that although the Chicagoan did not compete, he profoundly, albeit vicariously, impacted the capital's design.

“Masters of Anaesthesia”

“Masters of Anaesthesia”

“This is a Civilized Nation, and a Man From the East Has No Right to Criticize It”: Indian Visitors at the 1893 Columbian Exposition

This article examines the travel narratives of three Indian visitors to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Occupying a precarious space between spectacle and spectator at the World's Fair, these visitors returned the ethnographic gaze and instead offered cultural self-representation that co-existed with and contested the prevalent perceptions of India (and other non-Western peoples). In the process, their narratives both questioned the civilized/primitive dichotomy as well as disrupted the grand official narrative of Anglo-Saxon supremacy and progress celebrated at the exposition.

Review: Learning from Frank Furness: Louis Sullivan in 1873; Furness in Space: The Architect and Design Dialogues on the Late Nineteenth-Century Country House; Frank Furness: Making a Modern Library—From Gentleman’s Library to Machine for Learning; Frank Furness: Working on the Railroads; Building a Masterpiece: Frank Furness’ Factory for Art; and Face and Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness

Learning from Frank Furness: Louis Sullivan in 1873 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia 6 October 2012–30 December 2012 Furness in Space: The Architect and Design Dialogues on the Late Nineteenth-Century Country House Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 14 October 2012–21 December 2012 Frank Furness: Making a Modern Library—From Gentleman’s Library to Machine for Learning Kroiz Gallery, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 5 October 2012–18 January 2013 Frank Furness: Working on the Railroads Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia 17 September 2012–19 April 2013 Building a Masterpiece: Frank Furness’ Factory for Art Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia 29 September 2012–30 December 2012 Face and Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Philadelphia 30 November 2012–19 January 2013 To mark the centennial of Frank Furness’s death, a number of educational and cultural institutions in and around Philadelphia collaborated on Furness 2012 , a series of exhibitions, a symposium, and a website that sought to place the architect, and by extension the city, securely within the modernist narrative. A quirky individual, Furness (1839–1912) wrestled with nearly every major building type of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Banks, railroad stations, libraries, educational and medical institutions, clubhouses, places of worship, urban townhouses, and country estates all bear his unmistakable stamp. Among his American contemporaries, only H. H. Richardson equaled Furness in both range and creativity. Why is Furness not better appreciated outside his native Philadelphia? That is the question Furness 2012 attempted to answer, and, in large part, it succeeded. Furness was born into a prominent and accomplished Philadelphia family in 1839, just as the city was transforming itself from a cultural capital into an industrial metropolis. He exhibited a temperamental personality, even at a young age, and he was slow in settling on a career path. A three-year placement in the Philadelphia office of the Scottish emigre architect John Fraser eventually led to a longer and more pivotal stay in the experimental New York atelier of Richard Morris Hunt, who had just returned to the United States from his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Meritorious service in the Union cavalry during the Civil War interrupted Furness’s studies permanently and marked his life indelibly. Not long after his discharge, Furness began working again with Hunt in New York, this time as an assistant, but the lure of his native city soon proved irresistible. By 1866 he had returned to Philadelphia and formed Fraser, Furness & Hewitt, in partnership with his former employer and a former assistant …

Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History by David Cowart (review)

Reviewed by: Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History by David Cowart Joseph M. Conte Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2011. xix + 250 pp. $24.95. The year 2013 is a propitious time to be reviewing the career of Thomas Pynchon, whom David Cowart, the Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Humanities at the University of South Carolina, calls “America’s greatest historical novelist” (24). It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Pynchon’s first novel V. in 1963, a work that fell like a meteorite onto the steppes of American literature, and the fortieth anniversary of the publication of what remains his greatest achievement, Gravity’s Rainbow. What’s more, it’s 120 years since the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, whose White City burns to the ground near the start of Against the Day (2006); and it’s been 250 years since Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon began the survey of their eponymous Line in 1763. These anniversaries were justly celebrated at the International Pynchon Week conference in Durham, England in August. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History is Cowart’s second book devoted to that author. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (1980) was his first book, and among the earliest of book-length treatments of Pynchon, so Cowart has brought more than thirty years of close attention to Pynchon’s oeuvre to the present volume. He remarks at the start, in “Calibrating Clio,” the muse of History, that Pynchon “stands out as a near-mythic figure of literary virtù” (1) for his equal appeal to popular and academic readers, a fact to which the online denizens of the “Pynchon Wiki” will attest. Perhaps for that reason, Dark Passages provides an inviting and relatively jargon-free introduction to all of Pynchon’s works, from the early short stories such as “Entropy” collected in Slow Learner (1984) to the recent “California novel,” Inherent Vice (2009), for the nonspecialist reader. Cowart reprises and revises some essays, including a 1978 piece on the Third Reich in Gravity’s Rainbow and his recent contribution on literary history in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (2012). While the editing process occasionally allows for some overlapping commentary (if you’ve been paying attention closely), Dark Passages sustains more elaborated readings for Pynchon scholars that many introductory retrospective studies do not. [End Page 709] As Cowart’s title suggests, he gathers his thoughts on Pynchon through the problematic of history—the subterranean, recondite, and subversive versions that are threaded through the eight volumes included in this study—not the orthodox and often uncontested story that They would have us believe. So we are told near the close of Against the Day that the narrative has borne witness to “the other side of the tapestry—a ragged, practical version of the grander spectacle out there” (1026). It’s the knotting into and the loose threads that we only find when we look behind the arras that reveal the true machinations of power, not the representations in golden brocade of coronations, military campaigns, and royal hunting parties. Because Pynchon is a self-proclaimed Luddite, we should recall that the followers of King Ludd were textile craftsmen who opposed the introduction of the industrial looms that concentrated wealth in the hands of the factory owners and oppressed the working class. These dark passages of history are best approached by circumvention. Cowart’s treatment of the novels calls forth the heterodox historiography that we find, for example, in V., with the procession of its sigil character through the Fashoda crisis in Egypt in 1898, Paris in 1913, southwest Africa in 1922, and Malta during World War II. Cowart appropriately invokes Hayden White’s conceptualization of postmodern historiography in Metahistory (1973), such that all historical events are subjected to narrative interpretation. “Historians shape their material: the writing of history, like the writing of fiction, involves selection, subjectivity, ‘emplotment’” (45). As a postmodern writer, Pynchon not only appreciates the inherent subjectivity of historiography but he also casts a skeptical eye on an historiographer’s selection of facts, which is made to comply with the narrative...

Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: Marketing the modern imaginary of the city and urban everyday life through representation

Held in Chicago to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 has been one of the first events of a kind later defined as ‘media events’ (Susman, 1983). Set up in a liminal period for American life, this ‘event’ was a ‘rite of passage’ paving the road to modernity out of traditional life, as Henry Adams recognized when he defined the Fair as “the first expression of American thought as a unity.”I suggest the Columbian Exposition is a worthwhile case study for this special issue from a historical point of view. The Fair was indeed one of the first cases in which the interplay among urban planning, communication technologies and marketing strategies — a mark of the contemporary production of urban space (McQuire, 2008) — can be observed. I would also suggest it is important from a genealogical point of view because it contributes to unveil the conditions of emergence of such interplay as the outcome of a process of interactions among several social actors which had the task of marketing an imaginary of the city adequate to the new economic and social conditions of America (Harris, 1990).I will therefore attempt to show how the Chicago World’s Fair was both a place where to trace back the genesis of modern American urban life and an opérateur of such emergence, given the fact that the experience of its ideal city life contributed in shaping the imaginary at its foundation. Through a description of the Fair I show how the representation (a literal ‘staging’) of a temporary ideal city — a land of enchantment freed from pain and poverty, with beautiful marble–like buildings, basins, theatres, palaces of consumption, spectacles, entertainments and wonders — was strategically conceived to produce actual effects on the imaginary of the public. As Lewis Mumford (1934) and Louis Sullivan (1949) recognized, the ‘liminal’ characters of the fair became ‘permanent’ features of modern cities and their everyday life through the staging of illusory (but with real consequences) effects.