Louisiana Purchase Exposition Research Articles

Maritime Encounters in the American Midwest

ABSTRACT During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, public displays of both humans and animals helped to reinforce a sense of natural order and progress in the rapidly developing United States. By placing the perceived primitive and natural world on display, a contrast could be made to the quickly modernizing nation. This article addresses two public exhibitions of whales held in the American Midwest – the 1880 Pioneer Inland Whaling Association’s traveling whale show helmed by Newton and the Smithsonian Institution’s full cast of a blue whale displayed at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Both exhibitions provided the opportunity for audiences living far from the ocean to encounter whales’ bodies, a feat that merged showmanship, spectacle, and science. As deceased whales were transformed for display, they took on new meanings in their afterlives. Occurring at a moment of growth in entertainment, industry, and science, the Pioneer Inland Whaling Association’s whale show emphasized tourist spectacle and novelty, while the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibition reinforced prevailing ideas about natural history and American exceptionalism. Though faced with limitations, these exhibitions touted the scale and spectacle of their subject, indicating how whales emerged as a distinct category of display.

A feminist analysis of colonial representations of Visayan women at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition

ABSTRACT Significant works have been published on American colonial photography in the Philippines, which primarily focus on the depiction of Filipinos in general and not on the images of Filipino women, specifically Visayan women. Using an intersectional feminist lens, this article examines how Visayan women were portrayed at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition through colonial photography by comparing their representations with those of Visayan men and indigenous Filipino women in terms of gender, ethnicity, religion and social class. It interrogates how the Americans utilized photography not only as an imperialist instrument but also as an effective means to propagate their gender ideology in the newly acquired colony. While indigenous Filipinos were generally represented as savages, indigenous women were doubly so owing to their implied inferiority to men. And while Visayan women were depicted as ‘the most civilized’, their representation in photographs still promoted a certain type of gender ideology that circulated the idea of male superiority over women, portraying them as how the colonizers perceived them, thus reinforcing the power of the colonizer over the colonized. This study also challenges photography’s claim to objectivity by comparing Visayan women’s images in colonial photography with their actual roles in society.

“An Exhibit as Will Astonish the Civilized World”: Seeking Separate Statehood for Indian Territory at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition

AbstractChickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee, and Seminole citizens employed the Indian Territory exhibits at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition to advance the separate statehood movement. Increasingly shut out of the formal political realm, they adopted creative measures to exert their political will, including participating in the world’s fair. Employing insights from settler-colonial theory and public history, this paper argues that the politics of display expanded the agency of a group marginalized from political representation. The U.S. government, pressured by the territory’s growing population of non-Native settlers, had begun planning for statehood, passing the 1898 Curtis Act to force allotment and dissolve the Five Tribes’ governments by 1906. To protect their land and sovereignty, a cohort of Native citizens pursued statehood for Indian Territory separate from Oklahoma Territory. Although joint statehood won out, separate statehood advocates succeeded in creating exhibits that centered on the survival of Native nations. They also articulated an Indigenous conception of citizenship, developing an imaginative vision for a future in which self-determination and U.S. citizenship could converge in a Native state. This represented a novel contribution to ongoing debates over how to integrate remaining western territories into the United States and how to incorporate diverse peoples within the citizenry.

The Philippine Craftsman: Empire, Education, and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition

Shortly after the Philippines was annexed by the United States in 1898, representations of Filipinos in the US popular imagination became inseparable from the sensationalist Philippine exhibition at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Of the more than 1,000 Filipinos and indigenous peoples who made up this “live exhibition,” the Bontoc Igorots, portrayed as savage “dog eaters,” became representative of the United States’ new colonial subjects. By the time of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, however, exhibitions of the Philippines centered on the handicraft of Filipinos under US tutelage to showcase the success of US industrial education in uplifting and civilizing Filipino savagery. This article examines the 1915 exposition’s Philippine exhibit organized by the Bureau of Education, which also published the magazine, The Philippine Craftsman, a publication devoted to the “advancement of industrial education in the public schools of the Philippines.” In analyzing the exhibition rationale of the Bureau of Education, this article demonstrates how the discourse of craft was central to the US imperial cultivation of a civilized “Philippine Craftsman” and embedded in the exhibition practices of empire, which, in turn, inculcated fairgoers in an imperial craft discourse that naturalized territorial expansion, reinforced racial hierarchies, and promoted faith in the redemptive possibilities of industrial capitalism and consumer culture.

China on display: the architecture of the Chinese pavilion at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition

After the Boxer Rebellion ended with China’s crushing defeat and the signing of the Boxer Protocol, China participated in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition as its official debut at world’s fairs. The Chinese pavilion was supposed to represent the country’s national pride and cultural identity, yet ironically, the pavilion materialised the Chinese government’s weak position in its quasi-colonial relationship with the US – both politically and culturally – in terms of the appointment of architects, the design process, and the arrangement of construction. Such power interaction shaped an ambiguous ‘Chinese architecture’ presented at the fair, imitating the Beijing residence of a Chinese Prince while incorporating vernacular architectural elements from south China. It reflected the Chinese government’s early self-vision of its global image in an age of political turmoil and cultural uncertainty, and pioneered the exploration of an architectural ‘Chinese-ness’ in the early twentieth century.

Review: The Mass Production of Memory: Travel and Personal Archiving in the Age of the Kodak, by Tammy S. Gordon

Review: <i>The Mass Production of Memory: Travel and Personal Archiving in the Age of the Kodak</i>, by Tammy S. Gordon

Semi-Civilized: The Moro Village at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition by Michael C. Hawkins

Semi-Civilized: The Moro Village at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition by Michael C. Hawkins

Bound for the Fair: Chief Joseph, Quanah Parker, and Geronimo and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair

The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition was a demonstration of America’s newly minted might both abroad and at home. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the display of the Native American, who, through a variety of means, was exhibited, paraded, and exploited. One of the most important but largely unexplored aspects of this display was the Native American celebrity. Of particular importance were Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, Comanche Chief Quanah Parker, and Geronimo, the “Apache Terror.” This article examines the meaning of their presence and absence in St. Louis. More specifically, through an investigation of contemporary imagery, it analyzes how these “Notable Resistance Leaders” corroborated notions of the Native American as spectacle, commodity, and spoil of American conquest all while maintaining a certain level of autonomy that comes with celebrity.

Cidades e Exposições Internacionais: da “Stone in a Pond” ao “Meteorite from Another World”

This paper discusses the understanding revealed by the media about five World Fairs held in the United States: Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia, 1876; World’s Columbian, Chicago, 1893; Pan American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901; Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904; and Panama-Pacific International Expo, San Francisco, 1915. The main source of data for the case study is the Chronicling America Project, with two thousand newspapers online. The objective of this article is to compare reactions to these events in their contemporary societies and identify possible distinctions and convergences when compared to ours. Its conclusions reveal an intriguing and ubiquitous apology for these events and the dormancy of controversies they may have generated: The hypothesis that current criticism would be similar in content, form and volume to the analyzed period (1876-1915) was thus not confirmed. The theoretical reference permeates the text and prioritizes distinctions between the perception of the five selected fairs at the time they were held and those more commonly found nowadays concerning large urban events. Keywords: great exhibitions, city marketing, epistemology of urban studies.

“The center of the manual training movement in Germany”: die Deutsche Lehrerbildungsanstalt für Knabenhandarbeit in Leipzig, 1887–1914

ABSTRACTIn the decades around 1900, reformers in virtually all industrialising countries debated boys’ manual training as a new subject for primary education. This contribution discusses the German debates on and institutions of manual training from a transnational perspective. The focus is on the German Association for Manual Training founded by Emil von Schenckendorff in 1886 and its Training College for Teachers established one year later in Leipzig, which notably organised summer courses where teachers received supplementary training in manual skills. The Training College soon developed into a centre for manual training instruction of European and global significance. This article discusses the Training College in Leipzig as a portal for educational globalisation. Its two directors Woldemar Götze and Alwin Pabst, on the one hand, transferred Scandinavian, French and American ideas and practices to the German context. On the other hand, foreign experts visited and referred to the Training College in order to enhance reforms in their respective countries. Especially after his trip to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, Pabst enthusiastically embraced American education and – albeit with limited success – planned to transform the Training College into a model school and new education research centre. Moreover, Pabst theoretically reflected on processes of cultural development and cultural transfers, largely following the ideas of historian Karl Lamprecht. Manual training, in this respect, appeared as a panacea for constructing a genuinely modern and cosmopolitan society.

Robert H. Kargon; Karen Fiss; Morris Low; Arthur P. Molella. World’s Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology, and Modernity, 1937–1942. viii + 206 pp., illus., bibl., index. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. $34.95 (cloth).

Robert H. Kargon; Karen Fiss; Morris Low; Arthur P. Molella. <i>World’s Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology, and Modernity, 1937–1942</i>. viii + 206 pp., illus., bibl., index. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. $34.95 (cloth).

Seeing Is Believing: U.S. Imperial Culture and the Jerusalem Exhibit of 1904

ABSTRACT What are the historical proximities and parallels linking Jews and Muslims in U.S. imperial culture? What are the technologies of knowledge production that make and make sense of these connections, and what are their effects? The Jerusalem Exhibit at 1904’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis offers a generative site through which to consider these questions. The exhibit included hundreds of “native” Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants, and exemplified a national covenantalism at the interface of U.S. settler colonialism and imperial rule. Visuality played a key role in staging and naturalizing racial difference between and among these various “natives,” even as its will towards transparency was routinely thwarted. While such overdetermined pedagogical labor never satisfied the predilections of American imperial authority, by the end of the exhibit’s run, it also served as an impetus to express political Zionism’s desires for Jewish nation-state status commensurate with other political formations organizing the World’s Fair.

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Guest Editors’ Introduction

C. W. Beehler's collection of vertebrate fossils: A lost legacy

The Kimmswick ‘bone bed’, a late Wisconsin paleontological locality in Jefferson County, Missouri, south of St. Louis, has been known since the early nineteenth century. The site gained international recognition in 1843 when a German immigrant and enterprising entrepreneur, Albert Koch, sold a composite skeleton of an American mastodon to the British Museum, parts of which came from Kimmswick. A half-century later a mechanic, inventor, and fossil hunter named Charles W. Beehler spent several months each year between 1897–1904 exhuming a massive collection of vertebrate fossils, representing several taxa, but one dominated by American mastodon (Mammut americanum). In addition, Beehler discovered human artifacts that he deemed were associated with the extinct fauna, thus adding Beehler to a growing number of proponents of what was termed the ‘American Paleolithic’. In retrospect he may have indeed uncovered evidence for an association between humans and extinct fauna, but the relationship went unrecognized by leading scientists of the time. Beehler constructed a wooden frame building on the site to house his collection, which he referred to as a museum. This was in preparation for visitors who would flock to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, known officially as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Featuring his active excavation and mastodon-dominated bone collection, Beehler created an attraction that enticed fair goers—as well as the curious—to schedule trips to Kimmswick. Following the World's Fair Beehler returned to St. Louis, but the disposition of his collection remained a mystery. There is no evidence that any significant number of specimens made their way into institutional hands where they were preserved. Beehler attracted national and international attention through his work at Kimmswick, but his reluctance to share or donate his collection to a reputable institution left him with a legacy of notoriety, and led to the loss of this important collection of vertebrate fossils.

Imagining Geronimo: An Apache Icon in Popular Culture William M.Clements. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.

Imagining Geronimo: An Apache Icon in Popular Culture William M. Clements. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.In Imagining Geronimo: An Apache Icon in Popular Culture, William M. Clements offers an in-depth analysis of images in popular culture of Chiricahua Apache holy man and warrior Geronimo, images that have .not followed a single-stranded line of development. Instead they have waivered between extremes: .. .[Geronimo] as the consummate incarnation of savagism... [and].. .as the embodiment of freedom, courageous resistance, and principled defiance of overwhelming odds (5). In so doing, Clements demonstrates yet another example of American popular culture's insistence that, regardless of tribe, nation, or community and regardless of historical context or temporal setting, American Indians must fit into one of only two categories: savages-pitiful anachronisms feebly clinging to scant remnants of a once majestic culture or saints-people uniquely possessed of mystical sensibilities and ways of life that hold the keys to modern peoples' survival. In Geronimo's case, images have ranged from bloodthirsty terrorist to patriot chief (16). Central to Clements's purpose is to offer a more nuanced analysis of Geronimo's image in American culture than that typically permitted by the forced choices embodied in this question from Wild West Magazine-. Was Geronimo a butcher of men, women, and children...? Or was he a freedom-loving shaman struggling heroically to resist attempts by the United States and Mexico to exterminate him and his people? (16). To Clements, there is more to Geronimo than suggested by the polar opposite choices.Clements presents biographical and historical information about Geronimo with an eye toward creating a fuller, more accurately complex portrait, one that belies simple either-or depictions. He provides details about Americans' fascination with Geronimo as noted in accounts of Americans heading west. Following his surrender, the public remained fascinated with Geronimo as evidenced by his star billing at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, various World's Fairs, Pawnee Bill's Wild West Show, and President Roosevelt's 1905 Inauguration.In various elements of popular culture-art, advertising, literature, and film-Clements describes a morphing of Geronimo at all points along the image continuum of savage to soldier-saint. There an iconic photo of Geronimo dressed in a top hat sitting behind the steering wheel of a 1904 or 1905 model automobile (a Locomobile, according to Clements; a Cadillac, according to Country singer-songwriter Michael Martin Murphey and others [187]). …

Theology at the Olympics: St Louis 1904 and London 2012

AbstractThis paper contrasts the London Olympics of 2012 with the St Louis Games of 1904 in the context of their cultural and historical context, especially the World’s Fair (the Louisiana Purchase Exposition). What I suggest is that the 1904 World’s Fair, with its supporting academic congress at which Adolf von Harnack and Ernst Troeltsch lectured, played a modest part in the early phases of the deabsolutization of western culture, together with the Christianity upon which it was constructed. Despite the widespread patronizing and racialist atti­tudes in St Louis, the sheer variety and breadth of cultures seen by millions demonstrated a cultural relativism that was emerging as a serious approach to anthropology and other branches of knowledge, including theology. The fruits of such a deabsolutization can perhaps be glimpsed in the gradual transformation of the absolutes of western religion through the twentieth century into the new universals of nationhood and sport, both of which clearly coalesce in the contemporary version of the Olympic Games. I conclude by suggesting that sport and national myths may be the only universals that will have the strength to survive into the future. Of the two, the modern Olympic ideal seems better suited to promoting harmony between peoples than most national myths.

The new borders of Saint Louis

In 1904 the Olympic and Anthropologic Games in Saint Louis, Missouri, were lost in the chaos of the Louisiana Purchase (Universal) Exposition. Although the expected universal spirit, for a long time Saint Louis expressed racial prejudices of its personal. This paper shows up how Sport Sciences and growing up Anthropology acted together in sense of serving questioned causes like racial ranking and colonization right. They were important in improving a feeling of nation in North American that took in grant sport as part of its constitution. The Universal Exposition and Market of Saint Louis offered new possibilities in definition of technological, racial, geographic and corporal borders.

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.

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.

Whose Fair? Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition. By James Gilbert. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. x, 221 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-226-29310-3.)

James Gilbert's Whose Fair? explores the practice of American cultural history by reexamining the much analyzed St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, an event that has generated a rich historiography centered on race and empire from the disciplines of history, art history, architectural history, and anthropology and ethnohistory. The professional and lay histories of the fair, according to Gilbert, have relied too heavily on accounts generated by David Francis, the president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, and William J. McGee, the former director of the Bureau of American Ethnology who oversaw the anthropology division. Gilbert attempts to raise broad theoretical issues about scholars' categories of analysis, such as historical recollection, experience, memory, and identity formation, to address how historians ascribe meaning to history. Revisiting narratives of the fair, Gilbert shows how “historians as well as memory-keepers sometimes neglect the experience of certain types of historical actors, particularly those who constitute the audience” (p. 3). Through the channel of meaning often called “reception,” Gilbert considers the oscillation between individual and collective memory of the St. Louis fair by scrutinizing diaries, memoirs, photographs, postcards, and other published and unpublished reminiscences to try to recenter the meaning of the event. “It is the sum of this marginal behavior,” says Gilbert, “that I wish to restore to the center of the historical account” (p. 4).

The Discovery of Fossil Vertebrates on Missouri's Western Frontier

Fossil-bearing sites containing predominantly mastodon, Mammut americanum, remains were discovered west of the Mississippi River on the Osage River in Upper Louisiana only a few decades after the discovery by Longueuil of similar remains at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. The first excavations were conducted in the 1790s by Pierre Chouteau, a fur trader and member of the founding family of St Louis. Chouteau's work was documented by several early travelers, including Georges-Henri-Victor Collot and later by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, among others. It was from Chouteau's excavation that the first mastodon molar from west of the Mississippi River reached Baron Georges Cuvier in Paris, having been sent from Philadelphia by Benjamin Smith Barton. Early nineteenth-century travelers continued to mention the Osage River locality and, by 1816, William Clark displayed fossil specimens in his St Louis Museum. By 1840 the indefatigable fossil collector and museum entrepreneur, Albert C. Koch, began extensive digging in the Osage River basin along with sites in the Bourbeuse River valley and at Kimmswick along the Mississippi River in Missouri. Koch's extensive collection of mastodon bones enabled him to assemble a mounted specimen that he named the Missourium, an exaggerated and poorly reconstructed skeleton that was later identified and properly reassembled by Richard Owen at the British Museum. The specimen was later purchased by the trustees of that museum. The publicity surrounding Koch's work stimulated a veritable ‘bone rush’ to the Osage River in the years preceding the Civil War, with some of the fossils making their way into the collections of the American Philosophical Society and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Following the Civil War, interest shifted to the Mississippi valley and the Kimmswick site just south of St Louis, where ongoing excavations became an attraction during the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis. C. W. Beehler, a St Louis resident, was responsible for the work, a venture that attracted scientists from the Smithsonian as well as other institutions. While none of the principals in the early exploration of fossil sites in Missouri had scientific training, the fact that their collections were passed on to scientific practitioners in Philadelphia, Washington, Paris, and London contributed to the expanding body of information that aided in the development of the field of vertebrate paleontology.