Customer Reviews

Celebrating the New World: Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 (American Ways Series)

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After reading Devil In The White City, a book about the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893, I was drawn to find out a bit more about it. I got a copy of Celebrating the New World - Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 by Robert Muccigrosso from the library the other day, and I think this is another book that suffers a bit from what I ended up reading first...

Contents: Setting for a Celebration; The City on the Prairie; A Gathering of Architects; "You Must See This Fair"; A Community of Ideas; For Some, A Harder Struggle; Satisfying Popular Tastes; Legacies of a City of Dreams; A Note on Sources; Index

I'll grant that this book is not meant to be done in a style of Devil in the White City. That was a storytelling approach, and this is more of a scholarly coverage of the event and what led up to it. If I had read this one first, I'm not sure I would have gotten the full impact of the gargantuan task that was undertaken with this fair, and how many obstacles had to be overcome to make it all come together. I did learn a bit more about how hard the women's movement worked to get a voice in the event, and how African-Americans were virtually ignored. There was also quite a bit of religious ecumenicalism that was a topic during the fair, and I was totally unaware of that angle. Still, the people in this book are really just names. In my prior reading, they were people with feelings, depth, and color... Here, the Ferris Wheel is just a contraption. There, it was the cornerstone of the fair meant to surpass Paris and the Eiffel Tower.

If you've never been exposed to the Chicago World's Fair, this would be an OK place to start your reading. But you won't come away with the awe and wonder of what was actually accomplished. There are other books that do a far better job in putting flesh on the people behind it all...

Celebrating the New World is a wonderful historical book. After reading it, I felt the urge to visit Chicago and try to visualize the place where the "Great World's Fair" of 1893 took place. Not only do readers learn about the Columbian Exposition of 1893 but also they learn about the birth of Chicago, including Mrs. O'leary's cow that caused the great Chicago fire of 1871. I'm sure when you finish this book your Jeopardy scores will improve.

I consider myself an "informed amateur" (read: I collect all kinds of stuff) on the World's Columbian Exposition (WCE) a/k/a the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Sight unseen, I ordered a used paperback copy of Robert Muccigrosso's 1993 book "Celebrating the New World: Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893" and was amazed both at its literacy and at how much information he had packed into its 200 pages. Chapter 1 gives an overview of preceding 19th-century world's fairs (including the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876), Chapter 2 tells us about the squalor and splendor of 1893 Chicago (which had virtually burned to the ground in 1871) as well as its most prominent luminaries, then with Chapter 3 we're off and running with the competition between leading American architects for the honor of translating into physical form the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World. (Should we include our innovative home-town upstarts from Chicago, or should we rely on the more established firms of the Eastern seaboard?) How the principal players finally reconciled their conflicting egos and settled on the uniform style of the dazzling White City and the stately Court of Honor makes for fascinating reading. We are educated both as to the "highbrow" (the series of World's Congresses held on every major topic of the era--Religion, Public Health, Labor, etc.) and the "lowbrow" (the Midway, which bequeathed us not only its name as the generic term for an amusement area, but also the mechanics of both George Ferris' gigantic wheel and Little Egypt's sinuous "hootchy-kootchy") aspects of the WCE. The only reason I rated the book 4 instead of 5 stars is because of the now-obligatory view (in Chapter 6) of the Fair through the race/class/gender prism of the late 20th century, which (for me, at least) seems to mar so many other recent works on the subject--e.g., Robert Rydell's--yet even here the author strives to be factual in his discussion of women, blacks and Native Americans by showing some of the positive aspects of their portrayal and participation, rather than merely painting them as haplessly exploited victims who obtained no advantages at all from one of the grandest events of the century. All in all, I found this book to be one of the best I've read on the WCE and, though sparse on photographs (get Stanley Appelbaum's 1980 Dover book for those), an excellent overview which can be enjoyed by scholar and novice alike. A quick glance at the bibliography convinced me that this author had indeed done his homework well.