An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop, and the World's Columbian Exposition [Hardcover]

Arnold Lewis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1997

This volume is the winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History given by the Council of the American Philosophical Society. Extravagantly illustrated with over seventy photographs, drawings, paintings, and contemporary cartoons, "An Early Encounter with Tomorrow" documents the mixture of amazement and alarm with which European visitors greeted 1890s Chicago: as a futuristic city animated by a crass, frenetic mercantile class. This volume also contains an extensive bibliography, arranged by country, and profiles of the foreign observers, who sought the implications for European culture in what Asa Briggs called the "shock city" of the western world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Lewis has produced an amazing book that won the Jacques Barzun Prize in cultural history and that argues for Chicago's importance in the emergence of modern America." -- Chicago Tribune "According to Arnold Lewis ... the more lasting impact on foreign visitors to the exposition was experienced not at the fairgrounds but rather in Chicago's bustling commercial Loop, where a far more amazing preview of the future was on display... There ... the audacious new vocabulary of steel-frame high-rise construction would within a generation revolutionize the practice of architecture more fully than at any time since the Renaissance. It was not just those innovative buildings that transfixed observant Europeans, but also the frenetic pace and abrupt habits of a public that seemed of a piece with its thrusting, no-nonsense surroundings. Here was a brave new world indeed, and its implications were at once fascinating and frightening to Old World believers in the civility of city life." -- Martin Filler, New York Times Book Review "[An] excellent, enormously rich book... Carefully researched, well-documented, clearly organized, and beautifully written, Lewis's book should be required reading for anyone in the fields of American history, cultural studies, and women's studies as well as architectural history. It is cultural history at its best." -- Meredith L. Clausen, American Historical Review "An Early Encounter with Tomorrow offers a detailed cataloging and interpretation of a vast store of European commentary on Chicago's architectural achievement during the Gilded Age. Based upon exhaustive research in the published literature of the period, Lewis provides a fresh interpretive perspective, and at times an important historical corrective... Arnold Lewis has produced a valuable companion piece to the latest works that interpret anew Chicago's contribution to the emergence of modern America." -- Dennis B. Downey, Illinois Historical Journal

Product Details

• Hardcover: 488 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (April 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252023056
• ISBN-13: 978-0252023057
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,735,066 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Winner of 1998 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, April 21, 2001

By 

Hilde Hoogenboom "hhoo" (Tempe, AZ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop, and the World's Columbian Exposition (Paperback)

An Early Encounter with Tomorrow won the 1998 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society. From the Society's press release, this book meets "the highest standards of imaginative scholarship", "makes available much new information", and "interpretations cross disciplinary lines and point the way to new approaches." "Arnold Lewis demonstrates and analyzes the cultural importance of the Columbian Exposition and of the skyscrapers in Chicago's Loop....The major theme is Chicago's international importance in the transformation of Western culture at the end of the 19th century. Europeans who endtered the Loop walked int a real future, not a vision of one. Exhilarated or disquieted, they acknowledged Chicago's central district as the 'Museum of the present.' The minor theme is the usefulness for historians to study the encounter between the established and the new, the collision between old world assumptions and new world realities, not only in the Loop but also in the Columbian Exposition." From Meredith Clausen's April 1998 review in the American Historical Review, "Carefully researched, well-documented, clearly organized, and beautifully written, Lewis's book should be required reading for anyone in the field of American history, cultural studies, and women's studies as well as architectural history. It is cultural history at its best."