Disposing of Modernity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca S. Graff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Waste Disposal ◽  
Mineral Water ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Urban America ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition

Through archaeological and archival research from sites associated with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Disposing of Modernity explores the changing world of urban America at the turn of the twentieth century. Featuring excavations of trash deposited during the fair, Rebecca Graff’s first-of-its kind study reveals changing consumer patterns, notions of domesticity and progress, and anxieties about the modernization of society. Graff examines artifacts, architecture, and written records from the 1893 fair’s Ohio Building, which was used as a clubhouse for fairgoers in Jackson Park, and the Charnley-Persky House, an aesthetically modern city residence designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of the items she uncovers were products that first debuted at world’s fairs, and materials such as mineral water bottles, cheese containers, dentures, and dinnerware illustrate how fairs created markets for new goods and influenced consumer practices. Graff discusses how the fair’s ephemeral nature gave it transformative power in Chicago society, and she connects its accompanying “conspicuous disposal” habits to today’s waste disposal regimes. Reflecting on the planning of the Obama Presidential Center at the site of the Chicago World’s Fair, she draws attention to the ways the historical trends documented here continue in the present.

scholarly journals Gwendolyn Brooks and the Legacies of Architectural Modernity

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 167
Author(s):  
Gill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Structural Steel ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Office Buildings ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
American Architecture ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Relationship

This essay reads the work of poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, in terms of its critical engagement with the architectural modernity of her home city, Chicago. Taking her poetry from A Street in Bronzeville (1945) through to the 1968 collection, In the Mecca, as a primary focus, the essay traces the significance of Chicago style architecture on Brooks’ aesthetic. It was in Chicago that some of the first tall office buildings were designed; it was here that structural steel and glass were first used to distinctive architectural effect, and it was here, in 1893, that the World’s Columbian Exposition was held – an event that, for better or worse, was to shape American architecture well into the twentieth century. Brooks’ poetry is alert to this history, attuned to contemporary debates about urban design and sensitive to architectural experience and affect. This context informs and shapes her work in often unexpected ways. Her approach is often oblique (registered in metaphor, style, and voice) but nevertheless incisive in its rendering of the relationship between architecture, modernity and power.

The Columbian Exposition—The Chicago World’s Fair

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean E. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
American Music ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
African American Music ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
Chicago World's Fair

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's participation in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, as representative of African American music. The exposition was designed to celebrate four centuries of progress toward building a lively industrial nation, which Chicago seemed to symbolize. It drew Americans from across the country, in company with Europeans, royals as well as commoners, to see whether the Americans might very literally be able to outshine the Paris Exposition of 1889. Despite resistance by the fair commission, there was some official representation of African Americans. This chapter examines how the World's Fair gave Burleigh, together with Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, the opportunity to address issues of representation and the ambiguous role that music and public performance could play in confronting discrimination and racist stereotyping.

Journey to Frederick Douglass’s Chicago Jubilee

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-56
Author(s):  
John Mccluskey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
General Public ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
American Vernacular

To the general public, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was a technological, visual, and cultural showcase in Chicago. For an aging Frederick Douglass, the months-long event presented a set of questions urgent at the dawn of the twentieth century: What does it mean to be civilized? How central for Douglass were seemingly foreign notions of achievements related from ancient Egypt and contemporary Haiti to answering this question? Closer to home, can and should an African American/American vernacular be admitted into any discussion of a national and “racial” identity? Though unresolved by Douglass’ generation, such questions—aesthetic, historical, and political-- would remain important to understanding the tensions and achievements of the Black urban renaissances of the twentieth century.

Spectacular Work: Labor as Entertainment at the World's Columbian Exposition Fairgrounds

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-162
Author(s):  
Meredith Conti
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Single Mother ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Construction Site ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The City

Night is falling in the city. Holiday shoppers bustle down the sidewalk, some pausing to gaze at a colorful billboard publicizing the delights of an upcoming exposition. A few crafty rats scamper along a tall wooden fence, stalked by a sinister ratcatcher of the Dickensian mold. Children frolic, fight, and tease one another in front of the fence, the familiar syncopated strains of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker overture underscoring their exuberant street play. This is not, however, the early 1800s Germany of the upper-class Stahlbaum family. It's 1892 Chicago. In the Joffrey Ballet's 2016 production of The Nutcracker, the story of Clara Stahlbaum's innocent Christmas Eve dalliances with an anthropomorphic nutcracker and their journey to the Land of Sweets becomes the story of Marie, the daughter of a Polish immigrant single mother, whose fantasyland is the future Chicago World's Fair. Marie's mother, we learn, is a hired artist working on the fair's sculptures. Marie, Fritz, and their mother inhabit a wooden shack in the heart of the construction site, surrounded by the skeletal structures that will become the White City's buildings. Drosselmeyer is now “The Great Impresario,” a character of vision and magnetism inspired by the fair's Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham, and Marie's working-class mother transforms in the second act into the embodiment of the fair's golden Statue of the Republic, a less saccharine substitute for the Sugar Plum Fairy. The mutual affection of Mother and The Great Impresario spans both acts, and though the ballet leaves unclear the outcome of their budding romance, in it young Marie sees the promise of her American dream: a contented nuclear family.

Modern Belly Dance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavros Stavrou Karayanni
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Belly Dance ◽  
National Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
The World ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Performance Area ◽  
The Relationship

References to dances of the East have appeared in Western sources at least since the beginning of the Christian era, yet what has become known and established as "belly dance" seems most closely connected to the World Expositions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 was an event that formally introduced the danse du ventre or belly dance to American audiences and caused a stir in public morals, reformed concepts of the exotic, and revolutionized ideas about the relationship between movement and aesthetics (kinaesthesia). Even though renditions of the dance have varied greatly, there are choreographic elements that make belly dance immediately recognizable and even objectionable to some audiences: elaborate hip articulations, isolations that often layer the choreography and express the texture of the music, and movement on the vertical and horizontal axis without covering a large performance area. In terms of culture, the space it has occupied both in its "native" lands (predominantly but not exclusively, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon) and in the West continues to be contested in choreographic, social, cultural, and even national politics of the twentieth century and beyond. Like many dance forms, belly dance has had an uneasy and anxious passage through modernity.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Rebecca S. Graff
Keyword(s):  
Gold Coast ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
To Come ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many

This chapter begins with two Chicago vignettes to frame the discussion to come. The first is an account of public responses to the end of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in the months after it closed for good. Alternately used as a space for homeless “tramps,” souvenir hunters, and incipient preservationists, the fairgrounds exerted a powerful emotional hold on the many tourists who visited it. Next, the chapter introduces James and Helen Charnley as they moved into their new Louis Sullivan- and Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home on the Gold Coast—a startlingly modern home from 1892 that looked nothing like the elaborate Victorian mansions that surrounded it. Finally, the chapter introduces the Chicago Fair as we consider it today: a watershed moment in the development of modern, industrial American society that invites further investigation to understand the myriad social and cultural processes still part of American urban experiences today.

Gardening in the Apocalypse

2020 ◽  
pp. 389-517
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Robert Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Utopian Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
To Come

The “White City” of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago struck many Americans as a hopeful glimmer of the happy cities to come, but soon, visions of even happier utopian suburbs reclaimed dominance, asserting the need for “A Cityless and Countryless World.” When Bellamy produced his sequel to Looking Backward, it promised a future of commuting by motorcar and personal aircraft to and from cottages in garden suburbs. In different ways, influential reformers and architects such as Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright fed their readings of utopian literature into influential designs for destroying old cities and achieving suburban bliss. The last great nineteenth-century utopian visionary was also the greatest science-fiction author of the early twentieth century: H. G. Wells. He, perhaps more than any other writer, carried forward the Victorian call to abandon Babylon to new heights and fresh audiences, prophesying dreadful apocalypse, and luminously modern gardens to follow.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document