The Anthropology of World's Fairs PDF Download

Author: Burton Benedict
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Author: Robert W. Rydell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226732371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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In the depths of the Great Depression, when America's future seemed bleak, nearly one hundred million people visited expositions celebrating the "century of progress." These fairs fired the national imagination and served as cultural icons on which Americans fixed their hopes for prosperity and power. World of Fairs continues Robert W. Rydell's unique cultural history—begun in his acclaimed All the World's a Fair—this time focusing on the interwar exhibitions. He shows how the ideas of a few—particularly artists, architects, and scientists—were broadcast to millions, proclaiming the arrival of modern America—a new empire of abundance build on old foundations of inequality. Rydell revisits several fairs, highlighting the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial, the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, the 1935-36 San Diego California Pacific Exposition, the 1936 Dallas Texas Centennial Exposition, the 1937 Cleveland Great Lakes and International Exposition, the 1939-40 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, and the 1958 Brussels Universal Exposition.

Author: Nancy J. Parezo
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803213948
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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As scientists claiming specialized knowledge about indigenous peoples, especially American Indians, anthropologists used expositions to promote their quest for professional status and authority. This title shows how anthropology showcased itself "to show each half of the world how the other half lives".

Author: Dr Diarmid A Finnegan
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472444388
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
‘Global’ knowledge was constructed, communicated and contested during the long nineteenth century in numerous ways and places. This book focuses on the life-geographies, material practices and varied contributions to knowledge, be they medical or botanical, cartographic or cultural, of actors whose lives crisscrossed an increasingly connected world. Integrating detailed archival research with broader thematic and conceptual reflection, the individual case studies use local specificity to shed light on global structures and processes, revealing the latter to be lived and experienced phenomena rather than abstract historiographical categories. This volume makes an original and compelling contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the global history of knowledge. Given its wide geographic, disciplinary and thematic range this book will appeal to a broad readership including historical geographers and specialists in history of science and medicine, imperial history, museum studies, and book history.

Author: Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520378091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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This intriguing study of Mexico's participation in world's fairs from 1889 to 1929 explores Mexico's self-presentation at these fairs as a reflection of the country's drive toward nationalization and a modernized image. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo contrasts Mexico's presence at the 1889 Paris fair—where its display was the largest and most expensive Mexico has ever mounted—with Mexico's presence after the 1910 Mexican Revolution at fairs in Rio de Janeiro in 1922 and Seville in 1929. Rather than seeing the revolution as a sharp break, Tenorio-Trillo points to important continuities between the pre- and post-revolution periods. He also discusses how, internationally, the character of world's fairs was radically transformed during this time, from the Eiffel Tower prototype, encapsulating a wondrous symbolic universe, to the Disneyland model of commodified entertainment. Drawing on cultural, intellectual, urban, literary, social, and art histories, Tenorio-Trillo's thorough and imaginative study presents a broad cultural history of Mexico from 1880 to 1930, set within the context of the origins of Western nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Author: Wendy Jean Katz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803278802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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The Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 celebrated Omaha’s key economic role as a center of industry west of the Mississippi River and its arrival as a progressive metropolis after the Panic of 1893. The exposition also promoted the rise of the United States as an imperial power, at the time on the brink of the Spanish-American War, and the nation’s place in bringing “civilization” to Indigenous populations both overseas and at the conclusion of the recent Plains Indian Wars. The Omaha World’s Fair, however, is one of the least studied American expositions. Wendy Jean Katz brings together leading scholars to better understand the event’s place in the larger history of both Victorian-era America and the American West. The interdisciplinary essays in this volume cover an array of topics, from competing commercial visions of the cities of the Great West; to the role of women in the promotion of City Beautiful ideals of public art and urban planning; and the constructions of Indigenous and national identities through exhibition, display, and popular culture. Leading scholars T. J. Boisseau, Bonnie M. Miller, Sarah J. Moore, Nancy Parezo, Akim Reinhardt, and Robert Rydell, among others, discuss this often-misunderstood world’s fair and its place in the Victorian-era ascension of the United States as a world power.

Author: Susan Brownell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803210981
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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One of the more problematic sport spectacles in American history took place at the 1904 World?s Fair in St. Louis, which included the third modern Olympic Games. Associated with the Games was a curious event known as Anthropology Days organized by William J. McGee and James Sullivan, at that time the leading figures in American anthropology and sports, respectively. McGee recruited Natives who were participating in the fair?s ethnic displays to compete in sports events, with the ?scientific? goal of measuring the physical prowess of ?savages? as compared with ?civilized men.? This interdisciplinary collection of essays assesses the ideas about race, imperialism, and Western civilization manifested in the 1904 World?s Fair and Olympic Games and shows how they are still relevant. A turning point in both the history of the Olympics and the development of modern anthropology, these games expressed the conflict between the Old World emphasis on culture and New World emphasis on utilitarianism. Marked by Franz Boas?s paper at the Scientific Congress, the events in St. Louis witnessed the beginning of the shift in anthropological research from nineteenth-century evolutionary racial models to the cultural relativist paradigm that is now a cornerstone of modern American anthropology. Racist pseudoscience nonetheless reappears to this day in the realm of sports.

Author: Zeynep Ç Elik
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520074941
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Gathering architectural pieces from all over the world, the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 introduced to fairgoers the notion of an imaginary journey, a new tourism en place. Through this and similar expositions, the world's cultures were imported to European and American cities as artifacts and presented to nineteenth-century men and women as the world in microcosm, giving a quick and seemingly realistic impression of distant places. elik examines the display of Islamic cultures at nineteenth-century world's fairs, focusing on the exposition architecture. She asserts that certain sociopolitical and cultural trends now crucial to our understanding of historical transformations in both the West and the world of Islam were mirrored in the fair's architecture. Furthermore, dominant attitudes toward cross-cultural exchanges were revealed repeatedly in Westerners' responses to these pavilions, in Western architects' interpretations of Islamic stylistic traditions, and in the pavilions' impact in such urban centers. Although the world's fairs claimed to be platforms for peaceful cultural communication, they displayed the world according to a hierarchy based on power relations. elik's delineation of this hierarchy in the exposition buildings enables us to understand both the adversarial relations between the West and the Middle East, and the issue of cultural self-definition for Muslim societies of the nineteenth century. Gathering architectural pieces from all over the world, the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 introduced to fairgoers the notion of an imaginary journey, a new tourism en place. Through this and similar expositions, the world's cultures were imported to European and American cities as artifacts and presented to nineteenth-century men and women as the world in microcosm, giving a quick and seemingly realistic impression of distant places. elik examines the display of Islamic cultures at nineteenth-century world's fairs, focusing on the exposition architecture. She asserts that certain sociopolitical and cultural trends now crucial to our understanding of historical transformations in both the West and the world of Islam were mirrored in the fair's architecture. Furthermore, dominant attitudes toward cross-cultural exchanges were revealed repeatedly in Westerners' responses to these pavilions, in Western architects' interpretations of Islamic stylistic traditions, and in the pavilions' impact in such urban centers. Although the world's fairs claimed to be platforms for peaceful cultural communication, they displayed the world according to a hierarchy based on power relations. elik's delineation of this hierarchy in the exposition buildings enables us to understand both the adversarial relations between the West and the Middle East, and the issue of cultural self-definition for Muslim societies of the nineteenth century.

Author: Rebecca S. Graff
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813057558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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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. Published in cooperation with the Society for Historical Archaeology

Author: Istvan Ormos
Publisher: IFAO
ISBN: 272470830X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Built as a temporary structure and made of ephemeral materials, "Cairo Street" had a dual nature. On the one hand it was a purely scientific installation, a piece of anthropology. On the other, it became the most popular entertainment venue at the World's Columbian Exposition of Chicago (1893), a place where "people went wild with excitement". Far from being a copy of any actual street, it was an assemblage of authentic architectural elements put together in such a way as to conjure up the atmosphere of the Arab-Islamic metropolis, the city of the Thousand and One Nights. Its impact was greatly enhanced by the presence of local Cairo inhabitants, who plied their trade, some of them with their camels, donkeys, monkeys, and even snakes. The belly dancing on Cairo Street caused an enormous stir: many claimed that it was immoral and called for its immediate suspension; others regarded it as a performance of important scientific and ethnological value. It was never suspended-and people flocked to see it. An immense amount has been written about world's fairs. This monograph represents a novel approach in that it subjects a single project, the Cairo Street, to detailed analysis, placing particular emphasis on interpreting it within the context of the Fair as a whole. What was the great uproar about the belly dancing? What motivated it? In order to answer these questions, this monograph attempts to offer a complex, multi-faceted, interpretation within the context of the society of the time. Cairo Street was the sensation of the World's Columbian Exposition, a fair which many sold their stoves, mortgaged their houses, spent their life savings or their funeral money to see. This monograph is enhanced with a ground plan and 168 illustrations.