Overview

Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 celebrated the quadricentennial of Columbus's 'discovery” of the Americas by creating a fantastical white city composed of Roman triumphal arches and domes, Corinthian colonnades, and Egyptian obelisks. World's fairs were among the most important cultural, socio-economic, and political phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: millions visited hoping to understand the modernity and progress of these cities and the nascent superpower of the United States. But what they found was often a representation of the past. From 1893 to 1915, ancient Greco-Roman and Egyptian architecture was deployed to create immersive environments at Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco. The seemingly endless adaptations of ancient architecture at these five fairs demonstrated that ancient architecture can symbolize and transmit the complex-and often paradoxical or contradictory-ideas that defined the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and still endure today.

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9781009407106

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ELIZABETH R. MACAULAY is Professor of Liberal Studies, Anthropology, Classics, Middle Eastern Studies, and Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She is the author or editor of seven books, including Archaeological Ambassadors (2024) and Antiquity in Gotham (2021). Her essays and videos for Smarthistory.org, the Center for Public Art History, have been viewed by over 1.4 million people.

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