"The great Fair was indeed a superb and appropriate symbol of our great nation, in its noble general design and in the inequalities of its execution; in its unexampled display of industrial energy and practical capacity; in the absence of the higher works of creative imagination; in its incongruities, its mingling of noble realities and ignoble pretenses, in its refinements cheek-by-jowl with vulgarities, in its order and its confusion - in its heterogeniousness and in its unity."

- Charles Eliot Norton on the 1893 Columbian Exposition

Tonight: Midterm Examination

Review: Midterm Exam

To this point, we have examined the shifting state of the individual within various rhetorics of the ideal community. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it becomes clear that neither church nor state can construct a perfected social order. Perhaps, the job should be left to masters of commerce and captains of industry. The ideal public life becomes a product to be planned, packaged, and purchased - and placed within what Michel Foucault labels a heterotopia. Yet, as with the fanciful republics imagined by philosophers and statesmen, a troubling question cannot be ignored: who counts in this brave new world, and who remains invisible in this rarified locale?

Readings: Burg, Dial, and Paine

Supplemental Website: Wood's Columbian Exposition Resources

Supplemental Website: Images from the 1933-34 Century of Progress Fair

Off-campus webpages

Discovery Channel, Future Worlds, 1893

Julie K. Rose, World's Columbian Exposition: Idea, Experience, Aftermath

Bruce R. Schulman, Interactive Guide to World's Columbian Exposition

Jim Zwick, World's Columbian Exposition - lots of primary material.

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