World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893

The World’s Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago on 1 May 1893 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first Atlantic voyage. Its neoclassical exhibition buildings, planned around Jackson Park and known collectively as the White City, displayed industrial products, art, science and imperial claims to visitors from the United States and abroad.

Daniel Burnham directed construction with architects, engineers and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, while George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. created the great wheel that became the Midway’s most famous attraction. The fair promoted technological confidence and urban ambition but also reflected racial exclusion, labour conflict, commercial exploitation and the inequalities of Gilded Age America.

For historical books, the exposition provides a setting for architecture, invention, migration, spectacle and crime in rapidly expanding Chicago. Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City places Burnham’s creation of the fair beside the crimes of H. H. Holmes in the surrounding city.