Photos From The 1893 Chicago World's Fair

I may be a little late to the party on this volume, but I recently read the amazing book, Devil in the White City, an account of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition - the Chicago World's Fair.  Erik Larson does an incredible job in fleshing out both the physical presence, and the lived experience, of this historic event.   Real photographs are a great way to supplement this volume.   Flikr houses a flock of  public domain pictures held by various museums and libraries.  Flikr's World Columbian Exposition Collection includes 97 beautiful photos that really help flesh out my imagined vision of, for example, the massive Transportation Building (below.)  I also loved the New York State Building - above - which looked like a Manhattan mansion on steroids.

Comments

[Eric Fink]

Among the best classes I ever took as a grad student at U Chicago was a seminar about the 1893 Fair (the 100th anniversary of which was then approaching). The professor took us on a tour of Fair remains in Jackson Park. While there is a good body of scholarship on the fair, I've never seen any from a legal perspective. One possible subject, for legal scholars interested in race & ethnicity, might be the ethnographic "villages" that were part of the Midway attractions.

[Tanya Marsh]

Devil in the White City is a great book. After reading it, I took an architectural boat tour in Chicago -- it totally changed the way I experience Chicago!