The Trouble Begins: Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future with Fergus Bordewich (In Person)

The spectacular story of America’s hundredth birthday bash—the country’s first world’s fair and a moment of reckoning for a nation barreling toward the Gilded Age “Those who were there felt that the wheel of history itself had turned before their eyes.” Held at Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia, the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 attracted 10 million Americans—nearly 20 percent of the population, among them P. T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain—and visitors from around the world, including the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro (who couldn’t get enough of the exhibition). On display were inventions that signaled the changing landscape of American life, from the typewriter to the telephone to Heinz Tomato Ketchup. This celebration of America’s first century came at a moment when its future seemed more precarious than ever—as big money threatened to overwhelm the government, underpaid workers waged the first national labor strike, feminists demanded rights for women, Native… View Source