I thought that I would never be able to complete this assignment. I am so used to conveying history purely in words that I couldn’t figure out how to come up with a historical story that could be told primarily with pictures. Then, when I finally settled on a topic I couldn’t find enough images that were legally usable. Or, I suspected that there were legally usable images out there but I worried that they were copyrighted. Could it really be so hard to find five images on one topic? I longed for a plain English guide to copyright law. The free photo sites were not very helpful for historical topics although I did find a number of fun new desktop backgrounds. (more…)
The 1851 Great Exhibition: The First World’s Fair
Image 1: The Indian Court and Jewels by H.C. Pidgeon. With permission of the Department of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.
Between 1 May and 15 October, 1851 over six million people visited the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London. The Exhibition was a celebration of modern industrial technology and design featuring displays of industrial and agricultural machinery, scientific instruments, and decorative arts and crafts. At a time when Britain proudly proclaimed itself the “workshop of the world” the Exhibition was intended to display Britain’s industrial and commercial strength and to open new markets. The Exhibition was hugely popular and was the first of a series of world’s fairs that would be held in Europe and the United States over the next century.
The 1851 Exhibition displayed not only Britain’s economic and industrial strength but also its imperial reach. The Exhibition featured exhibits from every corner of the British Empire. The sumptuous engraving of the India exhibit by H. C. Pidgeon gives us a glimpse of the clothing and textile products that were imported to Britain from India. Indian shawls were highly desired by Victorian women, something that is suggested by the artist with his depiction of Victorian ladies strolling through the Indian exhibit.
The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair
Image 2: The World’s First Ferris Wheel. Courtesy of Boston College Department of Fine Arts.
In a fierce competition, Chicago beat out New York City to host the first American world’s fair, also known as the Columbian Exposition because it celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World. The Fair had a lasting impact on architecture and landscape and urban design in America. Despite mishaps which delayed the opening of many of the exhibits, the Fair gave a powerful boost to American confidence by being a symbol of the United States’ emerging industrial and technological strength. It was the first exposition to devote a whole pavilion to electrical power and to be illuminated by alternating current. The Chicago Fair was also the first to feature an amusement area of which the centrepiece was George Ferris’s innovative big wheel — Chicago’s answer to the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show was relegated to the periphery of the fairgrounds. His request to participate in the Fair had been turned down becuase the Exposition’s organizers did not think he would fit in with the overall tone of the attractions.
The 1900 Paris Exposition
Image 3: Roger Williams University, Nashville, Tennessee, Normal Class, ca. 1899. A photograph collected for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
As with previous world’s Fairs the 1900 Paris Exposition was a celebration of technology and progress. Through its exhibits the Exposition presented visitors with a vision of a future filled with technological and electrical wonders such as moving sidewalks and wireless telegraphy. American innovation was everywhere to be seen leading one English writer to describe the Exposition as “the Americanization of the world.”
From the United States also came over 400 photographs gathered for the use in the American Negro Exhibit in the Hall of Social Economy. The pictures consisted of portraits, scenes of education, work and daily life among African Americans. W. E. B. DuBois, who assembled many of the photographs, used the images to demonstrate the social and economic progress of African Americans since the Civil War. Shown Michelle Smith, in an article in the African American Review, argues that in so doing, DuBois was using the Exposition to challenge racial attitudes towards African Americans by presenting “images of blackness” focused on individuality and community that resisted and supplanted white perceptions of African American criminality in turn-of-the-century America.
The 1937 Paris World’s Fair
Image 4: Genius of Fascism, by Georges Gori. Totalitarian Art from the University of Maryland Architecture Library, World’s Fair and Graphic Materials Collection.
In her study of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, historian Shanny Peer described the significance of world’s fairs as “a dramatic stage and centralized forum for the international exchange of information, ideas, and technologies…”(1) The Paris World’s Fair demonstrated this idea in startling ways as European powers used art and architecture to embody the competing nationalist ideologies that would, in less than two years, plunge Europe into war. The image shows the statue of a mounted soldier, entitled the Genius of Fascism, designed for the Italian Pavilion and placed so that it overlooked the the Soviet and German pavilions.
1. Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair (Albany, NY, 1998), 5.
The 1951 Festival of Britain
Image 5: Festival of Britain Opening Special Number, The Illustrated London News, May 12th, 1951. Courtesy of http://www.iln.org.uk.
The cover of the Illustrated London News issued on the opening day of the 1951 Festival of Britain depicted a colorful watercolor painting of the futuristic exhibit site located on London’s South Bank. The Festival, which consciously evoked the 1851 Great Exhibition, took place in a nation very different from the one that had hosted the first world’s fair one hundred years earlier. The British people, still rationed, were slowly recovering and rebuilding after five years of war. Indeed, the central “Dome of Discovery” was built on over 20 acres of bomb damaged land. The British Empire, which featured so prominently in the first Exhibition, was quickly being dismantled and Britain’s status as an economic and political power had been eclipsed, most notably by the United States.
Even so, the Festival was intended as a statement by the new Labour government that Britain’s future was bright. In a time of austerity the Festival promised color, fun and hope. It proved immensely popular with the British public. Its use of modern design and architecture promoted new ideas about urban planning that would shape the rebuilding of Britain. In subsequent years, however, the urban architecture influenced by the Festival would be roundly criticized. Before the Festival concluded, the Labour Government was ousted by Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party — a victory which reflected growing discontent with the rising cost of living and housing and Britain’s economic and military decline. When the Festival closed, the Conservative Government destroyed most of the buildings. The legacy of the Festival was somewhat mixed, as was the postwar promise upon which it was founded.
Web Review: World Civilizations: An Internet Classroom and Anthology
World Civilizations: An Internet Classroom and Anthology is, as it title suggests, an online teaching resource aimed at freshmen-level students enrolled at Washington State University. The backbone of the website is two online surveys of world history for use as distance learning tools: Tradition and Memory: World Civilizations to 1500 and Culture and Conflict, and Modern World Civilizations after 1500. In addition, the site has an anthology of resources relating to various regions and peoples, a glossary of important terms, maps, and links to other online and text resources. (more…)
Saint Valentine’s Day Challenge: Comment
For our fourth assignment we compiled a history of St. Valentine’s Day using on free web sites and then commented on the experience. I started my search for the history of St. Valentine’s Day with a straightforward Google search. There was no shortage of results and from a variety of sources. History.com, the first result, proved a good place to start. It had a fairly detailed outline of the story from its Roman roots to its modern day form.
To get the story of St. Valentine’s martyrdom straight I googled several Catholic web sites. CatholicHerald.com, AmericanCatholic.org, and Catholic.org helped in some degree to clarify which St. Valentine gets the credit for the day of love. A personal web site helped fill in some gaps.
By this point I had begun to find trawling through information on the various Valentines to be something of a chore. What occurred to me then is that the history of Valentine’s Day needs to account for how the festival become a popular phenomenon. The Catholic sites pointed me to the date when the holiday became officially recognized as a holy day and its association with pagan festivals of love.
Taking another cue from History.com, however, I began to search for information about the popularity of St. Valentine’s Day in the Middle Ages. Here I found a site that referenced Chaucer’s use of Valentine’s motifs and cited the work of UCLA medieval scholar Henry Ansgar Kelly, author of Chaucer and the Cult of Saint Valentine. I also found an online exhibit dedicated to Esther Howland and her role in popularizing Valentine’s Day cards in the US. Wikipedia provided the final conclusion to the history with its references to the commercialism of St. Valentine’s Day.
What surprised me the most when I did my initial search was how similar the information was on each site. There was variation in the amount of detail and emphasis; for example, the Catholic sites stressed the Christian aspects of the story. That said, the basic outline of the story was essentially the same and I wondered if there were just a few common sources on which each site drew or repetition between sites. It was only when I began using Google to search for specific aspects of the story, such as Esther Howland, that the history began to take more interesting directions.
Is this a reliable history of St. Valentine’s Day? Curiously, all sites concurred that the history of St. Valentine’s Day was shrouded in mystery so I take that to suggest there is still confusion about its origins. But perhaps the similarity in each site is a sign of consensus about what we do know.
Saint Valentine’s Day Challenge
The tradition of celebrating love and marriage on February 14, also known as St. Valentine’s Day, has both classical and Christian roots. At the heart of the story is the somewhat mysterious figure of St. Valentine. We can be sure that there was a St. Valentine because Pope Gelasius marked February 14th as a celebration in honor of his martyrdom in 496 AD. Archaeologists have also unearthed a Roman catacomb purported to be that of the saint and an ancient church dedicated to his memory.The problem is that the Catholic Church recognizes a number of saints whose names are variations of Valentine and at least three of these are considered likely contenders for the honor of being the originator of the day of love. One Valentine was martyred in Africa and another, who was Bishop of Terni, Italy, was beheaded during the reign of Claudius II.
It seems, however, that the St. Valentine was a priest living in Rome, also during the persecution of Christians by Claudius II. He was martyred on February 14, around 270, because he would not renounce his faith. The historical record is fullest with regard to this St. Valentine and offers more clues as to why this saint in particular would become associated with romance. The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 records that the priest secretly married Christian couples and protected them from persecution. When jailed after making an unwelcome attempt to convert the emperor to Christianity, he restored the sight of his jailor’s blind daughter and left her a note with the words “from your Valentine.”
Hagiography only goes so far in explaining how the legend of St. Valentine become the basis for a celebration of romance recognized in countries across the globe. To learn how St. Valentine’s Day became a popular festival we return to Rome, some 200 years after the original martyrdom. (more…)
Approaches to History on the Web
For this assignment we analyzed four different web sites to answer the question: How do these web sites represent different approaches to history on the Internet?
Two of the four sites are similar in historical approach though different in scope and topic. Both are firmly grounded in academic research and archival resources. The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War is based on historian Edward L. Ayers’s study of two communities, one southern and one northern, in the era of the Civil War . The Valley Project’s collection includes letters, diaries, newspapers, diaries, church rolls, census statistics, maps and speeches from Franklin County, Pennsylvania and Augusta County, Virginia, divided into three periods: before, during, and after the Civil War. The work of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich forms the basis of the DoHistory site, which features a digitized version of the diary of Martha Ballard, a midwife and healer living in Maine in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The diary is the foundation of Ulrich’s award wining study A Midwife’s Tale and the eponymous film.
The content and focus of each site consciously underscores the historical importance of ordinary people and of the need to understand history not just in terms of big events and famous people but also through the lens of everyday life. The approach of both sites is firmly within the realm of social history but the intent is not to present a particular version of history. Interpretation is largely the task of the site’s user. (more…)
