At the point of desperation I returned to the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs online catalog where I found the collection of African American pictures collected for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Having read studies about both the 1851 Great Exhibition and the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, as well as Erik Larson’s book about the Chicago World’s Fair, The Devil in the White City, it occurred to me that I might be able to complete a photo essay using images from world’s fairs. There were many images online and most sites allowed the images to be used. The sites from which the images were taken were primarily by world’s fair enthusiasts and educational organizations. I did ask permission to use one image from University of Kansas and I was surprised at how helpful the staff were in letting me use the image for educational purposes.

In the end, then, this assignment turned out to be a great deal of fun. I enjoyed taking what on the surface appeared to be a disparate set of images and connecting them together in a larger narrative about world’s fairs. I now feel a lot more comfortable about combining text and image and about using images to capture salient historical details about an event.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The navigation from the home page is straightforward and consists of three buttons. The contents page lists the syllabi, learning modules, glossary, atlases, and readings. Resources include links to primary and secondary text and internet resources. Last, an about page explains the intent and scope of the website. The navigation is consistent throughout the learning modules. The about section, however, is modified to explain the expected learning outcomes for each module and includes a guide to how to use each part of the module.

The about page lacked information about the site’s creators and contributors. A Google search confirms them to be faculty members at Washington State University but short biographies would have rounded out the about page. The site is apparently still growing, and moving from an individual venture to a collaborative project through submissions of material from multiple authors, making it more important to list contributors’ credentials.

In terms of presentation of information, the site’s homepage opens with a striking graphic but overall the presentation is bare bones and text heavy and there is no search function. There’s also a lack of consistency in page formatting, with varied backgrounds and fonts, as well as a number of pages, including the main navigation pages, which use white font on a black background. Although information is laid out logically and consistently, the mixed color schemes and formats are sometimes distracting.

Navigation and presentation issues aside, how well does this website working as an online teaching resource? The online syllabi are nicely laid out into units, each dealing with a particular geographic region or culture, and which students can tackle at their own pace. Within each unit, what amounts to an online lecture is accompanied by links to related primary source documents and a glossary. There is also a means for students to submit assignments online and to participate in online discussion.

Although the modules are divided into sub-topics, it is hard to resist the temptation just to scan the text heavy web pages, rather than to read the information thoroughly. The situation suggests some of the challenges of creating an online learning environment that is intended to replicate an undergraduate survey course. Certainly, in an actual classroom, there is the possibility that students will “tune out” a lecture, but there are also more opportunities to encourage engagement with material through questions, visual media, and strong lecture skills. In a virtual classroom, where so much of the work involves reading online, the success of each module requires a strong degree of self-motivation and independence on the part of the students, something that is noted by the site’s creators.

That said the presence of materials online means that students can revisit particular topics at will. Put simply, it’s hard to miss a lecture. Further, the embedding of links in the text gives the reader immediate access to explanations and definitions of pertinent themes and ideas. It also allows to students to jump to earlier modules that are relevant to an issue under discussion, if necessary, which means that a module does not have to include a lot of background information.

Given that the site attempts to deal with every corner of the globe over several millennia there are necessarily points at which the complexity of a particular event or period is compromised. This is less a problem of online teaching than it is a function of the sheer scope of world history. Having multiple authors, each with a particular specialty, could add depth. Organizing modules by region or culture also means that thematic connections between cultures are less obvious. What comparisons could be made about the emergence of nations and nationalism in global context, for example? There are obviously many different ways to organize a syllabus, virtual or otherwise, each with its pitfalls.

While this web site began as an online learning resource it has apparently grown into a more extensive collection of resources on world cultures. There were several dead links and pages still under construction but then the site is very large and no doubt requires much maintenance. It remains, however, rich in information about various aspects of world history and of use to both student and general interest reader.

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.

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.

During the festival of Lupercalia, a pagan fertility rite honoring the Roman goddess Juno, which took place on February 15, the names of young women were placed in a lottery and drawn at random by adolescent men. The women would become sexual companions to the young men for the duration of the year. Christian authorities were not too keen on this pagan licentiousness and so, in 496, Pope Gelasius issued an edict replacing Lupercalia with Valentine and creating a new game where only the names of saints would be put into the lottery. Each man and woman would draw the name of a saint and spend the year in emulation of the saint’s life.

It seems, however, that Roman men continued to see Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to seek love and to present handwritten love notes to young women. Along with Christmas and Easter, then, St. Valentine’s Day is another event that reflects the gradual but incomplete process by which Christian authorities tried to paper over pagan rites.

Some argue that it was the fourteenth-century writer Geoffrey Chaucer who made the definitive association of this Christian feast day with love and romance through a poem in honor of the betrothal of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia. Certainly, by the Middle Ages, St. Valentine’s Day had become a popular holiday. Medieval lovers expressed their affection for each other with letters and small gifts. The British Library holds the earliest known valentine greeting, written in 1415 by the Duke of Orleans to his wife after he was captured at the Battle of Agincourt and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

The widespread belief in Europe during the Middle Ages that birds chose their partners in the middle of February reinforced the association of St. Valentine’s Day with romance and marriage.

Following the Protestant Reformation, St. Valentine’s Day lost its Catholic origins but continued to be widely popular in Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Friends and lovers of all social classes would exchange notes and love tokens.

Improvements in printing technology marked the next phase in the evolving history of St. Valentine’s Day. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Valentine’s cards could be mass-produced and mailed long distance thanks to cheaper postage rates. Esther A. Howland, dubbed the “Mother of the American Valentine,” initiated mass production of the American Valentine’s cards in the 1840s and propelled the celebration of love into the public consciousness.

Howland, who is celebrated by the greetings card industry as something of a visionary in business and marketing, is a fitting place to conclude this history of Saint Valentine’s Day. In the US Valentine’s Day is now the second largest card-sending holiday after Christmas. For cynics, the holiday’s popularity is as much about canny marketing and commercialism as it is about love – yet another “Hallmark holiday.” Perhaps a more productive turn in the history of St. Valentine’s Day has been the trend to call it instead Singles’ Awareness Day so as to recognize the needs of those not coupled.

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.

The Valley Project provides bibliographies and some historical context drawn from academic studies. It also poses questions about the major debates in Civil War scholarship such as the role of slavery in the causes of the War. On the whole, however, it is up to the user to make connections between the documents, which are presented with only the briefest summary of contents, and to put together a broader historical narrative.

The DoHistory site is similar in its interpretive minimalism. But, as its title suggests, the site also promotes the doing of history. History is like detective work is the site’s premise. It shows how Ulrich pieced together the story of Ballard’s life from archival fragments and then encourages users to do the same. To this end, it provides a “Tool Kit” with guidance on how to find and use primary sources and oral histories.

Both sites define themselves as experimental in their attempt to encourage exploration into the past via digital resources. The intended use is primarily educational and academic, hence the classroom resources, but the sites would also be of interest to lay historians and genealogists.

The web site of the National Museum of American History essentially extends the institution’s mission to provide the American public with a broad understanding of the nation’s history, people, and culture. The web site includes visitors’ guides, on-line exhibits, collection information, and teaching tools.

Museums rely extensively on the interpretation of material culture and so the web site of the NMAH is image rich. A small portion of the Museum’s collection is showcased through its History Wired section and on-line exhibits. The selection is vast and varied, ranging from major artifacts such as the flag that inspired the Star Spangled Banner to objects of popular culture and everyday life. The web site shares a common historical approach with the first two sites in its focus on society and culture.

Unlike the first two sites, however, the NMAH site is interpretive. The Julia Childs exhibit is highly visual and interactive, with a virtual tour of the TV chef’s kitchen. The exhibit traces Childs’s life and career and gives historical context to her life as a popular embodiment of postwar domesticity. The site also explains Childs’s cultural impact on Americans’ cooking through her popularization of French ingredients.

The History.com site, like the NMAH site, is technologically sophisticated with rich visuals, video shorts, and interactive media — quite a contrast to the bare-bones layout of the first two sites. Given that History.com is essentially a vehicle to advertise History Channel programming. it is intended to appeal to a broad audience. Moreover, the commercial nature of the site and the cable network means that it reflects popular interest in history. There is a heavy emphasis on military history, major events, and biography, as well as some more salacious segments on cannibalism and historic hauntings, for example.

The overall presentation of history on this site is straightforward, entertaining, and condensed into discrete episodes that neatly accompany program arcs. The intent is to make events of the past immediately intelligible to a modern audience. There is no larger interpretive framework and little exploration of historical debate. History is, for all intents and purposes, packaged.