World's Fairs in a Southern Accent - Atlanta, Nashville, and Charleston, 1895-1902 (Hardcover)

The South was no stranger to world's fairs prior to the end of the nineteenth century.
Atlanta first hosted a fair in the 1880s, as did New Orleans and Louisville, but after the
1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago drew comparisons to the great exhibitions
of Victorian-era England, Atlanta's leaders planned to host another grand exposition that
would not only confirm Atlanta as an economic hub the equal of Chicago and New York,
but usher the South into the nation's industrial and political mainstream. Nashville and
Charleston quickly followed suit with their own exhibitions.
In the 1890s, the perception of the South was inextricably tied to race, and more specifically
racial strife. Leaders in Atlanta, Nashville, and Charleston all sought ways to distance
themselves from traditional impressions about their respective cities, which more often
than not conjured images of poverty and treason in Americans barely a generation removed
from the Civil War. Local business leaders used large-scale expositions to lessen this stigma
while simultaneously promoting culture, industry, and economic advancement. Atlanta's
Cotton States and International Exposition presented the city as a burgeoning economic
center and used a keynote speech by Booker T. Washington to gain control of the national
debate on race relations. Nashville's Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition
chose to promote culture over mainstream success and marketed Nashville as a "Centennial
City" replete with neoclassical architecture, drawing on its reputation as "the Athens of the
south." Charleston's South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition followed in
the footsteps of Atlanta's exposition. Its new class of progressive leaders saw the need to
reestablish the city as a major port of commerce and designed the fair around a Caribbean
theme that emphasized trade and the corresponding economics that would raise Charleston
from a cotton exporter to an international port of interest.
Bruce G. Harvey studies each exposition beginning at the local and individual level
of organization and moving upward to explore a broader regional context. He argues that
southern urban leaders not only sought to revive their cities but also to reinvigorate the
South in response to northern prosperity. Local businessmen struggled to manage all the
elements that came with hosting a world's fair, including raising funds, designing the fairs'
architectural elements, drafting overall plans, soliciting exhibits, and gaining the backing
of political leaders. However, these businessmen had defined expectations for their expositions
not only in terms of economic and local growth but also considering what an international
exposition had come to represent to the community and the region in which they
were hosted. Harvey juxtaposes local and regional aspects of world's fair in the South and
shows that nineteenth-century expositions had grown into American institutions in their
own right.
Bruce G. Harvey is an independent consultant and documentary photographer with
Harvey Research and Consulting based in Syracuse, New York. He specializes in historic
architectural surveys and documentation photography.

General

Imprint:	University of Tennessee Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	July 2014
First published:	July 2014
Authors:	Bruce G. Harvey
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 33mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth over boards
Pages:	416
ISBN-13:	978-1-57233-865-4
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Public buildings: civic, commercial, industrial, etc > General Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history Books > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history
LSN:	1-57233-865-2
Barcode:	9781572338654

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