The Official Directory Of The World S Columbian Exposition May 1st To October 30th 1893

128 rare, vintage photographs: 200 buildings — 79 of foreign governments, 38 of U.S. states — the original ferris wheel, first midway, Edison's kinetoscope, much more. 128 black-and-white photographs. Captions. Map. Index.

At the time of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the United States was fast becoming the world's leading economy. Chicago, the host city, had grown in less than half a century from a village to the country's second-largest metropolis. During this, the Gilded Age, the world's most extensive railroad and steamship networks poured ceaselessly through Chicago, carrying the raw goods and finished products of America's great age of invention and industrial expansion. The Fair was the largest ever at the time, with 65,000 exhibitors and millions of visitors. It has been called the "Blueprint of the American Future" and marked the beginning of the national economy and consumer culture.

Today, Americans are some of the world’s biggest consumers of black teas; in Japan, green tea, especially sencha, is preferred. These national partialities, Robert Hellyer reveals, are deeply entwined. Tracing the transpacific tea trade from the eighteenth century onward, Green with Milk and Sugar shows how interconnections between Japan and the United States have influenced the daily habits of people in both countries. Hellyer explores the forgotten American penchant for Japanese green tea and how it shaped Japanese tastes. In the nineteenth century, Americans favored green teas, which were imported from China until Japan developed an export industry centered on the United States. The influx of Japanese imports democratized green tea: Americans of all classes, particularly Midwesterners, made it their daily beverage—which they drank hot, often with milk and sugar. In the 1920s, socioeconomic trends and racial prejudices pushed Americans toward black teas from Ceylon and India. Facing a glut, Japanese merchants aggressively marketed sencha on their home and imperial markets, transforming it into an icon of Japanese culture. Featuring lively stories of the people involved in the tea trade—including samurai turned tea farmers and Hellyer’s own ancestors—Green with Milk and Sugar offers not only a social and commodity history of tea in the United States and Japan but also new insights into how national customs have profound if often hidden international dimensions.

Explores the creation and significance of an exhibit hall at the 1893 world's fair that contained more than 8,000 volumes of writings by women.

Built as a temporary structure and made of ephemeral materials, "Cairo Street" had a dual nature. On the one hand it was a purely scientific installation, a piece of anthropology. On the other, it became the most popular entertainment venue at the World's Columbian Exposition of Chicago (1893), a place where "people went wild with excitement". Far from being a copy of any actual street, it was an assemblage of authentic architectural elements put together in such a way as to conjure up the atmosphere of the Arab-Islamic metropolis, the city of the Thousand and One Nights. Its impact was greatly enhanced by the presence of local Cairo inhabitants, who plied their trade, some of them with their camels, donkeys, monkeys, and even snakes. The belly dancing on Cairo Street caused an enormous stir: many claimed that it was immoral and called for its immediate suspension; others regarded it as a performance of important scientific and ethnological value. It was never suspended-and people flocked to see it. An immense amount has been written about world's fairs. This monograph represents a novel approach in that it subjects a single project, the Cairo Street, to detailed analysis, placing particular emphasis on interpreting it within the context of the Fair as a whole. What was the great uproar about the belly dancing? What motivated it? In order to answer these questions, this monograph attempts to offer a complex, multi-faceted, interpretation within the context of the society of the time. Cairo Street was the sensation of the World's Columbian Exposition, a fair which many sold their stoves, mortgaged their houses, spent their life savings or their funeral money to see. This monograph is enhanced with a ground plan and 168 illustrations.