By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--June 17, 2024

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The last third of the 19th century was my original academic focus area. It had everything a young man with imagination and a thirst for knowledge could ask for. There were railroads, covered wagons, the frontier, Indian conflicts, bonanza farming, Reconstruction politics and the bloody shirt, immigration issues, free markets, big city political chicanery, industrialization, manifest destiny, labor unrest, economic depressions, westward expansion, sod houses and cabins and mansions, the Dakota boom, timber and mineral resources, and entrepreneurs, gold rushes, all in the context of a noble experiment in self-government. Some people called it the Gilded Age, but that’s a pejorative term.

In the last decade of the 19th century there came a world’s fair that would document the industrial achievement of a free people in the New World. Coinciding with the anniversary of the first voyage of Columbus to the New World, it would be set in a great city where just sixty years before there had been no city at all. It became known as the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Exactly sixty years before, Chicago had been a tiny settlement in the marsh along the edge of Lake Michigan. Fewer than 350 people lived there. Incorporated as a town in 1833, and then as a city in 1837, it underwent a stunning growth that saw it emerge as a major metropolis. Perfectly placed near the southern tip of Lake Michigan, the lakes served as a great fence to direct the commerce of the northern prairies and plains through its streets, sending it to all points east. The capital and trade and muscle of the Northeast came the opposite direction to pass through Chicago to all points west. Few cities were ever so favorably sited for spectacular........

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