Lala

nothuing really just wanted to go and look at other's things..

The Fair was immensely popular, drawing over 27 million visitors, including Frederick Douglass, Jane Addams, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Henry Blake Fuller, Scott Joplin, Walter Wyckoff, Edweard Muybridge, Henry Adams, W.D. Howells, and Hamlin Garland. It was widely publicized both nationally and internationally, and people traveled from all over the world to see the spectacle. Travelers came from the East by "Exposition Flyers" --Pullman coaches traveling at the amazing speed of 80 m.p.h -- which gave "many Americans their first look at the country beyond the Alleghenies..." (Donald Miller, 74) People left their factories, their farms, and their city businesses to participate in what was touted as the greatest cultural and entertainment event in the history of the world.

The goals of the management and the reactions of the public to this massive event reveal a great deal about the state of America at the close of the Gilded Age. The early 1890s were a time of considerable turmoil in America, and the conflicting interests and ideas found full play in the presentation and reception of the Fair. It was an age of increasing fragmentation and confusion, of self-conscious searching for an identity on a personal and on a national level. The industrial, and increasingly electrical, revolutions were transforming America; the American way of life was no longer based on agriculture, but on factories and urban centers, and the end of the Gilded Age signified the advent of what Alan Trachtenberg has called the "incorporation of America," the shift of social control from the people and government to big business. The accompanying shift from a producer to a consumer society and the incredible growth of these corporations led to financial instability. Recessions and the devastating Depression of 1893, the violent Homestead and