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Aug 31, 2024 · World’s Columbian Exposition, fair held in 1893 in Chicago, Illinois, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America. The chief planner was the Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham. The classical facades of the fair’s ‘White City’ were electrically lighted at night.
- Philadelphia Centennial Exposition
Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, (1876), international...
- Philadelphia Centennial Exposition
The World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, was a world's fair held in Chicago from May 5 to October 31, 1893, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus 's arrival in the New World in 1492. [ 1 ] The centerpiece of the Fair, held in Jackson Park, was a large water pool representing the voyage that ...
Aug 19, 2024 · Its immense scale and breathtaking grandeur surpassed previous world’s fairs, establishing it as a symbol of America’s rising prominence on the global stage. Nearly 129,000 people — “a surging sea of humanity,” as the title on this stereograph print describes it — filled the grounds on the opening day of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the most famous world’s fair in America.
- Overview
- Diseases
- Animals
- Plants
Columbian Exchange, the largest part of a more general process of biological globalization that followed the transoceanic voyaging of the 15th and 16th centuries. Ecological provinces that had been torn apart by continental drift millions of years ago were suddenly reunited by oceanic shipping, particularly in the wake of Christopher Columbus’s voy...
Before 1492, Native Americans (Amerindians) hosted none of the acute infectious diseases that had long bedeviled most of Eurasia and Africa: measles, smallpox, influenza, mumps, typhus, and whooping cough, among others. In most places other than isolated villages, these had become endemic childhood diseases that killed one-fourth to one-half of all children before age six. Survivors, however, carried partial, and often total, immunity to most of these infections with the notable exception of influenza. Falciparum malaria, by far the most severe variant of that plasmodial infection, and yellow fever also crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas.
In the centuries after 1492, these infections swirled as epidemics among Native American populations. Physical and psychological stress, including mass violence, compounded their effect. The impact was most severe in the Caribbean, where by 1600 Native American populations on most islands had plummeted by more than 99 percent. Across the Americas, populations fell by 50 percent to 95 percent by 1650.
The animal component of the Columbian Exchange was slightly less one-sided. Horses, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep, and several other species adapted readily to conditions in the Americas. Broad expanses of grassland in both North and South America suited immigrant herbivores, cattle and horses especially, which ran wild and reproduced prolifically on the Pampas and the Great Plains. Pigs too went feral. Sheep prospered only in managed flocks and became a mainstay of pastoralism in several contexts, such as among the Navajo in New Mexico.
With the new animals, Native Americans acquired new sources of hides, wool, and animal protein. Horses and oxen also offered a new source of traction, making plowing feasible in the Americas for the first time and improving transportation possibilities through wheeled vehicles, hitherto unused in the Americas. Donkeys, mules, and horses provided a wider variety of pack animals. Thus, the introduced animal species had some important economic consequences in the Americas and made the American hemisphere more similar to Eurasia and Africa in its economy.
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The new animals made the Americas more like Eurasia and Africa in a second respect. With goats and pigs leading the way, they chewed and trampled crops, provoking between herders and farmers conflict of a sort hitherto unknown in the Americas except perhaps where llamas got loose. This pattern of conflict created new opportunities for political divisions and alignments defined by new common interests.
One introduced animal, the horse, rearranged political life even further. The Native Americans of the North American prairies, often called Plains Indians, acquired horses from Spanish New Mexico late in the 17th century. On horseback they could hunt bison (buffalo) more rewardingly, boosting food supplies until the 1870s, when bison populations dwindled. Additionally, mastery of the techniques of equestrian warfare utilized against their neighbours helped to vault groups such as the Sioux and Comanche to heights of political power previously unattained by any Amerindians in North America.
The Columbian Exchange was more evenhanded when it came to crops. The Americas’ farmers’ gifts to other continents included staples such as corn (maize), potatoes, cassava, and sweet potatoes, together with secondary food crops such as tomatoes, peanuts, pumpkins, squashes, pineapples, and chili peppers. Tobacco, one of humankind’s most important drugs, is another gift of the Americas, one that by now has probably killed far more people in Eurasia and Africa than Eurasian and African diseases killed in the Americas.
Some of these crops had revolutionary consequences in Africa and Eurasia. Corn had the biggest impact, altering agriculture in Asia, Europe, and Africa. It underpinned population growth and famine resistance in parts of China and Europe, mainly after 1700, because it grew in places unsuitable for tubers and grains and sometimes gave two or even three harvests a year. It also served as livestock feed, for pigs in particular.
In Africa about 1550–1850, farmers from Senegal to Southern Africa turned to corn. Today it is the most important food on the continent as a whole. Its drought resistance especially recommended it in the many regions of Africa with unreliable rainfall.
Corn had political consequences in Africa. After harvest, it spoils more slowly than the traditional staples of African farms, such as bananas, sorghums, millets, and yams. Its longer shelf life, especially once it is ground into meal, favoured the centralization of power because it enabled rulers to store more food for longer periods of time, give it to loyal followers, and deny it to all others. Previously, without long-lasting foods, Africans found it harder to build states and harder still to project military power over large spaces. In the moist tropical forests of western and west-central Africa, where humidity worked against food hoarding, new and larger states emerged on the basis of corn agriculture in the 17th century. Some of them, including the Asante kingdom centred in modern-day Ghana, developed supply systems for feeding far-flung armies of conquest, using cornmeal, which canoes, porters, or soldiers could carry over great distances. Such logistical capacity helped Asante become an empire in the 18th century. To the east of Asante, expanding kingdoms such as Dahomey and Oyo also found corn useful in supplying armies on campaign.
The durability of corn also contributed to commercialization in Africa. Merchant parties, traveling by boat or on foot, could expand their scale of operations with food that stored and traveled well. The advantages of corn proved especially significant for the slave trade, which burgeoned dramatically after 1600. Slaves needed food on their long walks across the Sahara to North Africa or to the Atlantic coast en route to the Americas. Corn further eased the slave trade’s logistical challenges by making it feasible to keep legions of slaves fed while they clustered in coastal barracoons before slavers shipped them across the Atlantic.
Cassava, or manioc, another American food crop introduced to Africa in the 16th century as part of the Columbian Exchange, had impacts that in some cases reinforced those of corn and in other cases countered them. Cassava, originally from Brazil, has much that recommended it to African farmers. Its soil nutrient requirements are modest, and it withstands drought and insects robustly. Like corn, it yields a flour that stores and travels well. It helped ambitious rulers project force and build states in Angola, Kongo, West Africa, and beyond. Farmers can harvest cassava (unlike corn) at any time after the plant matures. The food lies in the root, which can last for weeks or months in the soil. This characteristic of cassava suited farming populations targeted by slave raiders. It enabled them to vanish into the forest and abandon their crop for a while, returning when danger had passed. So while corn helped slave traders expand their business, cassava allowed peasant farmers to escape and survive slavers’ raids.
Old and new frontiers at the Chicago World’s Fair. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. . . .
The Catholic fraternal order, the Knights of Columbus, urged Congress to add “under God” to the pledge in the 1950s. On America the Beautiful, see Chaim M. Rosenberg, America at the Fair: Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (Arcadia, 2008), p. 10.
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World's Columbian Exposition. (May 1, 1893–October 30, 1893.) Map of Fairgrounds, 1893. Organized to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landfall in the New World, the World's Columbian Exposition became a defining moment in Chicago's history and the history of the United States as a whole. When the World's Columbian Exposition ...
