Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future

Fergus Bordewich returns to Commonwealth Club World Affairs with the spectacular story of the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia: a world’s fair designed to mark America’s 100th birthday, but also a moment of reckoning for a nation sliding headlong into the Gilded Age. The extravaganza attracted 10 million Americans—nearly 20 percent of the population. Among them were P. T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain. Visitors from around the world also attended, including Dom Pedro, the emperor of Brazil. On display were inventions that signaled the changing landscape of American life, from the typewriter to the telephone to Heinz Tomato Ketchup. This celebration of America’s first century came at a moment when its future seemed more precarious than ever, as big money threatened to overwhelm the government, underpaid workers waged the first national labor strike, feminists demanded rights for women, Native tribes went to war to repel the advancing settlement of the West, and Black Americans struggled to exercise their hard-won freedoms. And looming over the fair was the presidential race of 1876—a highly contested election that would determine the fate of Reconstruction and permanently reshape the Republican party. Fergus Bordewich animates these converging crises through the lives of four protagonists—Rutherford B. Hayes, Alexander Graham Bell, railroad magnate Tom Scott, and sculptor Edmonia Lewis—revealing an America striving to live up to the promise of its founders while bracing for the tidal wave of change on the horizon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices