ABSTRACT
From 10 May to 10 November 1876, the United States celebrated the centennial of its independence with a giant international exposition in Philadelphia, the city where that independence had been declared 100 years earlier. Countries from all over the world contributed exhibits, even Japan, which had only been open to American trade since 1854. The British exhibit boasted several large buildings constructed in the half-timbered Tudor Revival style and displayed, among other technological innovations, the ‘penny-farthing’ bicycle. But the chief purpose of the exhibition was to showcase the host country’s own progress in ‘Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mind’. Among the examples of technological progress on display were the telephone, newly invented in the United States by the Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell, the typewriter, and an ‘electric dynamo’ that would prove a precursor of incandescent lighting. The exposition deliberately ignored one very important kind of recent progress: the abolition of slavery and the granting of civil rights to black Americans by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Despite protests from African Americans, the exposition’s organizers accorded a higher priority to cultivating the goodwill of white southerners, hoping to revive their patriotic identification with an American Union they had had to be kept in by force less than a dozen years earlier. During its six-month life, the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 attracted over ten million visitors. As the London Crystal Palace in 1851 has been used to provide a window on Victorian Britain, so the exhibition in Philadelphia can provide one on Victorian America (Gilberti 2002 is a work on the exposition of 1876 by a historian of architecture).
