ABSTRACT
That Midway is just a representation of matter, and this great 'White City' is an emblem of mind. In the Midway it's some dirty and all barbaric. Goode, the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, a theorist of taxonomy, and the primary liaison between the Smithsonian and world's fairs, argued in his 1889 lecture, The Museums of the Future, that To see is to know. Scholars have traced the phenomenon of human zoos and their visual dimensions back to the Renaissance when Columbus returned to Spain with indigenous people in tow. In the US, world's fair organizers drew upon European exhibitionary and ideological precedents and made important innovations, especially in terms of how exposition grounds were mapped ideologically. The visual dimensions of these human zoos, of course, were not restricted to displays of or performances by indigenous people, generally represented as racial types, trophies of imperial subjugation, and human specimens whose body parts were best suited for laboratory jars.
