From December 1901 to May 1902, the City of Charleston, South Carolina, hosted the only world's fair ever held on Palmetto State soil. Officially known as the South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition, or more commonly as the Charleston Exposition, the event was eagerly anticipated by Charlestonians in hopes that it would boost business ad industry. Even an unusually cold winter could not deter the 675,000 people who visited this landmark celebration in South Carolina history. With the arrival of the Exposition's 100th anniversary, a renewed interest has been sparked in the story that surrounds it. People from all over the country flocked to the Charleston Exposition to tour the detailed building erected in what is now known as Hampton Park. Appearances from President Theodore Roosevelt and author Samuel Clemens; shows with Jim Key, the famous intelligent horse; and the display of the Liberty Bell, on loan from Philadelphia, were just a few of the highlights that enticed visitors to come to South Carolina's Lowcountry. Readers of The Charleston Exposition will experience this almost forgotten event, from its conception, through its planning and construction, to the fair's arrival and completion.
The South was no stranger to world’s fairs prior to the end of the nineteenth century. Atlanta first hosted a fair in the 1880s, as did New Orleans and Louisville, but after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago drew comparisons to the great exhibitions of Victorian-era England, Atlanta’s leaders planned to host another grand exposition that would not only confirm Atlanta as an economic hub the equal of Chicago and New York, but usher the South into the nation’s industrial and political mainstream. Nashville and Charleston quickly followed suit with their own exhibitions. In the 1890s, the perception of the South was inextricably tied to race, and more specifically racial strife. Leaders in Atlanta, Nashville, and Charleston all sought ways to distance themselves from traditional impressions about their respective cities, which more often than not conjured images of poverty and treason in Americans barely a generation removed from the Civil War. Local business leaders used large-scale expositions to lessen this stigma while simultaneously promoting culture, industry, and economic advancement. Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition presented the city as a burgeoning economic center and used a keynote speech by Booker T. Washington to gain control of the national debate on race relations. Nashville’s Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition chose to promote culture over mainstream success and marketed Nashville as a “Centennial City” replete with neoclassical architecture, drawing on its reputation as “the Athens of the south.” Charleston’s South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition followed in the footsteps of Atlanta’s exposition. Its new class of progressive leaders saw the need to reestablish the city as a major port of commerce and designed the fair around a Caribbean theme that emphasized trade and the corresponding economics that would raise Charleston from a cotton exporter to an international port of interest. Bruce G. Harvey studies each exposition beginning at the local and individual level of organization and moving upward to explore a broader regional context. He argues that southern urban leaders not only sought to revive their cities but also to reinvigorate the South in response to northern prosperity. Local businessmen struggled to manage all the elements that came with hosting a world’s fair, including raising funds, designing the fairs’ architectural elements, drafting overall plans, soliciting exhibits, and gaining the backing of political leaders. However, these businessmen had defined expectations for their expositions not only in terms of economic and local growth but also considering what an international exposition had come to represent to the community and the region in which they were hosted. Harvey juxtaposes local and regional aspects of world’s fair in the South and shows that nineteenth-century expositions had grown into American institutions in their own right.
With nearly 2,000 entries and 520 illustrations, this comprehensive reference surveys the history and culture of the Palmetto State from A to Z, mountains to coast, and prehistory to the present.
Focusing on Black Americans' participation in world’s fairs, Emancipation expositions, and early Black grassroots museums, Negro Building traces the evolution of Black public history from the Civil War through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mabel O. Wilson gives voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content: Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Horace Cayton, and Margaret Burroughs. Originally published in 2012, the book reveals why the Black cities of Chicago and Detroit became the sites of major Black historical museums rather than the nation's capital, which would eventually become home for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016.
