| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Season of Renewal: The Columbian Exposition and Victorian America. By Dennis B. Downey. (Westport: Praeger, 2002. xxii, 216 pp. $67.95, ISBN 0-275-97186-4.)

In this book Dennis B. Downey sets out to challenge the hegemonic model of world's fairs offered by Robert Rydell (All the World's a Fair, 1984), suggesting that there was much more to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He focuses on the "cultural conversations" carried on by diverse commentators in order to find the points of convergence that created "the basis of a common culture" (p. xvi). He argues that this culture was a "culture of renewal," concluding that "the fair reaffirmed the possibilities of renewal and reinvention in a time of profound social and economic reorganization" (p. xvii). Although he concedes that the exposition spotlighted the "dominant voices of the era," Downey asserts that it also "gave fresh expression to the subversive voices of dissent" (p. xix), including labor activists who left the Labor Congress at the fair to rally with unemployed workers outside the fairgrounds and African Americans such as Ida B. Wells who denounced the exposition's exclusionary racial policies.

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