A Dream of the Future: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville World's Fairs
Nathan Cardon
Abstract
A Dream of the Future examines how southerners at the end of the nineteenth century worked through the major questions facing a nation undergoing profound change. In an age of empire and industry, southerners grappled with what it meant to be modern. At Atlanta’s 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition and Nashville’s 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition, white and black southerners endeavored to understand how their region could be industrial and imperial on its own terms. On a local, national, and global stage, African Americans, New South boosters, New Women, and Civil War veterans ... More
A Dream of the Future examines how southerners at the end of the nineteenth century worked through the major questions facing a nation undergoing profound change. In an age of empire and industry, southerners grappled with what it meant to be modern. At Atlanta’s 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition and Nashville’s 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition, white and black southerners endeavored to understand how their region could be industrial and imperial on its own terms. On a local, national, and global stage, African Americans, New South boosters, New Women, and Civil War veterans presented their own dreams of the future. White southerners at the fairs exhibited a way of life that embraced racial segregation and industrial capitalism, while African Americans accommodated, engaged, and contested this vision. The Atlanta and Nashville expositions are representative of a developing Jim Crow modernity through which white and black southerners constructed themselves as the objects and subjects of modernity during the formative years of segregation. Ultimately, the Atlanta and Nashville fairs were spaces in which southerners presented themselves as modern and imperial citizens ready to spread the South’s culture and racial politics across the globe.
Keywords:
Atlanta,
Nashville,
Cotton States and International Exposition,
Tennessee Centennial Exposition,
World’s Fairs,
Jim Crow modernity,
US Empire,
African American,
the New South
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190274726 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190274726.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Nathan Cardon, author
Lecturer in United States History, Co-Director of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham
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