jan 1, 1893 - Chicago World's Columbian Exposition

Description:

Scientific discoveries received widespread publicity through a series of great world’s fairs, most famously Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, held (a year late) to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to America. At the fairgrounds, visitors strolled through enormous buildings that displayed the latest inventions in industry, machinery, and transportation. They marveled over steam engines, weather-forecasting equipment, and moving sidewalks. At dusk they gathered to watch the exposition buildings illuminated with strings of electric lights. One observer called the exposition “a vast and wonderful university of the arts and sciences.”

It is hardly surprising, amid these achievements, that “fact worship” became a central feature of American intellectual life. Researchers in many fields argued that one could rely only on hard facts to understand the “laws of life.” In their enthusiasm, some economists and sociologists rejected all social reform as sentimental. Fiction writers and artists kept a more humane emphasis, but they made use of similar methods — close observation and attention to real-life experience — to create works of realism. Meanwhile, other Americans struggled to reconcile scientific discoveries with religious faith.

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