High school history teacher Michael Skomba writes in “Go West! Then Back to the Future” (Smithsonian Magazine blog January 14, 2022) about his exploration of one of the most popular and enduring historical narratives of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The Book of the Fair by Hubert Howe Bancroft, published in numerous editions, was “algorithmically perfected to maximize the market for an expensive work,” according to Bancroft scholar Dr. Travis Ross of Yale University. Skomba finds Bancroft’s history of the 1893 World’s Fair to be “a zeitgeist piece, a monolithic feel-good source about the American Coming of Age.”
