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July 19-Aug. 4, 2024: “White City Murder” at the Phoenix Theatre (Indianapolis)

Murder! Mischief! Dark Comedy! White City Murder, a macabre and hilarious tale of infamous serial killer H.H. Holmes at the 1893 World’s Fair, is playing at the Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis from July 19 to August 4, 2024. Featuring original music by Ben Asaykwee, the show promises a blend of laughter and chills. In two acts, the play includes over 30 characters, all played by two actors as they sing and dance their way through the life story one [...]

By |2024-09-22T11:07:50-05:00July 20th, 2024|Categories: EVENTS (past), THEATER|Tags: |0 Comments
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Horace Spencer Fiske’s odes to Daniel Chester French’s Columbian Exposition sculptures

The great sculptural works of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition have been memorialized in photographs, paintings, and prose. Poetry, too, honors some of the famous sculptures from the Fair. Horace Spencer Fiske (1859–1940) taught English at Beloit College and Wisconsin State Normal School before a long career on the faculty and administration of the University of Chicago beginning in 1894. He stablished the John Billings Fiske Prize in Poetry (in honor of his father) for University students in 1919 [...]

By |2024-07-11T06:07:08-05:00July 11th, 2024|Categories: REPRINTS, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |0 Comments
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Eyewitness to the Cold Storage Building fire

Mr. Bryan and Mr. King could not have imaged the infernal tragedy about to unfold at the Columbian Exposition on the afternoon of Monday, July 10, 1893. Thomas Barbour Bryan was a leading figure in the effort to bring the World’s Columbian Exposition to Chicago and had been its First Vice-President. William Fletcher King served as the president of Cornell College from 1863 until 1908. Their conversation was interrupted by smoke billowing from the cupola of a building in [...]

By |2024-07-03T08:41:57-05:00July 10th, 2024|Categories: REPRINTS|Tags: , |0 Comments
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“Ring the Bells!” by Richard Lew Dawson

Essayist, story writer, song writer, critic and poet, Richard Lew Dawson (1852–1921) wrote for many popular newspapers and magazines, including the Indianapolis Sentinel, Indianapolis Journal, Chicago Current, Saturday Herald, and Century Magazine. He was a founding member of the Western Association of Writers in 1886. A few years before his death on April 23, 1921, the Hoosier writer moved to San Francisco, where he departed this world on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday. Dawson’s poem “Ring the Bells!,” celebrating [...]

By |2024-07-03T08:29:08-05:00July 4th, 2024|Categories: REPRINTS|Tags: |0 Comments
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“Big Shoulders” comic series plans to visit the 1893 World’s Fair

“A crossroads is where destinies can get made or broken,” states Big Shoulders #1, the first of a proposed six-issue full-color comic series. This Chicago-based fantasy, where the mundane and the cosmic collide, features twenty-two-year-old Coda Walker waking up and finding himself transported to the 1893 World’s Fair. Two pages (not yet colored) from Big Shoulders #1, showing Coda Walker in front of the Administration Building at the 1893 World’s Fair. [Art: Scott Gray] Written by John Dudley, [...]

By |2024-06-19T13:49:30-05:00June 19th, 2024|Categories: FICTION, NEWS|0 Comments
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Famous World’s Fair Name on “Jeopardy!”

“Famous Names” served as the Final Jeopardy category on the June 12, 2024, episode of Jeopardy! The answer was: “Vying with Eiffel, this engineer wanted to create big; an admiring account said the Obelisk of Luxor is too short to be a spoke.” Two of the contestants came up with correct question of is “Who is Ferris?” Pittsburgh engineer George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., designed his great iron wheel for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The Ferris Wheel [...]

By |2024-06-17T21:23:10-05:00June 17th, 2024|Categories: NEWS|Tags: , , , |0 Comments
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Jul. 9, 2014: “Race-making in the Americas From Columbus to the 1893 World’s Fair” (Chicago)

The Adult Education program at the Newberry Library will offer a course on "Race-making in the Americas: From Columbus to the 1893 World’s Fair" weekly on Tuesdays from July 9–30, 2024. Led by Breanna Escamilla, an anthropologist from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the seminar will begin by analyzing the journal of Christopher Columbus and expand into the archival materials of religious missionaries in the Western Hemisphere, before turning toward the racial project of chattel-slavery in the Americas. Finally, [...]

By |2024-09-22T11:08:10-05:00June 4th, 2024|Categories: EVENTS (past), Uncategorized|Tags: , |0 Comments
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(Re)Introducing the Dana Palace of Fine Arts

Dear Mr. Burnham, Please take a look at the attached press release drafted by Chief Halsey Ives of the Fine Arts Department. Are we to proceed with this? I urge caution. With concern, Moses P. Handy Publicity and Promotion May 14, 1893 (Re)Introducing the Dana Palace of Fine Arts The World’s Fair is open, the guidebooks are printed, and the maps are distributed. And yet, winds of change are blowing through the Windy City. The Palace of Fine Arts [...]

By |2024-05-18T09:48:10-05:00May 18th, 2024|Categories: NEWS|Tags: |0 Comments
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Reaching the fairgrounds by cable car, cattle car, steamboat, or L?

Visitors to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition had many options for transportation to (and within), the fairgrounds. The poem below, about various transportation modes, may have been a sly advertisement for the company mentioned in the final line. “The Crowd Entering the Grounds from the Elevated Railway,” drawn by T. de Thulstrup after a sketch by T. Dart Walker. [Image from Harper’s Weekly June 10, 1893.] Some reached The Fair by steamboat, .....Some ride upon the “L;” Some bump [...]

By |2024-04-27T10:31:58-05:00May 2nd, 2024|Categories: REPRINTS|Tags: , |0 Comments
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