The Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) in West Bend, Wisconsin, is hosting a talk on "The Vanishing City: Excavating the World’s Fair of 1893" on Saturday, February 8, 2020, from 2-3:30 pm. Rebecca Graff, associate professor of anthropology at Lake Forest College (IL), divulges what is hiding beneath the surface of Jackson Park. Professor Graff will discuss her archaeological and archival research focused on the Fair’s ephemeral “White City” and Midway Plaisance. The results of the excavation in Jackson [...]

For a short time in 1893, the Hyde Park and Kenwood neighborhoods of Chicago bordered the capital of the world, as millions visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance. The City in a Garden, a new book by John Mark Hansen explores the history of these neighborhoods: Chicago suburb, world’s fair grounds, college town, the city’s first stably integrated community, Hyde Park and Kenwood have many distinctions. The City in a Garden tells the [...]

The January 10 luncheon of the Caxton Club of Chicago features James Hagy, co-author with Sage Hagy of Fair Tricks: The Magicians at the Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893. Recent scholarship has confirmed the long-assumed basic presence of a young Howard Thurston and an even younger Harry Houdini, both then unknown but who would soon become the two most recognized magicians of the vaudeville era. But how extensive were conjurors’ contributions to the “Magic of the White City”? Fair Tricks pulls [...]