Centennial

The spectacular story of the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876—held in the shadow of a highly contested presidential election that triggered the collapse of Reconstruction and laid the foundations of the Republican Party we know today “Those who were there felt that the wheel of history itself had turned before their eyes.” Held at Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia, the extravaganza attracted 10 million Americans—nearly 20% of the population, among them the likes of P. T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain—and visitors from around the world, including the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro (who couldn’t get enough of the exhibition). On display were inventions that signaled the changing landscape of American life, from the typewriter to the telephone to Heinz Tomato Ketchup. This celebration of America’s past 100 years came at a moment when its future seemed more precarious than ever—as big money infiltrated government, Black Americans struggled to exercise their hard-won freedom, underpaid workers waged the first national labor strike, feminists demanded rights for women, and Native tribes went to war to repel the advancing settlement in the west. In this engrossing, kaleidoscopic history, Fergus Bordewich brings the reader down onto the fairgrounds, animating these converging crises through the lives of four protagonists—Rutherford B. Hayes, Alexander Graham Bell, railroad magnate Tom Scott, and sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Centennial reveals a country in metamorphosis, still striving to live up to the promise of its Founders while bracing for the tidal wave of the twentieth century.