02) World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893

The lecture on urban architecture and Chicago history around the turn of the century fascinating and engaging. The themes were tied together beautifully. The World's Columbian Exposition held at Chicago in 1893 was mentioned. It reminded me of Fredrick Jackson Turner and his "Frontier Thesis", which  he  first presented at a meeting of the American Historical Society at the Chicago World Fair of 1893: "The Significance Of The Frontier In American History". 

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom-these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

In particular, I was struck by the resonance of,  Sullivans Transportation Building -- a rejection of  the classical Beaux-Arts style of the rest of "White City" --  and Turner's thesis, that stated that the   "expanding frontier", and the it's interaction with settlers, had produced, a newer, "American Man", and a distinct, democratic, American culture and rejected the previously accepted "Germ Theory" -- that American history is an extension of European history, and American culture derived from it's Germanic origins.