The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition—the Chicago World's Fair—was a watershed moment in the development of modern American society. Rebecca S. Graff examines this event through two interrelated sites: the fairgrounds themselves—designed to disappear in an act of creative destruction—and the Charnley-Persky House, still a monument in Chicago's landscape. This volume juxtaposes the microhistory of these sites and broader sociocultural trends in order to examine the notion of modernity. This blend of micro- and macroscales of analysis illuminates prevailing ideologies and how they were—and are—experienced in everyday life. Graff applies the concept of presentism to bridge the gap between more traditional historical archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary world during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, a liminal period often ignored by both areas of archaeological research.
Graff's first chapter outlines her approach, and it discusses how the fair's ephemeral nature gave it transformative power connecting “conspicuous disposal” habits to today's waste disposal regimes. Garbage allows the links between consumerism and modernity to be viewed from an archaeological perspective. The second chapter presents the history of Chicago, followed by an overview of the historical roots of worlds’ fairs—particularly in the Victorian era. This sets the historical, physical, and social limits of the sites: the fairground's ephemeral “White City,” constructed in the city's Jackson Park and Midway Plaisance Park, the quasi-domestic Ohio Building, and the aesthetically modern Charnley-Persky House with its associated artifact midden.
Chapter 3 focuses on temporalities at both sites. The aboveground “city for a single summer” (p. 54) was erased from the landscape by decision in an act of capitalist creative destruction, in accordance with the prevailing ideology. However, the archaeological remnants of impermanent architecture—the majority of the underground infrastructure associated with the White City—are still present. The chapter turns to the still-extant Charnley-Persky House. The discussion of a tin-can-style alarm clock, an iconic artifact from the associated midden, offers a material manifestation of industrial time at the domestic level. Note also the examination of racialized pasts in the fair's planning and functioning as well as in the operation of the Ohio Building.
The fourth chapter examines domesticity and social life within the two “houses,” beginning with an overview of ideologies of domesticity as understood through historical and archaeological accounts. Like the scarcely acknowledged servants who were essential to a household's smooth functioning, the infrastructure of the Ohio Building and the Charnley-Persky House midden were ignored by contemporary sources even though they were central to the successful conduct of social life.
Chapter 5 focuses on the archaeological remains of the goods consumed as evidenced by the garbage left, seen as matter out of place. Trashmaking is presented as the critical lens for examining consumption in theorizing modernity. Graff examines Chicago's changing waste management regimes, turning the focus from the contents of garbage as an insight into consumption to the changing scales of garbage disposal practices—which Graff aptly refers to as “conspicuous disposal”—as a hallmark of the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter is the most deeply grounded in archaeological data, although the latter is not easily amenable to a tight analysis. For example, Graff states, “Confoundingly, the entire [midden] site seemed one immense garbage deposit with no meaningful stratigraphy or features” (p. 135).
The sixth and final chapter concludes by returning to the present day—Jackson Park will become the home of the Barack Obama Presidential Center. The Chicago World's Fair is consequently destined to be remembered with our presentist concerns, which Graff engages explicitly through the framing concepts of archaeology of the contemporary. This framework—the refusal of periodization and the acknowledgment of the past's intrusion into the present—encourages and enables the examination of processes that may have begun in the nineteenth century but that are still active in contemporary urban projects.
Each of these sites would be less instructive if studied alone. What is forceful is the deeper meaning and relevance obtained through their comparison within the same urban system, as well as their analysis in wider cultural and historical contexts. Graff confirms that the social and consumer practices revealed through this analysis all persist and permeate our present. Thinking otherwise would negate our own contemporary familiarities and their pluritemporal imaginary. A link between heritage and contemporary archaeology could be further explored as part of current experience of modernity. The tension in the dialectic between creative destruction, particularly its transformative power, and heritage conservation could be a locus for further research on sites associated with the Chicago fairgrounds. In short, in this innovative, perceptive, and well-constructed book, Graff successfully demonstrates that we are still living the modernity that was experienced at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
