![]() ![]() New York's financial titans, including J. Congress would have to decide where the fair would be held and that the principal contenders, by virtue of their superior financial resources, would be Chicago and New York. Exposition backers also were also motivated by the prospect of securing greater prestige for themselves and for their cities. Louis, New York City, and Washington DC joined their counterparts in Chicago and announced that they were interested in hosting a fair that, in a time of great economic uncertainty, held the promise of generating commercial profits as well as increasing ![]() By the close of the decade, civic leaders in St. Momentum to celebrate the Columbian quadricentennial began building in the early 1880s. Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition cast all doubts aside. The United States followed in 1876 with a world's fair in Philadelphia, but this exposition lost money and left many Americans wondering if the exposition movement would ever take hold in the United States. The success of London's imperial show inspired Britain's continental rivals to organize fairs of their own. The first world's fair, London's Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, had been championed by the British government to counter the spread of political radicalism and to tout the global expansion of the British Empire. With many Americans wondering if sectional conflict had given way to class conflict, American political and economic leaders followed the example of their peers in Europe and turned increasingly to the medium of the world's fair to provide the cultural cement for their badly fragmented societies. In the interval, the era of Reconstruction had given way to a Gilded Age characterized by frenetic industrial growth, mass immigration, and class violence as evidenced by Chicago's 1886 Only 28 years had passed since the end of the American ![]() When the World's Columbian Exposition opened, only 22 years had passed since the Chicago Organized to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landfall in the New World, the World's Columbian Exposition became a defining moment in Chicago's history and the history of the United States as a whole. ![]()
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