someone should write an incredible devil in the white city style book about czolgosz, the assassination of william mckinley and the 1901 pan-american exposition in buffalo. i would read the fuck out of that
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
Neal Stephenson's latest book (Polostan) has a big section that takes place during the 1934 Chicago world's fair, with lots of detail. It was super interesting.
Book recommendation - Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz. Time travel to defeat anti-feminists with the Chicago World’s Fair being an important setting.
Thanks for posting this. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the original message, but couldn’t remember the name of it. You saved me a deep dive into my Storygraph history. 😀
if i had a time machine i would just happily spend the rest of my life going to a ton of world's fairs. and kill hitler i guess. but after that's done it's world's fairs time
Meet Me in St. Louis was my mom’s favorite movie. When I saw it for the first time as a kid, I thought the World’s Fair was a fair the entire world attended at once. Truly the product of a child’s imagination because when I remembered that just now I immediately thought OMG imagine the lines💀
My grandmother wrote several pages about her experience taking a train from Georgia to the World’s Fair with some friends, I think in Chicago in the 1930’s. It has been years since I read it. I need to get it out and read it again.
You should take a gander at Defunctland's season 3, it talks about how the ferris wheel was debuted at the World's Fair and what that eventually grew into. https://youtu.be/OsJu0XA429A?si=2P-c1Vc0NJfyLDrG
Some might say legislation in the 90s preventing our future participation in Worlds Fairs, but I blame it mostly on "Seymour D. Fair" the last US Fair mascot who salted the earth in his wake:
If we did I bet we'd have to do without the artistic landscaping and interesting architecture and just have all the displays at the convention center in the middle of the sprawling corporate park out near the airport. "The 2025 Worlds Fair is held in a liminal space" kinda shit.
At least they had a cute mascot. I remember my mother, who had lived in New Orleans, saying it was ridiculous to hold it in the summer. I don't see any stories about the failure mentioning the heat, only the Olympics and Epcot. Attendance picked up in November? 😸
My grandparents went on their honeymoon to the 1936 world’s fair in Dallas. Any time I go to or near Fair Park, I think about those two farm kids in the big city, deeply in love and gawking at all the buildings and exhibits.
If you’re ever in Dallas, I highly recommend checking Fair Park out. It’s the only intact, unaltered world’s fair site from before 1950, and it’s full of museums and cool stuff.
Judging by the IOC and FIFA it would probably be laughably corrupt and built mostly of waste and exploitation but cool if you made sure not to look behind the curtain.
They’re called Expos now for no reason I understand! The 2017 Expo was in Astana, Kazakhstan, where I was living at the time, and loads of my students had summer jobs working as translators for various exhibits. Also they literally built a Death Star in the middle of it.
At night they light it up and shoot beams of light out of the top like—it has some other official name? But literally everyone called it the Death Star. TAKE THAT CRYSTAL PALACE!
Only time I was in Buffalo, stopped at a gas station and my credit card was skimmed. But not at the pump. At the register. The guy at the counter did seem shady.
Buffalo is a deeply interesting town, home to the pound-for-pound greatest living literary journalist, JoAnn Wypijewski, and former home and muse to the greatest portrait photographer of all time, Milton Rogovin. They also both happen to be great radical artists. https://www.miltonrogovin.com/
Have you read Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell?
It’s an engrossing, quirky and moving book about the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, told through the framing device of a road-trip Vowell took with her sister.
I'm very grateful to Vowell for opening my eyes to the art of the essay through her books Take The Cannoli and The Partly Cloudy Patriot.
She's also one of my inspirations for becoming a published writer, along with Laura Van Den Berg, Stephen Baxter, Isaac Asimov and Max Barry.
Agreed.
Some people describe Trump as the worst President in US history. He's certainly ONE of the worst, and the worst in decades (the most blatantly corrupt since Nixon), but I'd say genocidal Jackson is worse.
John Sayles has a novel which might interest you, covering that and more. Called "A Moment In The Sun," it covers McKinley's assassination, the exposition in Buffalo, 1898 Wilmington, the Spanish American War, the Philippines, the Great Migration, NYC, Teddy Roosevelt, gold exploration in the PNW...
Came here specifically for this! Perhaps a part of this future book could contain some discussion of Assassins. The song has such deeply relevant lyrics too!
it wouldn’t be my wheelhouse to write, but i would LOVE a true historical/critical companion book for Assassins. adore the show, but you flatten a lot of historical context out when a central conceit like “the American Dream begets violence” needs to easily link everyone from Booth to Czolgosz etc
After the United Healthcare CEO shooting, I almost posted:
Wrapped him a handkerchief around his gun
Said, "Nothin' wrong about what I done
Some men have everything and some have none
That's by design
The idea wasn't mine alone, but mine"
And that's the sign
(And if anyone is wondering, I checked and all of those buildings/sites actually existed ((at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo)). Sondheim didn't skimp on the research!)
I was thinking (almost)this today too! like maybe Eric Rauchway came close once? But also then i got stuck standing at the stove trying to recall how to pronounce Czolgosz
In Polish, it would be spelled "Czołgosz," and would be pronounced CHOW-gosh, where the first syllable rhymes with "show" (not with "chow," as it might appear).
That was such an amazing book that caught me out of nowhere. Started reading for the “true crime” and ended up loving all the Worlds Fair sections even more!
How about the anarchist movement in general, this body of isolated men who just starting shooting powerful men in the late 19th : early 20th century. Seems topical.
Comments
Apparently there still are some, at least of a sort. Doubt they're as iconic as the Chicago one, or some others.
i did some digging and you might like this!
https://youtu.be/OsJu0XA429A?si=2P-c1Vc0NJfyLDrG
I worked at the U.S. pavilion in the Milan 2015 expo.
🎵Mr. McKinley didn’t do no wrong
Rode on down to Buffalo
Didn’t stay too long
Hard times, hard times ….
https://64parishes.org/new-orleans-threw-a-party-and-nobody-came
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymore_D._Fair
true story
Not fun.
Want me to be your researcher?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/419394.City_of_Light
tbf summertime along the lake btw Buffalo and PA line is pretty attractive
If u like fishing and swimming and watching grapes ripening
It’s an engrossing, quirky and moving book about the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, told through the framing device of a road-trip Vowell took with her sister.
She's also one of my inspirations for becoming a published writer, along with Laura Van Den Berg, Stephen Baxter, Isaac Asimov and Max Barry.
The author also voices Violet in the Incredibles movies.
- end random fact -
Also, Andrew Jackson, this is for you: 🖕🏼
Some people describe Trump as the worst President in US history. He's certainly ONE of the worst, and the worst in decades (the most blatantly corrupt since Nixon), but I'd say genocidal Jackson is worse.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-president-and-the-assassin-mckinley-terror-and-empire-at-the-dawn-of-the-american-century-scott-miller/8609622?ean=9780812979282
H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil
But I know it's hopeless.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
This is a grammatically correct sentence.
In the Temple of Music
By the Tower of Light
Between the Fountain of Abundance
And the Court of Lilies
At the great Pan-American Exposition
In Buffalo
In the USA you can have your say
You can set your goals and seize the day
You're given the freedom to work your way
To the head of the line.....
Wrapped him a handkerchief around his gun
Said, "Nothin' wrong about what I done
Some men have everything and some have none
That's by design
The idea wasn't mine alone, but mine"
And that's the sign
But I wasn't sure how well known it was
Maybe call it DEVIL IN THE BROWN CITY.