The South was no stranger to world’s fairs prior to the end of the nineteenth century. Atlanta first hosted a fair in the 1880s, as did New Orleans and Louisville, but after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago drew comparisons to the great exhibitions of Victorian-era England, Atlanta’s leaders planned to host another grand exposition that would not only confirm Atlanta as an economic hub the equal of Chicago and New York, but usher the South into the nation’s industrial and political mainstream. Nashville and Charleston quickly followed suit with their own exhibitions. In the 1890s, the perception of the South was inextricably tied to race, and more specifically racial strife. Leaders in Atlanta, Nashville, and Charleston all sought ways to distance themselves from traditional impressions about their respective cities, which more often than not conjured images of poverty and treason in Americans barely a generation removed from the Civil War. Local business leaders used large-scale expositions to lessen this stigma while simultaneously promoting culture, industry, and economic advancement. Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition presented the city as a burgeoning economic center and used a keynote speech by Booker T. Washington to gain control of the national debate on race relations. Nashville’s Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition chose to promote culture over mainstream success and marketed Nashville as a “Centennial City” replete with neoclassical architecture, drawing on its reputation as “the Athens of the south.” Charleston’s South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition followed in the footsteps of Atlanta’s exposition. Its new class of progressive leaders saw the need to reestablish the city as a major port of commerce and designed the fair around a Caribbean theme that emphasized trade and the corresponding economics that would raise Charleston from a cotton exporter to an international port of interest. Bruce G. Harvey studies each exposition beginning at the local and individual level of organization and moving upward to explore a broader regional context. He argues that southern urban leaders not only sought to revive their cities but also to reinvigorate the South in response to northern prosperity. Local businessmen struggled to manage all the elements that came with hosting a world’s fair, including raising funds, designing the fairs’ architectural elements, drafting overall plans, soliciting exhibits, and gaining the backing of political leaders. However, these businessmen had defined expectations for their expositions not only in terms of economic and local growth but also considering what an international exposition had come to represent to the community and the region in which they were hosted. Harvey juxtaposes local and regional aspects of world’s fair in the South and shows that nineteenth-century expositions had grown into American institutions in their own right.

Since their inception with New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition in the mid-nineteenth century, world's fairs have introduced Americans to “exotic” pleasures such as belly dancing and the Ferris Wheel; pathbreaking technologies such as telephones and X rays; and futuristic architectural, landscaping, and transportation schemes. Billed by their promoters as “encyclopedias of civilization,” the expositions impressed tens of millions of fairgoers with model environments and utopian visions. Setting more than 30 world’s fairs from 1853 to 1984 in their historical context, the authors show that the expositions reflected and influenced not only the ideals but also the cultural tensions of their times. As mainstays rather than mere ornaments of American life, world’s fairs created national support for such issues as the social reunification of North and South after the Civil War, U.S. imperial expansion at the turn of the 20th-century, consumer optimism during the Great Depression, and the essential unity of humankind in a nuclear age.

Featuring the work of sixty artists and including 300 illustrations, the catalog Southern Accent accompanies a major contemporary art exhibition that questions and explores the complex and contested space of the American South. This unprecedented exhibition investigates the many realities, fantasies, and myths of the South that have long captured the public's imagination, while presenting a wide range of perspectives that create a composite portrait of southern identity through contemporary art. It looks at the South as an open-ended question and concept in itself by encompassing a broad spectrum of media and approaches, demonstrating that southernness is more of a shared sensibility than any one definable culture or style. While the exhibition includes artwork from the 1950s to the present, it primarily focuses on the past thirty-five years. With numerous contributions by artists, scholars, musicians, and poets, a music-listening library, and a timeline of scholarship on southern art, this catalog redefines the way we look at the South in contemporary art. Southern Accent will be on display at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from September 1, 2016 to January 8, 2017 and at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, from April 29, 2017, to August 20, 2017. Contributors. Diego Camposeco, Mel Chin, Brittney Cooper, John T. Edge, William Fagaly, Carter Foster, Brendan Greaves, Harrison Haynes, Patterson Hood, Miranda Lash, Ada Limón, Mark Anthony Neal, Catherine Opie, Fahamu Pecou, Richard J. Powell, Tom Rankin, Dario Robleto, Trevor Schoonmaker, Bradley Sumrall, Natasha Trethewey, Kara Walker, Jeff Whetstone Selected Artists: Walter Inglis Anderson, Benny Andrews, Radcliffe Bailey, Romare Bearden, Sanford Biggers, Mel Chin, William Christenberry, Robert Colescott, William Cordova, Thorton Dial, Sam Durant, William Eggleston, Minnie Evans, Howard Finster, Theaster Gates, Jeffrey Gibson, Deborah Grant, Barkley L. Hendricks, James Herbert with R.E.M., Birney Imes, George Jenne, Deborah Luster, Kerry James Marshall, Jing Niu, Tameka Norris, Catherine Opie, Gordon Parks, Ebony G. Patterson, Dario Robleto, Xaviera Simmons, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems Publication of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

Examines material culture and the act of institution creation, especially through architecture and landscape, to recount a deeper history of the lives of African American women in the post-Civil War South.

As an age of empire and industry dawned in the wake of American Civil War, Southerners grappled with what it meant to be modern. The fair expositions popular at this time allowed Southerners to explore this changing world on their own terms. On a local, national, and global stage, African Americans, New South boosters, New Women, and Civil War soldiers presented their dreams of the future to prove to the world how rapidly the South had embraced and, in the words of Henry Grady in 1890, built "from pitiful resources a great and expanding empire." Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Atlanta and Nashville world's fairs held at the close of the nineteenth century. Here, Southerners presented themselves as modern and imperial citizens ready to spread the South's culture and racial politics across the globe. Unlike the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, the Southern expositions also gave African Americans an opportunity to present their own vision of modernity within the fairs' "Negro Buildings." At the fairs, southern African Americans defined themselves as both a separate race and a modern people, as "New Negroes." In Dream of the Future, Cardon explores these assertions of Southern identity and culture, critically placing them within the wider context of imperialism and industrialization.

This field-defining work opens the study of world's fairs to women's and gender history, exploring the intersections of masculinity, femininity, exoticism, display, and performance at these influential events. As the first global gatherings of mass numbers of attendees, world's fairs and expositions introduced cross-class, multi-racial, and mixed-sex audiences to each other, as well as to cultural concepts and breakthroughs in science and technology. Gendering the Fair focuses on the manipulation of gender ideology as a crucial factor in the world's fairs' incredible power to shape public opinions of nations, government, and culture. Established and rising scholars working in a variety of disciplines and locales discuss how gender played a role in various countries' exhibits and how these nations capitalized on opportunities to revise national and international understandings of womanhood. Spanning several centuries and extending across the globe from Portugal to London and from Chicago to Paris, the essays cover topics including women's work at the fairs; the suffrage movement; the intersection of faith, gender, and patriotism; and the ability of fair organizers to manipulate fairgoers' experience of the fairgrounds as gendered space. The volume includes a foreword by preeminent world's fair historian Robert W. Rydell. Contributors are TJ Boisseau, Anne Clendinning, Lisa K. Langlois, Abigail M. Markwyn, Sarah J. Moore, Isabel Morais, Mary Pepchinski, Elisabeth Israels Perry, Andrea G. Radke-Moss, Alison Rowley, and Anne Wohlcke.

Using the Atlanta, Birmingham, and Nashville Public Libraries as case studies, The Development of Southern Public Libraries and the African American Quest for Library Access, 1898-1963 argues that public libraries played an integral role in Southern cities’ economic and cultural boosterism efforts during the New South and Progressive Eras. First, Southern public libraries helped institutionalize segregation during the early twentieth century by refusing to serve African Americans, or only to a limited degree. Yet, the Progressive Era’s emphasis on self-improvement and moral uplift influenced Southern public libraries to the extent that not all embraced total segregation. It even caused Southern public libraries to remain open to the idea of slowly expanding library service to African Americans. Later, libraries’ social mission and imperfect commitment to segregation made them prime targets for breaking down the barriers of segregation in the post- World War II era. In this study, Dallas Hanbury concludes that dealing with the complicated and unexpected outcomes of having practiced segregation constituted a difficult and lengthy process for Southern public libraries.