| This dissertation is a social and cultural history of the 1933--34 Chicago World's Fair, also known as A Century of Progress. Civic leaders staged the international exposition to honor the city's hundredth birthday. The fair promoted optimism during the Great Depression through its colorful and modern architecture and its educational and engaging exhibits. Its entertainment zone, the Midway, featured fan dancer Sally Rand. Fair organizers, including Charles G. Dawes, Rufus C. Dawes, and Lenox R. Lohr, drew on their military, corporate, and engineering backgrounds to create a male-dominated organizational model that staged a civil-military enterprise. This fair reinvented the concept of world's fairs by seeking private funding rather than government support and by eliminating competitive industrial exhibits in favor of exhibits that offered a narrative of scientific discoveries and their applications to everyday life.; Various participants---fair organizers, expert advisers, corporate executives, ethnic groups, socialites and club women, African Americans, and working women---all sought to promote their own ideas of progress through control of space, exhibits, and activities in order to obtain respect and recognition. This study explores the efforts by major American corporations to stage cooperative exhibits and individual pavilions to promote their products and corporate images; the enthusiasm of the Italian immigrant community over halo Balbo's air squadron's demonstration; the conflict within the German immigrant community in reaction to the swastika on the Graf Zeppelin 's tail fins; the controversy over a separate woman's building; the representation of African Americans; and the evolution of popular culture and the debate over public nudity. |
