September 10, 2025
By Lindsay Fullerton
Ephemeral City: A People’s History of Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair presents a never-before-seen history of the 1933-34 A Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago through the eyes of its visitors. In prioritizing visitors’ voices and archives, this book has two interrelated goals. First, it adds the much-needed perspectives of everyday people to the broader history of this world’s fair and the interwar era. Second, it shows how visitors to A Century of Progress selected, crafted, and interpreted their own experiences of the Fair, while also critically grappling with complex messaging from Fair management and other third parties inside and outside the fairgrounds.
A Century of Progress was one of a worldwide, long-running tradition of world’s fairs. These temporary public expositions brought together international participants and served as showcases for the achievements of major organizations, companies, and governments. In the 1930s, world’s fairs remained influential cultural forces that attracted large crowds. Indeed, in the bleakest period of the Great Depression, A Century of Progress drew in over 39 million visitors over the summers of 1933 and 1934. Its expansive fairgrounds blanketed 424 acres of land south of the Chicago Loop on Burnham Park alongside Lake Michigan, spilling onto Northerly Island, a human-manufactured peninsula jutting into the lake. Dozens of temporary, colorful, art deco buildings sprung up for these two years, only to be torn down and returned to park land at the Fair’s conclusion. The Fair’s theme was to highlight one hundred years of scientific and technological progress, which was linked to the city of Chicago’s 1933 centennial, showcasing the city as an embodiment of progress itself.
Ephemeral City argues that world’s fairs are particularly productive places to study the experiences of social, technological, and cultural change in times of flux. World’s fairs have always served as test sites for innovative ideas and technologies that eventually become widespread, and A Century of Progress is a fruitful case study to understand the experience of the tumultuous interwar period. The diverse perspectives of the book’s sources illuminate their unique experiences of A Century of Progress, and how the Fair reflected (or ignored) the transformations of its era: the Great Depression, the expansion of mass media, the repeal of Prohibition, increasing urbanization, the emergence of new technologies, and the population shifts of the Great Migration. A metropolis in flux, Chicago stood at the center of these changes. As a transportation hub and booming industrial center with an increasingly diverse population, Chicago embodied the promises and problems of its era. A Century of Progress brought these aspects into even sharper focus.
Ephemeral City explores visitors’ own words, collections of ephemera, and artifacts to gain insights into their experiences of these changes. The book analyzes over 150 first-person accounts of A Century of Progress located in archives, libraries, museums, and private collections throughout the United States, many of which have not received previous scholarly attention. These sources consist of contemporary scrapbooks, photo albums, diaries, editorials, and letters written during visits to A Century of Progress, alongside accounts and oral histories given years after the Fair. Included in these sources are narratives from visitors from a variety of demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds including groups underrepresented in previous scholarly works: children, immigrants, the poor, Asian Americans, and African Americans. Ephemeral City also treats often-discounted sources like scrapbooks and photo albums as legitimate, revelatory source materials. A major contribution of Ephemeral City is to position these underutilized primary sources as authoritative, and to give voice to people often overlooked by historians.
Much previous research on world’s fairs has prioritized management’s viewpoints. By contrast, Ephemeral City focuses on the experiences of the people who attended or worked at A Century of Progress. Ephemeral City rejects outdated models of audiences as helpless in the face of an all-powerful media and management. While Fair management and media messages formed an important part of the A Century of Progress experience, so did other sources of information like visitors’ personal networks, real-time perceptions of the Fair, and previous lived experiences. Though Fair management attempted to tightly control the messaging within the Fair, they could not control visitor experiences or reactions. As Ephemeral City illustrates, these visitors did not just stand in opposition to Fair management, they interpreted and analyzed the Fair – and the idea of progress – individually and on their own terms.
Lindsay Fullerton’s new book Ephemeral City: A People’s History of Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair is available from the University of Illinois Press.
Fullerton is an historian and media studies scholar. She grew up in Chicagoland and holds a doctorate from the Northwestern University School of Communication.