The World’s Columbian Exposition--Chicago, Summer of 1893

The last third of the 19^th century was my original academic focus area. It had everything a young man with imagination and a thirst for knowledge could ask for. There were railroads, covered wagons, the frontier, Indian conflicts, bonanza farming, Reconstruction politics and the bloody shirt, immigration issues, free markets, big city political chicanery, industrialization, manifest destiny, labor unrest, economic depressions, westward expansion, sod houses and cabins and mansions, the Dakota boom, timber and mineral resources, and entrepreneurs, gold rushes, all in the context of a noble experiment in self-government. Some people called it the Gilded Age, but that’s a pejorative term.