UI Press | Arnold Lewis | An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop, and the World's Columbian Exposition

An Early Encounter with Tomorrow

Europeans, Chicago's Loop, and the World's Columbian Exposition

Awards and Recognition:

Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the American Philosophical Society, 1998.

For the first time in sixty years, Chicago and the development of Chicago’s Loop at a crucial and formative stage, is examined in light of its appearance, pace, and economic drive in a shattering encounter between Old-World assumptions and New-World realities.

Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History given by the Council of the American Philosophical Society Extravagantly illustrated with over seventy photographs, drawings, paintings, and contemporary cartoons, An Early Encounter with Tomorrow documents the mixture of amazement and alarm with which European visitors greeted 1890s Chicago: as a futuristic city animated by a crass, frenetic mercantile class. This volume also contains an extensive bibliography, arranged by country, and profiles of the foreign observers who sought the implications for European culture in what Asa Briggs called the "shock city" of the western world.