1. Following on the heels of Chicago's Columbian Exposition, San Francisco's Midwinter Fair generated representations of identities, histories, and memories that promoted a vision of social order that spoke to the hopes and fears of both the city and the nation. The version of history articulated at the Fair's '49 Mining Camp exhibit looked back to the past with nostalgia to construct meaningful identities for the present. Through that gauzy lens, it fashioned masculine historical identities that sought to assuage race, class, and gender-based anxieties in the present by emphasizing white male dominance and downplaying the economic dislocations associated with the expansion of industrial capitalism.
2. Barbara Berglund is an assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida. This article is drawn from her dissertation, completed at the University of Michigan in2002, Ordering the Disorderly City; Power, Culture, and Nation-making in San Francisco, 1846-1906, a study of the intersection of cultural spaces, categories of identity, and conceptions of social order in nineteenth-century San Francisco.
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4. 1 The Official History of the California Midwinter International Exposition: A Descriptive Record of the Origin, Development and Success of the Great Industrial Expositional Enterprise, held in San Francisco from January to July1894(San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Company, 1895), 74-75. San Francisco native James Duval Phelan was a prominent banker and civic leader, a key supporter of the Midwinter Fair, and a proponent of the City Beautiful Movement, which held that moral and civic virtue could be inspired in urban inhabitants through the creation of wellplanned and regulated cities. Daniel Burnham, also a leading advocate of this vehicle of reform and social control, designed the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. He also prepared a plan for the redesign of San Francisco, commissioned by Phelan, that was never implemented.In 1897, Phelan would be elected mayor of San Francisco and serve three two-year terms.
5. 2 The Midwinter Fair was the brainchild of Michael H. de Young, the publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle as well as a commissioner of the California Exhibits and vice president of the National Commission at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in1893. While at the fair in Chicago, de Young realized that although California's exhibits were indeed impressive, they did not demonstrate the full extent of the state's remarkable progress and abundant resources. He determined that it would be of great economic and social benefit for San Francisco to host a similar fair on home soil. He called a meeting of the San Franciscan businessmen with him in Chicago, pitched his idea, and despite some skepticism, they pledged over $40,000 for the enterprise. Although it had taken seven years to bring the fair in Chicago to fruition, within eight busy months, a corporate-style organizational structure had been arranged, successful fund-raising and publicity campaigns had been run, many of the exhibits from the Chicago fair were carried by rail to