Held in Philadelphia from May 10 through October 10, the 1876 Centennial Exhibition celebrated the 100th anniversary of American independence. Philadelphia hosted 37 nations in five main buildings and 250 additional structures on 285 acres of land. The celebration looked backward to commemorate the progress made over the 100-year period, and it announced to the world that American invention and innovation was on a par with that of our foreign counterparts. Patriotism abounded, as did messages of industrial and commercial prowess that promised a brighter future for all. Over nine million people attended this awesome consumer spectacle, an event that set the tone for a long series of world's fairs yet to come.

DIVDee Brown’s sparkling account of a momentous year in American history/divDIV In 1876, America was eager to celebrate its centenary, but questioned what might lie ahead. The American Republic had grown to four times its original population, and was in the midst of enormous changes. Industrialization was booming, and new energy sources were being used for fuel and power. People were suddenly less bound to agriculture, and there were revolutions in transportation and communication. It was a time of Indian wars, the first stirrings of the labor movement, and the burgeoning struggle form women’s and other civil rights. Historian Dee Brown takes the measure of America in a rare moment of reflection on the nation’s past, present, and future. /divDIV /divDIVThe Year of the Century was one of Brown’s favorites among his works. In page-turning prose, he tells of a tumultuous era and of a young nation taking stock./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Dee Brown including rare photos from the author’s personal collection./div

Designing the Centennial is an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the planning of America's first important world's fair -- the 1876 United States Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The conflicts between the players -- scientists and engineers, planners and politicians, organizers and their audience -- demonstrate wider cultural clashes between a traditional view of things as object lessons and our more current understanding of things as commodities. Bruno Giberti uses the official reports of the U.S. Centennial Commission and photographs of the Centennial Photographic Company, as well as the ephemera of the exhibition and literary accounts in books, magazines, and newspapers to examine the concept of world's fairs, contrasting the 1876 event with other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exhibitions and related institutions. The author goes beyond previous works on world's fairs by investigating the design process and by considering the nature of display -- what people were looking at and how they were looking.

With nearly 800 stunning illustrations, experience the most comprehensive contemporary visual tour of the great 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Built to celebrate the 100th anniversary of The United States, the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 will forever be remembered as one of the most successful World's Fairs in American history. This massive collection of images, period accounts, and journalism from the era details every step of the Exhibition with digitally scanned engravings enhanced with modern tools from an oversized master source. Millions of visitors enjoyed the Exhibition in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park and now, modern readers can enjoy what they saw through the eyes and the tools of the world's most talented contemporary artists. Witness the construction of the Fair, the crowds, the opening, the parties, the buildings, the triumphs, and the tragedies. The writer's intent was to "furnish a permanent, truthful, and beautiful chronicle of the Congress of Nations assembled in friendly competition in Philadelphia in 1876," and "to afford a complete history of exhibitive effort in the past, and an artistic and discriminating record of the Great Centennial, the entire work illustrated in the highest style of art, and forming altogether a magnificent Memorial of the Colossal Exhibition in Fairmount Park." -Lavishly illustrated with nearly 800 illustrations drawn for this work -Digital remastered and enhanced from an 1876 oversized print -Brand-new cover design created for this enhanced version -Crisp black and white engravings that show details from the event -Contemporary accounts of the fairgrounds, buildings, and events.

In Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South, Jack Noe examines identity and nationalism in the post–Civil War South through the lens of commemorative activity, namely Independence Day celebrations and the Centennial of 1876. Both events presented opportunities for whites, Blacks, northerners, and southerners to reflect on their identity as Americans. The often colorful and engaging discourse surrounding these observances provides a fascinating portrait of this fractured moment in the development of American nationalism.

In the annals of presidential elections, the hotly contested 1876 race between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden was in many ways as remarkable in its time as Bush versus Gore was in ours. Chief Justice William Rehnquist offers readers a colorful and peerlessly researched chronicle of the post—Civil War years, when the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant was marked by misjudgment and scandal, and Hayes, Republican governor of Ohio, vied with Tilden, a wealthy Democratic lawyer and successful corruption buster, to succeed Grant as America’s chief executive. The upshot was a very close popular vote (in favor of Tilden) that an irremediably deadlocked Congress was unable to resolve. In the pitched battle that ensued along party lines, the ultimate decision of who would be President rested with a commission that included five Supreme Court justices, as well as five congressional members from each party. With a firm understanding of the energies that motivated the era’s movers and shakers, and no shortage of insight into the processes by which epochal decisions are made, Chief Justice Rehnquist draws the reader intimately into a nineteenth-century event that offers valuable history lessons for us in the twenty-first.

The third volume of Gore Vidal's magnificent series of historical novels aimed at demythologizing the American past, 1876 chronicles the political scandals and dark intrigues that rocked the United States in its centennial year. ------Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, Aaron Burr's unacknowledged son, returns to a flamboyant America after his long, self-imposed European exile. The narrator of Burr has come home to recoup a lost fortune by arranging a suitable marriage for his beautiful daughter, the widowed Princess d'Agrigente, and by ingratiating himself with Samuel Tilden, the favored presidential candidate in the centennial year. With these ambitions and with their own abundant charms, Schuyler and his daughter soon find themselves at the centers of American social and political power at a time when the fading ideals of the young republic were being replaced by the excitement of empire. ------"A glorious piece of writing," said Jimmy Breslin in Harper's. "Vidal can take history and make it powerful and astonishing." Time concurred: "Vidal has no peers at breathing movement and laughter into the historical past." ------With a new Introduction by the author.