"The book challenges the common view that the Exhibition symbolized peace, progress, prosperity, and the emergence of an industrial middle class. Auerbach suggests instead that the Great Exhibition became a cultural battlefield on which proponents of different visions of industrialization, modernization, and internationalism fought for ascendancy in the struggle for a new national identity."--BOOK JACKET.

The Great Exhibition, 1851: A Sourcebook is the first anthology of its kind. It presents a comprehensive array of carefully selected primary documents, sourced from the period before, during and after the Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. Drawing on contemporary newspapers and periodicals, the archives of the Royal Commission, diaries, journals, celebratory poems and essays, many of these documents are reproduced in their entirety, and in the same place, for the first time. The book provides an unparalleled resource for teachers and students of the Exhibition and a starting point for researchers new to the subject. Subdivided into six chapters - Origins and organisation, Display, Nation, empire and ethnicity, Gender, Class and Afterlives - it represents the current scholarly debates about the Exhibition, orientating readers with helpful, critically informed, introductions. What was the Great Exhibition and what did it mean? Readers of The Great Exhibition, 1851: A Sourcebook will take great pleasure in finding out.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This volume covers one of the most influential buildings of the 19th century. Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace was the first public building to omit references to the past. Amid the historicist debates and battle of the styles of mid-19th-century Britain, Paxton's design was rational and straightforward.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.