Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America's Future

The spectacular story of America’s hundredth birthday bash—the country's first world's fair and a moment of reckoning for a nation barrelling toward the Gilded Age

“Those who were there felt that the wheel of history itself had turned before their eyes.”

Held at Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia, the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 attracted 10 million Americans—nearly 20 percent of the population, among them P. T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain—and visitors from around the worl...