AtD and Chicago

[Paul Nightingale]

Cody's Wild West returned from its European tour in time to appear at the
Chicago Fair in 1893, where "the Rough Rider contests and pageants were the
ritual games that looked to the beginning of a new age" (Slotkin, 173). A
new entry for the 1893 program "declared that the warfare of the future
would primarily engage civilized nations with barbarian races and that
therefore the American Indian-fighting cavalry would become the 'pattern of
the cavalry of the future'" (173).

Furthermore: "A reporter for the ChicagoInterOcean declared that the 1893
performances of the 'Deadwood Stage' and 'Last Fight' scenes made him aware
of 'the aboriginal ancestor' that remains 'in us after all the long
generations of attempted civilization and education.'" (174)

And then ...

>From Robert C. Allen (1991) Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American
Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 225-226

"It was here that the 'cooch' dance was introduced to American audiences.
Within months, practically every burlesque troupe in American had added a
Fatima, Little Egypt, or Zora to do her version of the famous danse du
ventre. 

"It is both ironic and appropriate that the cooch dance, the immediate
forerunner of the striptease, should enter burlesque by way of an attempt to
popularize the new science of anthropology.

[...]

"The Columbian Exposition was planned as two separate but related sites. The
monumental White City was the fair's formal side, containing exhibits
devoted to G. Browne Goode's twelve 'departments' of knowledge--everything
from fine arts to fish products. The Midway Plaisance, a mile-long avenue
stretching from White City to Washington Park, kept commercial and 'popular'
attractions safely removed from the exposition's high-toned, educational
side while allowing fair officials to realize considerable income from
concessionaires.

[..]

"In White City, visitors could be examined and measured by Franz Boas or
Joseph Jastrow, gauging their forms against statues of the ideal racial type
(whose models were Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates). Along the Midway
they could compare their culture with that of others from around the world
in dozens of village exhibits. There were 'villages' from Persia, India,
Japan, Egypt, Algeria, Sweden, Ireland, Lapland, Java, Turkey, and Germany.
Amid the villages were other opportunities to mix education and
entertainment, among them Hagenbeck's menagerie of performing exotic animals
and George Ferris's new piece of amusement technology: the dual Ferris
wheel, whose huge cars could lift 2,100 riders two hundred feet above the
fair."