I am not an American historian, but I am writing this a few blocks away from site of the fair, so I'll give it a shot. I will briefly sketch some the impressions left from the Columbian Exhibition, but there are also some things to touch on about these sorts of exhibitions more generally. The Crystal Palace is an early example of these sorts of expositions that persist until today, and there is a lot to say about the purposes, impressions, and results of these fairs - the Exposition Universelle of 1900 that led Adams to ponder the dynamo is the same exposition that embraced and disseminated art nouveau.

Chicago had recovered in a spectacular fashion from the Great Chicago Fire just a few decades earlier (remember, also, that Chicago was incorporated in 1833, two centuries after New York). Chicago's geographic location allowed the massive growth it enjoyed throughout the 19th century as an industrial and transportation center, and the fair legitimized the cultural place of Chicago, a young city, and the United States, a young country. The amusement sections of the fair, including the Ferris Wheel, gave rise to modern amusement parks, while the buildings were illuminated with (AC) electricity. Commercial exhibits, the palace of fine arts, international pavilions just capture a small slice of the scale and grandeur of the fair, all serving to establish Chicago as a global city and the United States as a global power - it's no coincidence that here is where Turner would proclaim the death of the American frontier and the necessity for expansion. At the same time the caricaturization of Native Americans and indigenous foreign groups, the aggrandizing approach to industrialization and immigration, and the exclusion of black residents (Douglas' dismissal of Lincoln's "Chicago Doctrine" comes to mind) are worth considering.

The utopian fantasy of the fair is captured in the destruction of the majority of buildings, by fire, the following year; and some fifty years later the area would become one of the most blighted in the city.

Fin de siècle travellers to America come away with diverse impressions, ranging from aspirational optimism to abhorrence. Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, a prolific German travelogue writer, characterized Chicago as 'the greatest wonder of America,' embracing the (utopian) future exemplified the city. Vladimir Korolenko, who had travelled to Chicago for the fair, condemned of the exposition and the city: the exploitation of immigrants was a disgrace to the ostensible freedom of the country, while the homeless were ignored. That Hull House and the Exposition could coexist was loathsome. Korolenko actually has some incredibly prescient writings on labor organization and political activism, which were very different in 1893 Russia and 1893 Chicago. One vignette of the "dreamlike city" sees a group of Russian immigrants fail to recognize the moon.

"Do you see the big ball over the middle of the street - what is it?"

Ivan replied, "An electric lantern. Only strange, like a lamp..."

It was the moon...lights, lanterns, lighted windows...and among all this, just like a large lamp, suspended...As soon as we realized it was in fact the moon, which we had not seen for a long time above the stone piles, we stopped involuntary

Maxim Gorky wrote of his 1906 visit to America in a trio of essays, the most well-known of which is "The City of the Yellow Devil"

"Everything is groaning, howling, grating, in obedience to some mysterious force inimical to man...This is a city. This is New York. Twenty-storeyed houses, dark soundless skyscrapers, stand on the shore. Square, lacking in any desire to be beautiful, the stiff ponderous buildings tower gloomily and drearily. A haughty pride in its height, its ugliness is felt in each house. There are no flowers at the windows and no children to be seen."

while the writer Grigory Machtet sought to develop a commune in the prairies of Kansas a few decades earlier. America's international place at the close of the 19th century, for better or worse, is symbolized by the fair.