An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago’s Loop, and the World’s Columbian Exposition

Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, given by the Council of the American Philosophical Society Extravagantly, illustrated with over seventy photographs, drawings, paintings and contemporary cartoons, An Early Encounter with Tomorrow documents the mixture of amazement and alarm with which European visitors greeted 1890s Chicago: as a futuristic city animated by a crass, frenetic mercantile class. This volume also contains an extensive bibliography, arranged by country and profiles of the foreign observers, who sought the implications for European culture in what Asa Briggs, called the
shock city
of the western world .