Building American National Identities at the End of the Nineteenth Century: Chicago, Buenos Aires, and Washington, D.C.
Open Access
- Author:
- Chapman, Roberta
- Graduate Program:
- Art History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 03, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Nancy Elizabeth Locke, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Nancy Elizabeth Locke, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Craig Robert Zabel, Committee Member
Madhuri Shrikant Desai, Committee Member
Willa Zahava Silverman, Outside Member
Elizabeth C Mansfield, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Ferris Wheel
Teatro Colón
Opera Garnier
Library of Congress
National Identity
1893 World's Columbian Exposition
Buenos Aires
Washington D.C.
City Planning - Abstract:
- This dissertation investigates instances of identity building in the Americas at the close of the nineteenth century, particularly as they were expressed through the built environment. Three cities serve as case studies for the various ways in which leaders in the Americas built modern identities: Chicago, Illinois, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Washington, D.C. Each case study is anchored by a structure whose architecture provided a means to embody politics, broadcasting claims of difference and superiority in a language that went beyond the written word. In Chicago, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition was a chance to declare the United States’s status as a global power and a moment to define a national identity for its diverse population. It did so through the world’s first Ferris Wheel, a deliberate challenge to Paris’s Eiffel Tower (1889). In Buenos Aires, the “Paris of South America,” the construction of the sumptuous Teatro Colón opera house that recalled Paris’s Opéra Garnier served to create a physical representation of the complicated negotiation of Argentine identity and modernization at the turn of the twentieth century. Finally, the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C. leaders of the United States used architecture, technology, and painting to assert that the nation was not just modern, but the most modern, claiming the mantle from France and redefining its national character. Whether it is being rejected, emulated, or seen as a stepping-stone, France (or at least the idea of it) functioned as a touchstone for these, and may other, urban projects in the Americas c.1900.