| Summary: | "'A Dream of the Future: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville World's Fairs' examines how southerners at the end of the nineteenth century worked through the major questions facing a nation undergoing profound change. In an age of empire and industry, southerners grappled with what it meant to be modern. At the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta and the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition held in Nashville, they attempted to understand how their region could be industrial and imperial on its own terms. On a local, national, and global stage, African Americans, New South boosters, New Women, and Civil War veterans presented their dreams of the future. They aimed to prove to the world how rapidly the South had embraced and built, in the words of Henry Grady in 1890, 'from pitiful resources a great and expanding empire.' The Atlanta and Nashville world's fairs were spaces in which southerners presented themselves as modern and imperial citizens ready to spread the South's culture and racial politics across the globe. This work connects the South to a global conversation in the late nineteenth century over how to include peoples deemed fit for labor but unfit for citizenship"--
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