The grand spectacle that marked America’s first century—and a moment of reckoning for a nation in flux

“Those who were there felt that the wheel of history itself had turned before their eyes.”

Held at Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia, the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 attracted 10 million Americans—nearly 20 percent of the population, among them P. T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain—and visitors from around the world. On display were inventions that signaled the changing landscape of American life, from the typewriter to the telephone to Heinz Tomato Ketchup.

This celebration of America’s first hundred years came at a moment when its future seemed more precarious than ever—as big money threatened to overwhelm the government, underpaid workers waged the first national labor strike, feminists demanded rights for women, Native tribes went to war to repel the advancing settlement in the West, and Black Americans struggled to exercise their hard-won freedom. Looming over the fair was the presidential race of 1876—a highly contested election that would determine the fate of Reconstruction and permanently shape the Republican party as we know it today.

Fergus Bordewich animates these converging crises through the lives of four protagonists—Rutherford B. Hayes, Alexander Graham Bell, railroad magnate Tom Scott, and sculptor Edmonia Lewis—revealing a country striving to live up to the promise of its founders while bracing for the tidal wave of the twentieth century.