Archiving St. Louis: The City as the Crossroads of the World

3 units

In 1904, a burgeoning St. Louis played host to the centennial commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase and the first Olympiad outside Europe, memorable events for the largest small city of the Midwest aspiring to (but not equaling) the cosmopolitan urban hubs of the north and east. The spectacle of the 1904 World’s Fair featured hyperbolic optimism for the St. Louis of the 20th century matched by the ardor for a national American identity as an emerging military and industrial-capitalist power. Organizers sought confirmation that the city and its industrial enterprises belonged among elite urban centers of culture, manufacture, academics, and political importance, thus providing St. Louis a much overdue global(ish) visibility. The penumbra of grandeur and affirming spectacle remains a key feature of most popular accounts of the fair. And yet colonial, racial, and criminalizing methodologies operate in plain sight, visible to any who look past standard narratives constructed out of the real and conceptual archive. Our investigative work seeks to define and dismantle how the fair is conceptualized and referenced today and to see the machinery of power that informs how archives of all kinds claim historical authority by, in part, limiting subjectivities worthy of remembrance. We'll flex our attention between the turn of the century St. Louis of the 1890s/early 1900s and today, mapping correspondences that inform the spatial-racial logics then and now.