It was already warm when Mae Turner left the University of Chicago campus and joined some friends to spend the day at the Columbian Exposition (known more popularly as the World’s Fair). She and her husband, Frederick Jackson Turner, had left their two toddlers back home in Wisconsin, so this trip to Chicago was a vacation for Mae—but not for Turner. He was in the “final agonies” of finishing a paper he was giving to an audience of his fellow history professors at the American Historical Association meeting in two days’ time. So, his wife went to the fair without him.
When Mae and her friends arrived at the exposition, there were already tens of thousands of people roaming the grounds: 630 acres of bright white Beaux Arts buildings, stuffed with the evidence of American achievement in mining, electricity, manufacturing, and agriculture; and a system of lagoons designed by the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Hawkers offered hot food and souvenirs along the Midway Plaisance, a carnival promenade on the west side of the grounds displaying “living villages” of African and American Indigenous peoples. A 264-foot-high Ferris wheel towered above it all, a feat of engineering that provided visitors with a spectacular view of Lake Michigan.
All the states and territories in the Union were represented at the fair. Colorado’s pavilion boasted a re-creation of Mesa Verde, a collection of Ancestral Puebloan cliff ruins in the southwestern part of the state, and a larger-than-life sculpture of an Indigenous hunter, standing upon the body of a buffalo he had just slain. The sculpture was titled “The Closing Era,” but most journalists called it “The Last of His Race.”
Turner would have liked to see this sculpture, along with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which was set up outside the fairgrounds. The ten-year-old show was immensely popular across the United States, depicting a West in which white pioneers conquered both Indigenous peoples and the “wilderness.” Turner had been studying American expansion and con-quest across the continent; it was the subject of the talk he had to finish.
The American Historical Association was less than a decade old and had been incorporated in 1889. Historians founded it amid the professionalization of academic disciplines in the United States, envisioning a society of trained scholars who engaged in rigorous historical research and educated future historians at the nation’s growing number of colleges and universities. Every year, members convened in Washington, D.C., to present new research and exchange ideas.