About this item
In 1901, Buffalo, New York, the eighth biggest city in America, wanted to launch the new century with the Pan American Exposition. It would showcase the Western hemisphere and bring millions of people to western New York. With Niagara Falls as a drawing card and with stunning colors and electric lights, promoters believed it would be bigger, better, and?literally?more brilliant than Chicago's White City of 1893. Weaving together narratives of both notorious and forgotten figures, Margaret Creighton unveils the fair's big tragedy and its lesser-known scandals. From a deranged laborer who stalked and shot President William McKinley to a sixty-year-old woman who rode a barrel over Niagara Falls, to two astonishing acts?a little person and an elephant?who turned the tables on their duplicitous manager, Creighton reveals the myriad power struggles that would personify modern America.
About the Author
Margaret Creighton's interest in history was sparked by a distinct event. One day, some time ago, her great aunt Letitia, of Thomaston, Maine, handed her a packet of letters tied up with a black ribbon. The letters had never been opened. They were written by Letitia's mother to her brother, Will, who had decided to follow a family tradition and go to sea. In 1886 he sailed from Newport News, Virginia, headed for Barcelona.
He never made it. The ship Norris disappeared in the mid Atlantic without a trace. The letters to Will were collected by the American consul in Spain, and then returned to his sister. "I am so very sorry," wrote the diplomat, in an attached note.
Creighton's interest in the history of seafaring - and the wider world of America in the decades after Independence--stemmed from that discovery. She wrote about families at sea, men who sailed before the mast, and, in Rites and Passages, about the maritime lives of American whalemen.
Teaching nineteenth century American history at Bates College meant studying the American Civil War, and it was on a Bates trip to Gettysburg that she uncovered evidence of another story, one that had largely been erased for 150 years. It was the story of soldiers and civilians - immigrant, African American and white women - who found themselves caught in the battle's crossfire, and who also fought to bring the Union to victory. This "other" Gettysburg, meant seeing and understanding the battle in a different light. The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History, was nominated for the Lincoln Prize and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best books written about Gettysburg.
Next, Creighton turned her attention to another national crisis: the assassination of a president at the 1901 World's Fair. The Pan American Exposition was staged to celebrate the United States at the peak of its imperial power and the country's command of the natural world. It also touted white American sovereignty over peoples of color worldwide. But the fair didn't go as planned, and The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City takes the reader through the final months of the fair, when things went tragically and spectacularly awry. It was released in the fall of 2016.
Historical figures in Rainbow City include an assassin and his attacker, a menagerist and his elephant, a Little Person and her lover, and a woman who wanted to ride a barrel over Niagara Falls. Another protagonist, in a way, is the host of the exposition, the proud and resilient City of Buffalo.
Margaret Creighton lives in coastal Maine with her husband, children, and two naughty terriers.
