Culinary Worlds Colliding: Using Biography to Understand the Alimentary Experience of Migration and ‘Modernization’ in Gilded Age & Progressive Era Chicago 

Summary

In 1893 Chicago hosted an event that brought the entire world– and it’s foods– together in the space of an ephemeral ‘white city’.  The World’s Columbian Exposition– America’s showcase for the possibilities of an increasingly globalized, modern world– was itself taking place in an uneasily globalizing and modernizing city. The aim here is to access something of the texture of one very intimate aspect of personal life in the midst of such transition– in the consumption of and reaction to food by the countless immigrants (both from the rural U.S. and across the globe) who called Chicago home at the close of the 19th century.  Urban foodways will be explored through the lens of those immigrant biographies intersecting in everything from daily meals to the extraordinary repasts had at the fair, all subject to a ‘modernizing’ food system itself evidenced in the changing biographies of animals destined for the table. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In the City: archaeology and the personal experience of urban transition   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 660