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"A Serious Ethnological Exhibition": The Indian Congress Of The Trans-Mississippi & International Exposition Of 1898, J. Brent Etzel

Library Faculty Publications

“It will be either a colossal success or a colossal failure, and time alone can decide which.”

This was the prediction of Edward Rosewater, editor and publisher of the Omaha Daily Bee, regarding his city’s Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, held from June to November 1898. The few historians who have studied the event agree that the exposition was a huge commercial success. The fair drew over 2.7 million visitors to a remote and economically depressed city during wartime, and those who purchased stock in the exposition corporation gained over a ninety percent return on their investment.[2] The exposition …