Learning ‘The Customs of their Fathers’: Irish Villages in Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, 1893

This article examines how a transnational vision of Ireland was created in the United States by two philanthropic women in Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Lady Aberdeen and Alice Hart each used accessible images of Ireland and the bodies of white exhibited women to authenticate their narrative of dying rural industries that needed to be revived. Their specific visions of Irish development and survival were located against the backdrop of significant Irish migration to the United States and capitalized on feelings of nostalgia popular among the newly settled Irish-American population. By trading on discourse of an Irish whiteness, a Scotswoman and Englishwoman foregrounded Ireland’s place in the imagined hierarchy of civilizations popular in the nineteenth century. They materially, physically and performatively manufactured Ireland as being at the apex of civilization narratives – positioned as the Irish Villages were at the start of the Midway Plaisance. If the Irish only laboured enough, produced enough, and consumed enough, their symbolic place in the fairground would ascend to the main arena of industry, technology, and capitalism – ensuring the survival of Ireland’s people and land. Through interrogating the multiple ways in which women’s bodies, rural industries, and commerce interacted in the space of the Fair, the article contributes to studies of Irish identities in Ireland, England, and the United States at the interface of race, gender, and class.