The world’s fair of 1915 celebrated both the completion of the Panama Canal and the rebuilding of San Francisco following the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire. The exposition spotlighted the canal and the city as gateways to the Pacific, where the American empire could now expand after its victory in the Spanish-American War. Empire on Display is the first book to examine the Panama-Pacific International Exposition through the lenses of art history and cultural studies, focusing on the event’s expansionist and masculinist symbolism.
The exposition displayed evidence—visual, spatial, geographic, cartographic, and ideological—of America’s imperial ambitions and accomplishments. Representations of the Panama Canal play a central role in Moore’s argument, much as they did at the fair itself. Embodying a manly empire of global dimensions, the canal was depicted in statues and a gigantic working replica, as well as on commemorative stamps, maps, murals, postcards, medals, and advertisements. Just as San Francisco’s rebuilding symbolized America’s will to overcome the forces of nature, the Panama Canal represented the triumph of U.S. technology and sheer determination to realize the centuries-old dream of opening a passage between the seas.
Extensively illustrated, Moore’s book vividly recalls many other features of the fair, including a seventy-five-foot-tall Uncle Sam. American railroads, in their heyday in 1915, contributed a five-acre scale model of Yellowstone, complete with miniature geysers that erupted at regular intervals. A mini–Grand Canyon featured a village where some twenty Pueblo Indians lived throughout the fair.
Moore interprets these visual and cultural artifacts as layered narratives of progress, civilization, social Darwinism, and manliness. Much as the globe had ostensibly shrunk with the completion of the Panama Canal, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition compressed the world and represented it in miniature to celebrate a reinvigorated, imperial, masculine, and technologically advanced nation. As San Francisco bids to host another world’s fair, in 2020, Moore’s rich analytic approach gives readers much to ponder about symbolism, American identity, and contemporary parallels to the past.

Empire on Display: San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915

Arts & Photography

Moore, Sarah J.

History & Criticism

University of Oklahoma Press

Moore positions the work of American artist John White Alexander at the intersection of the shifting discourse of nationalism in American art at the turn of the twentieth century. The book addresses the dynamic search for and definition of national identity through a careful examination of the institutional complexes in which Alexander worked and exhibited.

John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880-1915

UNKNO

First edition, first printing. Soft cover. Photographs and mixed-media works by Joyce Neimanas. Foreword by James Enyeart. Text by Sarah J. Moore. Includes a chronology, selected exhibition history and checklist. Designed by Nancy Solomon. 24 pp., with 16 four-color plates. 10-1/2 x 8-5/8 inches. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

Joyce Neimanas

Individual Artists

Center for Creative Photography

Moore positions the work of American artist John White Alexander at the intersection of the shifting discourse of nationalism in American art at the turn of the twentieth century. The book addresses the dynamic search for and definition of national identity through a careful examination of the institutional complexes in which Alexander worked and exhibited.

University of Delaware Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moore, Sarah J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Moore, Sarah J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moore, Sarah J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Empire on Display: San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915

John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880-1915

Joyce Neimanas

Joyce Neimanas

John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880-1915