May 10 2009
America’s Centennial Opens in Philadelphia
On this date in 1876 the “International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine,” the Centennial Exhibition, the first major World’s Fair to be held in the United States, opened on a 285-acre tract of Fairmount Park overlooking the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Designed by it planners to showcase America as a new industrial world power that would soon eclipse the might and production of every other industrialized nation.
