From a Farther Room

Caryatid columns at the Field Museum. These gals are a fabulous example of the neo-classicism of the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, to which Chicago owes its museum campus. The exhibition was, of course, the site of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Closing of the Frontier” lecture, one of the key moments in American social science and historiography. I have tickets to the Exhibition hanging on my wall; the day they finally perfect time travel, I’m taking the boys and my tickets and dropping in on the fair.