The Columbian Orator

I chose to read about H.H. Holmes in The Devil In The White City: Murder, Magic, And Madness At The Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson because I wanted to learn about something new rather than the alternative athlete that I’ve done biographies on in the past. The novel shows the stories of two different people during the time of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, one…

The name of my article is “The Maco Railroad Light.” This story was written by Troy Taylor. This article was published in 1998. Taylor writes mostly about history, hauntings, and the unexplained. He is the founder and president of the “American Ghost Society.” I believe the intended audience is people who love the unexplained. My article is about the Mako Light. It is an unexplainable light that appears near a railroad station. The light is supposed to come from a lantern that Joe Baldwin was…

Briefly alluding to the 1933 Chicago world’s fair also known as the “Century of Progress” exposition in celebration of the centennial anniversary of Chicago’s. The 1933 fair’s concept was to create a rainbow city in contrast to the 1893 World Columbian Exposition’s view of an idealized “white city”. The amusement zone followed a similar concept to its predecessor, and within the midway, one of it most popular attractions included a “Midget City” (fig.13). The midget city was filled with sixty…

Chicago in 1893: Bright City, Dark Menace In the historical novel “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America,” author Erik Larson portrays Chicago as both the city of opportunity and simultaneously as a hotbed of crime and human exploitation (Larson). Chicago in the 1890’s was quite rough because jobs and murders have made the city a place of both danger and opportunity. Numerous murders have led to turmoil in the city. In addition, the changes that…

Take Home Exam No.2 The Devil in The White City, by Erik Larson , is a wonderful deception of Chicago in the late nineteenth century. Larson writes the book in the style of a novel but it is a historical non-fiction. Larson follows the journey of two contrasting characters.Daniel Brougham an architect from Chicago that oversee’s all of building of the Worlds Fair of 1893. The other is H.H. Holmes, the psychotic serial killer works out of his own home. On the surface, the two characters seem…

“I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing” (Larson 109.) In the book, The Devil in the White City, Burnham, an architect, is having many different struggles in building the World’s Fair by opening day, but after the many struggles he ends up making the fair a dreamland. At the same time, Holmes, the first serial killer, is luring young women into his hotel and killing them without getting caught;…

not rich were forced to work in horrible conditions for little pay in order to stay alive. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson offers a great insight into the life of Chicago before and after the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (or The World’s Columbian Exposition) occurred. Larson uses the disturbing and gruesome stories of a serial killer named H. H. Holmes (or Herman Webster Mudgett) along with the life of the architects behind the Chicago World Fair to get a sense of what Chicago was going…

The novel I read was The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea. The Devil’s Highway is a true story about Mexican immigration to the United States. It retells the devastating journey of the group of men who attempted to cross the U.S. border by entering one of the deadliest regions in Arizona known as the Devil’s Highway. There were twenty-six men who entered the region, and only twelve survived. This journey was the largest number of border-event deaths in history. Urrea introduces each…

In Larson’s book The Devil in the White City, Larson portrays Jackson Park, the location of the Chicago World’s Fair, in different ways, based on the characters’ knowledge of the park. He uses three characters’ quotes and thoughts to give the reader an image of the park: Olmsted, Burnham, and the east coast architects. The image he gives the reader is never perfect, but the first impression he gives the reader is acceptable. At first, Larson describes Jackson Park as a place that may not have…

Propaganda in “The Jungle” The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a novel exploiting the lives of Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago during the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century. The immigrants have a goal of achieving the American dream, and as the story goes on they are faced with the horrors of the meat packing industry. Upton Sinclair is a yellow journalist and muckraker during the progressive era, therefore the story is bound to have exaggeration in order for him to succeed in…