Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America's Future with Fergus Bordewich 

Held at Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia, the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 attracted 10 million Americans—nearly 20 percent of the population, among them P. T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain—and visitors from around the world. From the typewriter to the telephone to Heinz Tomato Ketchup, the inventions on display signaled the changing landscape of American life. Coincidentally, big money threatened to overwhelm the government, underpaid workers waged the first national labor strike, feminists demanded rights for women, Native tribes went to war to repel the advancing settlement in the West, and Black Americans struggled to exercise their hard-won freedom. Soon, the highly contested presidential race of 1876 would determine the fate of Reconstruction. Don’t miss hearing from Fergus Bordewich about this challenging time in our country’s history and his latest work of history. Centennial animates the converging crises through the lives of four protagonists—Rutherford B. Hayes, Alexander Graham Bell, railroad magnate Tom Scott, and Black sculptor Edmonia Lewis—revealing a country striving to live up to the promise of its founders while bracing for the tidal wave of the twentieth century. 

Fergus Bordewich  is the author of nine previous nonfiction books, including Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction; The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (winner of the 2019 D. B. Hardeman Prize in American History); America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union (named best history book of 2012 by the Los Angeles Times); and Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Jean Parvin Bordewich, the president of Guilford College and a playwright.