A Nation at 100: Historian to explore America’s promise and contradictions

Historian and author Fergus M. Bordewich will explore the extraordinary promise — and deep contradictions — of America’s first century when he delivers Guilford College’s annual Rembert W. Patrick Lecture on Monday, Oct. 19.

Bordewich will discuss his new book, Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future, at 4 pm in the East Gallery of Founders Hall. The lecture, presented by the Guilford College History Department, is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided.

Published by Knopf in June, Centennial examines the Great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the first world’s fair held in the United States, and the nation that gathered there to celebrate its 100th birthday. The exhibition attracted roughly 10 million visitors — nearly one-fifth of the American population at the time — and showcased inventions and products that pointed toward a rapidly changing future, including the telephone, typewriter and Heinz Tomato Ketchup.

Fergus's story extends well beyond the spectacle of the fair.

In 1876, the United States was a nation caught between extraordinary technological and economic change and profound political and social uncertainty. The country was still struggling with the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Black Americans fought to exercise newly won rights, workers organized amid growing industrial power, women demanded greater political and social rights, and Native nations resisted the expanding settlement of the West. At the same time, the highly contested presidential election of 1876 threatened to reshape the country's political future.

Fergus brings these competing forces into focus through four people whose lives intersected with the Centennial moment: Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, railroad magnate Tom Scott and African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Together, their stories illuminate a country trying to reconcile its ideals with the realities of a rapidly changing nation.

“The spectacular story of the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876” is also, according to Fergus’s description of the book, a story about “a moment of reckoning” as the United States moved toward the Gilded Age.

Fergus is the author of 10 nonfiction books, including Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, Congress at War, The First Congress, America’s Great Debate and Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. His The First Congress won the 2019 D.B. Hardeman Prize in American History, while America’s Great Debate was named the Los Angeles Times’ best history book of 2012.

A historian and journalist, Fergus has written for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Smithsonian and Harper’s. He has also worked as a United Nations press officer and as an adviser to the New China News Agency. He holds degrees from City College of New York and Columbia University.

Fergus lives in Greensboro with his wife, Jean Parvin Bordewich, president of Guilford College.

The Rembert W. Patrick Lecture honors the memory of a longtime historian and educator whose scholarship focused on the history of the American South. It brings historians and other scholars to Guilford to explore significant questions in American history.