The Fair The Devil In The White City

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World; the 1893 Chicago World’s Exposition was a commemoration of the 400th anniversary of his ‘discovery’ of the New World (the Americas). After winning hosting rights, Chicago used the fair to show the world that it had risen from the ashes of the devastating 1871 Great Chicago Fire. Jackson Park served as the six-month exposition’s venue and Daniel Burnham was the lead architect that supervised the design and planning of the exposition’s major buildings. These temporary neoclassical “buildings that were made from wood frame wrapped In staff, a plaster mixture that gave the illusion of stone” were referred to as the White City because they were painted white (Bolotin et al. ……..). The fair
The author, Erik Larson, recreates fair through the lives of two real-life characters; Daniel Burnham, the lead architect that supervised the design and planning of the exposition’s major buildings and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer that used the exposition to lure his unsuspecting female victims and their children to their death. Burnham with the help of various architects endured adversity and various hurdles including impossible deadlines, workers’ strikes and so forth, but they stepped up to the challenges and got the grounds ready for the exposition. On the other hand, Holmes built the ‘World’s Fair Hotel’ a few blocks away from the fair ground where this impenetrable maze served as his torture castle and it had a dissection table, gas chamber, and
The first excerpt is taken from page 143 where Larson starts to use important terminologies related to the nineteenth century. For instance, the phrase Gilded Age is seen in several pages afterwards. Because this information is highly important for Arab readers to know, I struggled with the idea of providing little information about it to the readers. To tackle this, I considered whether the information was important to the plot of the story. At first, I thought to insert a glossary in the translation wherever only an English reader would know something that the average Arab reader would not. Since this was not an efficient way to represent information, I instead used footnotes for this contextual and metaphorical analysis. However, I soon realized that placing footnotes would distract attention rather than enlighten readers, which would risk loss of interest. I finally elected to solve this issue by discussing it and any other important concepts that need to be defined in the introductory chapter to the translation before the start of the story. As well as to mention important information about some geographical, political, and social references that are not familiar to Arab