In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Brundage writes, world’s fairs and expositions were wildly popular. They put new innovations and ideas on display, celebrating the advance of technology and human progress. One common feature of the fairs was exhibits purporting to reproduce the villages of exotic tribes. This helped to depict a kind of universal progress of humanity, contrasting Africans or other “primitive” people with “modern” white Europeans and Americans. Late nineteenth-century fairs in numerous U.S. cities featured glorified depictions of plantations, with Black people hired to portray content, ignorant enslaved people.
When she got the chance to create the diorama for the 1907 Jamestown fair, she jumped at it.