First Reflection on the Fair
After reading through the first part of “Devil in the White City”, I believe that the greatest problem facing America in the 1880s and 1890s was the overpopulation of big cities and the increasing influx of people into places like Chicago. When cities reach their carrying capacities, problems such as high costs of living, disease, and homelessness arise. The book also talks about a change in the morality of the city, where nightclubs and brothels were becoming the social norm. Along with these problems came crime and death. As Larson says, “Anonymous death came early and often” (12) which really served to set the mood for a book focused on a serial killer. I believe that when Larson refers to the “old world” he is speaking of a time of higher morals, where the majority of these problems didn’t exist, or at least weren’t very prevalent in society.
In my opinion, Larson chooses to intertwine the story of the fair and Holmes because the fair is the perfect scene for a murder. With thousands of people coming and going every day, it would be hard to detect when somebody goes missing – which bodes well for Holmes. The fair also attracted a melting pot of different types of people, giving Holmes a larger variety of targets.
Engineering
Engineering is design that is intended to solve a problem or better the lives of a certain people. Throughout history, people have been faced with obstacles and challenges that stood in their way. How they responded to these problems determined whether they thrived and passed on their genes, or died off and were forgotten to history. Many of these obstacles require physically engineered objects, while others require redesigned methods or ways of doing things. One of the first topics we looked at in this class were bridges. Bridges were originally engineered as a way to simply connect two land masses, but have evolved into artistic masterpieces and often serve as historic placemarks. This shows how engineering has transformed and how it can serve different purposes. We also looked at the architecture of ancient civilizations, such as the Incans and Aztecs, to study how engineering affected their ways of life. In these cases, engineering was heavily influenced by religious beliefs, rather than simply solving problems.