Chicago in Flames: Scene at Randolph Street Bridge, 1872 Frame Style:Canvas Wrap The lithograph carries the elegiac

The lithograph carries the elegiac swagger of Mexican War mourning — Manifest Destiny pausing

The image arrived in American parlors as elegy and alibi at once

the victor of Appomattox photographed as a private man stepping into civic life

rendered with the ceremonial gravity the Gilded Age reserved for its rituals — a republic still binding its post-war wounds

its first-order Fresnel apparatus and keeper's quarters platted with the patience of men who knew this stretch of Pacific had already swallowed the names carved into its charts

Chicago in Flames: Scene at Randolph Street Bridge, 1872 Frame Style:Canvas Wrap The lithograph carries the elegiacChicago in Flames: Scene at Randolph Street Bridge, 1872 a documentary engraving of the city's harrowing exodus, drawn in the long shadow of the Great Fire as crowds, carts, and panicked horses press across the river while the skyline behind them glows with its own undoing. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional historical societies, and the