Alaskan History
The 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition As noted in the 1907 Dawson Daily News article, the Alaska Club was in large part responsible for the remarkable extravaganza known as the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, which took place on the then still largely forested campus of the University of Washington. The A-Y-P Exposition, as it became known, was designed to showcase the city of Seattle as the up-and-coming commercial center of the Pacific coast. It was the golden age of expositions, or World Fairs, which had begun in 1851 with the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. The Great Exhibition, as it became known, was the brainchild of Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, and it set the precedent for many subsequent international exhibitions, later called world's fairs. London’s Great Exhibition, which took place from May to October, 1851, was attended by numerous notable figures of the time, including Charles Darwin, Samuel Colt, and the writers Charlotte BrontÍ, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot and Alfred Tennyson. Queen Victoria and her family visited three times. Although the Great Exhibition was a platform on
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