Photographic tour of best-loved world's fair: the 700-foot-tall Trylon, the 200-foot-wide Perisphere, GM's Futurama ride, 3-D movies, Elektro the 7-foot-tall robot, artwork by Dali and Calder, much more. 155 photographs, map.

After enduring 10 harrowing years of the Great Depression, visitors to the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair found welcome relief in the fair's optimistic presentation of the "World of Tomorrow." Pavilions from America's largest corporations and dozens of countries were spread across a 1,216-acre site, showcasing the latest industrial marvels and predictions for the future intermingled with cultural displays from around the world. Well known for its theme structures, the Trylon and Perisphere, the fair was an intriguing mixture of technology, science, architecture, showmanship, and politics. Proclaimed by many as the most memorable world's fair ever held, it predicted wonderful times were ahead for the world even as the clouds of war were gathering. Through vintage photographs, most never published before, The 1939-1940 New York World's Fair recaptures those days when the eyes of the world were on New York and on the future.

The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair was the largest international exhibition ever built in the United States. More than one hundred fifty pavilions and exhibits spread over six hundred forty-six acres helped the fair live up to its reputation as "the Billion-Dollar Fair." With the cold war in full swing, the fair offered visitors a refreshingly positive view of the future, mirroring the official theme: Peace through Understanding. Guests could travel back in time through a display of full-sized dinosaurs, or look into a future where underwater hotels and flying cars were commonplace. They could enjoy Walt Disney's popular shows, or study actual spacecraft flown in orbit. More than fifty-one million guests visited the fair before it closed forever in 1965. The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair captures the history of this event through vintage photographs, published here for the first time.

The 1939-1940 New York World's Fair promised a new age of global communication, nationwide superhighways, and suburban living-and it delivered. Crafted by designers such as Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, and Raymond Loewy, the twelve-hundred-acre fair in Flushing Meadows sold visitors a streamlined world of consumer goods-teardrop cars and smoking robots, electric dishwashers and nylon stockings-manufactured by companies such as Westinghouse, General Motors, and AT&T. In New York's 1939-1940 World's Fair, insightful narrative accompanies dazzling postcards, advertisements, and illustrations of Democracity, Futurama, the Lagoon of Nations, and the famed Trylon and Perisphere, recalling the promise and optimism of a fair that enchanted forty-five million visitors.

The Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) was a massive undertaking. The city of San Francisco had long looked for a site for a new airport to service the Pacific market, and the fair provided the impetus to build Treasure Island, a man-made island that would eventually service the massive seaplanes in use at the time. The GGIE also helped cement the Bay Area as a tourism and business center, competing directly with the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair. While New York centered more on the industrial side, the GGIE showcased the many natural wonders of the West, with expansive gardens and complementing architecture. The GGIE was a success on all counts, enticing millions of visitors to travel to the region. When the fair was over, Treasure Island became an important naval base during World War II.

Since the first world's fair in London in 1851, at the dawn of the era of industrialization, international expositions served as ideal platforms for rival nations to showcase their advancements in design, architecture, science and technology, industry, and politics. Before the outbreak of World War II, countries competing for leadership on the world stage waged a different kind of war—with cultural achievements and propaganda—appealing to their own national strengths and versions of modernity in the struggle for power. World's Fairs on the Eve of War examines five fairs and expositions from across the globe—including three that were staged (Paris, 1937; Dusseldorf, 1937; and New York, 1939-40), and two that were in development before the war began but never executed (Tokyo, 1940; and Rome, 1942). This coauthored work considers representations of science and technology at world's fairs as influential cultural forces and at a critical moment in history, when tensions and ideological divisions between political regimes would soon lead to war.

In the depths of the Great Depression, when America's future seemed bleak, nearly one hundred million people visited expositions celebrating the "century of progress." These fairs fired the national imagination and served as cultural icons on which Americans fixed their hopes for prosperity and power. World of Fairs continues Robert W. Rydell's unique cultural history—begun in his acclaimed All the World's a Fair—this time focusing on the interwar exhibitions. He shows how the ideas of a few—particularly artists, architects, and scientists—were broadcast to millions, proclaiming the arrival of modern America—a new empire of abundance build on old foundations of inequality. Rydell revisits several fairs, highlighting the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial, the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, the 1935-36 San Diego California Pacific Exposition, the 1936 Dallas Texas Centennial Exposition, the 1937 Cleveland Great Lakes and International Exposition, the 1939-40 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, and the 1958 Brussels Universal Exposition.

A narrative history of the 1939 World's Fair places its activities against a backdrop of World War II and a fatal bombing in New York, citing the contributions of such individuals as Albert Einstein, FDR and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Letters of Note comes a collection of 75 of history's most interesting, profound, and sometimes unknown speeches from a range of scintillating personalities such as Frederick Douglass, Justin Trudeau, Albert Einstein, Meghan Markle, Barbara Jordan, and Ursula K. Le Guin. This thoughtfully curated and richly illustrated collection celebrates oratory old and new, highlighting speeches we know and admire, while also shining a light on profound drafts that were never delivered or have until now been forgotten. From George Bernard Shaw's warm and rousing toast to Albert Einstein in 1930 and the commencement address affectionately given to graduates at Long Island University by Kermit the Frog, to the chilling public announcement (that was thankfully never made) by President Richard Nixon should Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become stranded on the moon, Speeches of Note honors the words and ideas of some of history’s most provocative and inspiring personages.

Deluxe presentation of the murals (in glass and marble mosaic, ceramic tile, terracotta, metal, and oil on canvas) of Art Deco artist, Hildreth Meière (1892-1961).