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.

Robert W. Rydell contends that America's early world's fairs actually served to legitimate racial exploitation at home and the creation of an empire abroad. He looks in particular to the "ethnological" displays of nonwhites—set up by showmen but endorsed by prominent anthropologists—which lent scientific credibility to popular racial attitudes and helped build public support for domestic and foreign policies. Rydell's lively and thought-provoking study draws on archival records, newspaper and magazine articles, guidebooks, popular novels, and oral histories.

This book is a fascinating journey along the history of architectural structures over the last 150 years, taking the World Expos as an original unifying thread. Nevertheless, it does not solely focus on the exhibition buildings; on the contrary, these are continuously being related to buildings beyond the scope of the Expos, thus ultimately providing a general vision of the history of modern structures. This essay is destined to become an essential work of reference within the history of architectural structures. It is generously illustrated with more than nine hundred large-scale illustrations, many of which have not appeared in contemporary publications. It offers innumerable facts that will interest architects, engineers or art historians. Likewise, members of the general public far-removed from these fields will also be able to enjoy many of the passages which are accessible to those who do not have any specific knowledge of architecture or engineering.

World's fairs were created to show off the wonders of the industrial revolution. But industrial progress has led to a polluted planet. This book provides an overview of world's fairs at the turn of the millenium. It describes the nature of fairs, shows how they evolved, & considers where they may be headed. The author demonstrates how fairs have tried to cope with the environmental consequences of the idea of progress they have traditionally celebrated. He suggests how fairs (& by implication the society as a whole) can do a better job of it in the future.

The post–World War II science-based technological revolution inevitably found its way into almost all international expositions with displays on atomic energy, space exploration, transportation, communications, and computers. Major advancements in Cold War science and technology helped to shape new visions of utopian futures, the stock-in-trade of world’s fairs. From the 1940s to the 1980s, expositions in the United States and around the world, from Brussels to Osaka to Brisbane, mirrored Cold War culture in a variety of ways, and also played an active role in shaping it. This volume illustrates the cultural change and strain spurred by the Cold War, a disruptive period of scientific and technological progress that ignited growing concern over the impact of such progress on the environment and humanistic and spiritual values. Through the lens of world’s fairs, contributors across disciplines offer an integrated exploration of the US–USSR rivalry from a global perspective and in the context of broader social and cultural phenomena—faith and religion, gender and family relations, urbanization and urban planning, fashion, modernization, and national identity—all of which were fundamentally reshaped by tensions and anxieties of the Atomic Age.

A history of world's fairs and expositions from London to Shanghai 1851-2010.

Every time you chew a stick of Juicy Fruit, eat a hamburger, slip on a nylon, plug your phone into a wall socket, flick on a TV, withdraw money from an ATM, lick an ice-cream cone, switch on a computer, ride an escalator, play a DVR, watch a movie about dinosaurs, or pop a tranquilizer, you’re doing something that originated at a world’s fair or trade expo. In fact, each new technology and every novel product that rocked America and rolled the world, from the Colt revolver and the Corvette to fax machines and flush toilets, started at trade fairs, a $100 billion industry that includes world expos, trade shows, and state fairs. More than just promoting material things, however, trade fairs popularized and evangelized every social movement and cultural concept, too, including Manifest Destiny, the closing of the frontier, Nudism, Nazism, Fascism, eugenics, female suffrage, temperance, and technocracy. While there have been notable works on world’s fairs by Robert Rydell, Erik Larsen, Erik Mattie, and others, they only capture a fragment of the whole mosaic of these shows—a mosaic that makes the glitziest Las Vegas spectacle look like an Amish barn-raising. This amusing book covers, for example, the World’s Fair that featured a nudist colony (1935); Salvador Dali’s half-naked lobster women, their virtue barely secured by well-placed crustaceans (1939); a model of the Liberty Bell made of Oranges (1893); one of Thomas Edison’s lesser-known inventions, the prefabricated concrete home (1907); and the Bayer Company’s experiment with selling heroin. More memorable and culturally iconic debuts discussed here include electricity, radios, the Volkswagen and the Corvette, television, the X-ray machine, air conditioning, and even nylon stockings. Dozens of short, illustrated chapters take the reader through over 150 years of world and trade fairs, from the vibrators displayed by sexual health advocates at the 1900 World’s Fair to the first true IMAX film at Expo ’70 in Japan.

The post–World War II science-based technological revolution inevitably found its way into almost all international expositions with displays on atomic energy, space exploration, transportation, communications, and computers. Major advancements in Cold War science and technology helped to shape new visions of utopian futures, the stock-in-trade of world’s fairs. From the 1940s to the 1980s, expositions in the United States and around the world, from Brussels to Osaka to Brisbane, mirrored Cold War culture in a variety of ways, and also played an active role in shaping it. This volume illustrates the cultural change and strain spurred by the Cold War, a disruptive period of scientific and technological progress that ignited growing concern over the impact of such progress on the environment and humanistic and spiritual values. Through the lens of world’s fairs, contributors across disciplines offer an integrated exploration of the US–USSR rivalry from a global perspective and in the context of broader social and cultural phenomena—faith and religion, gender and family relations, urbanization and urban planning, fashion, modernization, and national identity—all of which were fundamentally reshaped by tensions and anxieties of the Atomic Age.

The Atomium in Brussels is one of the tourist highlights of Belgium and was built specifically for the World Expo in 1958. Nearly 15,000 workers spent three years building the 2 km2 site, found on the Heysel plateau, seven kilometres northwest of Brussels. The site is best known for a giant model of a unit cell of an iron crystal (each sphere representing an atom), called the Atomium, which decades later remains one of the best known landmarks of Brussels. The 1958 Expo could be said to be a reflection of a changing society and of the economical, technical and social advances towards modernity that paved the way for the age of prosperity the Western World experienced in the sixties. The Expo ran for 6 months and was visited by over 42 million people. The exhibition features archived documents, such as the plans of the 1958 Expo, typical fifties objects, films of the time showing what was going on in the aisles of the Expo, several scale models including the Civil Engineering Arrow and the Place de Brouckère information centre, which transport the visitor back to the world of 58 and the spectacle of this unique event. As a symbol of these years of optimism, Expo 58 left an idyllic picture to the Belgians of a period of hope and utopia that can be discovered or rediscovered through the exhibition. SELLING POINTS: *Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Expo 58 is due to be featured in an exhibition taking place in the Atomium in Brussels. This lavishly illustrated book is the official catalogue that accompanies it *A fascinating look at a period of revolution in many areas of society, this book is perfect for those who wish to be transported to an age of excitement and fresh ideas, as well as those who can remember the fair itself and the anticipation that preceded it 100 b/w + 90 colour illustrations