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Technology and Culture 43.2 (2002) 429-431



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Book Review

Fair America:
World's Fairs in the United States


Fair America: World's Fairs in the United States. By Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. Pp. x+160. $29.95/$15.95.

The cultural footprints left by world's fairs continue to fascinate a wide range of readers, from historians and cultural-studies scholars to the general public. Fair America is a welcome addition to a growing literature and brings together the expertise of authors already well known for their substantial contributions to the field. Robert Rydell energized a generation of scholars with his seminal works on world's fairs, including All the World's a Fair (1984) and World of Fairs (1993). The finely edited Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs (1990) by John Findling and Kimberly Pelle made available a series of excellent essays on international fairs, including those in the [End Page 429] United States, and continues to be the most valued overall reference source available.

This new book is a fascinating overview and analysis of more than a hundred years of fairs and expositions held in the United States, showing both the complexities and the contradictions implicit in these events. What these authors demonstrate is the integral relationship of fairs to the nationalism, imperialism, and modernist economic and political forces that have dominated American society since 1876. Four chapters establish the chronological framework, beginning with the period of "Industrial Advance" (1876-97), followed by the "Imperial Era" (1898-1916), "Between the World Wars" (1926-40), and, finally, the "Atomic Age" (1941-84). In showing both the interlocking nature of these fairs and their distinctiveness, the authors have made clear that there was a consistency as well as an evolution of functions served by such events.

Regional fairs and expositions proliferated in the 1880s and 1890s as promoters demonstrated their utility for stimulating commercial recovery and influencing the public in favor of political and social policies. In addition, the fairs staged between 1890s and 1916 also carried with them an underlying theme of Western superiority laced with unmistakable racial overtones. While the authors have made this interpretation clear in their previous work, it gains a sharper perspective in its restatement here.

Emphasis is given to the value of the fairs of the 1930s as a positive force in social reconstruction during the desperate years of the depression. Fairs were successfully deployed to shore up public confidence in the nation through the direct appeal to a future prosperity based on the merger of science, technology, and industry. While the strategy of using technology to promote an ideology of progress had been implicit in fairs since the 1850s, this new reconfiguration had deeper implications, especially in the fairs following World War II.

This is not a book that deals solely with successful fairs; it also attempts to explain the failures, such as the 1926 Philadelphia Sesqui-Centennial and the 1984 New Orleans fair, the last in the United States during the twentieth century. Failure of the attempt in 1992 to stage a Chicago Columbian celebration—which the authors attribute to a lack of public interest—may also have been due to the inability of cultural institutions to move beyond self-interest. The survival/revival issue elicits an interesting discussion and some optimistic speculation by the authors in their concluding remarks.

This is a well-written and tightly argued text with careful attention to details. Some might feel that it is a rather slim volume for such an encompassing history, but its conciseness is actually a formidable achievement. The extensive bibliography is extremely useful in pointing readers to additional references as well as to previous work by the authors. One wishes, however, that more use had been made of the rich visual documentation of world's fairs, which would have both reinforced and enhanced the book's [End Page 430] thesis. While this is a book that readers new to the field will find useful, it is...

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