At the time of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the United States was fast becoming the world's leading economy. Chicago, the host city, had grown in less than half a century from a village to the country's second-largest metropolis. During this, the Gilded Age, the world's most extensive railroad and steamship networks poured ceaselessly through Chicago, carrying the raw goods and finished products of America's great age of invention and industrial expansion. The Fair was the largest ever at the time, with 65,000 exhibitors and millions of visitors. It has been called the "Blueprint of the American Future" and marked the beginning of the national economy and consumer culture.

Since their inception with New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition in the mid-nineteenth century, world's fairs have introduced Americans to “exotic” pleasures such as belly dancing and the Ferris Wheel; pathbreaking technologies such as telephones and X rays; and futuristic architectural, landscaping, and transportation schemes. Billed by their promoters as “encyclopedias of civilization,” the expositions impressed tens of millions of fairgoers with model environments and utopian visions. Setting more than 30 world’s fairs from 1853 to 1984 in their historical context, the authors show that the expositions reflected and influenced not only the ideals but also the cultural tensions of their times. As mainstays rather than mere ornaments of American life, world’s fairs created national support for such issues as the social reunification of North and South after the Civil War, U.S. imperial expansion at the turn of the 20th-century, consumer optimism during the Great Depression, and the essential unity of humankind in a nuclear age.

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Agricultural Fairs in America includes thirteen historical and contemporary articles exploring agricultural fairs in America. Featured throughout the book are paintings and posters from this unique collection, created in the last decades of the 19th century for promotional posters for fairs. Historic and contemporary photographs are also prominent.

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.

At the time of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the United States was fast becoming the world's leading economy. Chicago, the host city, had grown in less than half a century from a village to the country's second-largest metropolis. During this, the Gilded Age, the world's most extensive railroad and steamship networks poured ceaselessly through Chicago, carrying the raw goods and finished products of America's great age of invention and industrial expansion. The Fair was the largest ever at the time, with 65,000 exhibitors and millions of visitors. It has been called the "Blueprint of the American Future" and marked the beginning of the national economy and consumer culture.

Traces the history of fairs throughout the world and in the United States and describes the major events of modern-day state and county fairs.