Meet Me at the Fair

Together with the Olympics world's fairs are one of the few regular international events of sufficient scale to showcase a spectrum of sights wonders learning opportunities technological advances and new (or renewed) urban districts and to present them all to a mass audience. Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader breaks new ground in scholarship on world's fairs by incorporating a number of short new texts that investigate world's fairs in their multiple aspects: political urban/architectural anthropological/ sociological technological commercial popular and representational. In taking the measure of both the material artifacts and the larger cultural production of world's fairs the volume presents its own phantasmagoria of disciplinary perspectives historical periods geographical locales media and messages mirroring the microcosmic form of the world's fair itself.