Finding information about world's fairs, or international expos, can be challenging as their name/titles change. You can search the CSUEB Library Catalog or WorldCat using words such as "worlds fair" or "expo* and art". A good overview can be found in both Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia.
The Smithsonian has a great page on the history of the world fairs. The Archives of American Art Blog published a story on the home movies of Hildreth Meier that she took of the murals at the New York World's Fair of 1939-40.
There are multiple resources on the web for the world fairs/expos. Some general sites are:
The CSUEB Library contains approximately 30 books on the 1915 exposition, while we own only 5 books on the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40.
Pan-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE):
Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE):
DIVA (a project of Academic Technology at San Francisco State) provides silent video of the art at the fair.
An Empire on Display by
The grand exhibitions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are the lens through which Peter Hoffenberg examines the economic, cultural, and social forces that helped define Britain and the British Empire. He focuses on major exhibitions in England, Australia, and India between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Empire sixty years later, taking special interest in the interactive nature of the exhibition experience, the long-term consequences for the participants and host societies, and the ways in which such popular gatherings revealed dissent as well as celebration. Hoffenberg shows how exhibitions shaped culture and society within and across borders in the transnational working of the British Empire. The exhibitions were central to establishing and developing a participatory imperial world, and each polity in that world provided distinctive information, visitors, and exhibits. Among the displays were commercial goods, working machines, and ethnographic scenes. Exhibits were intended to promote external commonwealth and internal nationalism. The imperial overlay did not erase significant differences but explained and used them in economic and cultural terms. The exhibitions in cities such as London, Sydney, and Calcutta were living and active public inventories of the Empire and its national political communities. The process of building and consuming such inventories persists today in the cultural bureaucracies, museums, and festivals of modern nation-states, the appeal to tradition and social order, and the actions of transnational bodies.
All the World's a Fair by
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.
