Envisioning the Nation

The World's Fairs staged in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showcased world cultures in peaceful competition and cooperation. But as Astrid Boger shows in "Envisioning the Nation", at the same time the fairs played an important role in the growth of nationalism and American exceptionalism, subtly recasting world history from an American point of view and thus laying the groundwork for American dominance in the twentieth century. Drawing on studies of the fairs' sites, architecture, and scientific and cultural displays, as well as contemporaneous literary works that dealt with the fairs, Boger paints a richly contextualized portrait of these influential spectacles of national culture.