Rarely Asked Questions
Question: Are you just “chatting people up” about expositions in the United States or are you collecting data?
Answer: Talking to people about their experiences morphed into loosely structured qualitative interviewing, which I used to collect data to evaluate programs, in this case World Fairs.
Question: How do you choose who to interview?
Answer: I use a combination of convenience sampling and snowball sampling. Once I found someone who had attended a fair they often knew others who attended whom I subsequently interview.
Question: So you just talk to them?
Answer: Yes. Then I write up what I think they said and hopefully give it back to them to review and correct.
Question: How is your information about European Expositions different from your research about North American World Fairs?
Answer: The language barrier restricted who I could interview in Europe about their experiences and prevented me from conducting researching by reading oral interviews or first hand accounts. So, my European research is truly about what structurally remains at various sites. Background research was completed mostly on the Internet because I could use the “translate this page” function.
Question: How is your African research different from Europe or North America?
Answer: The African fairs were unique in that they were created by the colonizing government. The fair in Johannesburg was called the Empire Exposition and was more like attending a fair in Britain. People of all races attended the African fairs, especially in Cape Town, but their experiences weren't recorded-at least not on the Internet-so information comes from the perspective of the white people involved.
Question: Why are only a few of the fairs famous?
Answer: The fairs that created an engineering phenomenon like the Crystal Palace in London, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Space Needle in Seattle, or the Ferris Wheel in Chicago are fairs people tend to remember.
Question: Why did people create expositions?
Answer: People have been gathering since before written records. I’m thinking here of the gatherings at Ness of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands between the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar. Hundreds of Cattle were slaughtered to feed all the travelers. We aren’t sure why they gathered. Perhaps the coming together of communities was religious, social, or politically motivated. Perhaps they mirrored Medieval fairs which were economic and social hubs. Unlike local daily markets, Medieval regional fairs were not unlike our modern day county fairs that are large, periodic gatherings where merchants trade goods, luxury items, and livestock. The Medieval fairs lasted for an extended period of time, were often tied to religious festivals and offered entertainment—such as jousting, minstrels, and magicians. The fairs in the modern era were much the same with strides in technology (especially agriculture) shared, for example France’s 1798 Public Exhibition of the Products of French Industry.
Question: Why were there so many fairs? Your list has over 200 recorded for the modern era.
Answer: Beginning in the 1870s and continuing through the early 1900s there were lots of what I would consider to be World’s Fairs. Often two or three in one year at different places.
1936 was an especially popular year:
- 1936 Stockholm, Sweden; ILIS International Aerospace Exhibition Stockholm
- 1936 Tel Aviv, British Mandate of Palestine; Levant Fair
- 1936 Cleveland, Ohio; United States; Great Lakes Exposition
- 1936 Dallas, Texas; United States; Texas Centennial Central Exposition
- 1936-1937 Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa; Expire Exhibition
Some municipalities made a tidy profit while others lost money. Those who hosted a successful fair were more likely to host another (Like Chicago, Paris, and San Francisco). There were so many fairs making money (and losing money like Charleston, South Carolina in 1901 and Los Angeles, CA in 1923) that there was a push to regulate them. The BIE (Bureau International des Expositions) was created in 1928 to regulate and oversee these mega-events. World Expos have explicitly been organized around a theme that attempts to improve humankind’s knowledge, takes into account human and social aspirations and highlights scientific, technological, economic and social progress. The BIE now decides what constitutes a World’s Fair. The BIE believes the first one was the Great Exhibition which took place in London in 1851.
Question: How did Fairs flourish despite adversities like economic depression and wars.
Answer: Sometimes they made the fair have the theme of the tragedy like Chicago’s Allied War Exposition in 1918. Or Fairs were just held in other places. America’s Great Depression didn’t stop New Zealand and Belgium from having fairs in 1939. Sometimes holding a fair helped minimize economic fluctuation as in San Francisco in 1939.