Expanding Nationalisms at World's Fairs: Identity, Diversity, and Exchange, 1851-1915 in Bloomington, MN

Expanding Nationalisms at World’s Fairs: Identity, Diversity, and Exchange, 1851–1915
introduces the subject of international exhibitions to art and design historians and a
wider audience as a resource for understanding the broad and varied political meanings
of design during a period of rapid industrialization, developing nationalism, imperialism,
expanding trade and the emergence of a consumer society. Its chapters, written by
both established and emerging scholars, are global in scope, and demonstrate specific
networks of communication and exchange among designers, manufacturers, markets
and nations on the modern world'stage from the second half of the nineteenth century
into the beginning of the twentieth.
Within the overarching theme of nationalism and internationalism as revealed at
world’s fairs, the book’s essays will engage a more complex understanding of ideas
of competition and community in an age of emergent industrial capitalism, and will
investigate the nuances, contradictions and marginalized voices that lie beneath the
surface of unity, progress, and global expansion.