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Chapter Two explores the growth of Flushing in the early-mid twentieth century, the development of a community ideology of religious freedom and toleration that was born in the years around World War II and matured during the Cold War and Civil Rights movement while being fed by an emerging Judeo-Christian national identity and ecumenical spirit between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews on display at the World’s Fairs of 1939–40 and 1964–65. It also traces a story of great change, struggle, and fault lines that expose deeper and growing tensions of pluralism in the community: Flushing’s connection in 1928 to the New York subway system and the consequent population and real estate growth that transformed the small town and village; Jewish intrusion and eventual inclusion into a Christian world; city planning, zoning, and racism in downtown Flushing; and issues of religious and racial exclusion at the two World’s Fairs.

This chapter examines the main International Exhibitions hosted by Glasgow in the years 1888, 1901, 1911, and 1938. These occasions were used to promote Glasgow as a primarily industrial city with pride of place in the British Empire. Nostalgia for the Georgian and medieval periods is shown to have affected the cultural memory of Glasgow’s role in the Scottish Enlightenment.

The afterword summarizes the main themes of the book concludes that debates over the place of festivity and usefulness of fairs in eighteenth-century London reveal that concerns about morality and gender order were vital in ordering eighteenth-century London. The afterword also considers how discourses about politeness and festivity can obscure the realities of what fairs offered Londoners in terms of culture and employment. Existing fair records complicate our understandings of gender and work in interesting ways, and provide us one means of looking behind literary and visual depictions of men and women at fairs. The afterword goes on to make connections between fairs and commercialized versions of outdoor entertainment that emerged in London from the mid eighteenth century. Pleasure gardens, such as Vauxhall, Sadler’s Wells, or Ranelagh House provided Londoner’s regular and more controlled spaces for socialising, eating, and music during summer evenings. The circus also emerged at this time and continued some types of fair amusements. Finally, the afterword considers how exhibitions at eighteenth century fairs are forerunners to the types of exhibits offered at nineteenth and twentieth-century fairs, such as London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 and World’s Fairs.

Chapter 1 looks at ‘authentic attractions’ and at phenomena that might be referred to as ‘documentary before documentary’. Though the documentary film had not yet formally come into being, one might discern a documentary ‘impulse’ in the combination of education, edification, sensation, and entertaining display encountered in sites such as the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Exposition of 1893. This event brought together efforts to invoke a distinct American national identity through an amalgam of technologies, commercial ventures, cultural expectations, and ideological notions that fed into early cinema in the US, and into a popular taste for nonfiction actualities. The chapter moves on to examine films of the Edison Company, suggesting that rather than see these early films as ‘documents’ as opposed to fully fledged ‘documentaries’ we might consider how they lie at the heart of the documentary tradition, in no small part due to their interactions with a national imaginary.

Chapter four traces connections between commercial entertainment and McCay's work through a study of the landscapes of Slumberland. From the topsy-turvy funhouse of Befuddle Hall, to the onion domes of Morpheus' palace, Slumberland is pictured as a faraway dreamworld. However, the fantastic landscapes were recognizable to an audience acquainted with circuses, amusement parks, and world's fairs: the period's most popular forms of commercial entertainment. McCaypepperedLittle Nemo with allusions to circus poster typography, Coney Island thrill rides, and the architecture of the midway. This encouraged readers to draw connections between the various forms of mass culture, providing an entry point into the magical world of the comic. Circuses, amusement parks, and fairs acted in concert to provide audiences with spectacular entertainment and safe encounters with the exotic. Like Nemo, who ends each comic safe in his bed, they provided visitors with the illusion of adventure in a controlled environment.

This chapter focuses on the musical career of Kay Swift during the 1960s. It explains that during this decade Swift went through fewer professional disappointments and more successes than in the previous decade. She resumed writing pieces in a more classical style and also composed single songs. Swift also had success with the civic and industrial show and she became involved in writing music for a number of civic and commercial shows and World's Fairs.

This chapter discusses how white boosters used the symbolic power and magic of the railroad to support their regional and local claims that a New South had risen. It opens with a discussion of the New Orleans Exposition in 1884, which provided a microcosm for the transformations of the railroad. The chapter discusses how this magical thinking around the railroad meshes with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the phantasmagoria. The chapter then traces the arguments promoting 1880s railroad expansion projects in Macon, Greensboro, and Troy to show how this spirit filtered down into small towns across the South. It discusses how railroad construction imposed the logic of capitalism on southern environments and ends by looking at the community celebrations and travel narratives that boosters and journalists used to welcome new railroads.

An analysis of the extensive collections of photographs, illustrations, films and ephemera in company archives provides a fresh perspective on the factory gardens and parks. By means of illustrated lectures, publications and factory tours, in which the landscapes featured prominently, industrialists presented their enterprises as places of status, community, opportunity, health and hygiene and their products as authentic and modern. The landscapes and their representations defined this utopianist portrayal of working conditions and labour, and motivated myths about the commodities they produced. The advertising and packaging images from the early twentieth century of the companies discussed here are now iconic in the history of marketing and advertising, for it was largely through effective publicity that they became household names.