Hi historians, I'm currently reading and enjoying The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. I would like to learn more about the history of the World Fair and I'm particularly curious to why/how it has dropped off mainstream radar. The book makes me feel as though these fairs were anticipated by the entire nation and world for years, today I didn't even know the next one was in Italy in 2015 until I did some research. When and why has this shift occurred?
Television and the Internet; jet travel and widespread tourism; regional amusement/theme parks; and specialized industrial trade fairs all have made the world's fair less important to various groups who a century ago might have been drawn to them. Financially, the late 20th century fairs were often disappointments to the host cities, with at least one utter disaster: New Orleans (1984). No fair has been held in the US since.
Morris Dickstein discusses these factors in his essay “From the Thirties to the Sixties: The World’s Fair in its own Time,” published in Remembering the Future: The New York World’s Fair from 1939 to 1964.
hi! there's lots of room for more input on this, but meanwhile you may be interested in previous posts