Rydell, Robert W. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
In All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916, Robert Rydell, a professor of history at Montana State University, studies World's Fairs between 1876-1916 and argues that the expositions went beyond simply reflecting American culture. Instead, the expositions were intended to shape the culture, especially the masses. The bulk of Rydell's study is to look at how each fair contributed to this ideological process of shaping a culture via the expositions. Rydell discusses how the world's fairs "reflected the efforts by America's intellectual, political, and business leaders to establish a consensus about their priorities and their vision of progress as racial dominance and economic growth." Behind all these displays, Rydell believes there was a structured ideology intended to appease and control the masses in order to further instill the aims of corporate capitalism. He refers to the fairs as "triumphs of hegemony." Rydell discusses how even the amusements regions "reflected the growing efforts by the upper classes, threatened by class conflicts at every turn, to influence the content of popular culture." All the World's a Fair presents a cultural landscape, the world's fair, that has not been extensively studied and encompasses many options for future study. [J. Bixler]