(Not) One for the History Books: The Stories of Fairs that Didn’t Happen

For every fair that exists in the history books, there are many that had been planned that seem not to have any historical presence; for each celebratory opening day, there are months of work and planning on fairs that never happened. History tends to tell the stories of success – wars and elections won, accomplishments achieved, victories large and small. Recently, however, scholars of all stripes have begun to question alternate narratives – tales of the underdog or dispossessed making positive change for themselves and their world. In his post-colonial text Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, for example, asks not just what happened to make history, but how history is written. He points out that the discipline of history is inherently problematic because it cannot escape underlying power structures and that it is only through focusing on the production of historical narratives that, “we can discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.” Contemporary scholars of world’s fairs use a variety of archival sources to look past the recorded narrative to fill in silences, return voice to the voiceless, and arrive at new meanings. As the other essays in this resource show, world’s fairs are a lens though which to explore any number of contemporary questions concerning nation-building, international relations, architecture, leisure and entertainment, gender, race, and science. The fairs that didn’t happen, however, are a much deeper kind of historical silence, and one that deserves study.

The 29 fairs never held that Findling and Pelle mention, in Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions, are just a sample of the types of events that were planned.A brief investigation of these non-events provides tantalizing opportunities for historical analysis. While there are fewer extant records for planned fairs of the nineteenth century, the narrative of non-fairs in the twentieth century are plentiful.