The Tasmanian Exhibition, staged in Launceston over four months in the summer of 1891-1892, was the biggest event ever to be held in Launceston, attracting some 262,059 visitors. This book, arising from the Launceston Family Album project, is a celebration of the Exhibition and its legacy in two ways: it tells the story of the event in words and images of the time, and it explores the lives and family histories of over a thousand of the people who had season tickets to attend.
Beyond the great exhibitions, expositions universelles and world fairs in London, Paris or Chicago, numerous smaller, yet ambitious exhibitions took place in provincial cities and towns across the world. Focusing on the period between 1840 and 1940, this volume takes a novel look at the exhibitionary cultures of this period and examines the motivations, scope, and impact of lesser-known exhibitions in, for example, Australia, Japan, Brazil, as well as a number of European countries. The individual case studies included explore the role of these exhibitions in the global exhibitionary network and consider their ?marginality? related to their location and omission by academic research so far. The chapters also highlight a number of important issues from regional or national identities, the role of modernisation and tradition, to the relationship between capital cities and provincial towns present in these exhibitions. They also address the key topic of colonial exhibitions as well as the displays of arts and design in the context of the so-called marginal fairs. Cultures of International Exhibitions 1840-1940: Great Exhibitions in the Margins therefore opens up new angles in the way the global phenomenon of a great exhibition can be examined through the prism of the regional, and will make a vital contribution to those interested in exhibition studies and related fields.
Established in 1918, as a new state the First Czechoslovak Republic was keen to project a distinct image. Participation in World Fairs offered the perfect opportunity-. In this comprehensive account of Czechoslovak participation in international exhibitions of the interwar period Marta Filipová looks beyond the sleek façade of the modernist pavilions to examine the intersections of architecture, art and design with commercial interests, state agendas, individual action and the public, offering a complex insight into the production and reception of national displays. The rich collection of images – mainly photographs – provides a close look at the Czechoslovak pavilions. The design, content and context of the displays convey an idealized narrative that was created for the fairs and the myths on which the Czechoslovak nation and state were built. Heavy machinery, modern art, tourist destinations, and food and drink were presented as Czechoslovak, while many aspects of social life – particularly women or ethnic minorities – were strikingly underrepresented or absent. The book argues that the objects and ideas that the pavilion organizers put on display legitimized and validated the existence of the new state through the inclusion and exclusion of exhibits, people, and ideas. While Marta Filipová primarily focuses on Czechoslovakia, she also offers insights into how other emerging nations projected and sustained their image during this historical period and how interwar world’s fairs accommodated them.
Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate “nature” with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.
The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy at the end of World War I ushered in a period of radical change for East-Central European political structures and national identities. Yet this transformed landscape inevitably still bore the traces of its imperial past. Breaking with traditional histories that take 1918 as a strict line of demarcation, this collection focuses on the complexities that attended the transition from the Habsburg Empire to its successor states. In so doing, it produces new and more nuanced insights into the persistence and effectiveness of imperial institutions, as well as the sources of instability in the newly formed nation-states.
