All of the World’s Fairs, starting with the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, presented the latest trends in horticulture. The 1933 Century of Progress fair in Chicago featured an alpine garden with small alpine plants.
I just had an article published in the magazine “Miniature Collector” (JULY 2015 issue) on miniatures and models at the World’s Fairs. Here is the cover of the article, an image of the first page, and some of the images I used to illustrate it.
Now that our course is ended, we are making this blog public so we can share the research we did on the World’s Fairs for a course called “Anthropology and the World’s Fairs” at the University of Pennsylvania in the Spring 2015 semester. Our small class size made it possible for us to take several field trips (The Please Touch Museum and the Centennial fair grounds as well as the Philadelphia Flower Show) and to visit the American Section of the Penn Museum to see some fair artifacts and the Special Collections of the Van Pelt Library to see actual fair publications. Each student explored a topic that was found at several fairs and was connected to the present day. We followed foods introduced at the fairs, the history of the sewing machine through many fairs, and the presence and disappearance of archery in some very unusual iterations.
The final projects that the students produced will be posted on the Penn Library website and a link is provided here. A page from each project is shown below.
Emily Kurtz’s project on World’s Fair Foods
Samantha Markowitz’s project on World’s Fair sewing machines
Taylor Hojnaki’s project on World’s Fair archery
Anthropology of the World's Fairs 
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