World’s fairs and other major (commercial) exhibitions were the most significant “showcases” of modernity in the 19th century. They brought the world together in one place—a phenomenon that today could most readily be attributed to the World Wide Web. They were not merely exhibitions of goods, venues for cutting-edge technologies, or places for reflecting on shared—national or transnational—roots; above all, they were a unique repository of knowledge: vast in scale and globally interconnected at a time when, in the eyes of most people, the world was just beginning to expand. At the same time, they served as a stage for the nations of the world to showcase and compare themselves, presenting themselves in their own pavilions to the astonished gaze of visitors in a comprehensive display of the past, present, and future.

World’s fairs imparted knowledge to people about current trends in science and technology, as well as very concrete—visual and material—representations of the past at specific times and in specific places. In this way, they epitomize a medium that brings together both of the chair’s central research focuses. Yet the knowledge stored and conveyed at world’s fairs possesses a higher-order, universal character. As tourist destinations, they offered tourist knowledge; as venues where “human zoos” were on display, they offered knowledge of domination, which allowed people in the Western world to distinguish themselves from the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, or Asia. Art, culture, and architecture were aspects that, alongside technology, economics, and consumer culture, were given space and form at a world’s fair—and which millions of people on site could appropriate according to their own interests and desires.

The research on world’s fairs conducted at the chair treats them as precisely such multifaceted media for the storage and transmission of knowledge and, using various case studies, examines the strategies by which knowledge was negotiated at the exhibitions. In recent years, various studies have already been published on this topic:

• Angela Schwarz: “Destination Past: Showcasing History and Historical Time as an Attraction at World Exhibitions,” in: Filippo Carlà-Uhink/Florian Freitag/Sabrina Mittermeier/Ariane Schwarz (eds.): *Time and Temporality in Theme Parks* (Ästhetische Eigenzeiten, Vol. 4), Hanover 2017, pp. 43–62
• Angela Schwarz: “Reshaping Legacies: Context and Meaning of Cultural Heritage at Universal Expositions,” in *Ricerche storiche*, vol. 45, no. 1/2, 2015, pp. 37–45
• Angela Schwarz: The Regional and the Global: Folk Culture at World’s Fairs and the Reinvention of the Nation, in: Timothy Baycroft/David Hopkin (eds.): Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century (National Cultivation of Culture, Vol. 4), Leiden/Boston, MA 2012, pp. 99–111
• Angela Schwarz: “…absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation.” Exhibiting the Colonial Other at World’s Fairs and the Institutionalization of Cruelty, in: Trutz von Trotha and Jakob Rösel (eds.): On Cruelty. Sur la Cruauté. On Cruelty (Siegener Beiträge zur Soziologie, Vol. 11), Cologne 2011, pp. 538–556
• Angela Schwarz: “Come to the Fair”: Transgressing Boundaries in World’s Fairs’ Tourism, in: Eric G.E. Zuelow (ed.): Touring beyond the Nation. A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History, Farnham 2011, pp. 79–100
• Angela Schwarz: From the Machine Park to Futurama: The Popularization of Science and Technology at World’s Fairs (1851–1940), in: Petra Boden/Dorit Müller (eds.): Popular Knowledge in the Context of Media Change since 1850, Berlin 2009, pp. 83–99
• Angela Schwarz: Transatlantic Transfers Between World’s Fairs, 1851–1940, in: Alexander C.T. Geppert and Massimo Baioni (eds.): Expositions in Europe Between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Spaces, Organization, Representations (Special monographic issue of *Memoria e Ricerca. Rivista di storia contemporanea*, Vol. 17), Milan 2004, pp. 61–93

Future research should focus more closely on the historical reconstructions through which world’s fairs deliberately staged a specific narrative and sought to shape perceptions of past eras.