Dr. Andrew Wood Office: HGH 210; phone: (408) 924-5378 Email: wooda@email.sjsu.edu Web: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda

"[The Fair provided] a dazzling white reminder of a world that somehow science and technology might achieve, a neat and ordered geometric pattern which pleased aesthetically but somehow, like a science fiction movie set, seemed alien to life as it is really lived."

- Warren Susman

We continue our journey through the future as envisioned by the planners of the 1939 World's Fair - and those designers, like Walt Disney, inspired by that fair. The rhetoric of authority opens wide the gates of tomorrow, but not for everyone. Even as superhighways, nuclear-powered cities, and gleaming appliances fill our cultural landscape, dystopian fears of totalitarianism have not been crushed with the defeat of Axis powers. The federal government has become a more significant force in public life than ever before. Thousands of suburban gardens bloom, but the subtle machinery of control grows just beneath America's well-manicured lawns.

Readings: Susman, Rydell, and Dikkers

Viewing: The Middleton Family at the 1939 World's Fair

Notes: Cultural Contradictions of a Consumer Society

Notes: African-Americans and the Prewar Fairs

Notes: Meet the Middletons!