World's fairs were sites of the manufacture of cultural identity, whether it was of a company, ethnic group, state, or entire nation. Temporary wonderlands built of plaster of Paris, world's fairs were often torn down or engulfed in flame by the fair's end. A significant number of buildings from nineteenth-century American world's fairs have survived in one form or another, in locations across the country. After the Fair investigates the significance of these buildings, both during the respective fairs and through the circumstances of their salvaging, either as private follies or commercial commodities used for their promotional value. This project also investigates how the assigned meaning of the buildings changed over time. Of value to historians and popular-culture enthusiasts alike, After the Fair contributes to the scholarship of these seminal yet ephemeral events in American history.

Cristina Marie Carbone teaches art history in Kentucky and is the former curator of the Architecture, Design, and Engineering Collections at the Library of Congress. She was previously an archivist at the Getty Center in Santa Monica and at the University of California, Santa Barbara's Architectural Drawing Collection. She wrote her dissertation on the architecture surrounding the American National Exhibition in Moscow's Kitchen Debate in 1959, part of which was published in Kitchen Politics in the Cold War: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (MIT Press, 2009). She has also contributed to the Encyclopedia of World's Fairs (MacFarland Press, 2008).