Who organizes these things? Is there an oversight committee, like the Olympics? Are they organized by the federal government and supported by private industry and foreign governments, or what? Is there U.N. involvement?
When and where will the next one be? The last one, spoofed on an episode of The Simpsons, was in 1982 in Knoxville, Tenn.
Why are they held so far apart? The dates I have for World’s Fairs start in 1851, 1893, 1904, 1933, 1939, 1964, 1967, 1974 and 1982.
If they’re WORLD fairs, why are they overwhelmingly in America? The only World’s Fair I’ve found outside the U.S. was in Montreal in 1967.
As Americans, the ones we are likely to hear about are in North America, but those aren’t the only ones there have been. The last five have been outside North America:
Seville is the only one of those I remember hearing about.
The last one in North America was Vancouver, in 1986. The last in the U.S. was New Orleans, 1984. World’s Fairs are usually sponsored by the Bureau of International Expositions in Paris.
The U.S. didn’t send a very big exhibit to Taejon from what I read at the time of the exhibition.
I was in Lisbon a few months before its exposition and it seemed to be a big deal to people there.
I suppose the decline in popularity in world fairs and expositions is due in part to the overwhelmingly rapid pace of technology today. It takes a lot to impress us now. We are not as easily awed as our grandparents were in 1939 or our parents were in 1964.
(My apologies to any demographic I may have offended here.)
According to this site ( http://www.worldsfairs.com/expos.html ) World’s Fairs and Expos (WFs) are adninistrated by the Bureau of International Expositions (BIE). It was founded in 1928 to limit the number of WFs, to prevent an overkill of WFs. The BIE is located in Paris and has little real power. Their main contol over WFs seems to be getting various participants to restrict the number of WFs, as the US did here: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/22/2452b.text.html