Designing the Centennial is an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the planning of America's first important world's fair -- the 1876 United States Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The conflicts between the players -- scientists and engineers, planners and politicians, organizers and their audience -- demonstrate wider cultural clashes between a traditional view of things as object lessons and our more current understanding of things as commodities. Bruno Giberti uses the official reports of the U.S. Centennial Commission and photographs of the Centennial Photographic Company, as well as the ephemera of the exhibition and literary accounts in books, magazines, and newspapers to examine the concept of world's fairs, contrasting the 1876 event with other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exhibitions and related institutions. The author goes beyond previous works on world's fairs by investigating the design process and by considering the nature of display -- what people were looking at and how they were looking.

Held in Philadelphia from May 10 through October 10, the 1876 Centennial Exhibition celebrated the 100th anniversary of American independence. Philadelphia hosted 37 nations in five main buildings and 250 additional structures on 285 acres of land. The celebration looked backward to commemorate the progress made over the 100-year period, and it announced to the world that American invention and innovation was on a par with that of our foreign counterparts. Patriotism abounded, as did messages of industrial and commercial prowess that promised a brighter future for all. Over nine million people attended this awesome consumer spectacle, an event that set the tone for a long series of world's fairs yet to come.

The Unfinished Exhibition, the first comprehensive examination of American art at the Centennial, explains the critical role of visual culture in negotiating memories of the nation’s past that conflicted with the optimism that Exhibition officials promoted. Supporting novel iconographical interpretations with myriad primary source material, author Susanna W. Gold demonstrates how the art galleries and the audiences who visited them addressed the lingering traumas of battle, the uneasy re-unification of North and South, and the persisting racial tensions in the post-Emancipation era.