Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections & Reading Rooms > Manuscripts and Archives Division

New York World's Fair 1939-1940 records processing project

April 7, 2006- The New York Public Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a two and a half-year project to preserve and enhance access to the records of the New York World's Fair 1939-1940. This vast collection –the official records of the Corporation that was established for the purpose of planning, realizing, and operating the Fair– measures more than 1000 linear feet and includes correspondence, interoffice memoranda, photographs, and architectural plans. The records document every phase of the Fair. While it has for many years been among the most heavily-used collections in the Manuscripts and Archives Division, intellectual access to it is limited by the cursory level of the finding aid.

Please note that beginning June 1st, the Manuscripts and Archives will only provide limited access to the records. Researchers wishing to consult the records should send a written query to the Division outlining their project and interest in the records. If possible, Division staff will identify pertinent files and make them available for a specified period of time. We apologize for this inconvenience. The collection will reopen completely for research some time in the Fall 2008.

The project will enhance researcher's access to the collection by significantly expanding and improving on the current finding aid and making an existing crucial card index electronically searchable. The new finding aid and index will be available to researchers around the world through the Library's website. The project will also ensure the long-term preservation of the collection by rehousing the records.

By every measurement – size, cost, attendance, publicity, foreign government participation, number of exhibitors – New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 outranked every previous international fair. With 45 million visitors during its two seasons, it was the best-attended event of the first half of the 20th century. It continues to occupy a place in the American imagination. The Fair also endures as a highly complex and interpretable historical and cultural artifact, having taken place at the tail end of the Depression and on the brink of World War II, a period of profound economic, political, and social change worldwide.

The Fair represents a window into almost every facet of 20th Century American life; its records draw researchers from many disciplines who are studying a wide variety of themes: the birth of the consumer society; the rise of automobile culture; technology's transformation of the American home; the legacy of the New Deal; the impact of industrial design; urban and regional planning in 20th century America; representations of race in popular culture; tensions between nationalism and internationalism in the United States; manifestations of the technological sublime; and the introduction of foreign cuisines to the American public, to name a few. The participation of individual countries –particularly those such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Japan whose international status changed radically during the Fair– is a common topic of research for scholars at work in the U.S. and abroad.

The records provide insights into many aspects of the Fair unavailable from other sources: there is no event, visit, meeting, incident, or transaction related to the Fair's conception, planning, realization, and day-to-day operations that is not documented in some way in its records. Likewise, the participation, no matter how large or small, of each of the thousands of people and organizations involved in the Fair–from President Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, and General Motors to maintenance workers, chorus girls, and local construction companies–is traced in the Fair's records.