This collection consists of material realting to international world's fairs and expositions dating from the first official world's fair, the Great Exhibition of 1851, through to the Festival of Britain of 1951. The collection is particularly strong on the elabaorate expositions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and the Franco-British Exhibition in London. The larger expositions were international in scope and each had a theme which was suggestive of the content of the event for example, the theme of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was 'Industry of all Nations', and the theme of the Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Paris was 'Evaluation of a Century'. These expositions could last for up to six months or longer and they were attached to amusement parks and popular entertainment sites. They also left behind iconic structural landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, which was erected for the fourth Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1889 or the Chicago Ferris Wheel commissioned to George Washington Gale Ferris for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.