Exploration Talk: A World’s Fair for Southern California

Join us for our first Exploration Talk of the 2025 season!

Over the past two centuries world’s fairs and international expositions have been a reliable method by which nations, developing regions, and cities advertised to the international community their growth and success. In the United States nearly every decade since the 1890s has seen a world’s fair or international exposition open in its large cities. The exposition had “…become the instrument of civilization” as one scholar has written.

Successful expositions opened in San Diego and San Francisco between the world wars, largely to advertise the development of their ports and harbors. Other California cities studied the possibilities of organizing such an event. In 1959 planning began for a world’s fair in southern California. By 1961 Long Beach, encouraged by the participation of a cadre of enthusiastic community leaders, emerged as the likely location of the fair. What occurred over the next five years is a case study in how poor planning, lack of secure funding, and regional rivalries between cities and their ports doomed the project. The fair, once the darling of politicians, business leaders, and the public, “…plunged into oblivion” by 1966, in the words of an unfortunate news story.

Craig Hendricks will present his research on this topic. He is a historian, a retired professor of history from LBCC and CSULB, and a board member of the Historical Society of Long Beach.