1939: The Lost World of the Fair

In a time of great uncertainty, when the world was reeling from the Great Depression and on the verge of war, a World's Fair took place in New York. It was an event that transformed a generation with its vision of things to come. 

Millions of people came from all over the world to gaze in awe at the Trylon and Perisphere and to experience for an afternoon a thrilling yet humane utopia in which every citizen lived "the good life" that art, science, technology, and moral fervor had created. 

In 1939, David Gelernter gives us an intensely evocative picture of the World's Fair — and of a fleeting era of innocent expectation when the world looked forward in wonder rather than backward with regret.