The ideal of an international world of learning in which knowledge passed freely between scientists, regardless of political frontiers and language, captured imaginations during the second half of the nineteenth century. It bore fruit in unprecedentedly ambitious schemes for the ordering and retrieval of information and in a proliferation of universal exhibitions and congresses driven by the rhetoric of openness and cooperation. But in peace as in the world wars of the twentieth century national interests provided a constant counterweight at odds with the universalist vision and fed the tensions between ideal and reality that are the core theme of these lectures.
In his second of three lectures as the Horning Visiting Scholar at Oregon State University, Dr. Robert Fox (Oxford University) compared the international universalist exhibitions beginning with The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations (the Crystal Palace Exhibition) of 1851 on through some post-World War I era exhibitions. Fox explores the scientific highlights, the cultural exhibits & human zoos, and the underlying drivers (both nationalist and universalist) behind these massive public events.
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