"The 1876 United States Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was not only the country's first important world's fair, it signaled significant changes in the shape of knowledge that would affect the way future fairs were envisioned and executed.

Quarrels between participants in the exhibition represented a greater conflict as the world transitioned between two different kinds of modernity - the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the High Modern period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.".

"Designing the Centennial is an important first look at the design process and the nature of the display. Bruno Giberti uses official reports of the U.S. Centennial Commission and photographs of the Centennial Photographic Company, as well as the ephemera of the exhibition and literary accounts in books, magazines, and newspapers to illuminate how the 1876 fair revealed changes to come - in future world's fairs, museums, department stores, and in the nature of display itself."--BOOK JACKET.