Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee, and Seminole citizens employed the Indian Territory exhibits at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition to advance the separate statehood movement. Increasingly shut out of the formal political realm, they adopted creative measures to exert their political will, including participating in the world’s fair. Employing insights from settler-colonial theory and public history, this paper argues that the politics of display expanded the agency of a group marginalized from political representation. The U.S. government, pressured by the territory’s growing population of non-Native settlers, had begun planning for statehood, passing the 1898 Curtis Act to force allotment and dissolve the Five Tribes’ governments by 1906. To protect their land and sovereignty, a cohort of Native citizens pursued statehood for Indian Territory separate from Oklahoma Territory. Although joint statehood won out, separate statehood advocates succeeded in creating exhibits that centered on the survival of Native nations. They also articulated an Indigenous conception of citizenship, developing an imaginative vision for a future in which self-determination and U.S. citizenship could converge in a Native state. This represented a novel contribution to ongoing debates over how to integrate remaining western territories into the United States and how to incorporate diverse peoples within the citizenry.

How does a newly formed state and its newly created nation present itself at world’s fairs? This article focuses on the interwar period and the impact of the political restructuring of Central Europe in order to examine the strategies and motivations of Czechoslovakia for participation in exhibitions around the globe. It takes Czechoslovakia as an example of a country, created in 1918, that constructed and displayed its image in a comprehensible and uncomplicated way to international audiences. World’s fairs that were primarily organized to promote trade relationships thus gave the opportunity to countries like Czechoslovakia to validate its existence, internal composition, and domestic politics through carefully crafted narratives that were showcased. The article primarily addresses the question of who creates these narratives and why, while scrutinizing the transfer of domestic politics into international displays.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru were among the countries participating in the most important world’s fairs in Europe and North America. These mass gatherings focused on national self-images as well as technological development and commodities, but the Latin American exhibition organizers also understood them to be transnational spaces that contributed to the mobility of persons, objects, and knowledge. In this context, the scientific display of pre-Columbian ‘antiquities’ was regarded as being as important as the participation in archaeological and anthropological congresses. By understanding the world’s fairs as ‘spaces of global knowledge’, this article highlights the agency of Latin American scientists, intellectuals, and collectors in the transnational endeavour to create a ‘Latin American antiquity’ at the fairgrounds. Although most fair attendees sought to study and display the pre-Columbian past in an objective manner, the older dream of (re-)constructing the splendour of America’s ancient civilizations never completely vanished.