Fairs were arenas where manufacturers sought to promote products, where states and provinces competed for new residents and new investments, where urban spaces were organized into utopian cities, and where people from all social classes went to be alternately amused, instructed, and diverted. Memorialized in songs, books, buildings, public statuary, city parks, urban designs, and photographs, fairs were intended to frame the world view not only of the hundreds of millions who attended these spectacles, but also of the countless millions who encountered the fairs secondhand.