Interest in the personal, institutional, ideological, and artistic forms taken by systems of display has linked the work of many social scientists and humanists alike over the past half century. Buildings, body language, museum practices, advertising, civic rituals, staged pageantry, city planning, expositions, department stores, athletics—these are among the many subjects implicated in such analyses. Historians, anthropologists, art historians, sociologists, and others have sought to decode presentations of self, society, and commodities. Such questions have informed the scholarly work of Neil Harris. This symposium seeks to explore these themes by bringing together varied approaches to America's history of spectacle, merchandising, and display.