A World Fair was an exhibition designed to showcase the achievement of nations and in 1964-1965, one was held in New York City.

The immense fair had 140 pavilions and 110 restaurants and covered 646 acres of Flushing Meadows – Corona Park in Queens, a borough of the city.

This menu cover was from the African Pavilion, one of 80 nations represented.

The fair’s theme was ‘Peace Through Understanding’ but the fair was mostly a showcase for mid-century American culture and technology.

People could hear about the nascent Space Age and many saw computers for the first time, long before the internet, home computers and mobile phones were at everyone’s disposal.

(The first electronic computable programmer, called The Colossus, had been invented in 1943 to help British codebreakers decipher encrypted German messages during WWII and the first digital computer was invented in 1946.)

The fair ran for two six-month seasons and some 51 million people attended.

It remains a touchstone for many American Baby Boomers who visited as children, before the turbulent years of the Vietnam War and other cultural changes.

The food on this menu in the African Pavilion in the 1960s came from Mauritania, Kenya and the Congo.