One of the most interesting recent trends in American historiography is to write about failure. For example, Thomas H. Keels's study Sesqui: Greed, Graft, and the Forgotten World's Fair of 1926 on the failed Philadelphia Sesquicentennial draws absorbing conclusions about the United States in the 1920s. The fair failed to turn a profit, and though it was organized for forty million attendees, less than five million paying visitors turned up. However, this failure reveals a story of city corruption, civic organizations, racial politics, and sport that is sure to interest any scholar of American history in the period, particularly those interested in local government and popular culture in the 1920s. Most engaging are the elements of the book focussed on how money from the city and state was finagled to pay for the exhibition, and the layers of corruption in Philadelphia City Council, Pennsylvania's State House, and the Congressional delegation that helped produce the fair. There are a few areas where the narrative turns in odd directions, but overall Sesqui remains a concise study of a disastrous exhibition.

The 1926 Sesquicentennial was the pet project of the great Philadelphia department store owner John Wanamaker. However, the city itself was ill-suited for such an event. After several thousand deaths in the 1919 influenza epidemic, the city experienced a recession in the period after the First World War. City Hall was also notoriously corrupt; Philadelphia was singled out by Lincoln Steffens as one of the rottenest big cities in the nation. Much of Sesqui’s narrative is taken up with a discussion of Philadelphia politics in the period and an explanation of how the city could sink millions of dollars into the Sesquicentennial. The City Hall story, of how the fair was sold to the citizens and how it was paid for, is well told. As a result of City Hall's large stake in the success of the fair, and the lack of exhibitors, city officials were willing to allow almost anyone to display at the fair. The Ku Klux Klan planned to hold their “Klanvocation” there, even though the black community of Philadelphia was promised a prominent place in the exposition and Jewish merchants were some of the most willing to participate in the Sesquicentennial. It was only after substantial protest from these communities that the Klan was barred. It is when describing these fights between interest groups, organizers’ desire to pay for the fair, the Klan's aspiration to hold an event in a major northern city, and the political aims of various local interest groups like the black community in Philadelphia that Sesqui is most engaging.

Organizers of the fair permitted a number of exhibits that reveal insights about the United States in the 1920s. There was, for example, a re-creation of a Philadelphia street from 1776 with each building controlled by a different women's civic organization like the War Mothers of America and the League of Women Voters, highlighting the local power of these organizations in the wake of the First World War and the Nineteenth Amendment. Space was also given to the city's black community. For example, visitors could see a play organized by a body of black women that told the history of black life in the United States from Jamestown onwards. However, eugenicists were also given a prominent place in the fair to explain their racial theories. With each of these movements, Keels very effectively explains the histories of the organizations and the meanings of their participation in such a popular event. Each exhibit is a signpost for the popularity of these social movements in the period.

However, there are places where the narrative diverges somewhat too far from the focus of the book. While the expansive sections detailing the politics of the city and its relation to the Sesquicentennial are necessary for the book, there are other areas in which deep coverage is less pertinent. There is an in-depth history of the Klan outside Philadelphia, for example, which does not seem to fit with the rest of the book. Sesqui works best when it focusses on local studies, and is thus able to examine larger movements and organizations through the prism of Philadelphia. When it does relate the failure of the fair back to interests in City Hall and the citizens of Philadelphia, Keels's book is an excellent study of the functioning of local government and its relation to popular culture and civil society in the 1920s.