|
Product Description
Between the years 1850 and 1950, Americans became the leading energy consumers on the planet, expending tremendous physical resources on energy exploration, mental resources on energy exploitation, and monetary resources on energy acquisition. A unique combination of pseudoscientific theories of health and the public’s rudimentary understanding of energy created an age in which sources of industrial power seemed capable of curing the physical limitations and ill health that plagued Victorian bodies. Licensed and “quack” physicians alike promoted machines, electricity, and radium as invigorating cures, veritable “fountains of youth” that would infuse the body with energy and push out disease and death.
The Body Electric is the first book to place changing ideas about fitness and gender in dialogue with the popular culture of technology. Whether through wearing electric belts, drinking radium water, or lifting mechanized weights, many Americans came to believe that by embracing the nation's rapid march to industrialization, electrification, and “radiomania,” their bodies would emerge fully powered. Only by uncovering this belief’s passions and products, Thomas de la Peña argues, can we fully understand our culture’s twentieth-century energy enthusiasm.
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Tell the Machine Goodnight: A Novel
- The Iron Heel
- The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America
- Oilfield Revolutionary: The Career of Everette Lee DeGolyer (Kenneth E. Montague Series in Oil and Business History)
- Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (The University Center for Human Values Series)
- Iraq and the Politics of Oil: An Insider's Perspective
- Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies
*If this is not the "The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (American History and Culture)" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Oct 25, 2024 14:12 +08.