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OverviewThe 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, Carolyn Thomas de la Pena argues, can we fully understand our culture's twentieth-century energy enthusiasm. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Carolyn Thomas de la PenaPublisher: New York University Press Imprint: New York University Press Dimensions: Width: 15.30cm , Height: 2.60cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.619kg ISBN: 9780814719534ISBN 10: 0814719538 Pages: 329 Publication Date: 01 May 2003 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Manufactured on demand  We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier. Table of Contents"Acknowledgments Preface Introduction1 The Machine-Built Body2 Measuring Mechanical Strength 3 Exploring Electric Limits 4 Powering the Intimate Body 5 ""Radiomania"" Limits the Energy Dream Conclusion: The End of an Era? NotesBibliographyIndex About the Author"ReviewsCovers its subject well, provides useful context, and makes lively reading for anyone interested in the history of technology, the social context of electricity and radioactive materials, or the history of alernative medicine. --Technology and Culture Not only provides a richly detailed and suprising account of long-forgotten artifacts, but also fleshes out the longer history of some still-familiar attitudes toward health and vitality. --Journal of Social History De la Pena's fascinating study melds social history with material culture and the history of science and technology to explain Americans' enthusiastic embrace of modern mechanization and emergent industrial culture. --CHOICE In this engaging and well-written study Carolyn Thomas de la Pena offers a detailed cultural history of the medical-technological interface in the period 1850-1940, and in so doing tells us a great deal about how the body and its relation to modernity were conceived. --American Historical Review Exellent. Carolyn de la Pena's superbly researched project examines how Americans in the period between 1870 and 1935 sought to supplement their physical energy through engagement with a variety of popular health technologies, including muscle-building machines: electrical invigorators, such as belts and collars: and radioactive elixirs. --American Quarterly It's an irresistible account of fads and fascinating foibles, including electric belts and radioactive tonics. --Christian Science Monitor Transforming archival research into sparkling prose, The Body Electric explains how Americans learned to use machines to seek health, sexual rejuvenation, and physical transformation. This innovative book is both an entertaining history of fads and foibles and a groundbreaking cultural critique of the continuing obsession with achieving physical perfection. --David E. Nye, author of Electrifying America and America as Second Creation The Body Electric is the so-far missing puzzle piece in our nineteenth-twentieth century knowledge of the social history of the human body and technology--a richly illustrated study showing two centuries of technologizing the human body against fears of weakness, enervation, sexual depletion. --Cecelia Tichi, author of Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America Transforming archival research into sparkling prose, The Body Electric explains how Americans learned to use machines to seek health, sexual rejuvenation, and physical transformation. This innovative book is both an entertaining history of fads and foibles and a groundbreaking cultural critique of the continuing obsession with achieving physical perfection. -David E. Nye,author of Electrifying America and America as Second Creation Not only provides a richly detailed and suprising account of long-forgotten artifacts, but also fleshes out the longer history of some still-familiar attitudes toward health and vitality. -Journal of Social History Covers its subject well, provides useful context, and makes lively reading for anyone interested in the history of technology, the social context of electricity and radioactive materials, or the history of alternative medicine. -Technology and Culture This provocative exploration of the concept of energy in American medicine deftly ranges across medical theories, exercise machines and their inventors, early human potential movements, popular fads of electricity and radiation, and the national mood at the turn of the twentieth century. The author writes with wit and sympathy about medical theories and devices that may now seem like outright quackery but that formerly appealed to the educated as well as the gullible in their elusive search for good health. Building upon on a vast and vastly entertaining literature of medical pamphlets and ephemera, Carolyn Thomas de la Pena brings a discerning intelligence and an energetic analytic style to the cultural history of medicine, faith, science, and technology. -Jeffrey L. Meikle,University of Texas, Austin The Body Electric is the so-far missing puzzle piece in our nineteenth-twentieth century knowledge of the social history of the human body and technology-a richly illustrated study showing two centuries of technologizing the human body against fears of weakness, enervation, sexual depletion. -Cecelia Tichi,author of Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America An irresistible account of fads and fascinating foibies, including electric belts and radioactive tonics. - Christian Science Monitor; In this engaging and well-written study, Carolyn Thomas de la Pena offers a detailed cultural history of the medical-technological interface in the period 1850-1940 and in so doing tells us a great deal about how the body and its relation to modernity were conceived. - American Historical Review; Excellent.... superbly researched. - American Quarterly Author InformationCarolyn Thomas de la Peña is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis. 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