The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American

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, Carolyn Thomas de la Pena argues, can we fully understand our culture’s twentieth-century energy enthusiasm.