“A brillant and original achievement.” - Lewis Mumford “This admirably balanced and judicious book is invaluable for understanding the initial phase of America's love/hate relationship with industrial technology.” - Leo Marx, Massachusettes Institute of Technology “A first-rate contribution to our understanding of one of the deepest, most troubling issues in American life: Is the machine our servant or our master?” - Alan Trachtenberg, Yale University A brilliant, pathbreaking work.” - Merrit Roe Smith, Massachusettes Institute of Technology Concern with the white male body - with exhibiting it and with the perils to it -reached a climax in World War I, he suggests, and continues with us today.“A tour de force when it first appeared nearly twenty-five years ago, John Kasson's Civilizing the Machine has become a classic, and it remains required reading for anyone interested in the larger implications of the industrial revolution in America. Kasson's liberally illustrated and persuasively argued study analyzes the themes linking these figures and places them in their rich historical and cultural context. With Harry Houdini, the dream of escape was literally embodied in spectacular performances in which he triumphed over every kind of threat to masculine integrity - bondage, imprisonment, insanity, and death. Then, when Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan swung down a vine into the public eye in 1912, the fantasy of a perfect white Anglo-Saxon male was taken further, escaping the confines of civilization but reasserting its values, beating his chest and bellowing his triumph to the world.
When the Prussian-born Eugene Sandow, an international vaudeville star and bodybuilder, toured the United States in the 1890s, Florenz Ziegfeld cannily presented him as the "Perfect Man," representing both an ancient ideal of manhood and a modern commodity extolling self-development and self-fulfillment. Kasson examines the signs of crisis in American life a century ago, signs that new forces of modernity were affecting men's sense of who and what they really were.
A remarkable new work from one of our premier historians
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