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More than two thousand amusement parks dotted the American landscape in the early twentieth century, thrilling the general public with the latest in entertainment and motion picture technology. Amusement parks were the playgrounds of the working class, combining numerous, mechanically-based spectacles into one unique, modern cultural phenomenon. Lauren Rabinovitz describes the urban modernity engendered by these parks and their media, encouraging ordinary individuals to sense, interpret, and embody a burgeoning national identity.As industrialization, urbanization, and immigration upended socie

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction -- PART I Intellectual Histories of the Information Age -- Imperial Attractions: Benjamin Franklin's New Experiments of 1751 -- From Heat Engines to Digital Printouts: Machine Models of the Body from the Victorian Era to the Human Genome Project -- The Erasure and Construction of History for the Information Age: Positivism and Its Critics -- PART II Visual Culture, Subjectivity, and the Education of the Senses -- More than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture through Hale's Tours, imax, and Motion Simulation Rides -- Stereographs and the Construction of a Visual Culture in the United States -- The Convergence of the Pentagon and Hollywood: The Next Generation of Military Training Simulations -- PART III Materiality, Time, and the Reproduction of Sound and Motion -- Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History -- Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, The Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls -- Still/Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics -- PART IV Digital Aesthetics, Social Texts, and Art Objects -- Bodies of Texts, Bodies of Subjects: Metaphoric Networks in New Media -- Electronic Literature: Discourses, Communities, Traditions -- Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime -- Selected Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index