This dissertation explains the growth in Americans' fascination with robots and automata from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s as a result of the expansion of industrial capitalism and the emergence of modern science and technology. Using newspapers, periodicals, films, literary fiction, and other sources, it uncovers a long history of Americans building, viewing, imagining, and commenting on robots in ways that connected the devices to two trends of modern life: the replacement of human beings with machines and the transformation of human beings into machines. The robot's significance, the dissertation argues, derives from the relationships that people have posited between those two trends, how they have linked the advance of science, technology, and industrialization with the transformation of the individual soul.;Since the eighteenth century, robots and automata have helped a subset of Americans---white, middling to elite, men---resolve the tensions between their ideal vision of an American where they can be free individuals and the emergence of an industrial economy and scientific theories that threatened that vision. Initially, the robot was both a potential tool to reach a utopia in which every citizen was a master and an illustration of the type of people who lacked the independence, rationality, and character of full citizens. Enslaved to either its material nature or a person, the nineteenth century robot was the antithesis of the American individual. With the triumph of industrial capitalism and emergence of modern science and technology, however, the meanings of robots shifted as traditional boundaries between human and machine evaporated. As Americans debated whether the machine was a model for or the antithesis of the individual around the turn of the century, this subset of Americans embraced robots to help them and a mass audience decipher the proper relationship between humans and machines. As this debate intensified following World War I, interest in robots spread as more Americans sought to tame an out-of-control machine age. By the start of the Cold War, however, such efforts to tame the machine evaporated as the robot, once the antithesis of American individualism, became a model of human perfection.
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