DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Automatic Toy Works" (Manufacturers of the Best Novelties in Mechanical and Other Toys) by New York Automatic Toy Works. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

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This book explores the history of children’s toys and games bearing racial stereotypes, and the role these objects played in the creation and maintenance of structures of racialism and racism in the United States, from approximately 1865 to the 1930s. This time period is one in which the creation of structures of childhood and children’s socialization into race was fostered. Additionally, commodities, like toys, were didactic and disciplinary media in the creation, modification and reproduction of Victorian society. This volume: will shed light on issues of identity, ideology, and hegemony; will appeal to those interested in historical archaeology, critical theory, and constructions of racism and class, as well as material culture scholars, and antiques collectors; will be suitable for upper-level courses in historical archaeology, modern American history, and material culture studies.

The Wonder of American Toys reflects not only the toys of perhaps the most formative era of American history, but what they meant to the children who played with them and to the society that produced them.

Although they entered the world as pure science fiction, robots are now very much a fact of everyday life. Whether a space-age cyborg, a chess-playing automaton, or simply the smartphone in our pocket, robots have long been a symbol of the fraught and fearful relationship between ourselves and our creations. Though we tend to think of them as products of twentieth-century technology—the word “robot” itself dates to only 1921—as a concept, they have colored US society and culture for far longer, as Dustin A. Abnet shows to dazzling effect in The American Robot. In tracing the history of the idea of robots in US culture, Abnet draws on intellectual history, religion, literature, film, and television. He explores how robots and their many kin have not only conceptually connected but literally embodied some of the most critical questions in modern culture. He also investigates how the discourse around robots has reinforced social and economic inequalities, as well as fantasies of mass domination—chilling thoughts that the recent increase in job automation has done little to quell. The American Robot argues that the deep history of robots has abetted both the literal replacement of humans by machines and the figurative transformation of humans into machines, connecting advances in technology and capitalism to individual and societal change. Look beneath the fears that fracture our society, Abnet tells us, and you’re likely to find a robot lurking there.