From Angelo to Atlas, or How a 97-Pound (Italian) Weakling Became the All-American Working-Class Male

Dominique Padurano, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Using photographs, advertisements, and other texts from popular culture sources, Ph.D. candidate Dominique Padurano will trace the ways in which Angelo Siciliano, born in Calabria in 1893, transformed himself into Charles Atlas, bodybuilder and icon of twentieth-century American masculinity, as well as how he created a pan-ethnic coalition of working-class boys and men from the 1930s-50s.