As inescapable as it is multivalent, it has functioned, since the dawn of humanity, as a locus of meaning-making processes, spanning from the coercive and conditioning to the empowering and the liberatory. In the modern era, perhaps more than ever before in the course of human history, philosophy, science, and the arts worked to invest material, moral, and conceptual capital on it, even when they sought to downplay or even dismiss its importance. The past two hundred years have witnessed countless discourses of and debates on nakedness, which, ultimately, multiplied and diversified our understandings of the ever-present yet ever-elusive naked body, and which lent unprecedented visibility to it and its many expressions. It is an experience that has fed off and into the many social, cultural, and political shifts dotting the past couple of centuries, the attendant changing individual and collective conceptions of the body, morality, sexuality, health and well-being, as well as the new sociocultural codes that have emerged in response to new needs and concerns. Its six main chapters and its Epilogue chart the stormy evolution of nudism in the U. Initially, it fills the reader in with respect to the first discussions that took place among German immigrants well acquainted with the practice of nudism on the possibility of introducing organized nudism to the U.