Would you be happy with something as simple as an "electroscope"? http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/practical-physics/using-electroscope
I highly recommend A.D. Moore's book on Electrostatics: http://www.amazon.com/Electrostatics-Exploring-Controlling-Electricity-Includes/dp/1885540043
Now, in general, it is difficult to demonstrate electrostatic effects using conventional electronics. You run into too many practical details like: semiconductors stop working. Insulation on wires isn't thick enough to avoid breakdowns. The length of wire needed to get the number of turns in the transformer secondary has a resistance that is overwhelming at the scaled currents involved...
This is why electrostatic generators like Van de Graff, Wimshurst, or Dirod, look so much different than conventional electronics.
You can get "some" high voltage electronics that is unlikely to kill you: CCFL inverters (get them while they still exist!), "Ion Generators", Geiger counter power supplies, HeNe Laser power supplies, and so on. Typically these will generate up to a couple of thousand volts, which MIGHT be enough to show some effects. They're probably about as controllable from an Arduino as a house-lamp (not very.)
"A couple thousand volts" is not much by electrostatics standards; you've seen the lovely spark gaps - air has a breakdown voltage of about 30000 V/cm. You could presumably control the motor of a mechanical electrostatic generator.
There are all manner of folk experimenting with electrostatics and publishing info on the web. I really want to make a wimshurst-like machine out of CD blanks (and other people have done it!)
A lot of electrostatic publications (even Moore) are pretty weak on "quantitative" information. Let's try some calculations.
Columb's law says F = k*q1*q2/r^2 Force is proportional to total charge and inverse square distance apart.
So, for a force of 1g between charges 1cm apart
.0098 = 9e9*q1*q2/1e-4 (9e9 is "Columb's constant")
q1*q2 = .0098*1e4/9e9 = 1.1e-8
or for equal and opposite charges, q1=-q2= 1e-4 C.
So we need enough voltage to push 1e-4 C of charges within 1cm of each other. Approximately. It's sorta like charging a capacitor. So, q=C*V, and V = q/C
But what's "C" for our charges, 1cm apart? Capacitance is k2*A/d Where A is the plate area and d is the distance between them. For practical capacitors, d is typically MUCH smaller than 1cm. Let's give our hypothetical capacitor a capacitance of 10pF. (There is also the capacitance of an isolated sphere (4*pi*epsilon0*R), which wikipedia says is about 20pF for a 20cm van de Graff sphere. So 10pf is probably "close"; off by no more than a couple orders of magnitude :-)
So we have: 1e-4 = 10e-12 * V or V = 10e6V - 10 million volts!
So you can see that the forces involved tend to be very small. That's why electoscopes have leaves made of very thin foil (or gold leaf!) And that's why capacitors don't usually crush themselves...
