Creating Digital Histories: The History of Places in North America
This research guide is for the students in the "Creating Digital Histories: The History of Places in North America" (HIST 506:401:03). Professor Tatiana Seijas.
Books
Manhattan Project National Historical Park : Los Alamos, New Mexico. 2017. Washington, D.C: National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Call #: Alexander US Government Documents ; I 29.88/6:M 31/2017
Children of Los Alamos: by
Collectively the wartime children of Los Alamos---the children of scientists, of machinists and technicians from around the country, of construction workers from Texas and Oklahoma, and of Spanish Americans---constituted a microcosm of the United States. Katrina Mason gives readers a glimpse of what it was like to be the child of such luminous fathers as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, and Kenneth Bainbridge at such an intense moment in American history. Her interviews also show what it was like to live in such a community when you were the child of a Spanish-American laborer or a machinist whod brought his family over from a neighboring state. She explores how the children have dealt with their often conflicting feelings about their parents involvement in the creation of such a destructive weapon.
Call Number: SCUA Sinclair NJ Open Stacks QC773.3.U5M29 1995ISBN: 0805791388Publication Date: 1995-10-25
Critical Assembly: a technical history of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer years, 1943-1945 by
This 1993 volume is a lucid and accurate history of the technical research that led to the first atomic bombs. The authors explore how the 'critical assembly' of scientists, engineers and military personnel at Los Alamos, responding to wartime deadlines, collaborated to create a new approach to large-scale research. The book opens with an introduction laying out major themes. After a synopsis of the prehistory of the bomb project, from the discovery of nuclear fission to the start of the Manhattan Engineer District, and an overview of the early materials programme, the book examines the establishment of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the implosion and gun assembly programmes, nuclear physics research, chemistry and metallurgy, explosives, uranium and plutonium development, confirmation of spontaneous fission in pile-produced plutonium, the thermonuclear bomb, critical assemblies, the Trinity test, and delivery of the combat weapons. Readers interested in history of science will find this volume a crucial resource for understanding the underpinnings of contemporary science and technology.
Call Number: RUonline and Dana, LSM & Robeson QC773.3.U5C75 1993ISBN: 0511665407Publication Date: 2010
In the Shadow of Los Alamos by
Edith Warner (1893-1951), who lived by the Rio Grande at the Otowi Switch in northern New Mexico, has become a legendary figure owing largely to her portrayal in two books: The Woman at Otowi Crossing, by Frank Waters, and The House at Otowi Bridge, by Peggy Pond Church. Because she is famous for her tearoom, where she entertained scientists from the Manhattan Project, few people realize that Edith Warner was a serious writer. Here for the first time she is allowed to speak for herself. The book's title is taken from an autobiographical fragment published here for the first time. Also included are letters, essays published and unpublished, and journal entries (salvaged by various friends from the original, which was burned after Warner's death at her request). The editor provides a useful introduction outlining Edith Warner's life and sets it in local and historical context, along with a wonderful collection of period photographs and a facsimile of Edith's famous chocolate cake recipe. Thousands of readers have been fascinated by this modest woman whose friendships with Pueblo Indians and atomic scientists seem to epitomize the paradoxes of life in New Mexico. To read this book is to hear her own quiet voice, describing pueblo ceremonials, detailing the difficulties of life during the war years, and above all recording her own spiritual relationship with the New Mexico landscape. For Edith Warner her work in the world--building a house, running a restaurant, writing it all down--was a kind of meditation. People still come to New Mexico for the reasons that drew her here eighty years ago, and her response to New Mexico can now take its rightful place in the state's cultural heritage.
Call Number: Alexander F804.L6W37 2001ISBN: 0826319742Publication Date: 2001
Our Mothers' War: American women at home and at the Front during World War II by
"Our women are serving actively in many ways in this war, and they are doing a grand job on both the fighting front and the home front." -- Eleanor Roosevelt, 1944 Our Mothers' War is a stunning and unprecedented portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. Never before has the vast range of American women's experience during this pivotal era been brought together in one book. Now, Our Mothers' War re-creates what American women from all walks of life were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad. Like all great histories, Our Mothers' War began with an illuminating discovery. After finding a journal and letters her mother had written while serving with the Red Cross in the Pacific, journalist Emily Yellin started unearthing what her mother and other women of her mother's generation went through during a time when their country asked them to step into roles they had never been invited, or allowed, to fill before. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews and previously unpublished letters and diaries, Yellin shows what went on in the hearts and minds of the real women behind the female images of World War II -- women working in war plants; mothers and wives sending their husbands and sons off to war and sometimes death; women joining the military for the first time in American history; nurses operating in battle zones in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific; and housewives coping with rationing. Yellin also delves into lesser-known stories, including: tales of female spies, pilots, movie stars, baseball players, politicians, prostitutes, journalists, and even fictional characters; firsthand accounts from the wives of the scientists who created the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, African-American women who faced Jim Crow segregation laws at home even as their men were fighting enemy bigotry and injustice abroad, and Japanese-American women locked up as prisoners in their own country. Yellin explains how Wonder Woman was created in 1941 to fight the Nazi menace and became the first female comic book superhero, as well as how Marilyn Monroe was discovered in 1944 while working with her mother-in-law packing parachutes at a war plant in Burbank, California. Our Mothers' War gives center stage to those who might be called "the other American soldiers."
Call Number: Douglass, Robeson D810.W7Y45 2004ISBN: 0743245148Publication Date: 2004
Secret Mesa: inside Los Alamos National Laboratory by
"It's easy to feel watched in Los Alamos. During my first visit to the town several years ago, I stopped by the side of the road to take a picture of what I thought was just the Santa Fe National Forest. A small pickup truck did a quick U-turn and parked next to me until I left. When this happened again on another public highway in the area, I began to wonder whose woods these really were. "Later I learned that the technical areas of Los Alamos National Laboratory extend far beyond the obvious cluster of gray and tan buildings at its center. They are spread out over forty-three square miles of woods and canyons and are hemmed in by national forest and parklands. It turns out I was nowhere near the heavily guarded areas of the lab, where picture taking would be considered a threat to national security. But I was quietly watched, nonetheless." --from the text "It's easy to feel watched in Los Alamos," begins award-winning journalist Jo Ann Shroyer in this engrossing profile of life and work inside the world's most notorious science research center. Los Alamos is a world unto itself, rife with contradictions, haunted by its history, and yet bustling with an astonishing range of forefront science projects, from cancer research to the building of robotic ants. This is a town with the highest concentration of Ph.D.'s anywhere in the world; where children sometimes aren't allowed to know what their parents do for a living; and where weapons designers offer philosophical insights into why only deadly weapons can ensure lasting peace. Created as a top-secret outpost on a desolate mesa in the New Mexico desert--exclusively for the purpose of assembling the world's first atomic weapon--Los Alamos was transformed during the Cold War into a high-powered science complex and full-blown "company town," with a population of 20,000, covering forty-three square miles and including schools, stores, churches, and a private ski slope. But even today, the town is tightly guarded by a 400-strong special security force, and glinting barriers of razor wire encircle research facilities protected by motion detectors and patrolled by armed guards. As Shroyer probes behind closed doors, she finds a complex, colorful, and thoughtful community grappling with the legacy of its nuclear-tainted past and confronting the challenge of defining its future in the post-Cold War era. Drawing on extensive interviews with scientists and residents, from weapons designers to peace activists, she takes us into their labs and homes and explores the surprising range of their insights and research. We accompany her as she "goes behind the fence" to visit the X-2 thermonuclear weapons facility and talk with weapons designer James "Jas" Mercer-Smith, who describes the lab's mission as "trying to keep people from killing themselves in vast numbers." We meet robot scientist Mark Tilden and witness the lively antics of the menagerie of mechanical creatures he calls his "Robot Jurassic Park." And we visit the bizarre junkyard overflowing with "techno trash" run by peace activist Ed Grothus, where he sells research materials, discarded by lab facilities that he ironically dubs nuclear waste. A rich and evocative portrait of an intriguing, closed world, Secret Mesa ultimately offers a unique perspective on the complex questions surrounding the appropriate role, if any, for nuclear weapons in our future as well as the role of government-sponsored "big science" in spearheading much of the basic research so important to scientific progress.
Call Number: Alexander ; QC789.2.U62L677 1998ISBN: 0471040630Publication Date: 1997
Websites
- Bandelier National Monumentthe site of ancient Pueblo people from approximately 1150 to 1550, the residents built homes carved from the volcanic tuff and planted crops in mesa top fields. By 1550 the population migrated to Rio Grande area.