Longing for the Bomb
Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia
Lindsey A. Freeman
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 04/2015
Pages: 256
Subject: Social Science, History
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9781469623177
DESCRIPTION
Longing for the Bomb traces the unusual story of the first
atomic city and the emergence of American nuclear culture. Tucked
into the folds of Appalachia and kept off all commercial maps, Oak
Ridge, Tennessee, was created for the Manhattan Project by the U.S.
government in the 1940s. Its workers labored at a breakneck pace,
most aware only that their jobs were helping "the war effort." The
city has experienced the entire lifespan of the Atomic Age, from
the fevered wartime enrichment of the uranium that fueled Little
Boy, through a brief period of atomic utopianism after World War II
when it began to brand itself as "The Atomic City," to the
anxieties of the Cold War, to the contradictory contemporary period
of nuclear unease and atomic nostalgia. Oak Ridge's story deepens
our understanding of the complex relationship between America and
its bombs.
Blending historiography and ethnography, Lindsey Freeman shows how
a once-secret city is visibly caught in an uncertain present, no
longer what it was historically yet still clinging to the hope of a
nuclear future. It is a place where history, memory, and myth
compete and conspire to tell the story of America's atomic past and
to explain the nuclear present.