Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project was released by the University of Illinois Press in 1997. A cultural and environmental history of the Manhattan Project, it looks at a wide variety of artifacts, from classified memos instructing workers in the appropriate language to use, to photographs of the injured and dying at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the Spring of 1998, Atomic Spaces won the Hoover Prize; it was Runner-Up for the 1997 Parkman Prize in American History and the Small Press Book Awards as well.
"Superb! Hales combines careful scholarly research with stylistic power, a playful intellect, and a profound moral sensibility in a wholly unique way." -- Paul S. Boyer, author of By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age.
From the Parkman Prize Committee announcement: "Peter Bacon Hales' Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project tells the story of the project's three sites: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. In an extraordinarily imaginative interdisciplinary treatment of architecture, community planning, technology, environmental history, politics and race and gender relations, Hales raises searching questions about the broadest implications of the coming of the atomic age." Society of American Historians.
"Drawing on memoirs, declassified government files, unpublished letters and diaries, Hales...has assembled a cultural history of the Manhattan Engineer District--more familiarly, the Manhattan Project. Calling Los Alamos, New Mexico; Hanford, Washington; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee 'atomic spaces,' Hales tells the story of their birth by 'military fiat and necessity' and their emergence as a 'new sort of social landscape.' This is an engaging book encompassing everything from utopian architectural plans to the subject of race relations and the role of women. Sixty black-and-white photographs--archival photos and Hales's own photoessay--round out the book." -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To University of Illinois Press Page on Atomic Spaces
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Image from Medical Report of Japanese Bombing, 1945 |
Cover to Recruiting Pamphlet for Hanford Engineer Works
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