Outside the Gates: American Landscapes from Eniwetoc to Woodstock represents my current work-in-progress. Originally underwritten by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funded early research stages, this project was pushed aside by the arrival of Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project, which had begun as a brief introduction to that book but ended up a very different project.

Outside the Gates traces the transformations of the American cultural landscape after World War II. Beginning with essays on the atomic test sites and the early years of living in Levittown, the book travels through the landscapes of Western movies, the Esperanto-speaking, genetically engineered agronomic utopia of the Cold War social studies books, maps the changing topography of women's spaces in television sitcoms, from Lucy to Donna Reed, and ends at Woodstock.