How radio astronomers challenged national borders, disciplinary boundaries, and the constraints of vision to create an international scientific community.For more than three thousand years, the science of astronomy depended on visible light. In just the last sixty years, radio technology has fundamentally altered how astronomers see the universe. Combining the wartime innovation of radar and the established standards of traditional optical telescopes, the “radio te...

The Hanford History Project held the “Legacies of the Manhattan Project at 75 Years” conference in March 2017. Its Richland, Washington, meeting venue was a stone’s throw from the southern-most edge of the Hanford Nuclear Site--the place where workers produced the plutonium that fueled the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.The symposium’s appeal extended well beyond local interest. Professionals from a broad array of backgrounds--working scientists, gover...

The little-known history of nuclear reactors in American life, and the role of public colleges in the Atomic Age.In The Atom Goes to College, David Munns explores the creation and forgotten prominence of “teaching reactors,” nuclear reactors dedicated to education during the golden age of American atomic ambitions. From the 1950s to the 1970s, a generation took the science of the atom and made it into the engineering of the reactor. Across two dozen teachi...