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Oral History Series: Children of Los Alamos: An Oral History of the Town Where the Atomic Bomb Began

Amazon.com Price:  $39.32 (as of 02/05/2019 20:08 PST- Details)

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Description

Katrina R. Mason has interviewed a variety of people who spent all or parts of their childhoods in Los Alamos – from its muddy beginnings in 1943, when residents officially lived at P.O. Box 1663, to the late 1950s, after the laboratory had come under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission – to create this engaging and provocative portrait of a place that has come to epitomize both the scientific advances and the moral ambiguities of this century.
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. Mason identifies three elements common to their childhood recollections: a magnetic attraction to the land; a sense of security, that children at all times felt protected there; and multiculturalism. Almost the entire children interviewed attribute their interest in other cultures and ability to get together with a wide variety of people to their experience at Los Alamos. Some note that in important ways Los Alamos was an unusually stratified community, but most agree that scholastic achievement, not family background, made up our minds one’s place in the children’s social strata.
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 this type of community when you were the child of a Spanish-American laborer or a machinist who’d brought his family over from a neighboring state. She explores how the children have dealt with their regularly conflicting feelings about their parents’ involvement in the creation of this type of destructive weapon. Mason’s volume illuminates these personal and regularly very emotional dimensions of a fascinating historical era, and as such will have to prove invaluable to students of modern American history.

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