Michael J Neufeld
Biographic Data
| ID | 954886 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael J Neufeld |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael J |
| FAMILY NAME | Neufeld |
| SIGNATURE | NEUFELD M J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The People's Spaceship
Dark Star
The Long Space Age
Alexander MacDonald, an economist and economic historian now working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, declares his scholarly motivation at the outset: to construct a prehistory of the current moment in space flight, marked by the rise of private space patrons such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. He argues, in effect, that the government-dominated Cold War space boom is not the norm and that American efforts are returning to an …
Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment
Reviewed by: Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and International Prestige by Yanek Mieczkowski Michael J. Neufeld (bio) Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and International Prestige. By Yanek Mieczkowski. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Pp. x+358. $35. When I first heard of this book, I wondered what the author had to offer that was new on such a well-worn topic. After reading it, I am still wondering. Almos…
The Nazi aerospace exodus
The exodus of Third Reich scientific and engineering personnel after World War II has traditionally been understood through its impact on the Cold War missile and space race. This article assesses the state of scholarship on this topic globally, particularly in aerospace professions, in the process drawing some conclusions on the total numbers, skill composition and Nazi backgrounds of the Germans, the stages of movement, and the technological im…
Physics and Politics
Reviewed by: Physics and Politics: Research and Research Support in Twentieth-Century Germany in International Perspective Michael J. Neufeld (bio) Physics and Politics: Research and Research Support in Twentieth-Century Germany in International Perspective. Edited by Helmuth Trischler and Mark Walker. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2010. Pp. 384. €44. This book is a product of a conference convened as part of a project on the history of the Deutsche …
First Man
Reviewed by: First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong Michael J. Neufeld (bio) First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. By James R. Hansen. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Pp. xi+769. $30. Astronaut autobiographies and memoirs have proliferated since the 1970s. For vicarious astronauts like myself, these books have made for enjoyable reading, notwithstanding the variable quality. In the last decade, writers have started to produce biographies …
The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990
These volumes were originally published in 2004. The close association between the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany was a key element in the international order of the Cold War era. No country had as wide-reaching or as profound an impact on the western portion of divided Germany as the United States. No country better exemplified the East-West conflict in American thinking than Germany. The United States and Germany in the Era o…
Wernher von Braun and Concentration Camp Labor
Wernher von Braun, the SS, and Concentration Camp Labor
Dr. Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), the German-American rocket engineer and space visionary, is often depicted in white or black, saint or devil terms. In the eyes of his associates and hero-worshippers, he is still seen as an apolitical space enthusiast who was not a real Nazi and had nothing to do with the crimes of the Third Reich-indeed he was arrested by the Gestapo and held for two weeks in 1944.* Many critics and many survivors of the Mitte…
Stalin's V-2
The transfer of German rocket technology to the USSR's guided-missile and space programs has long been recognized as important, at least outside the former Soviet bloc. But it is only since the end of the cold war that historians and military specialists could construct a reasonably accurate depiction of the process by which the Soviets rapidly assimilated this technology and then cast aside the German scientists and engineers who had been brough…
The Bombing of Auschwitz
Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet
Sidewinder
The Bombing of Auschwitz
Did we know the gas chambers were there? Could we have destroyed them? Why didn't we bomb? For decades, debate has raged over whether the Allies should have bombed the gas chambers at and the railroads leading to the camp, thereby saving thousands of lives and disrupting Nazi efforts to exterminate European Jews. Was it truly feasible to do so? Did failure to do so simply reflect a callous indifference to the plight of the Jews of was it a realis…
The Luftwaffe
The Rocket and the Reich
Hitler's Enforcers
This first socio-organizational history of the Gestapo, the SD, and the regular detectives of the Third Reich, 1932-1937, explores the roots of their roles in police terror and programs of mass murder. These personnel helped to form the character and missions of their organizations, which were not simply created from above by Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich. Hitler's Enforcers is based on research at 34 archives in Germany and the United States, inc…
Aiming at Targets
The Rocket and the Reich
Relates the story of the German development of missile technology, a new kind of warfare that was extremely valuable to Allied powers during the Cold War but of little value to the Germans during World War II
Rolf engel vs. The German army
The history of German rocketry has been dominated by a master narrative emphasizing the Army Peenemūnde project. An examination of the career of Rolf Engel (1912–1993), an SS officer and veteran of Weimar rocket groups, undermines that narrative. After his arrest in 1933, Engel became a bitter opponent of the Army and joined the Nazi student movement and SD, ending his wartime career as an SS rocket expert. Engel's life demonstrates that the trad…
Die Illusion der Wunderwaffen
642 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE to secure the input of technical experts. The Academy’s transport commission studied axles, couplings, and other weak links in rail transport, and recommended changes in manufacture to fight this source of accidents. Yet even these scientific studies were subjected to the criticism that their authors were “limiters,” that is, individuals who created mere scientific obstacles to the superhuman targets which …
V-Missiles of the Third Reich
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 199 murder little by little. Technology for mass killing had developed separately. Experiments using carbon-monoxide exhaust in gas vans began in 1939 (already documented by Christopher Browning and recapitulated by Pressac). The first victims were Germany’s mentally retarded patients. In the course of 1941 the SS quickly extended gassing to mass executions of political opponents in Eastern Europe. In the dead …
Die Illusion der Wunderwaffen
V-Missiles of the Third Reich
The Bombing of Auschwitz
Did we know the gas chambers were there? Could we have destroyed them? Why didn't we bomb? For decades, debate has raged over whether the Allies should have bombed the gas chambers at and the railroads leading to the camp, thereby saving thousands of lives and disrupting Nazi efforts to exterminate European Jews. Was it truly feasible to do so? Did failure to do so simply reflect a callous indifference to the plight of the Jews of was it a realis…
Weimar Culture and Futuristic Technology
In 1923 the Transylvanian German Hermann Oberth published in Munich a slim theoretical volume on rocketry and spaceflight, Die Rakete zu den Planetenriiumen (The rocket into interplanetary space).' (See fig. 1.) Over the next few years Oberth's book was followed in the German-speaking lands by a number of other works, both popular and technical, which attempted to demonstrate the feasibility and desirability of spaceflight-at the time a rather ut…
Trans-Border Citizens
German Artisans and Political Repression
Journal Article German Artisans and Political Repression: The Fall of the Journeymen's Associations in Nuremberg, 1806–1868 Get access Michael J. Neufeld Michael J. Neufeld Department of History, SUNY Oswego, Oswego, NY 13126 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 19, Issue 3, Spring 1986, Pages 491–502, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/19.3.491 Published: 01 March 1986
Hermann Oberth
334 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE it may serve as a helpful guide for both scholars and laypersons to an important but much neglected area. Barton C. Hacker Dr. Hacker teaches history of technology and military history at Oregon State University. His book, The Dragon's Tail: Radiation Safety in the Manhattan Project, 1942— 1946, was published in 1987, and he is working on a sequel covering the period since the war. Hermann Oberth: Leben, We…
Hermann Oberth
The German worker
(1989). The German worker: Working class autobiographies from the age of industrialization. History of European Ideas: Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 378-379
Weimar Culture and Futuristic Technology
In 1923 the Transylvanian German Hermann Oberth published in Munich a slim theoretical volume on rocketry and spaceflight, Die Rakete zu den Planetenriiumen (The rocket into interplanetary space).' (See fig. 1.) Over the next few years Oberth's book was followed in the German-speaking lands by a number of other works, both popular and technical, which attempted to demonstrate the feasibility and desirability of spaceflight-at the time a rather ut…
Zwischen Kleinburgertum und Proletariat
The Skilled Metalworkers of Nuremberg
The Skilled Metalworkers of Nuremberg
The Many Lives of German Labour
IN THE PAST TWO DECADES, social-historical approaches have made a substantial contribution to history of 19thand 20th-century German labour movement. Each of books under review here carries this general project forward; yet each book also confronts us with quite different, at times, incompatible representations of the German working-class. Indeed one comes away from reading these five new studies with a troubling question; is there still a collec…
The Space Telescope
Hitler, the V-2, and the Battle for Priority, 1939-1943
Learning for Life
covered to some extent by Linda Trimble's finely researched piece on the politics of gender in Alberta and to a lesser extent by Tom Flanagan's use of rational choice analysis to discuss the tragic dispute of the Lubicon Cree with the provincial and federal government. However, the environmental movement, which has shown surprising vigour in Alberta is all but ignored. Finally, Jack Masson provides a sound analysis of a frequently neglected topic…
A Nation of Fliers
440 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE A Nation ofFliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination. By Peter Fritzsche. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Pp. xii + 282; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95. Not long ago I complained in the pages of this journal about the rarity of precisely the sort of work that Peter Fritzsche has written: the history of technology in German popular culture. A Nation ofFliers (a …
A Nation of Fliers
Wernher von Braun-Aufbruch in den Weltraum
Wernher von Braun-Aufbruch in den Weltraum
212 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE quite static—a series of snapshots with little accounting of precisely how nations move from one tier to another. It is also perplexing that Krause insists that he does not wish to build a “model” of the arms production and trade system; it is hard to imagine a more accurate word for the three-tiered structure that he identifies as the “most important feature” of the book (p. 212). Krause intends this work …
Trans-Border Citizens
The Rocket and the Reich
Relates the story of the German development of missile technology, a new kind of warfare that was extremely valuable to Allied powers during the Cold War but of little value to the Germans during World War II
Rolf engel vs. The German army
The history of German rocketry has been dominated by a master narrative emphasizing the Army Peenemūnde project. An examination of the career of Rolf Engel (1912–1993), an SS officer and veteran of Weimar rocket groups, undermines that narrative. After his arrest in 1933, Engel became a bitter opponent of the Army and joined the Nazi student movement and SD, ending his wartime career as an SS rocket expert. Engel's life demonstrates that the trad…
Die Illusion der Wunderwaffen
642 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE to secure the input of technical experts. The Academy’s transport commission studied axles, couplings, and other weak links in rail transport, and recommended changes in manufacture to fight this source of accidents. Yet even these scientific studies were subjected to the criticism that their authors were “limiters,” that is, individuals who created mere scientific obstacles to the superhuman targets which …
V-Missiles of the Third Reich
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 199 murder little by little. Technology for mass killing had developed separately. Experiments using carbon-monoxide exhaust in gas vans began in 1939 (already documented by Christopher Browning and recapitulated by Pressac). The first victims were Germany’s mentally retarded patients. In the course of 1941 the SS quickly extended gassing to mass executions of political opponents in Eastern Europe. In the dead …
Die Illusion der Wunderwaffen
V-Missiles of the Third Reich
Hitler's Enforcers
This first socio-organizational history of the Gestapo, the SD, and the regular detectives of the Third Reich, 1932-1937, explores the roots of their roles in police terror and programs of mass murder. These personnel helped to form the character and missions of their organizations, which were not simply created from above by Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich. Hitler's Enforcers is based on research at 34 archives in Germany and the United States, inc…
Aiming at Targets
Political science (32 works) · History (23 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (18 works) · European history and politics (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Aeronautics (12 works) · Archaeology (12 works) · Engineering (12 works) · German (12 works)