David Allen Burke. Atomic Testing in Mississippi

Nuclear history has only a few genres available for historians and writers. One is the sweeping epic, typified by Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986). Then there are the thick biographies of leading scientists and policymakers, such as Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005). Both the sweeping epic and the heroic biography emphasize the top players in the story at the expense of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who played a part in the history of atomic development, production, testing, and use. There are valuable community studies written about nuclear topics as well, though most have focused on just a few of the larger atomic communities such as Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. Charles Jackson and Charles Johnson's City behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942–1946 (1981) explored the social history of that locale using both documents and extensive oral histories. S. L. Sanger collected oral histories of Hanford officials, engineers, and workers to add a broader range of stories to the historical record. Drawing on previous scholarship, popular writer Denise Kiernan was able to bring a larger audience to the topic through stressing individual stories of ordinary people at the site, in her bestselling The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (2013).

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