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By DON CAVNESS
Los Alamos Historical Society Curator All museums have a characteristic and somewhat capricious weakness when it comes to managing their collections. We all have orphan artifacts that have absolutely no paper trail. In many cases, institutional memories that at one time would have provided important clues to ownership and use have long since vanished.
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By HEATHER MCCLENAHAN
Los Alamos Historical Society Stan Ulam may be one of the least known of the leading Manhattan Project scientists. A Polish-born mathematician, he was working as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, when he received a letter from physicist Hans Bethe, inviting him to join a wartime project near Santa Fe, NM. He would spend most of the rest of his career working on complex nuclear problems or mathematical issues related to them, such as high-capacity computing. As part of the Manhattan Project, Ulam, with John von Neumann and others, made the necessary mathematical calculations for the development of the “Fat Man” implosion weapon. Los Alamos is known worldwide as the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Our history and the people who made it have an international reach.
For the Los Alamos Historical Society, whether the stories are about geopolitical machinations during the Cold War or about the development of a neighborhood, all of our history is “local.” We bring this up because of the convergence of two points: the continued housing shortage in Los Alamos and a document we recently ran across in our Archives, “Disposal of the Los Alamos Community: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Communities of Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Congress of the United States, Eighty-Seventh Congress, Second Session on Disposal of the Los Alamos Community,” dated April 23, 1962. By HEATHER MCCLENAHAN
Los Alamos Historical Society Many years ago, someone at Los Alamos High School penciled on the fore edge of a history book on the teacher’s desk, “In case of flood, grab this. It’s dry.” Perhaps many of us had the kind of high school history classes in which textbooks spewed forth dates and names for dead people—“Memorize these for the test!”— and listed names of battles that seemed far away. Such textbooks offered no context to illustrate the importance or why all that stuff should be learned. |
AboutThese articles are written by the Los Alamos Historical Society Staff. Many of these articles were originally published by the Categories
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