The Policy of History-Making: People, Place, and Time in the Memory of the Manhattan Project

Abstract

President Obama signed the Manhattan Project National Historical Park into law in 2015 as a joint endeavor between the National Park Service (NPS) and the Department of Energy (DOE) to “preserve” and “interpret” the historically significant “sites, stories, and legacies” of the Manhattan Project. The DOE, as the Manhattan Project’s successor agency, maintains the nation’s nuclear weapons program through its three national laboratories, two of which are in New Mexico. How, then, can policymakers commemorate a secret history which remains ongoing? This thesis studies the historical and historiographical problems at stake in the monumental task of commemorating the United States’ nuclear history as a national historical park. I hypothesize that historiographical analysis reveals silences of people, place, and time in the official history of the Manhattan Project and the atomic age it set into motion.

The central questions my thesis asks are: Whose perspectives are represented in this chosen history of the nuclear age, and whose are marginalized? How do DOE and NPS policymakers arrive at national histories which inform future policies? How do national interests shape our public histories, and who, what, and where are left out of them? How can we investigate and attend to the holistic legacies of U.S. nuclearism, and how might these remembrances influence positive obligations towards their victims?

Using the analytical frameworks innovated by historians Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Pierre Nora on memory, history, and the archive, this thesis brings to light the nuclear victimization, suffering and marginalization experienced by local communities surrounding the bomb to show how policy and public history have created and embedded political, social and ecological silences into the official historical narrative.

Through interviews with Downwinders, museum directors and curators, public historians, scholars, journalists, consultants, and representatives of the Department of Energy and the National Park Service, along with my own anthropological and historiographical analysis inspired by Trouillout and Nora, I unpack and analyze the silences at the core of the Manhattan Project, modeling the kind of history-making and un-making that I argue is necessary for any honest remembrance of the Manhattan Project. I argue that any attempt at memorializing the Manhattan Project must attend to the “ongoingness” of the Manhattan Project’s legacies and endeavor to recover and make public what we know happened during the Manhattan Project, what is happening still, and what cannot be known, attending to as many experiences and memories as possible.