This special issue, “Revealing the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project,” highlights the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project at the University of Michigan, a program of civilian nuclear research established after World War II that also memorialized Michigan’s victims of the two World Wars. It blossomed into a broad-based, multidisciplinary program supporting work pursuing peaceful uses of the atom, understood broadly. It became the basis for sustained interdisciplinary and international collaboration, a conduit for scientific diplomacy, a privileged site for the alliance between the US government and industry, and a pioneer in the education of nuclear engineers. The Phoenix Project was an unusual and highly local phenomenon, but contributors to this issue nevertheless find ways in which it embodied larger trends in the early Cold War. In this introduction, we highlight the multiple dimensions of the Phoenix Project and reflect on the challenges and opportunities posed by writing the history of peculiar entities.

The Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project at the University of Michigan was an unusual specimen of the post–World War II nuclear research initiative. Its origins were modest; it sprang from a student-led effort to construct a living war memorial—a mission it maintained even as it grew into a peaceful-atom program. Rather than taking advantage of the copious government support for scientific research available after World War II, it drew funds from Michigan alumni and from industry, based on the conviction that these routes offered greater possibility of academic freedom. And its architects conceived of nuclear research unusually broadly, including not just the physical sciences and engineering, but also the biological, social, and human sciences, law, education, medicine, and other areas. These ways in which the Phoenix Project was exceptional nevertheless tell us much about how it was exemplary. The optimism that animated the project contrasts with widespread and well-documented currents of nuclear fear, but indicates a stable vein of nuclear optimism in the early post–World War II era. The suspicion of government secrecy regimes harbored by its founders led them to pursue unorthodox patronage relationships for a nuclear research initiative, which nevertheless reveals the flexibility of the contemporary funding context. And the project’s unusually broad notion of nuclear research indicates the local flexibility of nuclearity in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Revealing the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project.”

Most countries met the promotion of the peaceful uses of atomic energy as a tool for social and economic development with skepticism. In countries where it took hold, its acceptance was driven by a few elite actors. In Mexico the most salient included the Rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Nabor Carrillo, and William Draper Jr., President of the Canadian-based Mexican Light and Power Company. Nuclear technologies for so-called less-developed countries became a key niche for non-governmental actors such as the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project, the Atomic Industrial Forum, and the Fund for Peaceful Atomic Development, Inc., which played a relevant role in the implementation of the new foreign atomic policy after 1954 in close consonance with US governmental offices like the Foreign Operations Administration, which was superseded by the International Cooperation Administration in 1955. Without signing a manifest government-to-government agreement, Mexican officials were able to overcome domestic obstacles and historical distrust with her northern neighbor to get nuclear expertise and commodities. Apparently restricted to universities and private industries, this negotiation justified and backed the education and training of the first generation of Mexican nuclear engineers as part of the Phoenix Project at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At the same time, the Mexican Program provided a learning experience in nuclear and technical assistance diplomacy for industrialists and private interests in the implementation of the Atoms for Peace initiative abroad. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Revealing the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project.”

In the 1950s, American public universities began training a vast new cadre of nuclear engineers, technicians, and scientists in specially designed and built “teaching reactors.” As this article describes, a generation of nuclear engineering undergraduates and graduate students were exposed to an open, accessible, and above all, visible demonstration of nuclear energy through educational “swimming pool”–style reactors. Distinct from reactors for either weapons or power production, the swimming pool reactor was specifically configured to be a pedagogical tool. Educational programs were created around federally and industrially sponsored reactors for training, part of the massive Cold War era transformations of Midwestern, Western, and Southern public colleges and universities. This article offers the Ford Nuclear Reactor at the University of Michigan as an example of how the peaceful pedagogical atom developed after the 1950s. As I argue, teaching reactors were one product of the conservative compact made between government, public universities, and private industry in the early 1950s that underpinned the famed Atoms for Peace movement, with its technology and information sharing and international training priorities. Indeed, teaching reactors resolved for Eisenhower’s administration the tension between a desire for centralized control of the atom and the powerful vision of a future of prosperity brought about by open education and use of nuclear materials. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Revealing the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project.”

The Leipzig physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–88) is best known for his introduction of psychophysics, an exact, empirical science of the relations between mind and body and a crucial part of nineteenth-century sensory physiology and experimental psychology. Based on an extensive and close reading of Fechner’s diaries, this article considers psychophysics from the vantage of his everyday life, specifically the experience of taking a walk. This experience was not mere fodder for his scientific practice, as backdrop, object, or tool. Rather, on foot, Fechner pursued an investigation of the mind-body parallel to his natural-scientific one; in each domain, he strove to render the mind-body graspable, each in its own idiom, here everyday and there scientific. I give an account of Fechner’s walks as experiences that he both undertook and underwent, that shaped and were shaped by the surrounding everyday cacophony, and that carried a number of competing meanings for Fechner himself; the attendant analysis draws on his major scientific work, Elemente der Psychophysik (1860; Elements of Psychophysics ), as the thick context that renders the walks legible as an everyday investigation. What results are three modes of walking—physiopsychical, interpersonal, and universal—each engaging the mind-body at a different level, as also engaged separately in Elemente ’s three major sections, outer psychophysics, inner psychophysics, and general psychophysics beyond the human. This analysis ultimately leads to a new view of Fechner’s belief in a God who was “omnipresent and conscious in nature” and whom Fechner encountered daily on his walks in the budding of new blooms and rustling of the wind. More broadly, I aim to bring the analysis of everyday experiences as experiences into the historiography of science.

Popularization of science typically follows the lead of scientific research, conveying to lay audiences ideas and discoveries initially published in professional scientific literature and vetted by the expert community. The physicist George Gamow (1904–1968) did not respect this tradition, but promoted some of his most unorthodox scientific hypotheses as funny stories in his popular writings for non-specialists and teenagers, sometimes years before he dared to present them to the purview of academic peers in papers submitted to specialized research journals. Gamow’s proposal of the Big Bang cosmology—the theory that our universe started out in an explosive manner from a superhot and superdense state with thermonuclear reactions forming matter—was discussed by him initially in a series of non-serious articles and books, starting in 1938. Historians of cosmology recognize Gamow’s crucial contribution to the development of the Big Bang theory on the grounds of his subsequent professional publications but have not paid sufficient attention to his popular science writings and their role in changing our conception of the universe.

Despite the restrictions on knowledge and materials of the Anglo-American nuclear monopoly in the early Cold War, Norway and the Netherlands managed to build and operate a joint nuclear reactor by July 1951. They were the first countries to do so after the Great Powers. Their success was largely due to the combination of the strategic materials of heavy water (Norway) and uranium (the Netherlands). Nonetheless, they had to overcome significant political and technical obstacles. In that process a number of specific nuclear secrets played a central role. This case is used to study how and why knowledge circulation was impeded by secrecy. Specifically, I will explore four different secrets that illustrate how the Netherlands and Norway, being outside the British and American secrecy regimes, chafed against those regimes. Knowledge circulation was enabled through relations within networks that were at the same time scientific, diplomatic, and personal. I will identify three main factors that affected the mobility of information: the availability of strategic nuclear materials, the scientists’ individual interactions, and national interests.

The mid-twentieth century Australian fieldwork of Joseph B. Birdsell illustrates, perhaps uniquely, the transition from typological structuring in physical anthropology before World War II to human biology’s increasing interest in the geographical or clinal patterning of genes and commitment to notions of drift and selection. It also shows that some morphological inquiries lingered into the postwar period, as did an attachment to theories of racial migration and hybridization. Birdsell’s intensive and long-term fieldwork among Aboriginal Australians eventually led him to criticize the settler colonialism and white racism that had made possible his expeditions and data collection. Yet he continued to regard Aboriginal communities as “island laboratories” and to treat Aboriginal people as convenient research subjects, distancing himself from their life worlds and experiences of dispossession and exploitation. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Pacific Biologies: How Humans Become Genetic , edited by Warwick Anderson and M. Susan Lindee.

In 1952, a joint Indo-Australian team undertook one of the first genetic studies of the Chenchu people of southern India. Long thought of as one of the oldest populations on the subcontinent and a potential link between South Asian and Aboriginal Australian populations, the study hoped to illuminate the deeper demographic histories of both India and Australia. Coming as it did immediately on the heels of decolonization, it also signaled a new era of scientific collaborations after empire. But what exactly does “collaboration” entail? How far do agendas and imaginations actually cohere in such a “collaboration”? The various collaborating actors in the Chenchu project held very distinctive ideas and agendas. Keeping blood at the center, this article explores those distinctive “bloodworlds” that were mobilized in the course of the Chenchu study. The published text of the study was a potpourri of these different bloodworlds; equally important, however, was the bloodworld this potpourri could not accommodate: the bloodworlds of Chenchu wizards. Not a world engendered in some pure or isolated “tribal culture,” but a magical bloodworld created through historical interactions with Shaivism and Shi’ism. This was a bloodworld eminently recognizable by the Chenchu themselves, but incapable of accommodation in the published study on them. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Pacific Biologies: How Humans Become Genetic , edited by Warwick Anderson and M. Susan Lindee.