What’s Up, Doc?
It’s a tradition here at History in the Margins that I kick off the year with a post about what I expect to work on and think about over the coming year. I’ve always thought of it as the blog equivalent of the coming attractions at a movie theater—minus the popcorn. (I realize this is a dangerous position. Not everyone loves watching the trailers for future movies. I do.)
This year I have no coming attractions to offer you, because at some level I have no idea what I’m going to do next.
I will still be writing, thinking and, hopefully, talking about Nazi Germany and women journalists as the publication date for The Dragon from Chicago draws near. (August 6!). Beyond that, I expect to flail around without direction: reading widely* and following rabbit holes wherever they take me. No musts or shoulds allowed. Quite frankly, I’m looking forward to it—and I plan to take you with me.
Here’s to a New Year full of historical discoveries and lots of good books for us all.
*And randomly. The To-Be-Read piles are tall and varied. At the moment I’m reading books about the early movie industry, women in medieval Europe, and camouflage in World War II. Who know where they will lead me?
Silent Night: A Reprise
Earlier this month, My Own True Love and I began the holiday season with one of our favorite events: Songs of Good Cheer at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. For the last 25 years, a band of musicians and (now former) Tribune columnists Eric Zorn and Mary Schmich have led the audience in song. For the last 24 years, My Own True Love and I have been in that audience, accompanied by a changing cast of friends and family. The program each year includes both religious and secular holiday standards and less well known songs, some of which have become beloved over the years. There is always at least one Hanukkah tune and one song in Spanish. Every year, the audience sobs its way through a song by Mary Schmich titled “Gonna’ Sing.”*
Every year, the concert ends with “Silent Night.” This year, as we sang “Silent Night” I was reminded of our visit to Salzburg over Christmas several years ago. On our first full day in Salzburg we stopped at the Salzburg Museum to see a special exhibit celebrating the 200th anniversary of “Silent Night.”
Prior to seeing that exhibit, I had never thought about the historic context of the song, which a young Austrian priest named Joseph Mohr and the local teacher and organist, Franz Xaver Gruber,wrote in the small Austrian village of Oberndorf bei Salzburg in 1818.
Salzburg and the area around it had been under duress for several years. It was plundered by the French during the Napoleonic wars. Like much of Europe, it had suffered crop failures and food shortages in 1816 (“the year without summer”). That same year, after being shuffled back and forth between Austria and Bavaria, Salzburg was annexed by the Hapsburg monarchy, losing both its autonomy and its role as a regional capital. In 1818, the city suffered a major fire. No wonder Franz Gruber and Joseph Mohr wrote so longingly for peace.
I think we all share that longing this year.
*If you want to see the lyrics and hear the entire song, check out Eric Zorn’s blog, https://ericzorn.com/index.php/2023/12/12/gonna-sing/
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I’m taking the rest of the year off. I’ll be back in the new year with historical tidbits for your enjoyment. Until then, have yourself a merry little celebration of he victory of light over the darkness in the tradition of your choice
The Girls of Atomic City
When My Own True Love and I decided to stop at Oak Ridge, Tennessee on our way to Atlanta, I immediately pulled Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold City of the Women Who Helped Win World War II out of the To-Be-Read pile where it had sat for far too long.* (Or maybe not. Perhaps books wait until their time comes.)
Kiernan explores the story of Oak Ridge through the experiences of the women who worked there, as well as those of women who played an important role in the development of nuclear fission outside of Oak Ridge. (I, for one, did not know that a German geochemist named Ida Noddack, writing in response to a paper by Enrico Fermi in 1934, was the first to postulate that the nucleus of an atom could be split by bombarding it with neutrons. Her male colleagues ignored and sometimes mocked her work.) Unlike most other works dealing with the “hidden figures” of science,** Kiernan does not limit her story to the women scientists, mathematicians and engineers who worked for the Manhattan Project. She also introduces us to secretaries, the women who operated the machines which produced enriched uranium,*** and one of the Black women who worked as cleaners in the facilities. In addition to the work itself, she talks about life in the “secret city” built deep in rural Tennessee. Mud that would suck a woman’s shoes off her feet. Housing shortages and security measures. The constant warnings about not asking questions and not telling anyone about your work. Social life in a city where the average age was 27 and men outnumbered women. She describes the racial discrimination that was literally built into the new city, and one woman’s clever efforts to make her life better than the rules allowed. It felt to me like Kiernan lost briefly her focus on women as the Manhattan Project drew to an end, with the final test at Los Alamos and the actual bombing of Hiroshima, but she quickly recovered.
The structure of the book is clever. Personal experiences alternate with sections that deal with the development of the Manhattan Project outside Oak Ridge and the science behind it. (Kiernan manages to make nuclear fission comprehensible to a non-scientist.) The compartmentalization of the book is deliberate, designed to echo the way information about the work was compartmentalized, with no one knowing how their job fit into a bigger picture, or even what the bigger picture was.
The Girls of Atomic City is a wonderful choice for anyone interested in the Manhattan Project or women’s roles in World War II.
*I swore to myself that when I was finished writing my book about Sigrid Schultz I was going to read some of the many non-fiction books I own that are not about World War II in general and women in World War II in particular. So far, that has not happened.
**How did we express this idea before Margot Lee Shetterly’s book?
***Now known as “calutron girls,” after the machines they operated, they were the Manhattan Project’s equivalent of Rosie the Riveter. Most of calutron cubicle operators were women from the middle south with a high school education. They worked eight hour days, in front of panels that allowed them to monitor the conditions that produced enriched uranium, though they did not know what the machines did.