4. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: St. Martin’s, 2011).
5. On the debate over radioactive fallout in the 1950s, see Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Boyer, Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); and Boyer, “From Activism to Apathy: The American People and Nuclear Weapons, 1963–1980,” Journal of American History 70, no. 4 (March 1984): 821–844; Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Milton Katz, Ban the Bomb: A History of SANE, 1957–1985 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); and Joseph Masco, Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 43–98. On Silent Spring, see K. Hamilton Lytle, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Thomas Dunlap, DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). On the Santa Barbara oil spill, see Robert Easton, Black Tide: The Santa Barbara Oil Spill and Its Consequences (New York: Delacorte, 1972). On Love Canal, see Elizabeth Blum, Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Lois Marie Gibbs, Love Canal and the Birth of the Environmental Health Movement (Washington, DC: Island, 2010); and Richard Newman, Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). On the history of US environmentalism since 1945 more broadly, see Steven Stoll, US Environmentalism Since 1945: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2007); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island, 2005); Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2014).
6. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 6.
7. I borrow the concept of a “weirded world” from Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction: Environment and Affect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 118.
8. See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
9. See Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986).
10. I borrow the term reproductive futurity from queer theorist Lee Edelman, who uses it to describe a political field in which the pursuit of socials good is always rationalized in terms of the safeguarding of the future, which is symbolized by the child. I use the term here to refer to the future of healthy reproduction more broadly. But my argument throughout is influenced by Edelman’s insight about the how the future is emblematized by the child in much contemporary political discourse. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
11. See Carson, The Silent Spring; and Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (San Francisco: Sierra-Ballantine, 1971).
12. See Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
13. Throughout this book, I use the term imaginary not in the Lacanian sense, but rather to refer to how social life is collectively imagined by a group of people at a particular historical moment. Here, I am drawing inspiration from Charles Taylor’s concept of a social imaginary. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar describes this concept thus: “Within the folds of a social imaginary, we see ourselves as agents who traverse a social space and inhabit a temporal horizon, entertain certain beliefs and norms, engage in and make sense of our practices in terms of purpose, timing, and appropriateness, and exist among other agents. The social imaginary is something more than an immediate practical understanding of how to do particular things—such as how to buy a newspaper, ride a subway, order a drink, wire money, make small talk, or submit a petition. It involves a form of understanding that has a wider grasp of our history and social existence.… It gives us a sense of who we are, how we fit together, how we got where we are, and what we might expect from each other in carrying out collective practices that are constitutive of our way of life.” Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 10. See also Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
14. Here, I draw a distinction between an ecological consciousness with ties to the counterculture and environmental reform, which was a well-known bipartisan project of the 1970s.
15. On the body as a locus of sexual pleasure within the women’s movement, see Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920–1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, eds., Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). On the history of the women’s health movement, see Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Wendy Kline, Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Sandra Morgen, Into Our Own Hands: The Women’s Health Movement in the United States, 1969–1990 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); and Jennifer Nelson, More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2015). On the centrality of medical discrimination within the black power movement, see Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). On the politicization of science and health throughout the AIDS crisis, see Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Debra Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT-UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Books that explore grassroots health movements and popular epidemiology include Jason Corburn, Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); and Steve Kroll Smith, Phil Brown, and Valerie J. Gunter, eds., Illness and the Environment: A Reader in Contested Medicine (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
16. For a more extended discussion of patriotic body politics, see Natasha Zaretsky, “Radiation Suffering and Patriotic Body Politics,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 487–510.
17. See Michael J. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
18. See John Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
19. This shift in blame is indexed in the famous Rambo films of the 1980s. See Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993). Other cultural studies works that take up this figure include David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Peter Lehman, ed., Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001); Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Sarah Hagelin, Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).
20. See Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
21. On the history o
f women’s reproduction and reproductive politics, see the classic book by Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1990). See also Johanna Shoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Solinger, Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). While white, middle-class feminists focused on the securing of abortion rights, feminists of color sometimes advanced a countervailing politics of reproductive rights that aimed to expose the history of state-sponsored forced sterilization campaigns directed against African American, Latina, and Native American women. On this history and the feminist response to it, see Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003); and Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and US Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
22. See, for example, Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2012); Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2009); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Da Capo, 2002); Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1970s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); and Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
23. For an influential example of the former, see Bruce J. Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). Examples of the later include Dan Berger, The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); and Michael Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013).
24. My argument here is indebted to Jeremy Varon, who encouraged me to provide clarification on this crucial point.
25. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Elizabeth Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Other monographs that trace a political transformation in one locale or region include Lassiter, The Silent Majority; and Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
26. See, for example, Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1999).
27. My account of two competing strains of nationalism takes its cues from the well-known contrast between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism in US political culture. See, for example, Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). See also Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); and Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
1. THE CULTURE OF DISSOCIATION AND THE RISE OF THE UNBORN
1. Quoted in William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (New York: Twayne, 1991), 20.
2. Later, he reportedly told Teller, “You have done just that.” Quoted in Shiloh R. Krupar, Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 160.
3. On cancer epidemics as slow motion disasters, see Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
4. On the role of extreme emotion in modern mass politics, see Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right: The New American Right (New York: Doubleday, 1963); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Random House, 1955); and Michael Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967). On civil defense as a form of emotional management, see Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorders (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
5. On the history of the Manhattan Project, see Howard Ball, Justice Downwind: America’s Atomic Testing Program in the 1950’s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); James Delgado, Nuclear Dawn: The Atomic Bomb from the Manhattan Project to the Cold War (Oxford: Osprey, 2009); Joseph Masco, Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). On the ways in which atomic power transformed the institution of the presidency, see Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (New York: Penguin, 2011).
6. “Atoms for Peace,” address by Dwight D. Eisenhower to the 470th plenary meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, December 8, 1953. Reprinted in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower: Containing the public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, January 20, 1953 to January 20, 1961 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1958–1961), 813–822.
7. See Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (New York: New Press, 2006).
8. David Lilienthal, “Whatever Happened to the Peaceful Atom?,” Harper’s Magazine 227, no. 10 (October 1963): 42–43.
9. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 134–135, 143, 183, 195–196, 221, 224, 335, 381.
10. William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: Holt, 1915). Quoted in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 372.
11. John Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9–11/Iraq (New York: Norton, 2011), 259.
12. Ibid., 260.
13. Ibid., 261, 264.
14. Lilienthal, “Whatever Happened to the Peaceful Atom?,” 42–43.
15. See, for example, Glenn Seaborg, “Need We Fear Our Nuclear Future?,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 24, no. 1 (January 1, 1968): 36–42; Paula Fozzy, “Atomic Energy: New Peaceful Uses,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 18, no. 1 (January 1, 1962): 42–44; “Atoms for Peace: the Dream, the Reality,” New York Times Magazine, August 1, 1965. The utopian aspirations for civilian nuclear energy during this period are examined in Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (1989; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 171–174. See also Michael L. Smith, “ ‘Planetary Engineering’: The Strange Career of Progress in Nuclear American,” in Possible Dreams: Enthusiasm for Technology in America, ed. John L. Wright (Dearborn, MI: Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, 1992), 111–123.
16. Steven Spencer, “The Atom Is Going to Work,” Saturday Evening Post 231, no. 32 (February 7, 1959): 29, 110.
17. Luis Campos, Radium and the Secret of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 12.
18. On the entwined histories of radiation and radium, see Lawrence Badash, “Radium, Radioactivity, and the Popularity of Scientific Discovery,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122 (1978): 145–154; Luis Campos, “The Birth of Living Radium,” Representations 97 (Winter 2007): 1–27; Marjorie Malley, Radioactivity: A History of a Mysterious Science (New York: Oxfor
d University Press, 2011); Carolyn de La Pena, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 173–174; and J. Samuel Walker, Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On the radiological safety program developed during the Manhattan Project, see Barton Hacker, The Dragon’s Tail: Radiation Safety in the Manhattan Project, 1942–1946 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). On radiation’s effects on survivors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also Catherine Caufield, Multiple Exposures: Chronicles of the Radiation Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
19. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 164.
20. Quoted in ibid., 158–159.
21. Spencer, “The Atom Is Going to Work.”
22. See Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 3; Penny von Eschen, “Duke Ellington Plays Baghdad: Rethinking Hard and Soft Power from the Outside In,” in Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History, ed. Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 279–300.
23. “Mental Health Aspects of the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy: Report of a Study Group,” No. 151, World Health Organization, Technical Paper, Geneva, 1958, 4–5.
24. See Weart, Nuclear Fear, 173.
25. On the origins of the Price-Anderson Act, see Christian Joppke, Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy: A Comparison of the United States and Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 25, 222.
26. Ibid., 25.
27. See Weart, Nuclear Fear, 168–169.
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