Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia by Lindsey A. Freeman (review)

Lindsey A. Freeman’s Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia significantly adds to the body of work on the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and postwar atomic culture. Freeman, an assistant professor of sociology at Buffalo State, State University of New York, has created her own niche with this book. She has written a historically grounded, theoretically driven work of synthesis that tells the story of atomic nostalgia in Oak Ridge.

The historical case studies in the book are thorough and well chosen, and the research is solid. Rather than try to cover all aspects of Oak Ridge’s history, Freeman digs deep into a few key images and ideas. Events that serve as little more than a sidebar in other histories of Oak Ridge (John Hendrix’s prophecy, for instance) are analyzed for what they can tell us about the period. However, the book is far more than just a historical retelling. Freeman weaves social theory into every aspect of her book. The work of such thinkers as Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault are incorporated into Freeman’s argument throughout the book. In Longing for the Bomb, the relationship between history and theory is seamless, with Freeman’s skillful prose holding the two together.

Freeman has a keen ability to assign topics to unfamiliar categories in illuminating ways. She opens the book with a description of how the founding of Oak Ridge was “an act of magic geography,” which aptly captures the moment when the federal government chose “five small communities” to be bulldozed to erect a massive atomic testing complex (p. 1). Freeman explores nostalgia as a form of social memory. On the one hand, feelings of nostalgia shared by a community can “have a disorienting effect on societies, which in extreme cases can destabilize them—preventing its members from imagining a better (or different) present and future as they long for a past, which seems superior and often more secure” (p. 9). On the other hand, a community can have critical nostalgia: “We can be drawn in by the allure of better days that have passed us by into a place of thinking how to redeem our present and alter our course of future action” (p. 9).

Freeman’s chapters flesh out these concepts and the difference between critical and uncritical nostalgia. She begins with the story of Oak Ridge’s founding and then works through the creation of community during the war years, the transition to postwar life, the creation of museums and festivals to celebrate the secret city, and the ways photography captured the beginning of the atomic age. Freeman has made judicious choices about the topics she examines, and each chapter is rich in detail about how nostalgia has developed in Oak Ridge over the past seventy years.

The book ends with Oak Ridge slowly losing its atomic distinctiveness. As the older generation passes, only memories passed down through families are left. What will become of atomic tourism after the passing of the generation that gave birth to the bomb, as well as the generation that lived in its shadow? Freeman envisions a passing away of the atomic past, not as a tragic event, but as a slow, beautiful fade. Whether or not Freeman is correct about this decay of memory (a new Manhattan Project National Historical Park is in the making), Longing for the Bomb is a substantial contribution to the fields of atomic history, history and memory, and the intersection of social theory and social history.