HSTRY 390/388 B: Junior Colloquium in History of Science
This seminar-style course is required for History and Philosophy of Science majors and History of Science minors (both of these groups should register under the 390 number).
The goal of this seminar is to develop skills necessary for undertaking an independent research project in the senior year: defining a topic, developing a bibliography, critically assessing the relevant literature, working with primary sources, writing a review essay and a project proposal. We will work through these tasks as a group while discussing common readings, and students will go through these preliminary steps for an individual project.
For this year's colloquium we will consider the Manhattan Project as a problem for historians of science. The recent film Oppenheimer has raised some of the classic issues surrounding the events leading up to the use of nuclear weapons by the United States at the end of World War II, and provides scope for research in history of science and technology, as well as environmental, political, and military history (at least). For history of science, a central issue is the problem of biography -- individual and collective -- and by extension, so-called "physicists' histories" of the Manhattan Project.