Everyday Life in the Spectacular World of the Atom | A Lecture with Dr. Kate Brown

Kate Brown explores how the world’s first nuclear weapons in the US and USSR spawned model cities and environmental calamity. She argues that the demands of nuclear secrecy and safety reshaped the American and Soviet landscapes by militarizing and compartmentalizing them in order to cordon off secrets of nuclear technologies and the spillage of nuclear waste.  Dr. Brown is a multiple-award-winning historian and professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.  Her research travels as (what she calls with just a bit of irony) a “professional disaster tourist” has taken her around the world—from Russia to Richland, Washington; from Kazakhstan to Montana to the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion.  Sponsored by the University of Tennessee's Department of History.