Lavine, Matthew (Author)
The discovery of radiation and radioactivity at the close of the nineteenth century provoked extraordinary and enduring reactions from the American public. Fueled as much by direct physical experience of these novel energies as by breathless newspaper reportage, the lay public quickly amassed a broad and contradictory welter of impressions about them. They were variously understood to be natural or artificial, unpredictable and yet bound by the laws of nature, healthful or harmful, and rare or ubiquitous. Moreover, these understandings were constantly in conversation with one another, as the initial fascination evinced by the public as a whole was carefully nurtured and shaped by an array of interested actors ranging from scientific societies to fiction authors. Such an expansive engagement with so subtle and elusive a physical phenomenon was unprecedented, and was the result of the diversity of ways in which the public came into contact with them, voluntarily and otherwise. This dissertation characterizes that emergent nuclear culture by examining the principal sites at which it was created: rhetorically, in newspapers, science fiction magazines, textbooks and popularizations, and experientially, via medical encounters and consumer culture. It establishes the nature and scope of the interpretive tools, both factual and connotative, that Americans had access to with respect to these novel energies, and explores the channels through which information about them flowed. By elaborating upon the diverse library of impressions, built up over half a century, that the nonscientist public could draw upon, it provides a point of reference against which to measure Americans' experience of radiation and radioactivity in the post-Hiroshima world.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/05 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3314335.
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