American Science in an Age of Anxiety

American Science in an Age of Anxiety is the first major study of American scientists' encounters with Cold War anticommunism in the decade after World War II. Through the extensive use of archival sources - including recently released FBI files - as well as published primary and secondary sources, Jessica Wang demonstrates the stifling effects of anticommunist ideology on the postwar politics of science. By examining cases of individual scientists subjected to loyalty and security investigations and the organizational response of the scientific community to political attacks, she shows that scientists were neither uniformly helpless victims nor selfless heroes. Rather, her narrative exposes the deep political divisions within the scientific community over the Cold War and provides a complex story of hard choices, a community in crisis, and roads not taken.

First sentence: From the perspective of the present, the Cold War seems to have had a certain inevitability, but from the vantage point of the end of World War II, the future shape of American foreign relations and domestic politics was far from clear.

Year

1998

Language

English

Publisher

The University of North Carolina Press

Editions

3

Pages

392

ISBN

9780807847497

Data source: Wikidata