Tag: mass audience
An Oppenheimer Expert Watches ‘Oppenheimer’
This article containers spoilers for the film Oppenheimer.
Few authors have written as insightfully about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer as Richard Rhodes, whose 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is widely regarded as the definitive account of the Manhattan Project. Rhodes’s comprehensive history, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is both a massive work of scholarship—the main text alone runs nearly 800 pages—and a literary feat that he conceived as “the tragic epic of the twentieth
The Forgotten Best Sellers That Revealed America to Itself
In the years during and after World War II, the battle against fascism spread to an unanticipated front line: the national conscience of the United States. The warriors in this fight, many of them Black and Jewish veterans of combat abroad, insisted that America confront and rectify its homegrown racial hierarchy and religious intolerance. “Double V” was the slogan coined by the African American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, meaning victory over Hitler abroad and over Jim Crow at