An Experiment in Teaching Hiroshima to Tomorrow's Engineers
As many of our readers attempt to recover from the semester's end, I'm pleased to present a guest post by David Spanagel, reflecting on a just-completed pedagogical experience. This past term, I had the rare pleasure of teaching the history of modern American science and Technology survey course at WPI, an institution populated predominantly by engineering and natural sciences majors. Despite the high opportunity costs involved, I selected just two books to “cover” the twentieth century portion of this course, and both of these featured the role of physicists in developing the atomic bomb during World War II. A Tale of Two Cities , produced by the War Department in 1946, online thanks to the Prelinger Archives -- and one of Dan's favorite teaching films David Cassidy’s recently published A Short History of Physics in the America Century lived up to its title, providing my fact-obsessed but reading-averse engineering students with just 170 pages that introduce and contex