Teaching

I have been involved with teaching the history of science at both Harvard and MIT. Below are some of the teaching resources I have developed. I post them here so that they might be of use to other instructors working on similar topics, looking for something fresh.

Handouts

I am a big believer in paper handouts: they do a certain amount of intellectual and pedagogical work to augment lectures and dicussions that can't be accomplished by slides, such as prolonged contemplation of complex images and text. As a result I make handouts somewhat compulsively. Below are some of the ones I've made that I feel might be useful more generally; if you are a teacher of any sort and want to use them, please feel free.

Map of the Manhattan Project. Designed to give an idea of the primary sites of the Manhattan Project, along with their purpose, and a sense of scale for the whole thing.

Map of A.Q. Khan's nuclear network. A geographical summary of Pakistani proliferator A.Q. Khan's international network of nuclear suppliers and customers. Designed to emphasize the spatial dimension rather than the chronological one.

Documents

I have found the primary source documents below useful for teaching undergraduates in the past. You are free to use them as far as I am concerned.

Draft of a letter from J. Robert Oppenheimer to David Bohm (2 December 1966). This draft of a letter (which indicates the edits made to the final letter sent two days later) was written from Robert Oppenheimer to his former student David Bohm two months before Oppenheimer's death. It was written in response to a query from Bohm about whether to participate in the writing of Philip Stern's book, The Oppenheimer case: Security on trial (published in 1969). It serves as an opportunity for Oppenheimer to give some of his last-recorded views on his security hearing, the question of regret, and his assessment of Heinar Kipphardt's play about the hearing. I find the letter a nice way to portray Oppenheimer's own complicated feelings about his trial and the bomb itself, a nice contrast to the more simplistic "martyr" image that is usually presented in popular media.

Transcript of Executive Session Meeting of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, "Development of a Super Weapon" (9 January 1950). In this transcript of a formally top-secret hearing, the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy read and response to the 1949 General Advisory Committee recommendation against the development of the hydrogen bomb. It is a document that does dual-duty, containing the entire 1949 GAC report (minus the important minority annex, though) as well as contemporary and immediate responses from the powerful congressmen. It is a document with many rich layers, and of course has the additional fun of looking especially "raw" and gritty.

Last updated June 2009.

> Back