History

A Nation with "Collective Amnesia"

Edwin S. Grosvenor — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 13:08:52 +0000

A Nation with "Collective Amnesia" Edwin S. Grosvenor Thu, 07/11/2019 - 09:08

History and Knowing Who We Are

David McCullough — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 11:19:00 +0000

History and Knowing Who We Are David McCullough Fri, 01/21/2011 - 06:19

Who Owns Our History?

Bernard A. Weisberger — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:15:34 +0000

Who Owns Our History? Bernard A. Wei… Fri, 01/21/2011 - 05:15

The Way I See It

Bruce Catton — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:05:39 +0000

The Way I See It Bruce Catton Thu, 01/20/2011 - 12:05

Is History Dead?

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:01:29 +0000

Is History Dead? Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 01/20/2011 - 12:01

On History

John F. Kennedy — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:24:49 +0000

On History John F. Kennedy Thu, 01/20/2011 - 10:24

The Forbes 400

John Steele Gordon — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:12:01 +0000

The Forbes 400 John Steele Gordon Wed, 09/28/2005 - 20:12

The 2005 Forbes 400 list is out, and once again, alas, I failed to make the cut.

And the cut this year is an altogether impressive $900 million. Only twenty-three on the list are worth less than a billion. A mere ten years ago, $340 million got you a spot among the American financial seraphim.

In truth, the Forbes 400 list has tracked the greatest period of wealth creation in the country’s history, for it isn’t only the super-rich who have done well in the last quarter century, it’s nearly everyone. Two-thirds of American families now own their own homes, and real estate has been among the best investments in the last quarter century.

The Forbes 400 list was a brilliant publishing concept, widely imitated now in other publications. But the idea didn’t originate with Forbes. Far from it. The first list of the super rich of which I am aware dates back all the way to 1845, when Moses Y. Beach, editor of the New York Sun, put out a pamphlet called Wealth and Biographies of Wealthy Citizens of New York. It purported to give the size and origin of every fortune in New York City worth over $100,000. With few sources of reliable information, such as 10K reports to the SEC, it must have been based on rumor, gossip, and supposition. But it was highly entertaining gossip and ran through numerous editions over the next decade or so.

The richest man in New York in 1845? John Jacob Astor, supposed to be worth $25 million. That’s about 1/2000th of the fortune of the current number one, Bill Gates.

Keywords

50/50: The 50 Biggest Changes of The Last 50 Years

Phil Patton — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 19:04:24 +0000

50/50: The 50 Biggest Changes of The Last 50 Years Phil Patton Thu, 10/28/2004 - 15:04

Innovation

With American Heritage approaching its fiftieth birthday in December 2004, we asked five leading historians and cultural commentators to each pick 10 leading developments in American life in the last half-century. In this fifth installment, Phil Patton—whose books include Made in USA: The Secret History of the Things That Made America and Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World’s Most Famous Automobile—selects the 10 biggest changes in the realm of innovation and technology. In previous issues we presented our other authorities’ choices of the half-century’s biggest transformations in politics, business, home and the family, and entertainment and culture.

“I can’t imagine how we lived without it.” So we often say about an innovation that has changed our lives. But about the changes that have been most deeply absorbed into the pores of daily routine, we could also often say, “I can’t remember how we lived without it.”

My finger no longer retains the muscle memory of a rotary dial phone. I can no longer remember walking over to a television set to change the channel. When I think of slipping into the back seat of my father’s Oldsmobile, I falsely remember fastening a seat belt. Old television shows are magically remembered in color, and when I recall typing college term papers in the early 1970s, I do so on a click-clacking plastic computer keyboard rather than a massive metal Royal.

Such distortions may be the very definition of what has changed the world most. The year 1954 saw the arrival of the first solar cells, developed at Bell Labs. Boeing was testing a prototype of the 707, the intercontinental jet air-liner that would so change patterns of travel and consumption. Elvis was cutting his first records. And computers were just starting to be connected by telephone lines in the creation of the Cold War SAGE air defense system. The broader implications of that development were hardly imagined.

The impact of some innovations, such as jet planes, has been striking in its predicta-bility. But small innovations have wrought surprisingly large and unexpected changes in daily life too. Here are enough innovations, large and small, to count on all 10 of what used to be called digits —your fingers.

1 Getting the Dish: The Power of the Satellite
It was all there in Arthur C. Clarke’s famous article “Extra-Terrestrial Relays” in Wireless World magazine in October 1945. Inspired by the discovery of German V2 rockets, which he believed could serve as boosters, Clarke proposed launching earth satellites into geosynchronous orbit to handle radio, telephone, and television communications. By 1962 Telstar was beaming TV images between Europe and the United States.

Clarke understood that building ground networks no longer made economic sense, a truth realized as countries all over the Third World leapfrogged straight to wireless phones and satellite TV. The echoes of that article are still resonating in such events as Rupert Murdoch’s installation as the TV baron of China. Satellite phones remain challenged by cost and power demands, but their potential impact was illustrated a few years ago by the poignant final moments of a trapped Mount Everest climber phoning his wife with his last words and more recently by the pixelated pictures from the Iraqi war front generated by satellite phones.

In the western North Carolina valley where my ancestors lived for a century and a half, television reception was long limited by the mountains, and the population was too poor and too sparse to justify investment by cable companies. My cousins and neighbors could see only two fuzzy channels before the arrival of the TV satellite dish. But then this area of Appalachia quickly came to have a remarkably high number of the dishes. Now the mountaineers can keep up with gossip about Hollywood stars as easily as with that about their cousins in the valley.

2 The Silicon Frontier: Technology as Manifest Destiny
We’ve all heard by now of Moore’s Law, the dictum laid down by the Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965 that holds that the number of transistors and therefore the capacity of a silicon chip must rise exponentially. The Intel 8088 processor in the first IBM PC had 29,000 transistors. Today’s Pentium 4 has up to 178 million.

The importance of Moore’s Law, however, lies not just in what chips have done better and better—like running automobile engines more efficiently, regulating the browning of toast, and printing professional-looking flyers for the high school dance—but also in the pace at which their power has advanced, as relentlessly as did the frontier in the nineteenth century. Because of this, marketing and sales staffs have been able to set up a steady pattern of declining prices and new fashions in technology. “Adoption curves” have shot upward on the chart of time. Today’s cutting-edge device for the “early adopter” is tomorrow’s, or even today’s, strip-mall commodity.

Technical advances just over the horizon are like the empty lands of the nineteenth century. Exploitation of the manifest destiny of silicon has reinforced all the patterns of the Old West: speculation, competition, shootouts, and boomtowns and ghost towns.

3 Laser “Lite”
For those of us who grew up on the promise of the laser as a powerful ray gun, slicing up steel plate and boring holes through stone, the unexpected turn has been instead the spread of the low-power, low-cost laser.

It comes as no surprise that Boeing wants to mount antimissile lasers on jets, but it’s astonishing that the soldier in the field can pick out targets with his red laser pointer —and the regional sales manager can target data on his PowerPoint presentation with a pocket-size version of the same thing. We might have guessed that lasers would reshape the corneas of the myopic, but who would have anticipated the laser in a $30 device at the local Wal-Mart playing music or movies from discs?

4 Pumping Calories: The Heat Pump
At Seaside, the planned town in the Florida Panhandle built in the 1970s to elaborate the ideas of the New Urbanism, the architecture melds old Charleston galleries with bungalows and farmhouses in an American village so archetypical it was used as the backdrop for the film The Truman Show. Picket fences are required by town ordinance. But look behind the fence of the majority of houses in Seaside, and you’ll encounter the jarring sight of a mechanical minitower—a heat pump.

The heat pump changed Everytown, U.S.A., and helped create the sunbelt

The heat pump changed Everytown, U.S.A., and helped create what we began in the early 1970s to call the Sunbelt. The device was developed just after World War II by Professor Carl Nielsen of Ohio State University and an engineer named J. Donald Kroeker, whose engineering firm installed the first commercial unit in the Equitable Building in Portland, Oregon, in 1948. Heat pumps were soon to be found in motels across America.

Basically air conditioners that can be reversed to provide low-demand heating systems, they made life tolerable in the Sunbelt, and at low cost. The heat pump removed the need for radiators or vented-air heat in much of the southern half of the country while supplanting the window-installed air-conditioning unit. It has flourished everywhere cooling is more important than heating and has supported our national dependence on low energy prices to make life sustainable in our fastest-growing areas.

5 The End of the Blues? The Mechanical Cotton Picker
The mechanical cotton picker killed Broadway, believes Jimmy Breslin. By driving poor blacks off the fields of the South to “Trailways and Greyhound bus depots for the long ride to New York City,” he argues, it sent blacks moving “into the tenements that were vacated by whites,” who themselves moved to the suburbs and abandoned Times Square. “Broadway would no longer be the place of guys and dolls.”

The migration of African-Americans north and west out of the South is the greatest in American history, larger than that from the Dust Bowl to California. Cotton-picking machinery, pioneered in the 1930s by the brothers John and Mack Rust, was mature by the late 1940s, but not until 1960 was a majority of the cotton crop harvested by machine.

The cotton picker soon became a key focus for historians studying the interaction of social and technological forces. The debate is charted in The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South, by Donald Holley. Did the migration of workers out of the South trigger the adoption of the picker and push the maturation of its technology? Or did the machine displace the workers? Did the appeal of greater freedom and prosperity in the rest of the country pull people off the land and into cities? Or did the disappearance of an agricultural society create a classic displaced proletariat?

What is not in doubt are the consequences: The growth of frequently depressed inner-city neighborhoods and expanding suburban ones, and the transformation of the blues, in its new homes in Chicago and elsewhere, into rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop.

6 Bar Codes and the Universal Product Code
Scanning your own groceries and avoiding the gum-chewing gossiping checkout girl may be worth it for you, but it’s even more worth it for the supermarket, with its just-in-time inventory. Much of America’s recent productivity growth has been built on new sets of standards and means of marking products. The bar code is the most visible example of this.

The Universal Product Code was the first bar-code symbology widely adopted, endorsed by the grocery industry in 1973. Product coding allows for quick price changes and has abetted the growth of the big-box discount store. Items can be tracked from port to rail to loading dock to shelf, thanks to containerized shipping that uses the codes. The consequence is lowered living costs.

Bar codes are just one of many industry standardizations that have lowered costs and changed life. The American home has doubled in average square footage thanks in large part to standardized building materials (4-by-8-foot gypsum board and plywood, 2-by-4 studs 16 inches apart). Electronics is built on standards such as Windows compatibility, VHS, DVD, and so on. Coded product standards even rule the food in our kitchens. A banana that was once just a Chiquita is now a #4011.

7 Buckle Up: The Automobile Seat Belt
Can you recall a car without a seat belt? The movement to put seat belts in the car began in 1954, when the American Medical Association first recommended them. Ford and Chrysler began to offer them as options a year later. By 1965 they were standard.

The push by safety advocates to require seat belts helped establish the adversarial relationship between government and the automobile industry, which was accelerated by the Clean Air Act of 1970. Detroit grumbled, but the engineering achievement involved in developing the catalytic converter and the air bag, both of which Detroit argued were impractical, suggested that under pressure industry could do far more than it thought. For historians, the story indicated how effective “force fed” technology, demanded by government, could be. For philosophers, it challenged John Stuart Mill’s classic liberal precept that government should not protect the individual from himself. Harley-riding libertarians, agreeing with Mill, have forced a rollback of mandatory helmet laws in some states. Will belt laws be unbuckled next?

8 Seeking Heat: the TV Remote Control
Today’s children watch television in a wholly different way from those of the 1950s. The remote control makes television an environment to be moved through, not a schedule of successive programs. The result is grab-’em-quick programming and short attention spans. Once families clustered together to watch Ed Sullivan. Now a program waited for and seen straight through is the exception rather than the rule.

While scientists at the remote Naval Ordnance Test Center at China Lake were developing infrared heat-seeking guidance for the Sidewinder air-to-air missile in the early 1950s, TV designers were struggling to find a way to change channels from a distance. The first remote control, still wired to the set, bore the apt name Lazy Bone. In 1955 a Zenith engineer named Eugene Polley did away with the wire; his Flash-matic used light, but it didn’t work very well, so it was replaced by the Space Command, which relied on ultrasound—frequencies beyond the range of the human ear. The sounds were generated mechanically in a system that was part chime, part tuning fork, because batteries were inadequate to power a wireless electric ultrasound system.

Not until the 1980s did cheap and dependable infra-red technology take over. Today 99 percent of all TV sets come with remote controls, and restless fingers seek hot news and hot new stars unceasingly.

9 …And Going and Going: Better Batteries
We forget how much bigger and slower our portable devices used to be. Remote controls and mobile phones and Game Boys have become possible only with improvements in batteries. Hefty boom boxes are loaded with companies of chunky C cells, but hearing aids, watches, and automobile key fobs contain tiny button batteries that often outlast the devices they power. The change began with the introduction of alkaline and nickelcadmium cells in the 1960s. Later decades saw nickel metal hydrides and then lithium produce order-of-magnitude extensions in battery life. But there have been tradeoffs. Most of the substances that make the best batteries are environmental hazards. Nickel, mercury, cadmium, and other heavy metals tossed into landfills and incinerators are among the most dangerous sources of pollutants. And while cell phones can remain on standby for weeks, running a laptop for a whole airline flight across the United States remains a challenge. The hope? That in the future miniature fuel cells will replace batteries altogether.

10 Scoop! The French Fry Is King
In 1954 the first TV dinner arrived. It was a turkey-and-dressing meal packaged in a segmented foil tray in a box printed up to look like a television screen. Frozen industrialized dinners heated in the home kitchen looked like the culinary future. But in 1955 Ray Kroc began the national franchising of McDonald’s and signaled a different pattern, the industrialization of the restaurant kitchen, with machinery and methods allowing the use of untrained labor. More and more meals would be eaten outside the home as standardized chains spread.

Kroc’s kitchen engineer, James Schindler, first broke down the burger production system, the way Henry Ford had broken down auto manufacturing. Then he refined it, the way Toyota had with its just-in-time automaking. Nothing better exemplified the system than the engineer Ralph Weimer’s fry scoop, a metal device that, when slipped onto a waxed bag, measured out an order of fries with a single unskilled swipe.

McDonald’s success has turned less on burgers than on fries, and the fries in turn have depended on a whole supporting infrastructure. As critical to McDonald’s as Ray Kroc himself was the spud king J. R. Simplot, who produced Idaho russets with just the right water and sugar content for proper caramelizing in cooking fat with just a touch of beef lard added. And the potatoes created by a vast growing, freezing, and transportation network end up in the hands of the worker wielding the scoop.

The scoop is an apt symbol of the power of the franchise itself, the business-in-a-box approach that has sprinkled monad-like restaurants and clothing stores across America and the world in the last half-century. What McDonald’s pioneered has been carried out by Starbucks and the Gap and other chains. The colored signal lights that regulate restaurant machinery, the step-by-step photos on training charts in fast-food kitchens, and the just-in-time shelf arrangements at Gap stores—all are exact counterparts of elements in modern automobile factories.

In the franchise nothing is left to chance—or to sheer stupidity. Not long ago, after happily munching our Roy Rogers burgers, we smoothed out the wrapper to discover a small circle printed on its interior. Inside the circle were printed the words PLACE SANDWICH HERE.

Keywords

History

50/50: The 50 Biggest Changes of The Last 50 Years

Paul Berman — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 18:49:18 +0000

50/50: The 50 Biggest Changes of The Last 50 Years Paul Berman Thu, 07/22/2004 - 14:49

Home and Family

With American Heritage approaching its fiftieth birthday in December 2004, we’ve asked five prominent historians and cultural commentators to each pick 10 leading developments in American life during the last half-century. In this issue Paul Berman, a contributing editor to The New Republic and the author of Terror and Liberalism, published by W. W. Norton & Company, selects the 10 biggest changes in the American home and family life. In other issues this year our authorities offer their choices of the half-century’s biggest transformations in politics, popular culture, business, and innovation and technology.

What have been the 10 greatest changes in American home and family life during the last half-century? I think the first of these changes has turned out to be the deepest of all—the change that set into motion all the other changes, the prime mover. This was, oddly enough, the change mandated by the Supreme Court in its 1954 ruling on …

1 Brown v. Board of Education.
The Brown decision ordered the end of racial segregation in the public schools, on the ground that racial segregation means racial hierarchy, and government-sanctioned racial hierarchy runs counter to the democratic spirit of the Constitution.

You may ask, What has this got to do with families and the home? Everything, oh, everything, in my view. But in order to explain why I think so, I must defer to one of the greatest authorities on family life who ever lived—Honoré de Balzac. In the series of novels and novellas he called The Human Comedy, Balzac catalogued the changes that had overtaken French family life during his own time, the early nineteenth century. These changes were vast. And in Balzac’s judgment, they were horrendous. Daughters became contemptuous of their fathers (Le Père Goriot). Sons were careless of their family’s hard-earned wealth (ibid.). Homosexuals inflicted crime on the rest of society (ibid.). Cousins were monstrous (Cousin Bette). Husbands were indifferent to the material wealth of their own families (ibid.). Wives were unfaithful (practically the entire Human Comedy). And so on. And what was the ultimate source of these many dismaying changes, the moral catastrophe of French family life?

Balzac thought he knew. The ultimate source of the many disasters was the beheading of King Louis XVI in 1793. Until that moment family life in France, as Balzac imagined it, had floated serenely through the waters of a well-ordered society. Fathers and husbands ruled with a firm, just, and loving hand. Wives were obedient, pious, helpful, and ardent. Children loved and obeyed their parents. Cousins were un-monstrous. All society followed the pleasing customs of fidelity and morality, and these excellent customs were aromatized by a delicious feeling of passionate love in correct and Church-sanctioned ways. The social classes upheld the principles of mutual responsibility and honor. And all this, the splendid orderliness of a well-organized society, rested on a single foundation, which was the principle of duly-constituted, legitimate authority. This was the principle of social rank and hierarchy. It was the principle of nobility and of upper nobility—the principle, finally, of monarchy.

Alas! In 1793 the great diabolical crime was committed. The guillotine blade descended, the king’s head was severed from his body, and society was likewise severed from its legitimate governing principle. All hell thereupon broke loose, in Balzac’s view. The sacred bonds of family life disintegrated. Crime triumphed over duty. And Balzac, wide-eyed in astonishment, his curly hair standing on end at the mere thought of how dreadful were the scenes around him, dipped his pen into the inkwell and set out to record the scandalous consequences.

Balzac’s estimation of the French Revolution and its results is not universally shared. Some people have pointed out that monarchy had its shortcomings, feudalism was not everything it was cracked up to be, the Rights of Man was good, and the French Revolution was, all in all, a worthy project. This has always been my own judgment on French history. I take a sans-culotte-ish view of these things. It was a pity about the king and his head. But the ancien régime had to go. Still, I grant that Balzac did notice something important. He correctly understood that the most intimate details of family life rest in mysterious ways on the largest and most public of political principles. He noticed that a change in the foundation of political principles may well wreak considerable changes in the intimate regions of family life.

But enough about the France of long ago. What about America? In our country we never did have much of a feudal past, except here and there, ages ago. Nor was our Revolution anything like the one in France. Nor have we ever had a king of our own. We do have Presidents. But we have never had to behead any of them, though the temptation to do so has sometimes been great. Yet we did in the past have a firmly mandated and legally binding principle of social authority, which somehow or another dominated every phase of social life. This was the principle of racial hierarchy, a principle that descended into modern American life from the slavery of yore, the principle that put white people at the top and black people at the bottom.

In 1954 the Supreme Court decreed an end to that principle. Everyone knows that Brown v. Board of Education did not exactly bring about a revolution in boards of education all over America. Schools remained segregated just as before, and white schools tended to be better, and black schools worse, and the realities of racial hierarchy never did come to an end. Then again, in France beheading the king did not exactly put an end to the realities of social hierarchy either. Even today a surprising number of top figures in French life remain people with a de in their names, signifying aristocracy, as in Dominique de Villepin, the former foreign minister. Still, beheading the king back in 1793 did bring to an end an important principle—namely, the principle of monarchy, therefore of authority as a whole, taken in its ancient feudal version. Brown v. Board of Education did the same, in an American version. The decision brought an end to the principle of racial hierarchy and therefore to the many other kinds of authority that were somehow linked to the principle of racial hierarchy. And what was the effect on American life?

Balzac figured that all hell broke loose in French families after 1793, and many a commentator has concluded that all hell likewise broke loose in American families after 1954. Divorces increased. Promiscuity blossomed. Single motherhood flourished. People took drugs. Children became disrespectful. Homosexuals became much more visible. Homosexuals got married, which they had always done, but now they began to get married to one another. I could go on with the list of horrors, as seen by those who think the list is horrific. But I should like to argue, instead, that from a sans-culotte point of view, the changes that swept across American life in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education have been by and large salutary. The ancien régime in America may have been the good old days for some people, but not for most. The end of the principle of hierarchy in racial relations brought about a thousand changes in American life, among them five hundred alterations in the American family. And these alterations had their positive aspect.

I will list the best, the most admirable, of the changes, beginning with No. 2 because I have already cited Brown v. Board of Education as change number one. The others, in my view, have been:

2 Women became freer
to pursue careers outside the home and therefore realize their own talents, and thus advance the whole of society.

3 Men became freer
to appreciate the full talents of women.

4 Men and Women became freer
to become better lovers, I am convinced, because of their greater freedom to be themselves.

5 Parents became more sensitive
to the peculiarities and needs of their children, instead of merely demanding blind obedience.

6 A new sense of honesty arose
that has permitted modern society to take a firmer line against certain kinds of crime—against child molestation, for instance, and against rape.

7 Marriage:
Young people were no longer pushed into too-early unions.

8 Homosexuality
came to be looked on by a great many people as an ordinary sexual orientation, instead of as something shameful, sinful, et cetera.

9 Gay marriage:
Homosexuals began to be accepted, in a trend that has lately led, through a process that began with Brown v. Board of Education, to the dawn of legal recognition of gay marriage here and there around the country. And, finally …

10 Tolerance:
The country became a little more tolerant and a little more protective of the right to privacy, as shown by Bill Clinton’s political victory over the many censorious busybodies who tried to have him removed from office in the aftermath of his White House affair.

Freedom, personal growth, sensitivity, amorousness, honesty, tolerance, privacy—these are the salutary changes that have overtaken the family and the home in the years after Brown v. Board of Education. My own guess is that French family life took a turn for the better after the French Revolution, in spite of Balzac. American family life is better, I say, after the civil rights revolution. Let Balzac and the reactionaries beat their nostalgic drums in outraged dismay. Let them count up the numerous downsides. I shall study their books. Some of those books will make a terrific read, I’m sure. Balzac himself is one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Even so, progress is a good thing.

Keywords

History

1979: Three Mile Island

Frederic D. O'Brien — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 18:10:21 +0000

1979: Three Mile Island Frederic D. O'Brien Mon, 03/22/2004 - 13:10

25 years ago

Around 4:00 a.m. on March 28, maintenance workers at the Three Mile Island nuclear-power plant, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, accidentally blocked the flow of water into the reactor core. This water acted as a coolant, absorbing the tremendous heat created there; without it, temperatures would build up dangerously, and the core could even melt down. Events like this had been planned for in the reactor’s design, and the staff was trained in dealing with them. The reactor shut down automatically, emergency water pumps were turned on, and control-room workers looked forward to resuming normal operations in a few hours.

What their faulty instruments didn’t show was that a pair of valves in the emergency cooling system were shut, preventing water from reaching the core, while a valve that allowed water to drain from the core remained open. With coolant levels dropping, the core started to overheat dangerously as engineers and technicians struggled, amid a cacophony of alarm horns and a forest of blinking lights, to figure out what was going on. After 16 hours, plant operators finally managed to restore the flow of coolant. The next day a spokesman assured the public that all was well, the situation was routine, and the danger was past.

But it wasn’t. Unanticipated reactions had released hydrogen gas into the reactor vessel, where it accumulated at high pressure and temperature. If it reacted with oxygen, the liberated energy could blow the reactor dome open and spew radioactive material across central Pennsylvania. It took several tense days, during which 140,000 residents left the area, for plant workers to dissolve the hydrogen gas and eliminate the threat.

No one died or was injured at Three Mile Island, and there was no dangerous release of radiation. Yet in the accident’s aftermath, investigators uncovered a widespread disregard for safety throughout the nuclear industry. The government responded with strict and voluminous new regulations.

In retrospect, Three Mile Island was a watershed for nuclear power, though an unusual one. The industry was already in trouble; with costs mounting, orders for new plants had virtually ceased by the late 1970s. On the other hand, despite Three Mile Island, nuclear power generation increased through the 1980s and 1990s as plants ordered earlier were completed; today it supplies about 20 percent of America’s electricity. So Three Mile Island did not kill nuclear power in America, but it did drive a stake through the industry’s heart by greatly boosting both public opposition and the costs of building and running a plant.

Keywords

History