Racecraft on the Midwest Frontier: The Epistemic Culture of Postwar Physics at the University of Chicago

After World War II, US political leaders declared the nation's singular intellectual leadership to a public grappling with the anxieties of the nuclear age, ongoing social inequities, and the uncertainties of a reorganizing global order. The state's increased investment and participation in investigation, research, and experimentation fundamentally restructured the scientific economy and its roles for political, academic, and corporate actors, with wide-reaching ripple effects. This paper connects sociological observation of scientific knowledge production with historical and geographical context, in service of better understanding the social and cultural impact of physics as practiced at the University of Chicago between the 1940s and 1960s. The history of physics at the university, as constructed from archival research, will serve as the orientation to the epistemic culture of the discipline in this temporal and geographical context. Framing the academy's role in the material and ideological construction of race allows for the positioning of science in place, connecting this disciplinary history to its cultural footprint. This research concludes with a blended conceptual analysis drawing from scholarship on geography, race, physics, anthropology, and sociology of knowledge to establish a way of understanding physics as racecraft.