Nuclear and Coal in the Postwar US Dissertation Presented in Partial
Power From the Valley: Nuclear and Coal in the Postwar U.S. Dissertation Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Megan Lenore Chew, M.A. Graduate Program in History The Ohio State University 2014 Dissertation Committee: Steven Conn, Advisor Randolph Roth David Steigerwald Copyright by Megan Lenore Chew 2014 Abstract In the years after World War II, small towns, villages, and cities in the Ohio River Valley region of Ohio and Indiana experienced a high level of industrialization not seen since the region’s commercial peak in the mid-19th century. The development of industries related to nuclear and coal technologies—including nuclear energy, uranium enrichment, and coal-fired energy—changed the social and physical environments of the Ohio Valley at the time. This industrial growth was part of a movement to decentralize industry from major cities after World War II, involved the efforts of private corporations to sell “free enterprise” in the 1950s, was in some cases related to U.S. national defense in the Cold War, and brought some of the largest industrial complexes in the U.S. to sparsely populated places in the Ohio Valley. In these small cities and villages— including Madison, Indiana, Cheshire, Ohio, Piketon, Ohio, and Waverly, Ohio—the changes brought by nuclear and coal meant modern, enormous industry was taking the place of farms and cornfields. These places had been left behind by the growth seen in major metropolitan areas, and they saw the potential for economic growth in these power plants and related industries.
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