Cynthia C. Kelly, ed. — The Manhattan Project, signed and inscribed (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007)

Why this book is in the NMLP archive

The Manhattan Project is the central 20th-century event in New Mexico history. Los Alamos National Laboratory was the principal design and weapons-engineering site for the project from 1943 onward; the July 16, 1945 Trinity Site test (the first detonation of a nuclear device) took place at the Jornada del Muerto desert in southern NM, on what is today the White Sands Missile Range. The town of Los Alamos itself was created by the project — J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves, and the assembled scientific and engineering community built the Pajarito Plateau site on what had been the Los Alamos Ranch School. The post-1945 NM economy and political identity is in significant measure a downstream consequence of this single project.

Cynthia C. Kelly's The Manhattan Project is the principal popular-press anthology of primary-source documents and eyewitness accounts from the project's principal sites: Los Alamos (the design lab), Oak Ridge Tennessee (uranium enrichment via the calutron and gaseous-diffusion processes), and Hanford Washington (plutonium production reactors). It collects diary entries, official correspondence, technical memoranda, post-war reflections, and historian commentary into a single 480-page reference accessible to the educated lay reader. Kelly is President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, the Washington-based nonprofit that has been the principal advocacy organization for the preservation of Manhattan Project sites and which lobbied successfully for the 2015 establishment of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park (administered jointly by the National Park Service and the Department of Energy with units at Los Alamos NM, Oak Ridge TN, and Hanford WA).

Richard Rhodes wrote the introduction. Rhodes is the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, 1986) — the canonical popular history of the project that won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award — and its sequels Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), Arsenals of Folly (2007), and Twilight of the Bombs (2010). His introduction to Kelly's anthology contextualizes the documentary selections within the broader narrative of the project's scientific and political history.

Why this copy matters

The signed-and-inscribed status is the high-value provenance datapoint:

The "for your interest in this history" framing of the inscription suggests the recipients were donors, researchers, or institutional supporters of the Atomic Heritage Foundation rather than personal friends — consistent with the Foundation's pattern of presentation copies to NM-area donors who supported the Manhattan Project National Historical Park advocacy work. The "Cindy Kelly" rather than "Cynthia C. Kelly" form of the signature is the editor's informal hand and matches her authentic signing examples reproduced in Atomic Heritage Foundation correspondence and donor-recognition materials.

For a New Mexico-based collector, archive, or institutional library, a signed Kelly first edition of The Manhattan Project is one of the cleaner provenance pieces in the modern (post-2000) Los Alamos / Manhattan Project secondary literature. Cynthia Kelly is still actively living and working as of 2026, so her signature pool remains open, but signed first-edition copies of this specific volume are increasingly hard to source. Richard Rhodes is also actively living (born 1937), and the Rhodes-introduction provenance adds an associational layer.

The book is in clean hardcover condition with dust jacket intact and uncreased.

Multi-part bibliographic record

How it came in

Donated in May 2026 through NMLP. Donor scenario anonymized per archive policy. The "Debby and Buck" recipients of the original inscription are unidentified; the inscription wording and date suggest they were Atomic Heritage Foundation donors or associated with the NM-region Manhattan Project preservation network. Book in clean hardcover condition with dust jacket intact and uncreased.

Where it's going

Likely route: a Manhattan Project history collector, a Los Alamos resident or LANL retiree building a personal reference library, an Atomic Heritage Foundation donor or Friend, the Bradbury Science Museum library, the Los Alamos Historical Society research collection, or the Center for SW Research at UNM (which holds significant Manhattan Project ephemera). Signed Kelly firsts are not vanishingly rare given that her Atomic Heritage Foundation work continues to generate signing opportunities, but the inscription with the personal "for your interest in this history" phrasing makes this copy a presentation rather than an event-line signing — a higher-tier provenance class.