Oak Ridge Postcards

Postcard folders for U.S. cities are usually no big deal—beyond the nifty lettering on the front ("Greetings From Boise!"), what you typically find are silk-screened shots of hotels, natural attractions, statues, etc. Certainly, these images can be interesting, particularly if they capture things that no longer exist. But it's rare to see postcards for top-secret government military installations charged with producing doomsday weapons. Nevertheless, here it is: a postcard book for Oak Ridge, Tenn., issued shortly after the end of World War II. During the war, Oak Ridge was a "secret city," built from the ground up by the U.S. government and populated by locals from the surrounding area who weren't aware of the city's true mission: to build the atomic bomb.