A History of Land by Amanda C. Sweet

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For Want of a Nail

Michael Swaine with Amy Franceschini / Futurefarmers. For Want of a Nail. Distributed by The MIT Press (Cambridge, MA) for no place press, 2019.

From the webpage for this book:

For Want of a Nail takes as its starting point a series of curious memoranda sent from J. Robert Oppenheimer's office in October 1943 and archived in the Los Alamos Historical Museum, in which the eminent scientist repeatedly requests a nail in the wall upon which he could hang his hat. The persistence and specificity of the request for this nail inspired the international art collective Futurefarmers to create, by hand (and after more than a half-century delay), three nails for the theoretical physicist: one forged from a meteorite, one cast using 1943 steel pennies, and a third made by re-fusing Trinitite, a material formed by residue from the Trinity nuclear bomb test.

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