“Fermilab is the grandest instrument ever built by American physicists; just one of its particle detectors is bigger than an entire laboratory of an earlier generation. This book tells the Fermilab story in full for the first time, and tells it as a human story, with no more technical detail than necessary. The book should appeal not only to readers interested in science and technology, but to anyone concerned about the negotiation and management of landmark projects.”

Spencer Weart, AIP Center for History of Physics

“This book is masterful in being both a major scholarly contribution to the history of physics and a riveting read....The authors benefited from a long connection to Fermilab and complete access to personnel, files, and archives. They also display a sense of the historical changes and a thorough understanding of the physics. It is, however, to their great credit that they also have produced such a readable page turner. Fermilab, still working magnificently in 2009, has found the chroniclers it deserves.”

Gino Segrè | Physics in Perspective

“It is delightful to have in hand and to read the work of historians Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne Kolb, and Catherine Westfall. Fermilab weaves their accounts into a coherent narrative in limpid prose that should be accessible to anyone with an interest in the history of late-20th-century science....Fermilab’s story is well told and attractively framed in the book, a fitting capstone for the edifice of historical scholarship that the authors have erected over 30 years. Megascience requires ’megahistory,’ and Hoddeson knows how to pioneer in that field.”—Robert W. Seidel, Science

Robert W. Seidel | Science

“Fermilab, the book, is the first written history of this unique place, covering both the birth of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and its journey to its current position as a world centre of ‘megascience’. Yet Fermilab is far from being a dry historical account. It spans the entire spectrum of what is required to establish a cutting-edge facility and perform research there — from organizational aspects and technological choices to the sociology and politics of funding and site selection….Fermilab will be of interest to anyone curious about science and science policy, as well as those who want a better understanding of what it is like to perform large-scale research in high-energy particle physics.”—Robert Roser, Physics World

Robert Roser | Physics World

“A comprehensive and thoroughly engaging history of the world’s first high-energy-particle physics laboratory. . . . The authors do an exceptional job of explaining the multitutde of tensions that led to the decision to construct Fermilab.”

Journal of Illinois History

“[The authors] do a wonderful job of weaving together the lab’s technical and scientific developments with their corresponding social, institutional, political, and economic contexts. . . . The book’s highly detailed, nuanced, and well-supported account of the intertwined developments in organization, technology, and scientific discovery as Fermilab came to maturity will be essential reading in the history of particle phycics and the broader history of 20th-century physics.”

Charles Thorpe | Physics Today