This volume is the second in a series based on the lectures and discussions of historians and physicists at a Fermilab international symposium on the history of particle physics. The first volume, The Birth of Particle Physics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), was based on a symposium held in May 1980 that traced the emergence of the field out of cosmic-ray and nuclear physics in the 1930s and 1940s and also examined the extent to which relativistic quantum field theory could serve as a theoretical structure for the new area. All the lectures were given by physicists; historians of science participated in panels and in audience discussions, but did not serve as speakers.

The present book, more complex than the first, grew out of the International Symposium on Particle Physics in the 1950s: Pions to Quarks, held at Fermilab on 1–4 May 1985. Whereas the first symposium and volume dealt with the birth and infancy of particle physics in the 1930s and 1940s, the focus of this book is the period in which the field found its identity, became established, and turned into a big science – the adolescence of particle physics, with all the problems and anxieties that term evokes. At the second Fermilab history symposium, and in the present volume, historians of science played a major role, delivering talks and preparing chapters based on their presentations.

The book is divided into ten parts, each containing chapters based on symposium talks, a few also contain articles on topics that could not be addressed in the three short days of the symposium, but which the editors felt deserve a place in the volume.