Hidden Figures

Shetterly's research recovers the stories of the African-American women mathematicians who worked as human computers at NACA and later NASA, performing the trajectory calculations that undergirded the space program from the 1930s through the 1960s. The book goes well beyond the Hollywood adaptation, documenting not only the technical contributions of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden but also the institutional context of segregated facilities, limited promotion paths, and the slow, uneven process of integration within a federal agency. Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia, surrounded by these women and their families, which gives the narrative a specificity that academic histories often lack. The book is at its strongest when it shows how organizational structures — who gets credit, who gets access to which meetings, whose name appears on a report — determine whose work becomes visible and whose disappears.