Created space for African-American and non-Anglo-American ethnics to appropriate historical memory to challenge the status quo and call for their incorporation within the national community.1930s and 1940s – national historical memory was “open” and dominated by liberals.Michael Sherry argues that by the 1990s there was a “narrowing” of national historical memory and its appropriation by the populous.The final outcome was that the Enola Gay was displayed with no accompanying exhibit.Critics saw any presentation of the “darker” side of American history as unpatriotic.In the end the debate over the Enola Gay became a controversy over not just the exhibit but an attack on the historian profession as politically correct and anti-American.Scholars were late to the political game, marshaling a limited public relations campaign at the end of 1994 – after the debate had been dominated by veteran & anti-exhibition groups.The exhibit became entirely politicized by the time of the revised exhibition and part of the larger culture wars of the 1990s.
#Enola gay exhibit controvery archive
Today, the hull of the Enola Gay is presented with a plaque and a video about the crew.īelow is a sampling of articles which were collected as part of THE LIBRARY archive and are currently available at the Exploratorium. After five official script revisions the display was radically reduced.
Over the next year a battle ensued between the veterans groups, historians and anti-nuclear war activists over what should be included in the show. Several veterans organizations who recieved a copy of the first draft of the exhibition expressed concern over what they saw as a revisionist lean to the information displayed. In summer of 1993, the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum began planning a show about the atomic bombing of Japan and the end of World War II to accompany their display of the refurbished hull of the Enola Gay. Michael Heyman, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. "The institution has an obligation to be historically The Enola Gay Controversy The Enola Gay Controversy