Midwest Book Review
American attitudes toward
war and
historical reporting of
facts are revealed in a title which examines historical
interpretation and representation processes in America's
past. From the events surrounding the Enola Gay to realities
about patriots, encounters with other cultures, and other
American historical events, this provides much food for
thought.
From Kirkus Reviews , June 15, 1996
Linenthal (Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create
America's Holocaust Museum, 1995, etc.), Engelhardt, and six
other historians use a bitter controversy to consider
America's attitudes toward its past. The curators of the
Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum
planned an ambitious
exhibit centered on the Enola Gay, the
airplane used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug.
6, 1945. The exhibit, marking the event's 50th anniversary,
would have described the intense desire to end the war that
led to the bombing, but also the way the bombing's
nightmarish effects infected the
world with fear of
nuclear annihilation. Conservatives claimed the exhibit would be
anti-nuclear and anti-war, throwing into question the
decision to drop the bomb, and would transform the Enola
Gay's crew from heroes to terrorists. Under relentless
attack, the museum backed down and its director resigned.
The Enola Gay is now displayed virtually out of context.
These essays take the controversy as the starting point for
ruminations on American attitudes toward war, the nuclear
age, and, with exceptional insight,
history itself. The
writers are not uniformly supportive of the planned exhibit:
Former air force chief historian Richard H. Kohn concludes,
for instance, that it wasn't a balanced presentation; New
York University history professor Marilyn B. Young says that
it was. But there is unanimous regret among the essayists
that an opportunity was lost, as Kohn writes, ``to inform
the American people . . . about warfare, airpower, World War
II and a turning point in world history.'' The Enola Gay
conflict, writes University of Wisconsin history professor
Paul Boyer, was about ``the disparity between the mythic
past inscribed in popular memory and the past that is the
raw material of historical scholarship.'' This round of
history wars, conclude the writers in this excellent
collection, was won by the myth-makers
More summaries about the History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past