![]() While the “Enola Gay fiasco,” as some at the museum came to call it, was not the first skirmish in America’s ongoing culture wars, it was an ominous warning of the battles to come. When the Smithsonian decided to exhibit the “Enola Gay,” the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the director and curators of the National Air & Space Museum (NASM) hardly anticipated the firestorm of controversy that would result. What harbingers of the future of public history in the US resided in the mid-1990s fight over the meaning of the Enola Gay? The Fiasco When curators at the Smithsonian planned a critical commemoration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of WWII, the clash between professional historians, public interest groups, veterans, and politicians launched an era of high stakes contention in the United States over the meanings of America’s pasts for its present.
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