The Enola Gay controversy or some might called it the Smithsonian atomic bomb exhibit debates sparks a History Wars in American public. It will focuses on various predicaments in an attempts to produce a nation’s single and definitive public history and memory shared commonly and objectively by a nation. This essay explores the ways in which the Enola Gay debate was fought out primarily in the American public media and in congressional hearings about history and memory. The story of the Smithsonian and the Enola Gay reflected a larger battle in America over academic goals, cultural superiority, sacrifices, heroic effort and how should American remember their past. As the scripts developed, the exhibit had set off a heated controversy concerning national ideologies, the collective memory of self-victimization, and contestation over historical knowledge. This announcement brought the museum into contact with a variety of interested groups. Along that process, various stakeholders in the representation of this historical event were embroiled including Smithsonian curators, veterans such as the Air Force Association and the American Legion, members of the United States Congress, academic historians, media, American public and even the Japanese.Īs early as in 1988, Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) announced that they would display the Enola Gay as part of an interpretive exhibit on the end of World War II and the origins of the Cold War. This controversy centred around the failed 1995 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s exhibit of the Enola Gay, which intended to examine intersection the end of World War II beginning with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was based on the controversy over how history should be represented for the decision of dropping an atomic bomb on Japan when the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum drafted an exhibit entitled “ The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Cold War” around the refurbished Enola Gay to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1995. The term “ History Wars” was coined in the United States in 1994.