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The opposition forces who brought down the project lost, for history will view them poorly: the resulting literature will see to that. The NASM and the Smithsonian lost, not only for the obvious reasons of wasted effort and loss of prestige but also because the cancellation broke off, irreversibly so far as can be seen, a promising new direction for the NASM. With the cancellation of the original Enola Gay exhibit, everyone lost. In June of that year, the NASM opened another version of the exhibit, sharply reduced in size and radically expurgated in content.
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During its many years of preparation, the exhibit project became so controversial that the Smithsonian canceled it on 30 January 1995. "This is, in a sense, a new thing," he said.To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) had planned to open an exhibition centering on the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Wills said he expects more such controversies involving history because the study of America's past is undergoing reassessment. Historian Wills noted: "The representatives of the people can never entirely turn over public funds without accountability when they support scholarship."
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ENOLA GAY MUSEUM EXHIBIT TOP VIEW PROFESSIONAL
The role of a professional historian, whatever his or her political beliefs or loyalties, is to help people understand the context of events." "I guess what I would look for would be really careful, responsible leadership on the part of museum staff. Jack Hurley, history professor at the University of Memphis, said, "I'm not happy with the degree of political interference that political leaders are imposing on public institutions-not just museums, but the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and public broadcasting."īut he acknowledged museum directors have to perform a "balancing act" between public concerns and scholarly pursuit. My father saw history through the prism of World War II-that America fights good wars." I started college in 1971, when a lot of American history was being seen through the prism of Vietnam. "He felt he'd never come out of the war alive, that I would never have been born, without the bomb. "I remember conversations with my father," Pollock said. He suggested generational differences between World War II veterans and curators educated in the Vietnam War era may have played a role. Mark Pollock, professor of rhetoric at Loyola University Chicago, agreed that both sides' perceptions of the Enola Gay exhibit may have differed from reality. "They (museums) are responsible not only for what is said (in an exhibit), but for what people may reasonably think is said," Kennedy said. Stanford University historian Barton Bernstein, whose research was used for the 60,000 estimate, complained that the Smithsonian was bowing to Congress, which controls its funding.īut museum directors must take public reaction into account when they plan exhibitions, according to National Park Service Director Roger Kennedy, former director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Veterans groups believe what had been the conventional wisdom that the death toll would have been much higher, about 230,000. One major point of controversy was the exhibit's estimate that dropping the bomb prevented the deaths of some 60,000 U.S.