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Nonetheless, nothing in my experience with memorial exhibits prepared me for what happened when the National Air and Space Museum tried to mount its Enola Gay exhibit to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. In addition, as a historian I was aware of how uneasily the atomic bombing of Hiroshima rested in the American consciousness.
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Watching members of the Park Service-and Pearl Harbor survivors-grapple with such a seemingly simple matter as whether a Japanese airman's uniform should be displayed (in an attempt to give a "human dimension" to the former enemy), I came to a fuller appreciation of the inevitable tension between a commemorative voice-"I was there, I know because I saw and felt what happened"-and a historical one that speaks of complicated motivesand of actions and consequences often hardly considered at the moment of the event itself.īy the time Martin Harwit called me, I had published a book on the problems of memorializing American battlefields, from Lexington and Concord to Pearl Harbor, and had for more than a year been observing from within the volatile creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In the early 1990s, I studied the National Park Service's preparations for the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. There, I had first heard curatorial decisions attacked and derided as "politically correct history," and as a craven caving in to "special interests" but there, too, I had watched as a complex interpretation of a mythic American event had successfully supplanted an enduring "first take." Custer and the Seventh Cavalry into a historic site where different-often clashing-stories could be told. After all, for many years I had studied battles over battlefield memorialization, clashes over "sacred ground." In the late 1980s, I had spent much time with National Park Service personnel as they struggled to transform the Little Bighorn battlefield from a shrine to George A. When, in the fall of 1993, Martin Harwit, director of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), asked me to serve on an advisory committee for that museum's upcoming Enola Gay exhibit, I was excited.