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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

monuments, museums, mausoleums, art, Chinese nationalism

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

History

Abstract

In January 1995 after a national controversy that was sprawled upon the pages of USA Today and the Washington Post, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum reluctantly announced the abandonment of its Enola Gay exhibition. The cause of this cancellation was the divisive exhibit script that had questioned the necessity to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima—a perspective that satisfied historians but that alarmed veterans and conservatives. A fervent culture war quickly embroiled America, splitting the nation into those who supported the curators’ vision of an exhibition that reflected current historical scholarship against those who supported the veterans’ view that the Smithsonian was guilty of rewriting history.

Included in

History Commons

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