History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past

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Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention enola gay public history gay exhibit war political smithsonian general interest. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. This is a collection of essays centered around the controversy that surrounded the Smithsonian's plans to display the Enola Gay for the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII. It highlights how politically charged the past has become, and the fundamental controversy that has grown up between those who wish to keep rose-colored glasses on the look at the American past and those who want to look at all of the past, not just the victorious parts.

This is a frustrating but highly engaging read for both historians and the general public. It might raise your hackles a little, though. This book is required reading in many Public History courses, and for good reason. Many students of history remain painfully ignorant of the political battles which have shaped education about US History and public memory in general, and Linnenthal does a fantastic job of bringing this shadowy conflict into the light.

For anyone interested in public history, the nature of museums and memorials, or a desire for a more in-depth look at this subset of the Culture Wars of the s, this book is a must-read. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase.

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As a graduate student, this book was useful in providing information about the use of public history in society. It was also a very interesting read. One person found this helpful. Well written and makes you think about what history really is. One person found this helpful 2 people found this helpful.

I ordered this book because I have a report to write and this topic is of high interest to me. I just finished the introduction and am dismayed as this is going to be a long paper to the extent that I rely on this book. What offends me so far is that the editors don't substantiate their position. They talk about the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian and how it was derided by Bob Dole, but they don't say why Bob Dole was wrong.

History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past

They state their own position that WW II was a war that we won as a legitimate victory to their credit but they immediately go in a tirade about conservatives and their criticism for a left wing media. It's true, as one of the other reviewers points out, that this book if full of largely liberal-slanted arguments--and mostly criticisms--of the effort to change or cancel the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian in You will not find a "balanced" set of viewpoints here--they are all clearly critical of the largely conservative movement that prevented the original exhibit from going forward.

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This slanted viewpoint, however, is not a failing. Indeed, a book such as this was--and is--necessary, since the views of academic historians were largely drowned out during the cacophony of negative attention given to the exhibit during the 90s. Although some of the observations are dated e. This is a worthwhile read if you want to see a test case for how real scholarship gets treated in the public sphere in today's political climate.

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First of all, this book isn't really about the Enola Gay, or honestly about any of the events that happen within the chapters. This book is about pubic ownership of common histories. When the Enola Gay bombed, for instance, the dominant culture was behind act. Still today, many people are in favor of the act, but in our public spaces, there are of course those who see it differently. This book is about how museums display public history; and, this book is about several problems with perspective that have arisen from narrow minded portrayals of a history lived by many more than the dominant culture.

It is a good book worthy of a fair reading. History can both unite and divide our country. Young says that it was. But there is unanimous regret among the essayists that an opportunity was lost, as Kohn writes, ""to inform the American people. There was a problem adding your email address. Be the first to discover new talent!

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Each week, our editors select the one author and one book they believe to be most worthy of your attention and highlight them in our Pro Connect email alert. Sign up here to receive your FREE alerts. By clicking on "Submit" you agree that you have read and agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. 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.

History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past by Edward T. Linethal

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.

By 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 addition, as a historian I was aware of how uneasily the atomic bombing of Hiroshima rested in the American consciousness. 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. I certainly imagined that such a show would raise difficulties for the museum--problems between the commemorative and historical voices, between a reverently held story and its later reappraisal.

But I expected, as had happened elsewhere, that the museum would overcome them and that a historically significant Enola Gay exhibit would open in In fact, I felt remarkably sanguine about the problems or issues that might arise, and the record of the advice my colleagues on the committee and I offered the museum during its early script preparations indicates how little any of us foresaw what lay in the museum''s path.

So the following reconstruction of the ugly controversy that doomed the exhibition is meant not just as a record of the failures and errors of others, but also of what I proved incapable of imagining as events began to unfold. There is probably no better place to start that reconstruction than with a simple fact that was largely ignored while the controversy was under way.

Although uneasiness about the Enola Gay and its mission would often be called a product of a disaffected Vietnam generation, left-wing historians, or the politically correct, its roots are half a century old. In the spring and summer of , for example, the American press engaged in lively debate over alternatives to unconditional Japanese surrender.

There was vigorous disagreement among Manhattan Project scientists who made the atomic bomb about the wisdom of the decision to use it, andafter the war''s end, there was strong criticism of its use from many prominent Protestant and Catholic spokespeople. Influential conservative voices also criticized the decision. In , Henry Luce, the founder of Time , wrote, "If instead of our doctrine of ''unconditional surrender,'' we had all along made our conditions clear, I have little doubt that the war with Japan would have ended no later than it did--without the bomb explosion that so jarred the Christian conscience.

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