Invisible to the curatorial teams in their exhibit planning work, public responses eventually revealed the distance all too clearly. The museum controversies of the 1990s exposed how much distance had opened between scholarly and popular understandings of the American past. Public history grounded in scholarship thus provides a critical resource for the functioning of democracy. Maintaining interactive communication between scholars and citizens assures that fresh thinking can address real public needs and that new analyses of the national past can empower citizens to make their own important decisions well. In return for sharing their scholarship, scholars get opportunities to reach wide audiences and to test and shape their theories by hearing what questions citizens are asking. By grounding curatorial work in scholarship, public historians help increase the circulation of up-to-date ideas, even about subjects long in the past. Scholars remain indispensable partners in the practice of public history, not only to assure the accuracy of museum exhibits but also, and more importantly, to foster communication between the academy and the citizenry. The profession suffered both immediate and lasting consequences from these traumatic years of public exposure, and public historians have since worked hard to develop new paths forward. At a moment when including up-to-date scholarship had just established itself as a building block of best practice, The West as America and the Enola Gay called the whole role of scholars in public history into question.
![enola gay museum 1995 enola gay museum 1995](https://iballrtw.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/iballrtw-nasm-enola-gay-7.jpg)
The timing of the furor created serious problems for the practice of public history overall.
![enola gay museum 1995 enola gay museum 1995](https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=https://airandspace.si.edu/sites/default/files/media-assets/SI-2009-12463.jpg)
Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian website. The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The museums, individual staff, and outside scholars associated with the exhibits suffered damaged credibility, blighted careers, and several years of humiliating attack in the media and on the floor of Congress. At both museums, portions of the audience, media reviewers and some funders objected strenuously to interpretation they perceived as unpatriotic, incomplete, and tendentious. While it may seem tiresome to return to old debates, the field’s growing focus on audiences, interactivity, and participatory scaffolding (to borrow from Nina Simon) highlights unplumbed learning value in those 1990s experiences.īut recalling them can hardly be pleasant. After nearly two decades of restoration, the Enola Gay will be one of the highlights of the museum’s new Udvar-Hazy Center, which is scheduled to open at Dulles International Airport on December 15, 2003.Public historians took a battering 20 years ago through highly public struggles over two Smithsonian exhibits, The West as America at the National Museum of American Art (1991) and the Enola Gayat the National Air and Space Museum (1995). This book tells the story of the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 program, and the combat operations of the B-29 type. The original, controversial exhibit script was changed, and the final exhibition attracted some 4 million visitors, testifying to the enduring interest in the aircraft and its mission.
![enola gay museum 1995 enola gay museum 1995](https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/CTIrv0PcAfIZs1xM4SyMTTFTRb8=/fit-in/1072x0/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/08/f5/08f51abb-f5d2-48ba-bdae-58dadc7dedc3/deliveryservice.jpeg)
The aircraft was the primary artifact in an exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum from 1995 to 1998. The Japanese government, which had been preparing a bloody defense against an invasion, surrendered six days later. Three days later, another B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The “Little Boy” bomb exploded with the force of 12.5 kilotons of TNT, nearly destroying the city. The world entered the atomic age in August 1945, when the B-29 Superfortress nicknamed Enola Gay flew some 1,500 miles from the island of Tinian and dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.