Reviewing Public History in Light of the Enola Gay

Technology and Culture was one of the first scholarly publications to take museum exhibitions seriously and to evaluate their relationship to scholarship, teaching, and learning. The journal has published many individual exhibit reviews over the years, and in our pages authors such as Thomas W. Leavitt and Bernard S. Finn have cogently assessed how reviewers should approach their craft. ¹

This special section focusing on the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum’s (NASM) exhibition of the Enola Gay departs somewhat from that tradition. Instead of reviewing the exhibit itself, we have asked three scholars to reflect on four recent books dealing with the planning of the original exhibit, the controversy it inspired, and its aftermath. ² Alex Roland, Pamela Walker Laird, and Otto Mayr bring differing perspectives to bear on the exhibit’s tortured history, and each emphasizes different issues raised by and lessons to be learned from this episode. As a sort of counterpoint we include a case study by Donna Braden on the developing of an exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum—an effort unrelated to the Enola Gay exhibit but one whose history reveals tensions within the process similar to those exposed in the much more public Smithsonian project.

Under review here, then, is not so much an exhibit or a few books about an exhibit and the controversy it caused, but the process by which history exhibits are produced. Why should readers of Technology and Culture be interested in this? Exhibits are key tools in the public exchange about history, technology, and the history of technology, among other things. The essays gathered here address tensions inherent to the exhibit form, especially the relationship of exhibits to scholarship and to their public audiences. Might it change how we evaluate and review exhibits to consider such issues in the light of the Enola Gay experience? For me, these essays suggest reasons to view exhibits as teaching tools rather than works of scholarship, products more akin to curriculum materials than to research monographs. Reflecting on them may provide new approaches to evaluating the products of public historians, new insights into improving their work, and thus renewed influence in the public debate about technology and historical change.

An original justification for including museum reviews in a scholarly journal was that the work of museum scholars deserved to be scrutinized as rigorously as the publications of their academic counterparts. The reviews would, it was hoped, improve museum productions by creating a body of critical essays that would guide museum planners and help nonmuseum staff make better use of the exhibits. The essays here reveal some of the complexity of both goals by showing how the work of museum professionals is influenced in ways unfamiliar to many academicians. For example, Alex Roland points out that the other plane to drop an atomic bomb, Bock’s Car, has been quietly on public display for years in a military history museum, where its context and meaning have gone unremarked. In her contribution to History Wars, one of the books under review here, Marilyn B. Young characterizes the difference between scholarly and public history this way: “It is one of the less visible ironies of the democratic system that the academy’s freedom of expression rests securely on its [the academy’s] being ignored. . . . So it was as much the setting of the exhibit [NASM, on the Mall in Washington, D.C.] as its content that seemed to cause the uproar.” ³ While reviewers do not consider an author’s place of employment in evaluating the quality of his or her scholarship, museum professionals are thoroughly imbued with the institutional context and public face of their work. They work with the knowledge that colleagues can misconstrue, scholars can critique, visitors can ignore, and financial supporters—long-term and immediate—can retreat. Working to avoid all four of these dire consequences, museum professionals sometimes avoid going for broke in some dimension of the exhibit: scope and scale, content, interpretation, design, or media. Perceptive reviewers can recapture much of the original inspiration and subsequent constraint of an exhibit...