Some 90 scholars have formed an ad hoc Historians’ Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima, calling on colleges and universities to sponsor teach-ins this spring to discuss the atomic bombing of Japan. Now efforts are under way to open up the discussion.
![american historians who manufactured the enola gay exhibit american historians who manufactured the enola gay exhibit](https://s1.nyt.com/timesmachine/pages/1/1995/05/03/636095_360W.png)
Indeed, scholars who defend using the bomb as well as those who raise questions about it deplore the fact that Smithsonian officials limited the Enola Gay exhibit and closed off an opportunity to air scholarly debates. Linenthal, most historians say that recent depictions of their work are grossly inaccurate, conflating people in different camps, ignoring new documentary sources on the war, and asking the wrong questions. True, historical scholarship challenges the publicly accepted account of the war’s end. Linenthal, a professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, to a packed session at a recent meeting in Washington of the Organization of American Historians. “That kind of coverage, which dominated the American media, is grotesque,” said Edward T. On the other were citizens who believed that the bomb ended the war quickly and saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. On one side were scholars sharply critical of President Truman’s decision to drop the bomb. Most accounts painted the dispute as a standoff between historians and the public. The Washington Post editorialized against historians and their “special-interest point of view.” Some scholars who had been publicly quoted on the exhibit even received hate mail.
![american historians who manufactured the enola gay exhibit american historians who manufactured the enola gay exhibit](https://airandspace.si.edu/sites/default/files/media-assets/SI-2005-6309.jpg)
Members of Congress railed against “politically correct” history. But mounting controversy led officials to scale back the exhibit, now due to open next month with just the bomber and almost no commentary.Īt the center of the debate was the charge by veterans that Smithsonian curators had been overly influenced by “revisionist” scholarship, challenging commonly held explanations of why the bomb was dropped. Historical scholarship took a beating in the recent furor over the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit on the Enola Gay.Īlong with the B-29 that carried the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, the museum had planned to feature a text exploring questions about the end of World War II.