Call for a national teach-in on Hiroshima

Abstract

As historians and scholars who share a concern for the honest portrayal of important historical events, we are profoundly disturbed by the character of the public discourse occasioned by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's exhibit on the Enola Gay and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This exhibit has now been drastically scaled-down and in its place the museum intends to display merely the bomber's forward fuselage. Any materials which might have provided a historical context to the plane employed in the first combat use of the atomic bomb have been purged.